I thought this room would be easy to figure out, but it really zapped the PCs, and two died in the room. Now that’s a good puzzle.
The rules of D&D chess
- There is a chessboard of black and white tiles, each big enough for a human/demihuman to occupy.
- There are a bunch of floating eyes, distributed randomly, and occupying certain spots. If you make an illegal move, the nearest one zaps you for d6 dmg.
- If an eye-zap misses you, the attack will be rerolled against anyone sharing your square or anyone behind you, till the zap reaches a wall or strikes a player. Eyes can’t hurt each other.
- The first color you step onto matters if you are of a certain “class.” If you move onto the wrong color, you get zapped, and your color becomes whatever you end up on.
- I had the classes be: cleric=bishop, dwarf=short king, elf=queen, warriors and unheld pets=knight, wizard or actual free bird=rook, hobbit or zero level=pawn
- You have to move how your chess piece would move. If a cleric cum bishop moves orthogonally, they are going to get zapped. The eyes are fast, so if you try to run for the exit in a straight line as a bishop, you are going to get zapped each time you step on or jump over a tile during your illegal move; you might get shot a whole bunch of times.
- Ending or spending any part of your move on the same square as a fellow PC is illegal, even for those weirdly-moving knights. Some creative jumping/checks may be in order.
- You can attack an eye, as long as you make a legal move that ends in the attack thrust. So a dwarf/king cutting an eye in the next square over would be illegal, but if a dwarf/king charges into that contiguous square while striking, and they end their move there because that’s how a king moves, they will not be zapped. Each eye has one HP, but they are unharmed by illegal moves. If a cleric/bishop were to shoot an eye in a diagonally placed space, I’d say that is illegal because they are attacking before moving.
- If you don’t take turns with the other PC players, you get zapped. For instance, a warrior/knight moving in an L shape and then moving again would be a zappable offence. A wizard/rook moving a square orthogonally, looking around for a second, and then going one more square in the same direction would not incur a zap. But when a player says they are done, their turn ends. If they say something like, “I’m going to go again.” they have just announced that they love being zapped.
- The room is defeated if all the eyes are killed. The eyes don’t take turns, just to be clear. They zap whenever they can, and it is not a move or a turn; they are not in the game in that sense. But if all the eyes are dead, there is no one to punish poor play. The room might be a Zelda type room where all the enemies need to be defeated to reveal a treasure or open a secret door.
- The room is also defeated if the PCs make it to an exit, but one of them might have to step back in because a single PC in the room might need someone to alternate turns with. Any surviving eyes will be waiting if anyone comes back to the room.
And that’s it. If you want a slightly easier version of the room, you could have little piece-denoting hats appear on the PCs as they step on the board. You could also put little judge-wigs on the eyes to emphasize that they are rules-judges, not players in the game.
In our game, the PCs were lowered down into the middle of the board from above via the dungeon entrance, and I made a point of asking what color tile they landed on. We only had 4 PCs, and they all chose a different tile. After that, they kept taking double moves and it was a bloodbath. There was one exit to the north, and they just had to make it there to be safe.
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