D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[tetrasodium]

Actually, the combat pillar also suffers from this to some extent. If you stick to the CR guidelines for encounter building, it's virtually impossible to kill PCs with anything that isn't at least double Deadly after level 5.

That's kind of a different problem*. The players still need to go through the motions of the fight. Exploration has a bunch of abilities that may as well say

Spoiler: yell skip when your gm starts talking about x....

If fighters had an ability that read "You can not be hit except by magical means" & there was a background with an ability that had both "You have an excellent memory for creature anatomy and lore, and you can always recall the strengths of creatures, their weaknesses, and their other abilities." and "In addition, you can choose to defeat up to five creatures each day, provided that the the creature can be killed by blade, club, dagger, and so forth." people would seriously question why the game takes such efforts to remove & nullify the combat pillar but those are very minor reworks of a ranger & outlander ability.

*a big one but different

 

[iserith]

From 40+ years of D&D with exploration done in lots of various environments both in and outside of game, exploration only works if a number of conditions are met:

• The DM wants to run it, and will provide appropriate thrills and challenges
• The majority of the players want to do it
• At least one player is willing to take care of the management of resources for the group, hopefully someone who has fun doing that
• The party is low level enough for the challenges to actually matter
  • I would say that, after level 3-4, most of the challenges can be met by magic in one way or another, rather than by cleverness and management of resources.

It's not a question of the edition of the game, this was valid from BECMI (The Isle of Dread) to 5e (Tomb of Annihilation), with all the groups/tables that I have played with. If one of the conditions above is not met, you will have trouble running exploration at your table for more than a few sessions, and even then some players will disengage and complain.

This hasn't been entirely true in my experience. Obviously the DM needs to want to run it and provide appropriate challenges, but I think all the players at the table need to want to do it (or I ain't running it). I really don't need any unengaged players. Sometimes there's someone who steps up to manage resources (like splitting treasure or maybe keeping track of what's on a hireling or mule), but since everyone's individual encumbrance matters, they need to track at least some of this themselves. Electronic sheets make this a great deal easier these days.

Exploration challenges can still be difficult for higher-level PCs, but the DM needs to raise the stakes and expand the scale. Climbing a mountain in the normal setting isn't the same as climbing a mountain on Colothys in Carceri, for example. Higher-level characters have more options to deal with challenges across all pillars, but there are trade-offs if the game is being run with the expected resource attrition and some sense of urgency. There's a thing that happens in forum discussions where everyone assumes that they have exactly what they need to trivialize the challenge and that has never been true in any game I've played. You have to work with what you have at the time and maybe you got it and maybe you don't.

 

[Lanefan]

Oh good. We've moved on from Oberoni to appeals to authority. Good to see that people are so in touch with the feelings of millions of gamers they've never met or spoken to.

These discussions get a lot more productive when people just speak for themselves instead of trying to tell others how wrong they are based on what some fictional group of people apparently like or dislike. I mean, if exploration is THAT popular in the game, how come it's such a minor part of the rules and is pretty much entirely left up to freeforming?

Because it doesn't need detailed mechanical hard-coding. Yes it's abstracted, in that the players themselves aren't trying to cross a flooded river, but as no two situations are the same it only makes sense to leave it to the DM to adjudicate case by case. Mechanical hard-coding would make this process harder, not easier.

Combat's pretty popular. And, oh look, an entire abstract system for resolving combat conflicts. Interacting with NPC's is pretty popular. Oh, look, an entire abstract system for dealing with social encounters.

Social interactions don't need detailed mechanical hard-coding either. That "entire abstract system" is only there to replace actual role-playing at the table, and is almost completely unnecessary.

Combat, on the other hand, does need detailed mechanical hard-coding as - unless you're at a most unusual table - combat has to be completely abstracted.

But, apparently, despite exploration being popular with lots and lots of people, in forty years of the game, no one has bothered coming up with systems for resolving challenges.

Funny how that goes. Almost like stuff that isn't really very popular barely appears in the game and is only really liked by a very vocal minority that figures that the rest of us should just get with the program. Reminds me of something, but, I've only got half of the idea.

You're - very wrongly - assuming that popularity and-or importance directly maps to page-count or word-count in the rulebooks.

Which makes me wonder whether people in general are tending toward a similar - and similarly wrong - stance of "Oh, the rules don't bother much with it so it can't be important". This is in error, since about half of the game (the social pillar and a large chunk of the exploration pillar) works better when there aren't detailed rules getting in the way.

 

[Lanefan]

Vision is far more combat pillar than exploration. But, again, what mechanics are you using that require any resolution with time or vision?

Some of your points are valid but I must take issue with this one.

Vision is perhaps the most important factor - and often the most relevant, if subtle, challenge - in exploration. If you can't see it, it's mighty hard to explore it.

Consider wilderness or marine exploration in thick fog or smoke, or heavy rain or snow, vs the same exploration on a clear day. Consider indoor or underground exploration in darkness (or having to rely on your own limited-range light sources or night-sight*) vs the same exploration with the whole place nicely lit up. Consider any outdoor exploration at night vs during daylight. Which is easier?

