How often do you play in a dungeon where the whole thing is a puzzle/maze? Do you have fun, or is it mostly tedious?

I have a couple puzzle dungeons rattling around my head and I'm ultimately wondering if it's all just "cool in theory".

The Gem Puzzle: The Maguffin is in the most secret room. Upon entering the PCs will find the room lit by white flames. On the far wall of the entryway is a carving with a big diamond in the middle. To the right, a similar sized sapphire, bottom an emerald, and left a ruby. When they pull the diamond, there is a crashing noise and all of the torches go out. Upon re-inserting any gem, or creating magic light, the PC's will find the enterance gone and door sized squares on the walls. One in red, one in blue, and one in green. Whatever colour gem they insert into the middle makes the torches re-light in that colour, and the squares that were that colour are now open doorways. The PC's need to find ways to change a few door colours to work their way through the puzzle, grab the maguffin, and get out.

The Water Temple: The maguffin is inside this huge underwater temple. Most of the temple is actually dry and full of breathable air. The PC's need to plug holes, fill rooms, and use water pressure to work their way to the top, open the door, and get the maguffin... then pull the plug at the bottom to safely get back to the entrance and escape.

It’s a “once per campaign” thing for me: cool as a novelty but not something I or my players would like to do often. And even then it works best to do a string of smaller puzzles, interspersed with traps or the occasional fight to keep everyone engaged, than one giant involved puzzle. That’s because everyone gets a chance to figure out different things, so the group doesn’t tell the resident puzzle lover “okay, it’s all you,” and mentally check out…or worse, feel like they don’t have anything to contribute. It’s also way easier to pace properly.

D&D players, when presented with a maze, usually do something like get out a Big Hammer and start making their way through the walls.

Quote from Geann >>

D&D players, when presented with a maze, usually do something like get out a Big Hammer and start making their way through the walls.

 Once my dm put me in the maze,I litterally punched the walls over and over,which ended up with me in a interdimensional prison.

In 1e days, one of the players was a designated mapper, and has their own sheet of graph paper, tracking where the party went. Then, a maze made sense because it was the players’ job to track where they were. Now it seems like people just assume the characters are keeping track of things, and so don’t bother with mazes. 
Really though, it’s a group thing. If your group likes it, go for it.

As a pretty new DM playing with all new players, I really like using maze-like dungeons fraught with traps and riddles. I have found that with my group of brand new players, it is easier to get them interested in the game through the dungeons. When we first started, it was difficult to get them roleplaying during the main quest, especially if they were trying to investigate or find something. Adding a dungeon put them in an environment where they had easier choices as to where to go and what to do. In addition, I found that during the next session (which didn’t have a dungeon) everyone was more comfortable with figuring out where to go and what to do. 
I think that since none of them were seasoned players, they simply had no idea what to do when faced with en entire world. So giving them a smaller space (the dungeon) to start with, helped them build their confidence. 

Overall, my group seemed to really enjoy the dungeon, but it’s definitely not something to overuse. 

My party and I got stuck in a wizard tower for about 3-4 sessions and we all found it hilarious and very enjoyable, our DM however had to dumb the puzzle down for us so that we would actually find our way out and move on lmao

I made a pseudo maze as part of a one shot. Basically it was a twisty cave where all the passages eventually came out to the same place. The party had 2 levels of exhaustion and being chased by swarms of tiny spiders. I made them roll survival checks to see if their characters could keep moving in the right direction each time they came to an intersection. If they failed, then they literally had to guess. They could also use that opportunity to try to throw the spiders off in the wrong direction. Anyway, the maze had the desired affect as they felt lost but it didn't take too long before they wandered out. The keen mind feat would have made this challenge irrelevant, but since none of them had it, everything went as planned. 

Literal maze: absolutely not. Pure tedium.

A dungeon like you described: sure! I would recommend looking at Sly Flourish's material on "secrets," and incorporate lots of those into your prep for the dungeon. You can never really predict what your players will look into or ignore, and it's good to lean into that fact.

Also, keep it pretty short, I would say. The more rooms you have, the more likely it is that your players will lose track of what's important, or get confused.

Quote from ChoirOfFire >>

Literal maze: absolutely not. Pure tedium.

A dungeon like you described: sure! I would recommend looking at Sly Flourish's material on "secrets," and incorporate lots of those into your prep for the dungeon. You can never really predict what your players will look into or ignore, and it's good to lean into that fact.

Also, keep it pretty short, I would say. The more rooms you have, the more likely it is that your players will lose track of what's important, or get confused.

 Sly has some great books! I really enjoy his stuff on my Audible. I'm working on the colour dungeon now, and debating on how many rooms are actuslly needed.

