D&D 5E Expediting Exploration: keeping travel fun

[DMSage]

You are calling for WAY too many dice rolls. Only call for dice rolls when there is uncertainty.

I completely agree. And I did stop calling for dice rolls... but then there was nothing to do. "you walk into a room... OK we search it, OK you find nothing" lets move on.

Still boring. And the way the module was designed it asks for those dice rolls, and a DM who was following it would do them because that is what they expected people to do at these places. It was a poorly designed area of the campaign. Even making drastic changes it wasn't really entertaining until I just flew past it.

 

[DMSage]

I can't help but feel like sitting in on some old school style play would do you good. I'm stunned that any DM would claim "exploration = nothing to do" or "exploration is the boring stuff between encounters."

Or maybe you've just limited exploration in your games to a very specific subset of what is usually considered exploration in a D&D game?

EDIT: Oh, those are fantastic maps btw!

Thanks.
I'm not saying that exploration can't be fun. But I specifically define exploration as the non-fun parts in between encounters. If everyone is having a blast, then there's no need for these tools.

 

[DMSage]

I completely agree. It was Horde of the dragon queen. An official wizards of the coast product.
nice pictures too haha. And those are good ideas for creating more interesting dungeons

 

[DMSage]

Involve the players more in creating the environment they are exploring. Let them regulate the amount of detail that gets narrated and the spacing between encounters. Don't over-prep; encourage them to improvise too. Here's a completely fictitious episode:



Everyone is contributing, no-one is bored and the DM is as much in the dark as the players! You just have to give the players permission to do it.

That situation took twenty seconds. And I agree that it can be fun to explore something for a while. But I have played as a player through three hours of crossing bridges in the last two games I have played.... This article is to help those people.

 

[Quickleaf]

Thanks.

Yep, looks like you're making good use of your Chessex battlemat! I abused the heck out of mine to the point that I switched to gaming paper.

I'm not saying that exploration can't be fun. But I specifically define exploration as the non-fun parts in between encounters. If everyone is having a blast, then there's no need for these tools.

Well...

I could define cross-country running as the non-fun part of running, whereas sprinting is the fun part.

And I've made an entirely subjective assertion that may be completely untrue for another runner who loves cross-country (and someone else might find ANY running at all boring).

If your "definition" works for you and your group, great.

 

[DMSage]

Hiya!

Well, as [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION] said...but in less words...

I read your post and came away with this: "The problem wasn't your DM'ing...the problem was your players".

Basically it seems to me that your players don't want to "role-play characters in a fantasy world", they want to "be told a fantasy story through the eyes of their characters".

First, you lament about spending 'all that time' on your maps...and then the players didn't explore or otherwise engage in it. Well, SURPRISE!, you drawing maps was FUN for you, wasn't it? It gave you a great sense of satisfaction, right? Your accomplishment made you WANT to run a game, correct? Great! That is the entire point of drawing your own maps. Well, that and you can have exactly what you want in them. You say, "Despite considering myself adept at handling these actions and adjudications quickly, we spent the majority of the night exploring boring space and standing outside of doors whose rooms had nothing exciting in them anyways". "Boring space" and "nothing exciting in them" are specifically there so that when the PC's do get to the so-called "exciting stuff", it actually seems exciting. It's like a horror movie. If it starts off with the killer smashing through a doorway, and then for the next hour and half the movie consists of nothing but variations of said killer smashing through things and the distraught teen screaming and running to the next room...well, that'd get awfully boring awfully fast...probably after the third of fourth "jump scare". All that time int he movie, like, the first hour of it? That's the "boring space" and "nothing exciting" part of the movie...so that when the killer does arrive on scene, it IS exciting!