And mechanics aren't relevant here, only narration: the DM narrates what you see, which is - obviously - less if vision is obscured or light ing is limited.

* - I suspect this is why there's frequent complaints about too many PC-playable creatures having darkvision; it too-easily negates this vision challenge at night and-or indoors.

 

[turnip_farmer]

Which, is an interesting point, when you start looking at the questions you are asking. Because you are asking "what do you as the DM plan for the players to do or encounter" and at no point do the players get a say, except whether or not to engage.

"You can take the road, which would be pretty safe. It will take about five days to get there. Or, you can take a shortcut through the Woods of Dangerous Random Encounters and get there in two... if you survive."

"There's an interesting shiny thing in the distance off to the left of the path. Shiny things often contain useful magical items or sources of information that may just happen to give you clues on how to stop the Ritual of Evil Ritualing. But it would be a two-day detour to check, and you know the ritual is being prepared..."

 

[Lanefan]

I think D&D is more of a rougelite, when it resembles Rogue at all. In case you're unfamiliar with the term, a roguelite is similar in most respects to a roguelike, except that there's a sense of progression even if you die (although you might lose a significant amount nonetheless).

OK, that's fair.

I say this because even if the DM starts you back at level 1, the party will likely loot your old character's corpse and then outfit your new character with some of their spare gear. That, along with (outside a TPK) having higher level party members to help carry the new character, means that in most cases some progress is retained, unlike in Rogue.

Indeed. I guess I look at overall progress as being more on the party level than the individual character; which comes back to my oft-repeated sports team analogy: the Vancouver Canucks (the party) have existed as an NHL franchise for 50 years, but no single player (a character) has played with them for more than 20.

While I do enjoy roguelite games (currently playing Dreamscaper, which is quite good) I don't approach D&D with that perspective. I mean, sure, if my character dies, they die. However, I'm not simply playing them to see how far they get. That's part of it, but equally important is exploring the character's perspective and story.

My issue - and as a player I'm every bit as guilty of doing this as anyone else, so not pointing fingers - with exploring a character's perspective and story is that it's almost only ever relevant to that character's player; which means any table time spent on its development is time not being spent on the party as a whole.

Doing this stuff one-on-one with the DM during the week? Sure, all day long. Trying to do it during the session? In general, let's not.

 

[Lanefan]

No, I do not enjoy Roguelikes. I would also say that there is a comparison to Roguelikes that highlights why I think they are a bad fit for an RPG style game.

The few Roguelikes I have tried, and the majority I have heard people talk about have little to no story. In fact, a plot would almost ruin the point of a game. I play games like DnD for the story. And so, I find Roguelike elements completely at odds with that.

I suppose much of the time as a player I play more for the here-and-now, and let the big-picture story take care of itself (in part because half the time I'm not even sure what the big-picture story is or which part of it we're dealing with!).

Sure, each individual adventure has its own story - here we're rescuing refugees, there we're destroying a nasty temple, etc. - but that to me is here-and-now stuff, in a campaign that spans literally decades in real time and has built up maybe a dozen of sometimes-interweaving big-picture story arcs.

The characters also don't know that they have a numerical Intelligence score, do you think that we should hide all ability scores from the player's too?

While I know there's variant RPGs where that's the norm, I'm not sure how well it works in practice.

Just because the character doesn't know the numbers exist, doesn't mean the players shouldn't.

Which flies in the face of viewing and interacting with the setting through the eyes of your character. Some numbers, such as stats, serve as player-side informers as to how in general your character would perceive itself and-or be perceived by others. Other numbers, such as DCs, do nothing but hard-code things that in the characters' view would (nearly always) not be anywhere near so cut-and-dried. No need for the players to see those.

Choosing to sit down and play a game of DnD, and wanting to go on an adventure =/= wanting to be transported to the worst of fantasy Vietnam where we move forward inches at a time for fear of death.

Your play style would only encourage me to turtle up and take fewer risks. This is probably why you have the issue with player's vehemently hating you ever saying "your character does X" and need them to confirm every single action, because something as simple as picking up a sword to examine it could be death if they pick it up by the handle instead of the blade. So you back them into the corner of stating every, tiny action, marking what treasures they missed and what traps they trigger when they aren't precise enough to say what they need to say.

I actually just remembered another "hilarious" story, of the time I had a DM (I think it was a con game but I could have been wrong) who let our characters struggle for a good few minutes because I carelessly said "Okay, my character pulls open the door and looks inside" and when we couldn't figure out why the door was stuck he laughed and informed us that this was a push door and I had said I pulled it open, not that he had ever told us it was a push door, but boy, was I so silly for trying to pull open a push door. Because I guess I should have asked "does the door pull open or push open" because my character can't see that automatically and I have to ask the DM specific questions.

