DM advice, Running blind combat

[Sindenky]

In my upcoming session of crown of the kobald king, there is a section of the dungeon that is filled with smoke. The first area is a cave live tunnel system that twist and winds several directions, the smoke limits vision and can result in the players losing their sense of direction. The second room were the smoke is coming from is much thicker, preventing vision past 5 ft.

I'm looking for advice on how to play a section with this type of limited or restricted vision.

Ideas so far:
-Remove the grid board. Just vaguely describe the surroundings to the players, track their movement on my own map, but give them zero visual representation of the area to work with.

-Only draw a limited section of map. For the first area, give them only their square, and the immediate squares adjacent to them. They must/then can use the walls to help guide themselves though the area. For the second room only give them the exact square they are standing in and treat them as blind.

-As above, but force the players to make a check each round in order to maintain a sense of direction. If they fail the check, they step in a random direction (1d8) instead of advancing the way they had intended.

Any ideas or suggestions are much appreciated.

[Sindenky]

bump

[james014Aura]

The first and third combined seem reasonable to this circumstance.

[Trekkie90909]

I would not do 1d8 every round, that slows things down a lot. Once every 5 rounds away from a wall or other solid feature is probably more reasonable if you decide to run the idea. Personally, I'd not. If you want to disorient them, give them a combat or two within the smokey area; they'll naturally lose track of things as they scatter about in response to the threat.

Regarding representation: I've seen and done this as 1) this can be very frustrating to the players, particularly if they're mapping the progress they make and their perceived map differs from yours. That said, it's a pretty good representation of what's happening and I find it more interesting than 'roll 1d8 to determine direction.' Doing this as 2) increases your workload as GM considerably, particularly if the players like to meta-game by cheating off the areas the other characters have revealed. If you trust your players however, and think they won't meta-game then 2) is the way to go.

[Sindenky]

Well there is combat involved. First room has a hellhound, second has a forge spurned. As raw neither of these creatures are terribly effective inside of smoke, so I'm swapping one of their feats each with blind fight. The room is pretty small (areas 19 and 20 crown of the kobold king) though I've considered increasing the size if I remove the grid in that section.