D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[turnip_farmer]

I am back against my better judgement.

No snark intended here, just genuinely trying to understand what seems to me a very unusual perspective.

Here's a genuine example from an adventure run by a much better DM than me. The party were helping a young boy escape from the clutches of an evil wizard who had been abusing him. They were racing across the wilderness with pursuers on their heels.

Due to the abuse he had suffered, this boy was very highly stressed and distrustful. He was also a budding sorcerer who couldn't really control his powers. When he got too stressed, he would either cause some sort of magical explosion (potentially hurting his allies), or he'd try to run off alone into the wilderness so that he didn't hurt anyone else.

Now, the only reason for including all this was to make things difficult for the players. To complicate their wilderness travel and bring in an extra inconvenience they had to deal with.

I thought it was a great idea, but if I understand the feedback here some of you think that it would just make players decide they won't help any more NPCs because NPCs are too much hassle.

Is that a correct interpretation? Because it doesn't really fit with how I see people play the game.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Again, I'm not "crediting" anything. I don't care about your concept of "credit". Sorry, but I think it's wrongheaded. Perhaps a good way to "win" a philosophical argument on a message board, but absolutely useless for a DM who is actually interested in running a good game. I'm only concerned about results.

Okay, fine. Let's remove the offensive word. You're saying 5e supports survival well because it allows you to remove elements present in the system that actively fight survival challenges. I find this statement to be rather amazing -- a system supports something that it actively doesn't support because you can choose to ignore those bits. That 5e supports survival when your GM adds house rules to change 5e to enable survival challenges to work.

This is my problem -- you are saying 5e supports something when, in actuality, individual GMs have to make choices about which parts of 5e (non-optional or variant parts, mind) to ignore because they actively trivialize those challenges.

When I point out that 5e doesn't support survival because of the many effective ways that 5e provides to trivialize or eliminate survival challenges, it is not a defense of 5e to say that you can just ignore those parts and get survival back. This is a tacit admission that 5e doesn't do this well because it requires the GM do introduce changes to the rules to make it work. Neither does suggesting that 5e doesn't need to hold your hand and tell you these things make 5e better at supporting them or even change the situation. That's just you insulting people that point out, accurately, criticisms of 5e.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I think you're missing the point though. @Ovinomancer is pointing out that the changes that your DM made were done by the DM, and the verbiage surrounding D&D Exploration Pillar basically was zero help. And, the reason the DM made these changes is because of what the DM realized needed changing in order to make the campaign work better. Just like we should not credit games for being rules absent, we can't really credit games for helping your make these changes when the wording of the game doesn't actually tell you to make these changes.

My perspective is that every game, campaign and adventure has to be tweaked to get it to be the best experience at your table. The designers provide a fairly broad product and gives explicit permission to customize. It would be literally impossible to have a single game that would satisfy casual players who just want to hang with friends, hardcore optimizers, the players who just want to inhabit their characters, the sandboxers, the story-followers and the CAW enthusiasts.

@Fanaelialae’s GM was running a campaign that was not business-as-usual - the mere fact that it is set in a desert takes it somewhat out of the wheelhouse of vanilla D&D. It is normal that he would modify environmental rules to make surviving the desert harsher.

Edit. However, I agree with you that the example isn’t evidence that 5e does exploration challenges WELL.

 

[Imaro]

And still has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

It has everything to do with the original conversation you interjected into... perhaps you should go back and read it to make sure you actually understand what was being discussed.

No one is talking about no challenges here. Or not being heroic or any other made up arguments being attacked.

Go back and re-read, much of the conversation centered on engaging with the tropes of the genre and constructing challenges.

No, it's about NPC 'hooks' being burdensome instead of fun, the need for more motivation than 'there's monsters there'. Mocking that is what's really the point if people are being honest about wanting to improve the implementation of any challenges, much less the exploration pillar.

