D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

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.
I take the opposite view, I lean into just these type of solutions.....if entry into the dread ruins of the Iron Tyrants fortress requires knots tied by Mage Hand, this might explain why a diverse Adventuring Group succeeds in gaining admittance, while a royal squad of elite soldiers, (use Gladiator stats)...fails.
 
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Gradine

🏳️‍⚧️ (she/her) 🇵🇸
That last paragraph doesn't track. They have done nothing but expand on the exploration pillar over the life of 5E, from the "open world sandboxes" in most of the adventures, to downtime activities and various adventure rule expansions like Saltmarsh sailing.

Notice that I said "base" mechanics. They've definitely expanded rules in that direction, but if they continue in D&D beyond, that is likely the route they will continue to take
 

Li Shenron

Legend
This is because it's easier to make the mistake in the exploration pillar. The real issue here is if the game is cutting to the interesting parts. In combat, this is largely done for you as it doesn't even start until you've hit an interesting part. Social is similar, in that most people equate it with acting, which is fun. It gets less so when you're leaning on the social pillar for every shopkeep or stableboy, so there's some risk here, but it's largely offset by the pretend part being fun for most players.

Exploration, on the other hand... you can do long stretches of boring material and confuse this with what you should be doing. It's not the fault of the exploration pillar -- exploration isn't required to do this -- but rather of the way the GM structures the game they present. If you do exploration by glossing the 'transition' parts and drill down into the interesting things that happen, then exploration doesn't have this problem of boring just like the other pillars. The problem here is that GM's are often poorly taught (the rules have done a poor job of this for awhile now) and/or fixate on mechanically applying the mechanics of the game, like making a check to see if you get lost every hour with the result meaning you get an extra hour added onto the journey and another chance to roll.

I agree. I would also say that a poorly taught DM and an uninterested group can also make social interaction and combat very boring. Have you ever found yourself in a social scene where players appear clueless at what to ask and the DM is just waiting for them? Or a combat encounter where both PCs and monsters are just lazily dragging along with regular attacks for HP erosion? It doesn't matter that the rules offer at least 10 different combat actions if everyone is fixated on just damaging the opponent faster than they are doing to you.
 

Zardnaar

Legend
It's hard to pull off,I stole a lot of ideas from Pathfinder:Kingmaker.

The basic one. Give do for hexes explored. At level one this adds up fast, the XP scales with level.

2. You use a mixture of combat, locations, land marks and natural features to reward clever players. That ruined temple might have a font of magical water that can be used as a healing potion.

3. Mix in some role-playing encounters. And grant xp for "winning".

4. Mix in side quests. NPCs want body parts, eggs, antiques, knowledge etc.
 

Hussar

Legend
Again, it depends so hard on your group.

My last group, I gave them not one, but THREE treasure maps, complete with all sorts of quests and whatnot and a ship to go after the treasure.

The players dumped the ship, took one look at the maps and never mentioned them again.

It was so discouraging. I spent a long time making treasure maps, coming up with concepts and whatnot. And it got a grand "meh" from the players. So, yeah, it really, REALLY matters who your players are. BTW, here's the maps, if anyone wants them.
 

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Li Shenron

Legend
Again, it depends so hard on your group.

My last group, I gave them not one, but THREE treasure maps, complete with all sorts of quests and whatnot and a ship to go after the treasure.

The players dumped the ship, took one look at the maps and never mentioned them again.

It was so discouraging. I spent a long time making treasure maps, coming up with concepts and whatnot. And it got a grand "meh" from the players. So, yeah, it really, REALLY matters who your players are. BTW, here's the maps, if anyone wants them.

I can't believe a group of players being handed out that sort-of-triangulation map and not wanting to go an see what is there at the intersection :(
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
I'd agree it shouldn't but it's a matter of psychology. If you want to encourage behavior, you reward the behavior. If you want to discourage a behavior, you punish it.
Rewarding a behaviour you want to encourage is fine only until the reward becomes automatic, and thus expected.

Ideally, an exploration action could have one or more of three outcomes: reward (treasure, info, shortcut), punishment (trap, monster, misdirection), or nothing. Finding nothing is not a punishment.

A party is more likely to just ignore a door they aren't supposed to open.
You've had different players than I, then. Here, I could put every discouragement known to DMs on a door and they'd still try to find a way through it. (then again, how do the players know whether they're 'suppoesed' to open a door or not, until after they've already done it?)

And if they ignore it, what was the point of putting it there in the first place? It'll also confuse the players, because they'll think your descriptions are less interactive and more narrative. There's a door there, but is really a door or is it another stage-set?
In part you answered your first question with your second sentence: in part perhaps it is there to confuse, misdirect, or delay. As for the second question, the only way to find out is to go through it and look.

As the party, busy exploring deep in an old castle, opens a door and looks in I lay out the scene: "Behind the door is a round room about 30' across. An open-grid metal spiral staircase leads upward from the middle and passes through a hole in the ceiling. An open archway across from you seems to exit directly into another room, on your left and right are closed wooden doors. A bright torch in a sconce above each exit provides light. The only furniture is three sets of shelves, curved to match the room's walls, standing one between each pair of doors except to your immediate left. On the shelves are an assortment of knick-knacks, a few books and papers, and - as you can see even from here - quite a lot of dust."

