D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[Undrave]

t looks like I need to check this out and mine it for ideas. I like some of the concepts you describe.

I've done some things similar in my hex crawl. I have a calendar with moon phases. I have areas of my world that open only on full moons. I also have stone henges coded with sigils. If you collect the correct magic items with the correct sigils you can teleport to different henges (like Stargate).

I've always liked playing Metroid. It was a game where you had to kind of explore around and sometimes you can't open a door right by the start until you find a key later on. As an example and I haven't found a place for it yet, but I'd like to put a room in a dungeon with a glass floor that looks on a treasure vault. Except it shows no clear way to get to it. Let the players try to figure out a way to the vault.

In the older Pokémon games, HM moves work a lot like abilities in Metroid in that they open up the overworld map and you unlock them from progressing the story. In the Hoenn games in particular you have Cut, to chop down specific trees, Rock Smash to break cracked boulders, Strength to push boulders around (mostly for block pushing puzzles), Fly to take you back to places you've been, but the three more important ones are Surf, Waterfall and Dive.

Hoenn is (in)famous for being covered in water. It's theme is 'Land VS Sea' so about half the map is water area. Surf allows you to traverse water, Waterfall lets you climb waterfalls and Dive, if it's not obvious, lets you dive underwater in certain segment of the ocean.

HM moves are also used throughout the game to open up shortcuts that were previously unusable, which is useful because you don't get to use Fly until you've defeated 6 of the game's 8 Gym Leaders so it takes a while.

In addition, you have two bikes available to you: the Mach Bike and the Acro Bike. The Mach Bike is fast and lets you ride up sandy slopes that make you slip otherwise, and the Acro Bike lets you hop and ride on narrow elevated rails that (for some reason) exist in parts of the map.

Also, there's a desert covered in a permanent sandstorm that you can't explore until you gain goggles from progressing the story. It's mostly a short cut to avoid a cave system, but if you go off the main path you can find a fossil that you can have revived into a Pokémon. Among other things.

Throughout your journey you'll find water areas or just small bodies of water doting the map. Almost EVERY single one of them give you something if you go back to it once you have the Surf HM.

One BRILLIANT set piece is the abandoned ship! Early in the game you need to take a boat to reach your next destination (you can charter the boat after rescuing the old sailor's Wingull from the bad guys) and as you navigate you catch a glimpse of a beached ship, crashed against the rocks. If you go back there later when you have Surf (an entirely optional thing to do even) you'll find trainers there and a couple of items... but you can't explore ALL of it until you get Dive and can go through a submerged passage.

Some of the diving segment in the oceans hide rare Pokémon, rare items, items you can trade for useful services, and some of them allow you to pass through rock barriers into other segment of the over world water route.

What you'll find in those hidden nooks and crannies dotting the map will vary. Two common ones in Hoenn are Berry Trees and Secret Base spots. Hoenn introduced the concept of berry farming (while previously you could only harvest berries from predetermined tree, berries are useful held items that Pokémon can make use of, on their own, in battle). By planting a berry and watering the crop you can make more of the useful berries, and some of the rarer ones were hidden in those little out of the way nooks.

The game also had this 'secret base' system where you could use a special move when next to a specific terrain feature and open up an indoor space for yourself that you could decorate (giving you decoration to collect, including ones you could only get through specific achievements). If you connected to another player, your secret base would appear on their overworked and they could go visit it! There, they would find a NPC version of you, complete with your team at the time of connecting, who they could battle once per day! This system was brought back for the remakes, made even better by the use of the internet. Those terrain features were specific holes in rock walls, giant bushes or specific big trees you could climb. So, if you connected to your friend, you could discover them at random points in your map, or make them look for you and play hide and seek! It was a really fun concept.

Oh, and let's not forget to mention Pacifidlog Town, the optional town. If you go there you'll the TM for Return, a powerful move that can be thought to almost every Pokémon, a couple of items and a trainer offering a trade. It also looks nothing like the other towns in the game, as it's basically a floating city, built onto of a colony of Corsola (coral Pokémon). There's an old man there that, if you bring with you a Pokémon with a rare specific set of hidden stat, will tell you he can see Mirage Island, an area you can't normally access and you can go there to find wild Wynaut, the only place to find such Pokémon in the game. It's a baby Pokémon so it's not THAT great, but it happens so rarely that it's quite an event.

To the East of that town is a water route covered with rushing currents that act like a labyrinth. If you align yourself JUST right, you can find yourself at a spot where you can dive and then get into a secret cavern... This is the first part of the famous quest for the Regis (Regirock, Regice, Registeel) three Legendary Pokémon. Not to go into too much detail, but to be able to unlock the secret areas where those three titans dwell, you need to decipher BRAILLE! It's pretty crazy. And again, optional to the completion of the game.

