I've always been fond of Chess, and I'm a huge fan of D&D and its dungeons, obviously. Now the idea of a Chess area, a room that is a chess board, or an area of the dungeon that would have a Chess theme going on somehow, might be one of those classic ideas many DMs out there implemented in their own complexes one way or the other. The D&D 4e Red Box even has one such "Chess room" in its sample dungeon.

Did you implement it yourself in your dungeons? How? If you didn't, how would you go about building a Chess dungeon area (a room, or set of rooms) that wouldn't be boring to play, wouldn't be a slog fest, and wouldn't devolve into a complete minigame aside of the RPG going on around it?

I haven't done it, nor would I do it because I don't like chess. It's a beautiful game, but I don't enjoy its lack of randomness. And I loathe how reading up on strategy can allow you to almost follow a script to higher play; there's none of that exploration I love about games. I forget what sort of MtG archetype that makes me, but basically I hate script kiddies playing copied decks. I want to discover new, and hopefully funny and contradictory, combinations on my own. Chess... sorta already established; not much new things left to discover (anything new requires high lvl play, which requires familiarity with all its strategic history, which just gets on my nerves because there's so little exploration on the way).

That and given the rarely equivalent skill level of chess players, especially in a play group (as people tend to focus on different games), I think it's a recipe for frustration -- or boredom. I'd have to add a stochastic element to even bother. That said, I do have a crazy solution for you.

Knightmare Chess, the "card expansion" for chess.
http://www.sjgames.com/knightmare/

That adds enough 'WTF?' randomness to the game mechanics as to level skill discrepancies, and wonderfully incorporates that 'unpredictable wizards' trope. If I were to use a chessboard as a dungeon scenario, I'd most definitely use one of those card game mechanics to mix things up.

I got talked out of doing a chess trap dungeon area, I think it was a good idea not to put one in.

One night in Lankhmar and the world's your oyster?

Quote from: Telarus;558370One night in Lankhmar and the world's your oyster?

Heh, Chess, that's a fun album. Go team ABBA! Funny story, I've been scouting the music stores for years for a copy, but it took a stint in Seoul to find one. The world is entertaining that way.

Over years, I've used a few 'chess-based traps'.

I've used one with 'animated statues' that was much like the movie posted above (well before the movie).  

I've also done one where depending on where the character's entered the board determined what 'piece' they corresponded to.  If they moved illegally according to their 'piece', they suffered a 'bad effect' - probably shock, or something.  Ie, if you entered in the left corner, you were a rook and could move straight across the board.  If you entered at the Bishop position, you could only move at angles.  

I've also used 'solve for check-mate traps' a few times.  What these are is a board that is set up where a single move is required to put the opponent in check-mate.  The party needs to figure out the proper move in order to deactivate the trap.

I always liked this cover:



Can't remember if there was a game tied to it.

Given the title of the Challenge, I would do a series of rooms, all square shaped of course, and probably all tiled in chess patterns.

I'd have theme'd rooms (pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen, king), where the traps and/or monsters met the theme (the Bishop room(s), for example, punishing you for stepping on the wrong colored tiles, with further hints like automata (golems) made out to look like the right type/color piece (and I wouldn't tell the players why they were setting off traps, of course).

As you moved deeper in the themes would get more detailed. Say the 'second tier' rooms would be the 'side' rooms, where you have to face an entire chess 'set', one black room, one white room (perhaps with themed monsters taking the roles of pieces, just to change things up a bit, so less emphasis on the rules).

And of course, the third tier room would have two opposed chess sides, and would probably be more puzzle oriented (The players having to 'win the game', without actually being one of the sides), which would open the mad-wizard's lair for the final boss fight/treasure room... against (obviously) a wizard/lich who does, in fact, use some sort of chess theme with his spells (lots of charm/command spells, maybe custom designed to force opponents to mimic chess moves to act, or something...).

That's how I'd do it.

Quote from: Opaopajr;558315I haven't done it, nor would I do it because I don't like chess. It's a beautiful game, but I don't enjoy its lack of randomness.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;558322I got talked out of doing a chess trap dungeon area, I think it was a good idea not to put one in.

I think that there's one common mistake done with the idea of the Chess dungeon area that's basically to insert the Chess game itself into the D&D game and treat it as a "minigame". That's basically pulling a bait-and-switch, where the players are bent on playing a role playing game, while suddenly you switch the tables on them and they find themselves having to figure out Chess moves as part of a tactical challenge or entire encounter area, which wasn't what they were expecting.

It might work with some people who are real fans of the game, but generally I think that's not a good way to go about the idea, because it creates that kind of reactions at the game table.

I'm much more prone to either insert a Chess puzzle where you'd have to figure out say, a check mate in one move to open a secret door in the room, without having it being a bottle neck or "must solve" kind of problem, more of a possible side-area than anything, or to actually use Chess as an inspiration for the theme and tone of the area, rather than shoehorning the rules themselves in place of the D&D game, if you see what I mean.

Spike's idea sounds interesting to me, from that angle.

What I was thinking of doing myself was to have something like an entire Chess sublevel with a war going on between the Whites and the Blacks (golems on all sides), and having the level being the actual battlefield. Like when you look at a Chess board and you can imagine the action in some imaginary world from the highly abstracted moves and position on the actual Chess board? Well imagine the dungeon area IS this imaginary world without the abstraction of the Chess rules. An actual battlefield with forts on both sides of the level, a middle area where you find dead pawns and the like, the most highly contested position on the level, and skirmish warfare between the two sides, towers that can animate themselves, king and queen who have developed proto-identities based on their archetypes, insane, tortuous bishops that never target their enemies directly, paladins mounted on clockwork steeds on one side, champions of chaos mounted on gorgons on the other, etc.

The whole level would have been an actual battlefield for wizards controlling each one side, but the wizards died/disappeared before the game was finished, and something (like magic gone awry, or maybe some contingency or design from a third party) allowed the game to proceed nonetheless, up to the status quo both sides experience now. It'd be a mini-sandbox, with the PCs basically changing that balance and potentially breaking the status quo, if they ever choose a side...

Like that old video game Archon (essentially Battle Chess where each piece taking over another has to contest on a field of battle)? Could be interesting... Kind of a common trope in video games and anime/cartoons. But hey, if it's new or refreshing to your players, a common trope is welcome. Might even be more fascinating being able to talk to these frightening monsters who insist on "waiting until the next move" to attack, but otherwise stand there uninterested in the adventurers. That'd be a puzzle into itself.

I've found puzzles work better as rather open ended, possibly even inexplicable in the end. Pixel bitching kills a mood real fast, as you note. So your idea of it being used as a switch to trigger secret doors to other areas also sounds good enough to avoid that pitfall.

Not a game I'd use but hey, see if you can make it work! Good luck!

Yeah, I was a huge fan of Battle Chess actually! Very cool suggestion on the role play and the pieces insisting to "wait until the next move".

Of course, on a level like this, you'd have to flesh out the whole thing so it doesn't become monotonous. So, since the level was abandoned or left on its own for maybe centuries, it could have developed a variety of different environments and critters to vary the different threats. Like maybe a corner of the level got breached and infested by mushrooms, or there's a group of adventurers that made it into that area a few years back and made an alliance with one of the two Chess sides, or the whole level is built on top of the grave for the armies that fought in a long forgotten battle, all their bones intertwined, kind of like the Douaumont ossuary, maybe some sort of twisted, abstract memorial, with the magic of the place now awakening the dead below...

The ossuary of Douaumont is filled with alcoves that contain the bones of all the soldiers that fought in Verdun during the First World War, all of them unknown, without names, brought together, whatever their nationalities or the sides they were supposed to be on...



Anyway, yeah. Varying the types of threats and challenges would be important for the place to not feel stale and boring throughout.

For some reason I feel compelled to point out also that there was a pretty major boss fight in WoW (now horribly out of date by (two?) expansions that was based on chess.

As I recall (its been a few years) the party takes over automata chess pieces and fights by proxy the oppossing automata. Its a bit smaller than real chess, and the pieces act more like limited versions of playable classes (Fighter class, healer class, spell casting artillery class), than they do actual chess pieces, but the elements are there (and as I also recall, your character class matters nothing when you take over a piece, you have the abilites of that peice, period).

Heh. I didn't know that! It's really a classic idea, isn't it? Like Opaopajr said, there's nothing wrong with a common trope as long as you can make it entertaining for the players involved. Sometimes a good cliché works better than the most original ideas out there.

Another chess pic:



Not sure how'd incorporate into the dungeon, but it looks cool.