Second,


Dude, you and I have vastly different ideas of "fun" in D&D. I like "encounters" as much as the next guy, sure, but all that stuff in between? That's where the real cool stuff happens in a campaign. That's where characters bond, NPC's become hated, cities take on a life of their own, and wildernesses become spectacular visions in your imaginations. Rolling dice to kill a monster with the primary focus being on how much DPS you can bring to bare is..."less fun" for me, lets just say. Yes, those battles can have important/drastic effects on the campaign...but just saying "You head to the evil mages keep, fight some rats, walk down some halls and open some doors, and you find him in here [places battlemap on table]. Roll for initiative!"... um, no. Not fun in any form of the word, IMHO. But, according to you, it should be "fun" because, y'know, the players got to skip all that "boring stuff between encounters".

Third,



I could just as easily say "But in general, the only goal of the encounter phase of the game is to stop you from exploring one area to the next". Both statements would be misleading. You can't take one "aspect" of a story/game/adventure and just skip it without loosing much of the impact. The saying The whole is greater than the sum of it's parts? That applies to D&D adventuring as well. Without all the "boring stuff", as you put it, the game becomes nothing but a table top fantasy version of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. One encounter after the next, with only a change of scenery to tie them together.

Lastly, all the stuff you tagged as Player Perceived Encounter, False Encounter, Perceived Decision, etc...? I'll have to refer you back to my initial " " comment. Reading your "fixes" for these supposed problems had me scratching my head even more. It seems that you don't want players, you want an audience...or, at best, a group of people willing to sit there and let you lead them by the nose from encounter to encounter. I'm not trying to sound harsh, really, but as I said, your experience and mine are VASTLY different! Any DM that effectively "shushed!" me if I tried to indicate what I want my character to do after just being narrated a bit of campaign lore about an old, huge statue in the forest, would find himself with one less player. IME, playing a PC in an RPG is basically a "what would you do if you were this character in this world in this situation?". If I think my dwarf character would be interested in spending a few hours making notes about the stonework and craftsmanship of the stone statue in the forest, I want to do that. Just because the DM has decided that this sort of thing is "boring" and nothing but a speed-bump on the way to the next "exciting encounter", doesn't mean that this sort of thing is "boring" to the player(s).

Anyway, I'm not really trying to come off poo-poo'ing your revelation about what you want out of a game of D&D. If encounter-focused campaigning is your thing, go for it! What I'm saying is that maybe you've come to this conculsion erroneously because of how your players are playing. Maybe the learned it from some other DM that had the unfair-killer-DM complex, so now anytime the DM describes anything they are instantly on high alert. Or maybe they played with a DM who would have a note saying "The second door that they come to that they don't check for traps on will have a falling block trap on it". Or who knows? The point is, a group of players who check for traps on a merchants front door to his shop has some serious hang-ups that they need to address...as well as players who panic and go into hyper-vigilant mode when the DM gives a description of an old stone statue in a forest, fully expecting some sort of ambush because of a meta-game habit they learned from a bad DM, etc.

Sorry, I pretty much disagree (in case I wasn't clear enough in my post... ), with just about everything you said. But, as long as you and your players are having fun, ignore me.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

Good feedback about the article writing. It does indeed need to be edited better. I'll get on that.

How does speeding up your game equal me railroading the storyline of my campaign?

Of course some time is spent in down time chatting with each other or talking to NPCs or shopping or searching. But I get to play D&D 5 hours per week. If 2 of that five is spent on them searching for traps, so that they aren't ready for the fourth trap, that seems like a waist of time to me.

Also, You may have missed but an encounter, combat or not, can happen while exploring. And if it is a fun encounter, that's great! Why I wrote this article is that I noticed the vast majority of encounters that DMs had during exploration were boring, uneventful, and had no consequences and therefore didn't matter. They were just time waists until we figured out the DM's answer to getting past them.

 

[NotActuallyTim]

I think using the word 'encounter' might be throwing people off a little bit. Might I suggest replacing 'encounter' with 'content'?

In addition, you might want to specify that the content you're talking about is DM created content, and not player created content, for the sake of clarity.

 

[S'mon]

I can't help but feel like sitting in on some old school style play would do you good. I'm stunned that any DM would claim "exploration = nothing to do" or "exploration is the boring stuff between encounters."