 

[Gwarok]

To the OP, yes, you are right. I love walking out in nature, its amazing and has some sights that you remember for the rest of your life. But we mere mortal DM's, even legendary literary greats, simply can't render that sense of awe at seeing the perfect sunset or ocean or Mountain View with mere words. Its really hard even in dungeons. First the DM has to imagine it, then convert it into words for the players, then they have to interpret those words and imagine it themselves. Each step loses something, and even the starting point, the DM's imagination, is going to be only a fairly truncated version of an actual scene.

That being said if you are trying to spice it up, we live in a wonderful time where laptops are easy to incorporate into play, you can search for images that capture a natural(or unnatural) scene and use that as the starting point for the players. Having an image to work with helps a lot.

Second, you can make the traveling itself a game within the game. Come up with a few new "stats" that affect travel, and make the players have to do a few things to optimize it. Make them really track food and supplies. Chances are characters on foot won't be able to carry enough water to make it to where they are going, not without a wagon and a barrel or two of it. That means pack animals. That means staying on roads. Is the way they are traveling to where they are going the best? Is there a much better route as of yet undiscovered? The traveling itself can be an adventure. In fact players might not want to have to go through all that, making long overland journeys as tedious as in RL, and make players value things like say a Flying Carpet that bypasses most of that VERY important to them.

Or you can just skip it. Making traveling as interesting as combat or RP requires as much work as those other two things, and not just forcing a DM to describe a jaunt through a vast wilderness vainly trying to capture the beauty of actually doing so. I mean, I loved Fellowship of the Ring, but it had a lot of traveling in it, more than the other books. And frankly even Tolkien made me want to skip forward many pages when those scenes were dragging on, and he was pretty good at telling a story. Your average DM is unlikely to do better.

 

[Haffrung]

I love walking out in nature, its amazing and has some sights that you remember for the rest of your life. But we mere mortal DM's, even legendary literary greats, simply can't render that sense of awe at seeing the perfect sunset or ocean or Mountain View with mere words. Its really hard even in dungeons. First the DM has to imagine it, then convert it into words for the players, then they have to interpret those words and imagine it themselves. Each step loses something, and even the starting point, the DM's imagination, is going to be only a fairly truncated version of an actual scene.

What you're describing is exactly how written fiction and audiobooks work. And those dramatic formats seem pretty popular.

 

[Retreater]

What you're describing is exactly how written fiction and audiobooks work. And those dramatic formats seem pretty popular.

Except that authors work hard on finding the right descriptions and can make them interesting, not creating an impromptu scene. You can also skim boring passages in books.

 

[Haffrung]

Except that authors work hard on finding the right descriptions and can make them interesting, not creating an impromptu scene. You can also skim boring passages in books.

GMs can do that too. For interesting locations or travel sequences, I'll prepare a few sentences of crafted descriptive text. It's not really any different from preparing bits of dialogue, which a lot of GMs do as well.

 

[Yora]

Yesterday I saw entirely by accident a mention of Gus L's new site All Dead Generations. It's a big collection of long posts entirely dedicated to explaining in great detail what this whole "exploration" thing is actually about, where it comes from, and specifically why it doesn't work in 5th edition, and how you make it work with a few small tweaks.
Given how often this topic comes up, I am really surprised that the site hasn't become widely known as the go-to site to getting solutions. I never knew it even exists until now.

 

[HomegrownHydra]

Yesterday I saw entirely by accident a mention of Gus L's new site All Dead Generations. It's a big collection of long posts entirely dedicated to explaining in great detail what this whole "exploration" thing is actually about, where it comes from, and specifically why it doesn't work in 5th edition, and how you make it work with a few small tweaks.
Given how often this topic comes up, I am really surprised that the site hasn't become widely known as the go-to site to getting solutions. I never knew it even exists until now.

Can you link to specific posts that are especially insightful? The most recent posts don't seem to be about exploration.

 

[J.Quondam]

Can you link to specific posts that are especially insightful? The most recent posts don't seem to be about exploration.

I'm not at all familiar with that blog, but...
If you look down the column along the right side, (Blog List, Blog Archive, etc), the last heading is "Labels", and under that there's a tag for "Exploration." That might be a good starting point.

 

[turnip_farmer]

I like it, sounds like your players did too. I am also a fan of sandbox-y games and having monsters exist independently of the PC's level, but I would definitely protect them from an unfair TPK.



The key for me is to deliver a sense of urgency and pressure to the characters rather than the players.

As a player I certainly do not like seeing a DM pulling out a stopwatch or hourglass and force me to act without thinking. It makes me feel like I am forced to play badly in order to play quickly.

Players are the characters. If the characters are under time pressure, players should be made to feel like they're under time pressure. And they should make bad decisions by being pressured. That's the point of pressure. That's why you play chess with a clock.

 

[Morrus]

Players are the characters. If the characters are under time pressure, players should be made to feel like they're under time pressure. And they should make bad decisions by being pressured. That's the point of pressure. That's why you play chess with a clock.

I do that with combat too. If the character gets stabbed with a sword, I stab the player with a sword. It’s really important that players understand the pressure, man!