No it's about claiming exploration challenges don't work but then when presented with ways to make them work... like oh say the choice to save an NPC or stay safe in the wild... claiming your players don't want to save an NPC... or children wouldn't make bad choices... or this genre trope is "bad" or the ton of other excuses that have nothing to do with mechanics that have been consistently used to shoot down ways others have gotten exploration challenges to work for them in 5e.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I am back against my better judgement.

No snark intended here, just genuinely trying to understand what seems to me a very unusual perspective.

Here's a genuine example from an adventure run by a much better DM than me. The party were helping a young boy escape from the clutches of an evil wizard who had been abusing him. They were racing across the wilderness with pursuers on their heels.

Due to the abuse he had suffered, this boy was very highly stressed and distrustful. He was also a budding sorcerer who couldn't really control his powers. When he got too stressed, he would either cause some sort of magical explosion (potentially hurting his allies), or he'd try to run off alone into the wilderness so that he didn't hurt anyone else.

Now, the only reason for including all this was to make things difficult for the players. To complicate their wilderness travel and bring in an extra inconvenience they had to deal with.

I thought it was a great idea, but if I understand the feedback here some of you think that it would just make players decide they won't help any more NPCs because NPCs are too much hassle.

Is that a correct interpretation? Because it doesn't really fit with how I see people play the game.

I think that at this point, we are all talking about corner cases. Let me put it this way. I could readily sympathize with the child in your story, scared, stressed, and unable to control his powers.

I would find it much harder to sympathize with the NPC in the hypothetical, who despite being warned that if he leaves Leomund’s tiny hut he will likely be attacked in the wilderness, does exactly that.

I would add that I don’t even find that a particularly convincing hypothetical. Even when Leomund’s is popped up, every group I’ve seen still leaves a watch up, so I’m not sure how the child could leave without being stopped.

 

[Imaro]

I think that at this point, we are all talking about corner cases. Let me put it this way. I could readily sympathize with the child in your story, scared, stressed, and unable to control his powers.

I would find it much harder to sympathize with the NPC in the hypothetical, who despite being warned that if he leaves Leomund’s tiny hut he will likely be attacked in the wilderness, does exactly that.

I would add that I don’t even find that a particularly convincing hypothetical. Even when Leomund’s is popped up, every group I’ve seen still leaves a watch up, so I’m not sure how the child could leave without being stopped.

It was literally an example made up in less than a minute... I think the bigger point stands regardless of the exact example... complications can be added to make exploration challenges... challenging even with the abilities your typical party will have.

 

[Ovinomancer]

My perspective is that every game, campaign and adventure has to be tweaked to get it to be the best experience at your table. The designers provide a fairly broad product and gives explicit permission to customize. It would be literally impossible to have a single game that would satisfy casual players who just want to hang with friends, hardcore optimizers, the players who just want to inhabit their characters, the sandboxers, the story-followers and the CAW enthusiasts.

@Fanaelialae’s GM was running a campaign that was not business-as-usual - the mere fact that it is set in a desert takes it somewhat out of the wheelhouse of vanilla D&D. It is normal that he would modify environmental rules to make surviving the desert harsher.

And this is what confuses me. 5e provides a set of rules that interact with survival. These rules break down into two parts, those that describe the nature of the challenges and those that interact with those challenges. In 5e, the former is really just consumption of rations and water, with secondary inputs from the exhaustion, encumbrance, and rest cycles. The only options 5e provide officially is the variant encumbrance rules and the variant rest rules (gritty). On the latter, almost every single instance of a rule that interacts does so to reduce the effects of the first. Spells negate food/water. Backgrounds negate food/water. Spells remove exhaustion. Spells eventually negate need for travel at all. Magic items remove encumbrance issues. When taken in total, 5e presents survival challenges that are very, very quickly negated by the other rules of the system, most of which are not optional (magic items are).

