D&D 5E What aspects of play do you most enjoy?

[iserith]

I am not sure what exploration really means but I think it must be something I dislike while I like interaction & combat, i lose interest in mapping or tracking rations pretty fast.
I also tend to run a lot of games with something that is neither but does not readily fit with exploration. For example a crime campaign where the players are organising heists. Some of their planning involves negotiation & when things go awry there is often combat but much of the other stuff they do is not really exploration.

The three pillars of the game are defined and discussed on page 5 of the Basic Rules. "Exploration includes both the adventurers’ movement through the world and their interaction with objects and situations that require their attention. Exploration is the give-and-take of the players describing what they want their characters to do, and the Dungeon Master telling the players what happens as a result."

As to the original post:

As a DM, I present situations that provide an opportunity for the PCs to engage with whatever pillar they fancy to overcome the challenges therein.

As a player, I try to gauge the situation and try to figure out the best path to take to overcome the challenge before me, then engage with the appropriate pillar(s) accordingly. That said, sometimes the most optimal path is not the best one because it's boring, so any decisions I make is through the lens of the goals of play. As such, I don't have any general preference for a particular pillar, just whichever one happens to be the most fun at the time.

 

[AntiStateQuixote]

I enjoy all three pillars in this order:

1. Combat: the heart of the game - kill the monster, take its loot
2. Exploration: got to find the monster to kill it
3. Social Interaction: sometimes you have to talk to someone before you can find the monster to kill it

When playing I definitely prefer combat to the other bits.

When DMing I lean a little more towards exploration and the world building that comes along with it.

Social interaction comes as a natural part of the game before (get the hook), after (get paid), and between adventures (downtime whoring, training, etc.), and sometimes during adventures. Social interaction during adventures is usually limited to questioning prisoners, fooling guards, or other adversarial interactions. It's pretty rare in my group that we have interesting intrigues and social interaction during adventures. Sometimes I think that's too bad, but most of the time I accept that our Saturday night game is about killing monsters and getting loot. So, it's OK that we're not having deep philosophical discussions withe Lord of Air about the nature of magic in the world.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I am not sure what exploration really means but I think it must be something I dislike while I like interaction & combat, i lose interest in mapping or tracking rations pretty fast.
I also tend to run a lot of games with something that is neither but does not readily fit with exploration. For example a crime campaign where the players are organising heists. Some of their planning involves negotiation & when things go awry there is often combat but much of the other stuff they do is not really exploration.

Mapping can be part of exploration but tracking supplies is just book keeping, not actual game play. Exploration can be some of the most fun if the setting itself is interesting. Too often the setting is forgotten or is simply a two dimensional backdrop for combat & interaction. Exploring a town for the first time to see what interesting things are there can be a lot of fun if it isn't just a generic town with stock businesses and NPCs.
The dungeon environment can be fun to explore if it has interesting features beyond vanilla rooms & corridors.

In order for setting elements to provide the most fun, they have to matter. Setting elements need to impact gameplay. If exploration only includes listening to descriptions of window dressing then it will probably be boring and not much fun.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I enjoy pretending to be my character and making decisions from that standpoint, so social interaction, and then exploration, before combat.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I like all of them, but I'd say exploration is probably my greatest love (though I may be over-emphasizing it due to the fact that it has been out of favor for decades).

I just *love* exploring a world, whether that's a city, or a wilderness, or a dungeon. I like making decisions about how to effectively accomplish my goals (without dying), as well as just wandering around town tasting the local cuisine. The biggest problem that I have is that few DMs spend as time making a world that I actually *can* explore in that manner. I'd actually be fine if I were playing in, say, a 2e/3e era Forgotten Realms campaign with a DM who had a library of old supplements and used them. For example, Lost Mine of Phandelver has Neverwinter on the map, but no information on it--despite the fact that it's a logical place to go to get access to resources you can't find in po-dunk Phandelver. The party in my game ended up going there on a couple of occasions. I have 5 books with information on Neverwinter. A couple of them have just have a short entry, while the other three have multiple page entries--including Volo's Guide to the North, where he explains what some of the major inns are like down to the what foods are their specialties and what smells waft from the kitchen.

So the party is in Neverwinter the first time looking for information on a couple of pesky critters: the flameskull because they couldn't figure out how to keep it dead, and Norm the Spectator, that they felt wrong about just slaying (both because he didn't go hostile on them, and because they weren't sure how tough he was). The cleric of Kelemvor visits his local temple (which I did make up, since I had no info on it) and gets referred to the temple of Oghma (again, of my own creation), and then eventually to the temple of Tymora (yes, I made that one up too). They stayed at a particular inn and ate at particular levels of quality depending on their choice.

On their second visit to Neverwinter, accompanying Sildar as he brought prisoners there for trial, I was able to reference no only the inns, but also the Hall of Justice from the books. I also described the Neverwinter heraldry on the guards, as well as the way the town looked, and the kids that you could hire to run messages around--again, provided to me by the books I have.

I would absolutely love to play with a DM that does that sort of thing. I love the idea of knowing that official lore material is consistently used and not made up just to facilitate the story. If I were in Waterdeep, I'd want to walk around looking at things and have the DM say, "okay, let's take a 15 minute break," while he looked up the section of town we were in to figure out what prominent shops and atmosphere we should be seeing based on the books he had.