So you've got four known exits other than the door you're coming in: ahead, left, right, and up. What comes next?


Nobody really likes to look at nothing, though. It's boring and it wastes time on describing the nothing rather than actually playing the game.
Exploring and describing the 'nothing' is every bit as much a part of playing the game as talking with the King or putting a sword through a Giant. In the description I give above, how do you know whether it's 'nothing' until you interact with it? How do you know if any of the exits go anywhere useful until you check 'em all out?

Gaining something for searching a room isn't necessarily giving them a participation trophy because they won't know they didn't truly earn it.
Yeah, we're coming from completely different backgrounds here I think: I can't imagine a party not searching a room unless I describe it as four bare walls, a bare floor and a ceiling - and even that'd make 'em suspicious!

I structure my dungeons fairly similarly. Despite my constant rewards, players tend to miss 1-2 treasure hoards in a dungeon because they either forgot to inspect something or they didn't think about it.

By dread, I don't mean fear. It's perfectly fine if a player hears your description of a crimson dragon opening it's maw and preparing to unleash a shower of flames. That's awesome. It's not awesome when players hear you say roll initiative for the group of mooks and the players audibly groan and bang their head on the table while a player turns on the shredder preparing to recycle the leftover of their characters.
What always both amazes and pleases me is that what on paper are a complete bunch of mooks can give a party fits yet that same party can turn around and knock off foes that in theory have them completely outgunned. I like this, in that I prefer a flatter power curve where low-grade monsters remain a threat further into the game, and at the same time low-level parties can take on major foes with at least a non-zero chance of success.

Most attacks from a balanced fight are designed to hit based on the bounded accuracy. AC doesn't get all that high even at high levels while to-hit goes into the +11's to +13's. It's rare to come up against an enemy whose AC drops your hit percent below 55%. Spells almost always do some form of damage as a guarantee. Even if the enemy succeeds against the save, the caster will get to roll their damage dice.
I'm not running 5e so I've yet to deal with the joys of bounded accuracy. That said, I like a mix of fights and opponents - some where the PCs can't really miss and others where they have a very hard time hitting, with most being in the middle somewhere.

Of course, exploration needn't be low risk-low reward. Traps up the ante for collecting treasure. It makes it very tense when the party finds an obviously booby-trapped cache where they must find the mechanism, disarm it, then grab the treasure without activating the trap. And it won't feel like they merely participated since they did have to make hard decisions and perform difficult tasks to acquire what they earned, and with a risk of damage or worse.
Agreed. However, one has to be careful not to overdo this.

And again, mixing it up is fun too. Sometimes I'll leave amazing treasure just lying there unguarded by anything*. Other times I'll have traps and monsters guarding nothing, or nothing of value. The minute they start to be able to predict what comes next, I know I'm doing it wrong.

* - in an adventure I wrote and ran a few years back there was a secret passage - just a shortcut between two otherwise-very-explorable areas, which they found and explored no problem - and lying on the floor of this passage was a Ring of Three Wishes, completely undefended by anything other than the passage being hard to find. The idea was that if they used this passage some PC might have a Bilbo moment and find the ring...so of course they never found the passage at all. :)
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
Again, it depends so hard on your group.

My last group, I gave them not one, but THREE treasure maps, complete with all sorts of quests and whatnot and a ship to go after the treasure.

The players dumped the ship, took one look at the maps and never mentioned them again.
I feel your pain.

What is it that makes getting parties onto ships for some maritime adventuring so bloody hard? :)

Nice maps, by the way - I particularly like map-4 on the left.
 

Tales and Chronicles

Jewel of the North, formerly know as vincegetorix
What is it that makes getting parties onto ships for some maritime adventuring so bloody hard? :)

The worst in that is the next time you'll plan a land-based campaign, you can be sure they, somehow, will get their hands on a !&?#*@() ship (yes, even in the middle of a desert) and sail into the great un-planed nothingness! :p
 

Retreater

Legend
I feel your pain.

What is it that makes getting parties onto ships for some maritime adventuring so bloody hard? :)

Nice maps, by the way - I particularly like map-4 on the left.
My experience as a player in a few maritime adventures is that they tend to take away player agency. The captain makes you tend to mundane tasks, you get blown far off course and stranded, you watch fellow party members get keel hauled, you get trapped in tight quarters combats by raiding parties and can't escape short of diving into shark infested waters, you leave behind all the contacts you had on the mainland and connection to that campaign world, you're basically trapped in a floating hamlet where everyone knows you (bad for rogues), you're usually at sea for months with little happening, it typically involves several boring sessions of preparation just to launch the expedition, there aren't good rules for it in the core books (and thus it's out of the scope the core game can handle), heavily armored characters sink and drown easily. I could go on.
I have yet to play in a good nautical adventure, and I'd be wary about signing up for one after the horrible ones I've played in. I know they can be done well by a DM who has done the work to avoid situations like the ones I mentioned above, but I'd really have to trust that DM.
 

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