This is what James Wyatt says in the 4e DMG in his 'skip to the fun' advice.
The 5e DMG by contrast classes exploration as one of the three pillars of play.

Exploration can of course be boring - IMO combat can be boring too. Even social interation
can be boring - endless low stakes in-character negotiation with shopkeepers to buy
supplies, say. It comes down to GMing techniques such as using appropriate time-scaling for the environment. If a maze or similar area is truly empty and looks dull, even though it's fully mapped out
I'll typically say "ok, an hour later you have negotiated your way through the maze..." - just as I'd skip buying supplies or a day of uneventful travel. There are loads of poorly written adventures where exploration is a chore; the Dungeon Crawl Classics are often quite bad that way. OTOH exploration of
well-detailed, interesting environments can evoke that elusive Sense of Wonder and be
one of the best parts of the game, and early TSR modules like In Search of the Unknown
and (orange-cover) Palace of the Silver Princess often had fascinating environments to explore.
Some modern writers create great dungeons to explore, eg Dyson Logos with his wonderful maps can key a map in a couple of pages that creates something very interesting. Others create dull series of rooms that a computer could generate. If your adventure is like the latter, then 'skip to the fun' may be good advice.

 

[Imaculata]

In my campaigns, something interesting always happens while the players are traveling. They'll meet an interesting npc, or an obstacle, or they make a discovery, but there is always something. This is essential storytelling. Are the parts of Lord of the Rings where the fellowship travels, the boring parts? They shouldn't be. So make them exciting.

I've made a random encounter list for every type of environment, to aid me in this process. Encounters at sea, on land, at the coast, in the jungle, on islands.... even in the underworld. If I need an idea, I first roll a d6 for the type of encounter, and then a D20 for an encounter from that list.

I've split the encounters up into flavor encounters (just something of interest), minor terrain features (rivers and lakes), major terrain features (a volcano, a lake of acid, a river of lava, a mountain, a desert), human settlements (a village, a tower, a chapel, a farm, an encampment), discoveries (hidden weapon cache, an unmarked grave, a tomb), hostile encounters (monsters, bandits, animals), landmarks (special locations for which I've prepared some stuff).

Further more, if I roll a 20 on any of the tables, I consult my rare encounter list or exotic terrain list. This list includes fantastic stuff, such as a dragon's lair, or some haunted castle.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

How does speeding up your game equal me railroading the storyline of my campaign?

The impression I got was that if the players decided to do something that would take, say, a half-hour of game time, doing something that has nothing to do with advancing the story, getting to the next adventure, or anything even related to "the main story line", you suggest that the DM hand wave that PC's through and not allow the players to explore/investigate. You said you see that as 'wasting time' (re: checking out a supposedly 'dress setting fluff' of an ancient stone statue in the forest they are traveling through on their way to the 'real' adventure...or checking for traps at a door that isn't trapped, or listening at each of 6 doors down an off-shoot corridor that has nothing in the rooms beyond, etc).

To me, that seems like you would be taking much of the decision making and role-playing out of the players hands for favour of a "faster track to the good stuff". I contend that letting the players make whatever decision they feel their characters would make is the good stuff. The battles, puzzles and traps set forth to bar their path to the Great and Evil Mogg in his bleak Tower of Corruption isn't "the brunt of the game", nor is it the only "exciting stuff".

I like battles too. Lots, on occasion. My typical 5e D&D session (of, coincidentally enough, 5 hours a week) can have zero "encounters" (as you put it; combat, traps, etc), or can have 15 to 20 combats...not including traps and puzzles. IMC, all of this is balanced by the players choices. If they feel they are in more of a combat mood, they'll get into more combats. If they are in a role-playing mood, they'll do that. These actions have consequences in my games. If they are on a time-limit of some kind, and they spend days looking for an abandoned manor house to purchase and set up a "base of operations" in town...well, that gives the bad guy(s) days of carrying out their nefarious tasks. The key thing is, however, that all of this stuff going on is dictated by "logical campaign conclusions".