In dungeon environments, I most get into the game/competition sort of aspect. Even against other players! Not in the sense of conflict, just in the sense of trying to show how "well" I can defeat the dungeon by playing smart, knowing which risks to take and which not to, and generally being resourceful. I tend to be the guy who throw handfuls of pebbles as a "find traps" device when walking into suspicious rooms, pokes things with my weapon before touching them, and checks the walls before playing with the statue. Dungeon exploration/survival is probably the only part of the game where I actually enjoy the game-like feel of overcoming the challenge. I love one-shots where the goal is to see how long your character can survive the killer dungeon.

As a DM, I really enjoy interaction. I have a pretty wide vocal range, and I'm big into making faces and giving all of my NPCs fairly distinct personalities. Improvisational acting is a talent, so I have little problem coming up with what to say or do as the NPCs. The DMs I've played with are also pretty good with portraying NPCs (even if they aren't as animated) so I get to enjoy this from the player side too, which is good because I really get into my character (as most of the players in our groups do--it's a strength of our role-playing group).

As a player I feel a real need for combat in D&D, probably because we have relatively little of it when I'm not the DM. Our non-combat sessions outnumber our combat sessions by a large margin. This doesn't seem to bother anyone but me--probably because I'm the only one who doesn't play MMOs, and therefore doesn't get fantasy combat anywhere else. As someone who got my D&D start with the old Gold Box computer games, I feel dissatisfied without combats that involve me slaying vast quantities of weak foes. And not just handwaved either. It isn't the same to say, "you kill another 50 goblins" as it is make each of those attack and damage rolls while they swing away at me. (Does anyone else with Gold Box experience remember the pure joy of slaying an entire screen full of kobolds when you first got fireball?)

Okay, I'm done.

 

[TwoSix]

What I truly enjoy is conflict. So combat is definitely my favorite thing to do, with interaction second as long as there is some drama involved. Random conversations with guards or merchants to figure out the lay of the land bore me pretty quickly. I also get bored quickly with puzzles and logistics. Spending an hour to come up with a plan to avoid a confrontation with a monster is pretty much the worst possible scenario for me in a game.

 

[Jester David]

Mapping can be part of exploration but tracking supplies is just book keeping, not actual game play.

Only if there are no consequences.
Arguably, tracking hit points is just bookkeeping. If encounters never bring you to near death, than tracking hit points is just busywork.

If you're in a well civilized area then tracking food, ammunition, feed, and the like is unneeded. But if you're in a dungeon or the Underdark or the Isle of Dread or some ungodly swamp then tracking resources is basically hit points for the exploration pillar.
How much food determines how often the party might rest and if they travel that extra few hours or risk that extra encounter to avoid going hungry. How much water determines if the party might risk drinking from the forest pool or the underground spring. How much supplies determines if the party tries to parlay with the drow to trade for new stock or if they wait to see if they encounter less hostile races.

You can spawn some great stories and tension from tracking supplies. It's the difference between Voyager and Battlestar Galactica...

 

[redrick]

As a DM, I love social interaction. It's where I'm most comfortable working off-book, quickly creating characters and back-stories to help fill in important details about the setting and the adventure. Players also do a very good job at pretending to enjoy my various accents.

As a player, my favorite would be exploration. I love building a picture of what my character sees as the DM describes an area and imagining what scary things might lurk around every corner. Unfortunately, as a DM, I find exploration the hardest to run! I have to keep track of everything the players can't see (yet), and I tend not to improvise room and setting descriptions very well. It works when I've done the work beforehand to prep annotated maps, but I tend to chew through prep a lot faster in exploration than social interaction or combat. I also often find players spending the most time in areas that I found the least interesting, while completely ignoring areas that I had lovingly lavished detail and mystery on, and I don't always adjust well enough on the fly. ("No, really, there's nothing left to do in this room. Please go to another room.")

Combat's what I tend to spend the most time "planning" when I'm not actually playing — thinking about different ways for a player character or a monster to be effective — but it usually ends up laster longer than it needs to. I also get pretty bored when playing with people who like to agonizingly consider every possible action on every single turn.

 

[redrick]

Only if there are no consequences.
Arguably, tracking hit points is just bookkeeping. If encounters never bring you to near death, than tracking hit points is just busywork.

If you're in a well civilized area then tracking food, ammunition, feed, and the like is unneeded. But if you're in a dungeon or the Underdark or the Isle of Dread or some ungodly swamp then tracking resources is basically hit points for the exploration pillar.
How much food determines how often the party might rest and if they travel that extra few hours or risk that extra encounter to avoid going hungry. How much water determines if the party might risk drinking from the forest pool or the underground spring. How much supplies determines if the party tries to parlay with the drow to trade for new stock or if they wait to see if they encounter less hostile races.

You can spawn some great stories and tension from tracking supplies. It's the difference between Voyager and Battlestar Galactica...

When I recently played a PC for the first time in a long time, I realized how much, as a player, I enjoy tracking my resources. It really adds to the immersion of the game for me to think very concretely not only about what my character is carrying, but how much. I like to imagine my PC rooting around in his pack to pull out his day's rations (and I know what kind of food he has), or emptying the last drop of his water bottle. As a player, all I really have is that one little character, and I can really get into the details of what he is doing, how he is doing it, and how he feels about it. It's a big part of the joy of the game for me.

As a DM, of course, I don't pay attention to any of that stuff. I've got a whole world of people to worry about, and I have very little head-space for worrying about resources and the like. I am trying, however, to encourage and support players who do want to track their supplies, and meaningfully engage with them on that level if I can.

 

[Klataubarada]

Exploration by far (including clues gathering and puzzles).