"Which way does the door open?" is an easy enough question to ask if the DM forgets to tell you; not just push or pull but which side the handle/hinges are on, which can make a difference if characters want to line up their weapon-hand or shield-hand closer to the opening side. (amusing side note: one famous old-school module notes in its default description for dungeon doors that the handle and hinges are always on the left, which read literally means doors in that dungeon are mighty hard to open...)

No, I don't find that ironic. I find the idea that I might need a guidebook to give me a step by step instruction manual on how to not die just to learn what my rewards might be utterly depressing.

Where I find it cool! Different strokes, I suppose.

Sorry to say that this is yet another place where you are bringing in older assumptions of the game. Detect Magic tells you that something nearby is magical.

Then as an action you can get any magical item you can see to visible glow, and learn the school of magic it belongs to, if any exist. So, at best you could learn that the rod has Evocation magic on it. Does it deal necrotic damage? Does it deal fire damage? Does it heal you? Detect magic doesn't tell you, and it also doesn't tell you how strong the item is. And for a lot of magical items, the best you are going to get is "this item is magical" and that's it.

Ye-es, I see on reading it that 5e has taken out the strength-of-enchantment piece. Another dubious nerf.

This is what I have been saying. I've been told that I am wrong and am just not understanding the rules correctly or presenting the proper challenges to my players.

Thing is, whenever someone suggests changing the rules as a fix you jump on that too.

Can't have it both ways.

 

[Baron Opal II]

Wow, lots of discussion...

Personally, I find the depth and complexity of rules in 5e for exploration to be lacking. Also, there are too many "negate problem" options. Tiny hut, for example, creates an impenetrable bunker rather than a sturdy magical tent as it used to. Extrapolating from what @Hussar mentioned, once you have a sufficiently leveled ranger and wizard, you can pretty much skate by environment issues. This does mean you have to determine how violent weather must be for your magical tent to collapse, as in 1e, and how PCs might prepare for or mitigate that situation.

This also highlights the importance of encumbrance. Yes, you can "ignore" -20C temperatures with parkas, but it's that much less treasure you can carry as a trade off. If spells obviate the need for bulky clothing, then the casters are constantly down the spells needed for survival. There should be trade offs, and this decision making adds interest to the game.

Could you tell me what those skills and experiences are?

Should I go camping?
Play GeoGuesser?
Watch The Travel Channel?

Well, yes, although I don't know what GeoGuesser is. I would also read stories by Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Herman Melville. I recently finished a short story by London which illustrates why you listen to the ranger when he says "wait to travel, it's too cold". His stories can educate about winter and tundra hazards, and Melville can educate about the sea. Reading the journals of explorers can also be enlightening. I recently had the pleasure of driving through the Columbia Gorge in Oregon, USA. It was absolutely fascinating how over the stretch of a 1000 ft. the climate shifted from temperate pine / fir forest to scrub / semi-arid. Along the river, and only right on its banks, there was green. Elsewhere there was just scrub grass and sage.

Furthermore, time pressure can be strong or gentle, but it should always be there. The river fords are impassible in Spring and Autumn, the mountain passes choked with snow in Winter, the rocky wastes brutal in Summer. If you have to divert, that can add days to weeks and then the weather can change. The slower you go the more food you need, and you have to choose between travel and forage / hunting.

The exploration pillar should encompass Man vs. Nature and Man vs. Self. Examples can be found in literature and journals. Choices have to be made. Can you afford to divert to inspect the interesting ruin no one else has seen before, in time and supplies? It's late Summer, do you push to the ford when it can be easily crossed, or wait and risk the river flooding in Autumn? The trip from Town to Dungeon can be an adventure itself, but it does take forethought. And, you might need to adjust or update current rules to make choices interesting without being punitive.

 

[tetrasodium]

Which makes me wonder whether people in general are tending toward a similar - and similarly wrong - stance of "Oh, the rules don't bother much with it so it can't be important". This is in error, since about half of the game (the social pillar and a large chunk of the exploration pillar) works better when there aren't detailed rules getting in the way.

Would they not work even better without trivially accessible abilities to flatly nullify their ability to impact things?

 

[Fanaelialae]

OK, that's fair.

Indeed. I guess I look at overall progress as being more on the party level than the individual character; which comes back to my oft-repeated sports team analogy: the Vancouver Canucks (the party) have existed as an NHL franchise for 50 years, but no single player (a character) has played with them for more than 20.

My issue - and as a player I'm every bit as guilty of doing this as anyone else, so not pointing fingers - with exploring a character's perspective and story is that it's almost only ever relevant to that character's player; which means any table time spent on its development is time not being spent on the party as a whole.

Doing this stuff one-on-one with the DM during the week? Sure, all day long. Trying to do it during the session? In general, let's not.

I think your idea of exploring a character's perspective and story might differ from mine. What I have in mind doesn't hog the spotlight. It may even be that our approach to play doesn't differ much (IDK), but perhaps that I don't view the character as disposable, and it sounds like you somewhat do.