D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[Lanefan]

Unless the DC is so high that the person doing the unlocking cannot succeed, which I noted in my post, it will always succeed. There is no, "unable to open it" in 5e unless you are 100% unable to open it.

Ah, of course: you're allowing rerolls. Another 5e (and 3e, and 4e) flaw.

I'm not badwrongfunning anything. Freeform is not part of the game. It's something that's bolted on in the absence of a game. I even mentioned that it can be a lot of fun. But, it's still not something you can claim as part of the game. There's a reason that over the years, we've largely done away with freeform resolution to game events. This isn't anything controversial. This is all game design 101 stuff. If you want your game to be about X, then you need mechanics for X.

RPGs are perhaps unique in that the presence and existence within the game of an integral part of said game - roleplaying one's character in character and socially interacting with other inhabitants of the game world (most notably, other PCs!) - does not require the presence of hard-coded mechanics to deal with that part. They're optional, at best.

 

[tetrasodium]

There may be no meaningful consequence as @Ovinomancer indicated - so no roll needed. You just get the clue(s).

Or there may be any number of things that could happen due to a failed check as @J.Quondam listed - which could also include getting all, some, or none of the clue(s) as the DM sees fit.

The possibilities are endless if you are open to them. Everything is new when you are at the table and the discovery of what the DM has in mind (or pulls out of their backside in the moment) is part of the fun. I’m going to refrain from making a list for you here, though, as it seems examples from my style of game don’t mesh with what you are seeking.

No that entire tangent has nothing to do with the exploration challenge of needing to trek to the kidnappers. It instead amounts to "So after you accept that the whole trek is a pointless distraction, here are some ways you can continue the adventure while ignoring the trek"

 

[MichaelSomething]

I don't suppose you could list some TTRPGs that have in depth exploration?

There's lots of RPGs that do exploration plenty well enough. The space isn't 5e or video games.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Backgrounds provide serious benefits on this front.

I have no problem with this really, taking outlander means you didn't take something else.

Exploation doesn't have to be about food management survival horror.

Honestly, given this thread, exploration appears to be an amorphous form that is exactly what it needs to be this moment to counter an argument, and then can be whatever else the next. I mean, this line has gone from someone stating exploration has little to no teeth that aren't just moving to combat to someone pointing out that if you track rations and water it gets real fast to pointing out how easy it is to sidestep that and make it trivial to now exploration doesn't need to be about food at all. Which leaves the starting statement still open.

Exploration in 5e is entirely on the shoulders of the GM. There's almost nothing the system offers the GM by way of advice or suggestion that it doesn't almost immediately snatch back with class and racial features or spells. Do some GMs make do anyway? Sure, but not because of the system but because that GM has a table that aligns well with the way they deal with this issue, or, sometimes, they're ignoring it and believing that cool, evocative descriptions is doing that job (it's not). The problem with 5e is the lack of any real threat for exploration that the system doesn't negate with reasonably easy access. It's why they note that adding aarakocra racial flying ability is called out as a strong potential issue because it so easily negates low level exploration challenges. And exploration is really a low level challenge, for the most part.

This is the D&D forum, so I've very much avoided pointing out other systems that do this well. Some are very 5e adjacent -- AiME, for instance, does exploration very well but it does so largely by stripping out all of the things 5e has to circumvent exploration. There's no create water or flying in AiME, not without serious effort and usually out of reach of the PCs. So, travel is dangerous, but also rewarding. Dungeon World's Perilous Journey move does very well here as well. Ironsworn, a free game, has an exploration mechanic that is brilliant and well integrated with the whole game -- explorations can result is very good or very bad inputs into the next phase of the game through momentum.

It's very possible to do exploration well, but not when the system itself is hamstringing you and then taking the mess it made and dumping it on the GM's shoulders to make the best of it. Some of us do, but, frankly, I'm quite tired of it.

EDIT: I forgot to put 4e on my list of RPGs that did exploration well.

 

[tetrasodium]

Backgrounds provide serious benefits on this front.

I have no problem with this really, taking outlander means you didn't take something else.

Exploation doesn't have to be about food management survival horror.

Outlander's benefit is not a "serious benefit", it's the printed form of someone at wotc's abject & utter contempt towards the idea of allowing a GM to use exploration to apply pressure to their players. It's one thing to say "Exploation doesn't have to be about food management survival horror." as you did, but A: "survival horror" is entirely different from the need to do exploration related things applying pressures to the players * B: as we've seen with the kidnapped princess needing a trek to reach problem all of the alternatives start with "ok so toss that whole trek thing & start the adventure here like so but with nothing to do with exploration"

 

[Fanaelialae]

This is because you are trying to look at this as a distinct problem - solution instead of a conversation. Take a minute, step back. Look at the whole.


I asked originally "how do I make exploration and overland travel interesting with exploration challenges" and Iserith among many others responded with "Time pressure. Make it so they have to arrive at the location in time to stop the princess from being killed, this will prevent them from taking the safe path and lead to them fighting more monsters, which is an exploration challenge that is interesting."

I, after getting this answer a few times, pointed out that a ticking clock like this has issues. For one, the challenge of the time pressure fails if the party takes too long, you simply fail the mission automatically. Secondly, This doesn't actually provide new exploration challenges, it simply prevents solutions and forces the players to take otherwise unnecessary risks. Third, I have to manipulate events to make sure that the time pressure feels real, they have to be arriving just in time after their choices, or late and they fail. And finally, if I don't curate and manipulate the timeline, then I could have a situation where they arrive and blow through the climax, because there is no challenge if they arrive too early.

You stepped in and said that a lot of this was because I was given a binary clock. I have to make is a gradient. Add new monsters to fight at the climax for every day that passes until the clock runs out. I pointed out that still had most if not all of the same problems. Which is when you told me to remove the time pressure entirely.

The original premise, that the time pressure makes the exploration more engaging and makes for a better experience seems to be undercut if the solution to the issues of ticking clocks is to remove the clock entirely. So, it looks like, I was never actually given a solution at all.

And look, I get that no solution is perfect, but these aren't really minor flaws. The hard truth seems to be that not only does this involve gaslighting the players about the nature of the clock, but additionally at no point did anyone offer a real challenge for the actual journey.

You'll note that at the end of the post you quoted, I was actually saying that the princess and the cult when they don't want her dead is a great adventure. That has some real potential. The problem is though, that is the destination. Nothing interesting is happening on the journey to the destination, it is only after they arrive that we start engaging in the game and in something they will likely find fun. So, the part of the game I have been asking about, the actual journey, is best just skipped. Sure, keep track in vague terms of how long it takes to make the cultist hunting in the city more dynamic, but really, nothing interesting was happening on the way to the objective. That's the problem I've been trying to solve, and I'm trying to solve it without "throw more monsters at them". And it seems, we've now circled time pressures and shown they are somewhat lacking as a universal tool to make all exploration better.

Sure, time pressure isn't a universal tool. It's one tool in your toolbox.

Even if you remove the failure state from the time pressure, you haven't removed the challenge. There's still a challenge in managing the difficulty of attacking the cult. It's not really difficult to inform the players of this. You could have the characters find evidence that the cultists are creating witherlings, or a friendly NPC might simply tell them. Heck, if you don't mind breaking the fourth wall, you can simply tell the players. All depends on your style.

Another option for making a journey interesting is survival. Exhaustion, managing resources, etc. Again, depending on your playstyle.

My favorite form of exploration though are interesting exploration encounters. Like the titan supercomputer encounter I talked about earlier in the thread. That literally changed the entire course of the campaign. If we hadn't found that, and figured it out, the end of the campaign would have been entirely different. I think this kind of exploration suits most styles (apart from maybe something like a hack-and-slash game).

There's really nothing wrong with fast forwarding over the journey and skipping to the adventure site. Although there will probably be some exploration at the site (unless you just skip to combat/social scenes). It all depends on play style.