I absolutely detest adventures that say stuff like "This encounter will happen after the PC's have rested up and just set off out of town, no more than about two hours travel". That is HORRIBLE adventure design from a campaign perspective. It's "game designer meta-gaming in MY campaign" as far as I'm concerned. When these types of encounters occur the likely reason the writer is putting it in there is to make it a 'challenge', with the PC's at full strength for their level. Thing is, the writer has NO idea of what my players and their PC's are made up of, are capable of, or their favoured tactics. My players, for example, almost never sit and 'fully recuperate' (be it HP's, elixirs of healing, arrows/bolts, material components, etc) unless they KNOW they are going to need it. Travelling from Burkston to Westershireton less than a day away would not warrant "spending two or three days in town replenishing". So that encounter would never "happen". Anyway, I'm getting side tracked here. My point is that having set encounters with conditions being based on meta-game aspects are, to me, a form of railroading. The PC's choices don't matter. If they are being foolish and are almost out of spells and all down to half-hp's and low on ammo/material components (yes, I use them), and continue to press on deeper into the cave system and get to that cave that says "This cave is dangerous! Don't let the PC's find it unless they are at full strength!", well, tough noogies. I will let the dice fall where they may and PC's will fall. It's not my job as DM to try and help the PC's survive...that's on the players. By "railroading" them into not being able to do much else (re: spend time searching, casting spells, using resorces, etc), just so they can get to the "good stuff", I'm coddling them. IMHO, of course.

Of course some time is spent in down time chatting with each other or talking to NPCs or shopping or searching. But I get to play D&D 5 hours per week. If 2 of that five is spent on them searching for traps, so that they aren't ready for the fourth trap, that seems like a waist of time to me.

As I said, I think we have vastly different interpretations of "waste of time". It's all good though, as long as you and your players are having fun, right?

Also, You may have missed but an encounter, combat or not, can happen while exploring. And if it is a fun encounter, that's great! Why I wrote this article is that I noticed the vast majority of encounters that DMs had during exploration were boring, uneventful, and had no consequences and therefore didn't matter. They were just time waists until we figured out the DM's answer to getting past them.

This I can grock. Nothing can suck the life out of a game session than boring stuff happening all the time. However, and this is where our play style tastes come in, spending 2 hours of game time searching for stuff (traps, secret doors, clues, or whatever) is (or at least can be) a fun and fulfilling time. The problem is, as I said in my first post, not really on you, the DM. I blame your players for much of it. If they sat there like deer in the headlights of an oncoming semi, waiting for you to dangle the carrot the way they "should" go...that's on them. That's how they obviously "learned" to play D&D; the DM presents stuff for them to overcome. Period.

My tips for this is for the DM to do as much "background writing" as he can in his spare time. At lunch break, after classes/work, while riding the bus/train/subway, etc. Keep a note book and paper with you at all times (or near by). If you get an image of an old stone statue in the forest, half broken away, tilted at an angle and half-buried, with vines and chokers slowly breaking it apart...make a note of that visual. Then, when you have time, write up a couple of sentences about it. "Statue of Diedalla, an ancient nature demigod of travelers. Worshiped two hundred years ago by the Tengari tribesmen that lived in this forest at the time. Stone pieces taken from this statue are used from nearby woodsmen, settlers and loggers for use as talismans to ward off evil and bad tidings". Then, if you get a chance to include this in your PC's travel through a woodland, you can spring it on them. If they choose to investigate it, you can give them some of the info (or all, depending on checks, character background, races/classes, or whatever). Now, suddenly, that "boring and pointless encounter" is interesting and adds to the verisimilitude of the campaign as a whole. The players have been rewarded for investing into the campaign world and lore. This is ALWAYS good, IME. As you said, not all encounters need to be combat. And as I said, not all encounters need to be pointless.

^_^

Paul L. Ming