D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[Hussar]

It's also not all about the DM. If the players are not into exploration of the setting, no amount of good ideas, interesting places or whatnot is going to change that. You can have all sorts of setting stuff ready to go, but, if your players are all about being murder hobos and, after nearly a year of play, cannot even name the setting you're in, then, well, exploration is pretty much off the table.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

It's also not all about the DM. If the players are not into exploration of the setting, no amount of good ideas, interesting places or whatnot is going to change that. You can have all sorts of setting stuff ready to go, but, if your players are all about being murder hobos and, after nearly a year of play, cannot even name the setting you're in, then, well, exploration is pretty much off the table.

Solution: Choose players carefully.

 

[Reynard]

It's also not all about the DM. If the players are not into exploration of the setting, no amount of good ideas, interesting places or whatnot is going to change that. You can have all sorts of setting stuff ready to go, but, if your players are all about being murder hobos and, after nearly a year of play, cannot even name the setting you're in, then, well, exploration is pretty much off the table.

It's not even necessarily an issue of the players being shallow murder hobos. Maybe they care more about Plot, or Character Interaction, or Pretending to be an Elf. People play RPGs for lots of reasons and immersion in a deep fantasy world isn't always one of them.

 

[J-H]

I like the vats. Here's another one. This could be a combat encounter, but I class it as an exploration encounter. Most parties (?) can solve it without anything more than a couple of skill checks.

This was in the treasury area in my soon-to-be-published Castlevania Castle Dracula campaign.

Spoiler: Spoilered for length

Western Door: Shoggoth-in-a-box

You find a locked door made of iron, inscribed with a few runes (Arcana DC 15: They are runes of protection against acid). A simple wooden cabinet rests outside it. Inside the cabinet are several flasks of oil, a flint & steel, three torches, and a magic rod. The door is locked (DC 25).

The magic rod is the Rod of Telekinesis. It can be identified via the runes, DC 15 Arcana check. It gives the wielder the ability to cast Telekinesis once per day, or +2 on their DC if they cast it from a spell slot.

The room is about 30x30, and contains an iron-framed structure in the form of a flattened metal cube 10x10x5’H. The walls of the cube appear to be made of an opaque force field, like a Wall of Force. A large wooden funnel with a lid (5’H and wide, going down to 1’ diameter) lies to one side, and there appears to be an area at the top of the cube where it can be opened (1x1 square), or there’s a seam where you could undo a couple of latches and lift the entire top.


The floor is dusty. Nobody has been here in a long time.

If the party opens the lid, the Shoggoth inside begins to squeeze itself out through the opening (taking one round to exit). The party has the chance to react, using the Rod to move it back inside, or using opposed Strength checks to try to slam the lid, or using some other method to solve the problem.

Identifying the Shoggoth
Arcana DC 20: It’s not a natural creature. You feel like fire would help. The rod of Telekinesis might be effective at shoving it back in the box.
Arcana DC 25: You’ve seen a couple of references to a “shoggoth” and know that it’s extremely dangerous and strong, more so than any mere ooze. Thunder and fire damage are likely to be most effective on its unprotected flesh.
Arcana DC 30: There are theories that shoggoths can be controlled with music.
Nature DC 20: You feel like you should kill it with fire. It doesn’t belong.

There's a big Shoggoth statblock. It has a specific disadvantage against telekinetic movement.
It can also be controlled with music (Performance checks) if the party decides to go that route.
Or they can just kill it with fire.

My party explored, then opened the lid while staying at a distance, then panicked and shoved it back in the box immediately.

It was fun.

 

[robus]

Yes, but I have heard of those places; and that's the problem: if I've heard of it before, it's not new.

Sure a DM can take a bit of blank FR map (is there really any left?) and put some brand-new-to-all elements in there; and that's cool for a while but sooner or later it's going to become obvious to one and all at the table that the larger-scale setting is FR - again.

One could, I suppose, use the maps and just rename everything; but that's almost as much work as starting from scratch and nowhere near as much fun.

My issue with the Realms is just how pedestrian it is. It‘s basically Earth + Monsters. Earth is pretty familiar to everyone so I think the description of the environment is cut short because it’s fundamentally known to everyone at the table. I want spectacular and fantastic settings the beggar the imagination

Having this familiar terrain also being so well trod doesn‘t help IMHO.

 

[Scott Christian]

While I agree with some that DM's can and do, do it well. I think there is an underlying factor why many do not - D&D.

For the most part, in order to make something a pillar of the game, the rules need to coalesce around the pillar. There are too many outs for players to take, and this leads to a landslide of DM's not wanting to think about it. Environmental factors are a perfect example. Exhaustion is the rule set for much of environmental conditions. But it is so easy to negate. In the desert, no water - create food and water. In an icy cave - heat metal or any number of spells that can insulate or warm you. The same is true for environmental obstacles. Need to ford that raging river? I fly over it. I mage hand and tie knots with the rope. Need to climb that cliff wall? Levitate. Is the hallway trapped? Send in the familiar. These outs, while they may use a bit of resources, are almost always there. So the DM stops describing the exploration side little by little because the players always have a way of negating it.
And I do realize there are DM's that can and do push exploration. But sometimes, the way the rules and powers are, it's just a game of gotchya! Which is always viewed with rolled eyes from most tables. So over the course of time, it gets used less and less.