I ran one where there were 40 rooms in a grid, and each door was shrouded in mist.  Stepping through the first door transported a character to another room, but not the same room each time...there was an order.  The rest of the doors each connected to a specific room.  There was only one room with an out, and it's magical portal required all of the character's skills to activate.   It's a great way to facilitate a forced splitting of the party, and I had encounters that were roleplay, exploration and light combat in each room.  I had the players make Intelligence checks to see if they could decode the maze and get where they wanted to go as they mapped it out when they got stuck or frustrated.  Eventually they mapped it out and figured out how to get everyone to the final room.

My personal experience, I've enjoyed puzzles but not mazes (unless the solution to the maze is to figure out a puzzle). My biggest problem with mazes is that even if they're enjoyable, they're a pretty one-player thing if solved as a maze.

In my opinion, a few puzzles can offer some nice variety but should never be a centerpiece of the game nor take up too much session time. To my thinking, every quest in every campaign is a puzzle that has multiple solutions.

That being said, it's all about what the group enjoys. I like to ask my players what they enjoy before they even start to make sure I can make intelligent creative choices to cater to their style. Also, nothing wrong with including optional puzzles and mazes. Just because a maze is there doesn't mean the party has to solve it.

40 rooms seems like WAY too many rooms for an average group. I would try to keep it under 10. Ideally 5 or fewer, honestly. That only sounds drastic because we started at 40.

My most puzzley dungeon thus far was, I think, 6 rooms? Arranged like a needle: one room at the entrance, a split path into two parallel rooms, then converging again and ending in one room. There's a "room" at the start that involves how you get in, and a secret room you don't necessarily need to go into, that shortcuts to the end room. Perfect size for this kind of thing. Players don't forget clues, if they need to go back they can, and if someone isn't into it, it'll be over soon lol.

Here's the dungeon I wrote, for anyone who's looking for content lol. I based it on the Five Room Dungeon idea, published online by Johnn Four. My players had a good time with it. There's only one puzzle but in my defense, the puzzle does extend between rooms.

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Entrance - You tracked a flail snail here in hopes of getting its shell. Another party is trying to get in by mining. You can put coins in a door slot to get in, but they don't want to. They're kind of clueless and stubborn. At least one of them is a blaster caster, and props if you can see where that's going. Feel free to let the roleplay go wherever it goes. Just tune up the fights if they join as allies. There's also a tunnel filled with deadly poison, and nobody knows what's at the end. (The snail's lair.) I didn't write a solution for this and I'd be surprised if a party had one, but I left open the possibility, because golly they'd feel smart.

Room 1 - You can get into the toll box from this side if you're clever. Maybe it's trapped. This is the entryway to a flail snail zoo, but it's long been abandoned. Left is the gift shop, right is the guided tour. An illusion wants to show you around. The illusion is of the founder of this place and they're sympathetic towards flail snails to a fault. They want to tell you all about how cool and misunderstood the creatures are.

Room 2 - The gift shop has various decayed, rusted, and otherwise useless souvenirs. Among them is the thing you can use in room 3. I believe it was a crystal snow globe. You could put a monster in here. There's a door beyond but it's hard to see from this side, and only designed to open from the other side. Brute force could work but that's boring.

Room 3 - The path forward only opens when you go to several podiums and place tokens there to answer trivia questions about flail snails. The illusion provides hints if needed. I recommend 3 questions. One whose answer token is at the same podium as the question (alongside two wrong answers), one whose answer token is at the wrong podium, and one whose answer token is missing. Penalities for wrong answers are up to your discretion. I recommend withering condescension and/or damage from old magic/electrical systems malfunctioning. If the party is really stuck, you could have the other party get in and start a fight in here which blasts open the door. I would make the door hard to detect while closed, but if the players look and find it they could break it down similarly.

Room 4 - An observatory over the snail's habitat. If the other party is still alive, they get in and confront the party here. They break the glass which startles the snail and causes it to join the fight as a rogue agent. The blaster caster focuses on the snail unless the party is already doing that. If those guys are dead or otherwise gone, edit out the glass and play up the menace of the snail, see if the party wants to treat it with the same reverence as the illusion does, or fight it. There's a hidden entrance here that leads to the snail's lair where you can find more shells. If the snail is alive and treated nicely, it'll lead you there. Otherwise you're on your own.

If I did an actual maze, it would probably be more a theater of the mind thing where they could roll survival or investigation to see how efficiently they can make their way through it, rather than drawing out a map for the players to look at and solve. 

Since i play on a VTT I could always get a maze map and use limited sight , but this would likely get frustrating rather than be fun. 

For mazes take a good look at how WOtC did it in undermountain. Puzzles can be fun but you have to keep in mind that the party may come up with solutions you didn’t think of. The wildest case of that I ever heard of is supposed to have happened back in the 1950s at the Yerkes primate lab in GA where they were trying to measure ape intelligence. They designed a cage with 4 different ways out of differing difficulty. The put the first ape in and it found a fifth way out the scientists hadn’t figured out. 😳🤪