I'm not in any way suggesting that anyone needs to make exploration a focus of their game. That's a style choice. Not everyone enjoys every type of exploration, and that's important to recognize, IMO. However, that doesn't mean it can't be done, nor does it mean it can't be done well (if you and your group enjoy it).

 

[Chaosmancer]

3. Often times the pillars should be used in conjunction with each other to achieve a state of challenge for the PC's. As an example... the combat pillar and/or social pillar should be used to deplete resources, hinder PC's, etc. to make exploration non-trivial and vice versa.

See, this frustrates me though, because if we think of exploration as land and travel and discovery... you can't make a lot combats or social encounters harder with these elements. I'm not talking about terrain in combat, because that is a clearly combat effect. Just like Strong winds pretty much are exclusively a combat challenge.

So, turning around and constantly making exploration "challenging" by adding combat seems to hint at something deeper

4. Know the rules for specific things that you feel are trivializing encounters and play to their disadvantages at times.

Darkvision: does not allow one to see color and in total darkness grants disadvantage to perception checks. Play on these factors to create a challenging situation. The PC's find themselves forced to climb a sheer cliff face on a moonless night where the natives have color coded the safe hand holds they use for ascent... Suddenly darkvision isn't an overwhelming advantage anymore (But also refer to 1 as the darkvision should at times bypass or make things trivially easy because they chose a race with darkvision).

Well... if it is a climable surface you just climb it, per the rules on 182. If it would be climbable without a check if you could see color, then the worst you've done is make it an athletics check to climb as "a surface with few handholds" and I'm not sure it would even be that difficult of a check. I don't remember exactly where I found it in the DMG, but I think climbing a cliff covered in Ice was a DC 15, so one that just has a few handholds wouldn't be as challenging as that.

5. Use the optional rules from the DMG. Plain and simple use the optional rules for the dungeon masters guide to increase the challenge exploration poses if necessary. Perhaps in the Badlands the environment is so taxing that travel through it has the Gritty Realism rules as an environmental effect. Use Natural/Environmental/Supernatural Hazzards... and create your own since between the DMG and Xanathar's the framework is there (see point 2 above)

But it should work with the baseline rules, not with optional rules. If it doesn't work baseline, that should be a problem.

 

[robus]

There's lots of RPGs that do exploration plenty well enough. The space isn't 5e or video games.

In the spirit of illumination (and sorry if you’ve been asked earlier) but what are some of those games and would others here lamenting the sorry state of 5e exploration agree that their rule sets (appropriately adapted) would address the issue?

I’m genuinely curious and the discussion seems to be going in circles.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Sound to me like there's none, so just let the check succeed.

That's what I was thinking.

Which means that in this scenario, I set up a clock for the players to increase the challenge. They did something or other on the route, and took too long. So they arrive to be told where the next challenge is.

It has consequences, but it doesn't feel like they've actually... done anything.

 

[Chaosmancer]

The cost of failure is that they don't find the clues they need.

Edit to add: or worse, they find "clues" that are outright wrong, irrelevant, or misleading.

A DM did this to me once. They expected we'd find the clues we needed to find out that the jail we were in wasn't controlled by the sorcerer king. We failed every single check, we learned nothing. Not that the guards were weaker than they appeared. Not that the items had a noble family crest on them. Nothing.

So, when my character's personal nemesis who set this trap came to collect my sorcerer from the anti-magic cell I was in to be executed, the rest of the party did nothing. They stood by and played cards through the cell bars while my character fought for their life, was beaten unconscious, dragged off, and executed.

The DM had to fill the prison with poison gas just to get them brave enough to actually leave their cells and go towards the final battle he had planned, where they killed my nemesis in a session I missed, because I was dead and had a conflict with the game session, that I decided to mean I went to that, because I was just going to be sitting and watching whatever they did that session anyways. .

I say be VERY cautious about just saying that they never find the clues. It is one of the most common pitfalls of DMs ever. It grinds things to a halt and makes the game far less fun.