 

[Hriston]

So the three pillars of play are combat, role-playing, and exploration. Combat we discuss a lot and have many rules to make dynamic and exciting, hordes of monsters, reams of magical spells, and numerous tomes of battle equipment. Role-playing is theatric, and we have seen it done with character arcs, accents, and know how it has been long elevated as the height of good Game-Mastering ("Role-play" NOT "ROLL-play.")
But exploration? It's the neglected middle child of the pillars. Why? I think because it's the in-between of interesting things.
It's the trek through the wilderness listening to the DM trying to use purple prose to describe the forest that exists to waste your time between getting the quest from the haughty noble (role-playing) to the bandit hideout (combat). It's the long, featureless corridors that may contain a ho-hum trap (which is likely going to be less dangerous than a single monster of your party's level), but that trap will be avoided with a Passive Perception check you don't even have to roll. That hallway may connect two exciting combat encounters, but the hallway itself is just a line on a flowchart.
Exploration is the session that you're buying supplies for your journey and making preparations, which can be easily avoided with a die roll. ("Did we bring enough food? Here, let me roll randomly. Good, you have enough food.")
How much game time is wasted on exploration? Would the experience be better by simply asking the players: "Do you want to go to Fight A with the troll barbarian or Fight B in the vampire's crypt?" We could speed through literal sessions of actual games that require wilderness travel from the starting town to the dungeon.
But the only advice I've ever seen for improving exploration mode is to use better descriptive phrases, wandering monsters, or have a few skill checks that are going to ultimately have no impact on the game (maybe you lose some hit dice, maybe have to spend a few spell slots, etc.). But even with most of that advice, it's telling you to make exploration mode better by adding combat (wandering monsters).
So what do you think? Am I wrong on this?

First, it's ALL roleplaying. The pillar you have identified as roleplaying is called Social Interaction. This may seem like a pedantic distinction, but I don't think it is. By limiting roleplaying to the Social Interaction pillar, you're saying that Combat and Exploration don't involve making decisions for your character. This is the fundamental activity of roleplaying and underlies all three pillars. If you view Combat and Exploration as mini-games that don't involve roleplaying, combat is going to be all about interfacing directly with the combat mechanics, and exploration is going to seem like a pointless waste of time waiting for an encounter to happen.

Second, if D&D is a meal, and Combat is the crunchy meat and Social Interaction is the roleplaying vegetables in an "eat your veggies" kind of way, then Exploration is the potatoes. It's what fills out the plate and brings all the flavors together. I'd go so far as to say it's THE pillar of the game that contains and encompasses the other two. Combat and Social Interaction only come into play when the game's default state, Exploration, focuses in on an encounter.

Third, to bring roleplaying into the Exploration pillar, the choices the players make for their characters have to matter. Otherwise, you might as well skip it.

 

[Reynard]

While I agree with some that DM's can and do, do it well. I think there is an underlying factor why many do not - D&D.

For the most part, in order to make something a pillar of the game, the rules need to coalesce around the pillar. There are too many outs for players to take, and this leads to a landslide of DM's not wanting to think about it. Environmental factors are a perfect example. Exhaustion is the rule set for much of environmental conditions. But it is so easy to negate. In the desert, no water - create food and water. In an icy cave - heat metal or any number of spells that can insulate or warm you. The same is true for environmental obstacles. Need to ford that raging river? I fly over it. I mage hand and tie knots with the rope. Need to climb that cliff wall? Levitate. Is the hallway trapped? Send in the familiar. These outs, while they may use a bit of resources, are almost always there. So the DM stops describing the exploration side little by little because the players always have a way of negating it.
And I do realize there are DM's that can and do push exploration. But sometimes, the way the rules and powers are, it's just a game of gotchya! Which is always viewed with rolled eyes from most tables. So over the course of time, it gets used less and less.

This post, and a number of others, seem focused and equating "exploration" with come combination of Survivalism and Resource management. That is not what Exploration is. i mean, it can include those things, but they aren't requirements. Exploration is Discovery -- it is the process of exploring the world, its inhabitants and the things that the designers, GM, other players, random tables and what-have-you have populated the world with.

It doesn't actually matter if the whole world is mapped and the names of all the important NPCs are known to the players. They don't know the name of the baker's daughter or the cursed princess she loves or the jealous duke that called down the curse in the first place (because the GM invented all that stuff 3 seconds ago on the fly). Finding those things out are the Exploration pillar. They don't know where the Cairn of the Highway King is located or how finding the skeleton of his favorite steed will allow them to plunder his grave goods (because the GM wrote that adventure when she was 12 but never got around to running it). Finding those things out is the Exploration pillar.

And so on.

 

[Retreater]

@Hriston I guess I see roleplaying different than combat. Sure you can say something in character during a fight, but when a player starts "role-playing" their character in the midst of a dangerous fight, that's when I get miffed.
"I'm going to heal the monsters during the fight because I'm a pacifist."
"I'm going to grapple the cleric because it would be funny."
"My character is paranoid and I think your character could be a doppelganger (even though there's no evidence) so I'm going to attack a fellow party member."
All of these have happened in my games. It's annoying. Get that crap out of my combat.

 

[dragoner]

Exploration is to look beyond the unopened door; though I know a lot of players live for combat. Personally I find combat a chore, and quite boring anymore, even though at one point in time I found it fun.