pemerton said:
if a player is setting out to do something in a different "pillar", and discovers by way of unanticipated GM adjudication that s/he is really exploring, then s/he might feel surprised or even disappointed.
As would the PC; and
this is perfectly fine. Same way I'd feel if I took a swig of water only to find I'd just downed a mouthful of Gilbey's Finest London Dry: I don't like gin, and so I'd be both surprised and disappointed...and probably a bit annoyed too.
So here's a fairly uncontroversial idea: bartenders who swap water for gin, or vic versa, aren't doing something perfectly fine. Even leaving aside the breach of laws that regulate the commercial provision of alcholic beverages, there is the social issue: they're doing wrong by their patrons.
And I can tell you, if I was playing in a game where a signficant number of my attempts to change the fiction got reframed by the GM as opportunities to provide me with the outcomes of exploration - ie to tell me more about the gameworld and fiction as they conceive of it - then that
wouldn't be fine and I'd be out of there quick smart.
Actively chasing someone usually falls under combat
Says who? It could be a race. An attempt to deliver a message. This seems like sheer projection.
The same is true of your discussion of other examples. Eg buying things in BW is not mostly about social interaction at all, but is primarily about how the resource stat is affected.
crossing a desert = exploration.
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it all fell under the exploration pillar in terms of learning about the setting and how things work there.
In what sense is either case (the desert crossing, or me describing to the players the situation in which their PCs find themselves) exploration?
Here's how the 5e D&D Basic PDF describes exploration (p 5):
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. On a large scale, that might involve the characters spending a day crossing a rolling plain or an hour making their way through caverns underground. On the smallest scale, it could mean one character pulling a lever in a dungeon room to see what happens.
In my Traveller game, last session, a group of PCs was being pursued by mercenaries and Imperial Marines in a faster, better-armed vehicle, and so surrendered. I described to them the circumstances in which they found themselves as prisoners (incuding that there were force-fields of a particular type to keep warm air inside an open-air area). That's not exploration, that's just the GM describing the situation. Having the GM tell the players about the PCs' circumstances isn't exploration - isn't "interacting with objects". It's the functional equivalent of reading the boxed text in a module.
And the last time I adjudicated a desert crossing was in BW. The PCs knew where they were going. There was no exploration, either in the fiction (the PCs weren't exploring) or in the process of resolution (the players weren't learning the content of the fiction from the GM). The actual question resolved by the action resolution was whether or not they would make it to the foothills and find the fresh water there. The outcome - given the relevant check failed - was that when they got to the waterhole it had been fouled by an enemy. There was no "give-and-take" here, and the players weren't being told the result of their journey by the GM: there was a framed, and ultimately unscuccessful, Orienteering check. Had it succeeded, the players' vision for the fiction (safe arrival at fresh water) would have been what happened. But because it failed, I as GM got to establish an adverse vision of the fiction instead.
after the jump you're going to be somewhere you weren't before - a place which you either know through previous exploration or don't know and thus will probably want to explore - even if such exploration consists only of looking out the window (and-or checking the sensors) to see what's around you before jumping again to somewhere else.
But that's not what I talked about. I referred to the need to succeed at checks to avoid misjump, enging failure and the like.
RPGs can cover any ficitonal events that can be conveived of - and human endeaour extends beyond talking to people, fighting them and looking for them.
I wonder if you can name anything a PC might do or try to do within the fiction of an RPG that doesn't fall under one or more of the four pillars including downtime?
The "three pillars" of 5e, and your "four pillars", are a jumble of in-fiction and at-the-table characterisations of PC actions. In Cortex+ there are Action Scenes and Transition Scenes - differentiated both by their role in the fiction and (more importntly) their role in pacing and conflict at the table.
In Burning Wheel there is either "say 'yes'" or else there is confict, which is resolved via checks. Whether the conflict is about fighting, persuading, or makng it safely across a desert, the mechanical basics are the same.
But anyway, I've already listed some stuff that doesn't fall under any of your pillars, in that it is not fighting, not talking, and not just "give and take where players say what their PCs do and GM tells them what happens": runing a race; and ensuring that a spaceship successfully makes a jump. More examples would include successfully placing a secret message (happened in my second-to-last Traveller game), trying to ensure a message is sent to your family so they can join you at an event (happened in my last Prince Valiant game), intercepting or blocking communiation signals (a recurrent element in my Traveller game), repairing a vehicle, testing the DNA of an alien creature, making checks to avoid being caught doing illegal things (al Traveller again), lighting a campfire (Burning Wheel), recalling a fact, etc, etc.
The other half of the picture is, of course, hidden information that the PCs (and thus players) can't know until they discover it, sometimes the hard way.
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Information gathering of any kind is exploration.
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You aren't always going to describe every last little feature of a scene and nor is anyone else. Players can (1) ask for more (or more specific) info, or they can (2) declare actions that'll get them the info. Either way, for better or worse they should end up learning more
Spout Lore and Discern Realities (in DW), or the scenario I described from my Traveller game, are not
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. They don't involve the revelaion of hidden information (maybe in the fiction it might be hidden, but not necessarily). They're examples of players activating the mechanics to oblige the GM to
make some stuff up! The sort of thing the GM makes up depends on the outcomes of the check(s) at issue.
5e D&D simply doesn't contemplate this sort of thing in its account of "exploration". And there are features of the game - namely, the lack of an appropriate system of checks - that would make it hard to introduce. (This is a marked contrast with 4e, which is easily run this way.)
So they never declare any action on the basis of "let's try this and see if it works"? No trial-and-error, intentional or otherwise?
In the fiction, of course this happens. In my Traveller game one of the PCs has Jack-of-all-Trades-4. But as a resolution method, no, not really. When actions are declared the players know the general way that resolution will be determined (eg in Traveller, the default is a 2 dice throw), and we throw the dice and see what happens.
It's not any sort of coincidence that this post keeps coming back to the framing of checks. Making checks is the most obvious alternative to
GM decides in order to esetablish the content of the shared fiction.