D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[Faolyn]

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 it would depend entirely on how the NPC was presented. Can the DM pull it off playing a scared kid who sometimes blows stuff up, but who will respond to the player’s (hopefully) kind actions towards him? Or will the DM make the kid more troublesome (for the players) than he is interesting? And do the players enjoy this sort of thing?

I‘m sure my group would love this sort of NPC. But a group that only cares about murderhoboing, or with a DM who plays NPCs as insufferabl, may have a very different opinion.

 

[iserith]

For some, D&D 5e will forever be tainted with the original sin of not being D&D 4e, