D&D 5E Three pillars: what is "exploration"?

Tony Vargas · Jul 18, 2017

Yaarel said:
I’m thinking there might be four pillars to the game.

• Character creation and leveling, choosing spells and equipment
− the optimization a player does between sessions.

Maybe there's three plinths to go with the three pillars?

The Optimization meta-game, won at chargen/level-up
The Background of the character, and it's ongoing personality growth & development
The Relationship between the DM and player, and how it can be leveraged.

...not entirely serious...

Yaarel · Jul 18, 2017

Tony Vargas said:
Maybe there's three plinths to go with the three pillars?

The Optimization meta-game, won at chargen/level-up
The Background of the character, and it's ongoing personality growth & development
The Relationship between the DM and player, and how it can be leveraged.

...not entirely serious...

... Yet entirely true.

Optimization while leveling, is working as intended.

Background is social pillar.

Leveraging DM adjudication style is too true for narrative exploration.

Mephista · Jul 18, 2017

Mah, well, here's what I do.

Combat is fighting. Interaction is talking. Exploration is doing puzzles.

"How is exploring like a puzzle?" Well, its one part gathering information where you lay out the peices (scouting, research, detecting magic), then one part figuring out how to overcome the problems you discover (traps, terrain, magic locks). Usually this involves out-of-the-box thinking and some amount of being clever.

Are there things that don't involve combat, interaction or exploration? Sure. Crafting comes to mind. But these are the main challenges we face.

Yaarel · Jul 18, 2017

Crafting belongs to the fourth pillar: character creation and leveling, choosing spells and gear.

That reminds me.

I love campaigns where players invent their own spells, doing spell research. And I havent done a campaign like that in years.

guachi · Jul 19, 2017

Yaarel said:
I’m thinking there might be four pillars to the game.

• Character creation and leveling, choosing spells and equipment
− the optimization a player does between sessions.

• Combat.

• Social − NPC interaction − bio and personality for Background
− identity groups, team, family, friends, factions.

• Exploration − interacting with the world − creating a home in the world − achieving ambitions.

In some ways, NPCs can be part of all four pillars.

I want to 'like' the addition of the first point so much. I'd actually expand it to include all of the rules interaction a player does (or can do) outside of the gaming session. To me, I fell in love with D&D and RPGs by reading the rule books.

Who among us who read the introduction in the Mentzer Basic didn't want to KILL BARGLE? How long did I spend looking at the pictures, reading spell descriptions, and just... imagining? Name any other game where the writing style of an author (Gygax, in this case) is a valid topic of discussion.

Ten-year-old me curled up in my bed reading the 1e DMG I checked out of the school library is a pillar of the game. Why did a grade school library have the PHB and DMG? Who knows!

Thirteen-year-old me standing in the gaming store and spending far too long on whether to buy the 1e Forgotten Realms boxed set or the Karameikos Gazetteer, deciding on the latter, and falling in love with Mystara is a pillar of the game.

Harzel · Jul 22, 2017

Tony Vargas said:
Maybe there's three plinths to go with the three pillars?

The Optimization meta-game, won at chargen/level-up
The Background of the character, and it's ongoing personality growth & development
The Relationship between the DM and player, and how it can be leveraged.

...not entirely serious...

You get XP because I had to look up the definition of 'plinth'. Good word, although it sounds like something that might be a relative of the flumph, the bunyip, the thork, the osquip, or the gryph.