The defense for this is to literally state that you can just ignore the parts that cause problems and create new rules that aid in survival challenges. This is then lauded as a strength of the 5e system -- that you can ignore parts of it or come up with bits on your own and 5e tells you that you can do this! I guess if 5e didn't tell you to do the work on your own, that you couldn't do it, so 5e deserves full credit for you doing work on your own because it told you to do work on your own? Little fuzzy here. I'm just very confused how 5e gets defended and/or lauded for being a great system that supports survival challenges when the reality is that it tells you to fix it for yourself and then gives you stuff you have to fix! I'm even further confused by the arguments that then suggest or outright state that it's a personal failing for anyone to not be happy with this state of affairs -- that if you don't think 5e is doing a great job of telling you to do the work yourself that it's because you need hand-holding.

 

[iserith]

Friendly Reminder:

NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT ACTUALLY PLAYING A TAX COLLECTOR. THAT'S THE DUMB INSULT BEING TOSSED AROUND AT PEOPLE.

What do you have against tax collectors? "The Taxman cometh..." he said, driving a sword through the demon's heart. "Final notice."

 

[Ovinomancer]

I am back against my better judgement.

No snark intended here, just genuinely trying to understand what seems to me a very unusual perspective.

Here's a genuine example from an adventure run by a much better DM than me. The party were helping a young boy escape from the clutches of an evil wizard who had been abusing him. They were racing across the wilderness with pursuers on their heels.

Due to the abuse he had suffered, this boy was very highly stressed and distrustful. He was also a budding sorcerer who couldn't really control his powers. When he got too stressed, he would either cause some sort of magical explosion (potentially hurting his allies), or he'd try to run off alone into the wilderness so that he didn't hurt anyone else.

Now, the only reason for including all this was to make things difficult for the players. To complicate their wilderness travel and bring in an extra inconvenience they had to deal with.

I thought it was a great idea, but if I understand the feedback here some of you think that it would just make players decide they won't help any more NPCs because NPCs are too much hassle.

Is that a correct interpretation? Because it doesn't really fit with how I see people play the game.

I think that the problem is that such a scenario (NPCs need help) was presented as an easy fix to exploration challenges, by having the NPC force exploration challenges. Taken to be a general solution, if many NPCs keep doing things like this, it can seem forced and dangerous to the PCs to even engage with NPCs.

Now, I don't think that the response regarding NPCs was meant to be a general, always on situation, but, then, if it's an occasional one it does really address the initial question very well.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Okay, fine. Let's remove the offensive word. You're saying 5e supports survival well because it allows you to remove elements present in the system that actively fight survival challenges. I find this statement to be rather amazing -- a system supports something that it actively doesn't support because you can choose to ignore those bits. That 5e supports survival when your GM adds house rules to change 5e to enable survival challenges to work.

This is my problem -- you are saying 5e supports something when, in actuality, individual GMs have to make choices about which parts of 5e (non-optional or variant parts, mind) to ignore because they actively trivialize those challenges.

When I point out that 5e doesn't support survival because of the many effective ways that 5e provides to trivialize or eliminate survival challenges, it is not a defense of 5e to say that you can just ignore those parts and get survival back. This is a tacit admission that 5e doesn't do this well because it requires the GM do introduce changes to the rules to make it work. Neither does suggesting that 5e doesn't need to hold your hand and tell you these things make 5e better at supporting them or even change the situation. That's just you insulting people that point out, accurately, criticisms of 5e.

I don't see it that way at all. I see those abilities as opt-out features, that can be enabled and disabled at either a player or DM level (the DM level potentially overriding the player, since if the DM says a certain spell is unavailable, the player can't choose it).

If players want to engage with the survival features of having to manage rations and water, they don't take spells like Create Food and Water. If they don't want to engage with it, they take the spell.

If the DM wants to run a campaign where management of rations and water is a central conceit, the DM declares such abilities unavailable for that campaign. If they don't want those to be an issue at all, give the party a Decanter of Endless Water and a Murlynd's Spoon, and you're all set.

Rules for managing supplies, starvation, dehydration, and the like all exist in 5e. I think it's absurd to suggest that if you're following those rules without Create Food and Water being allowed, that you're not using the 5e rules.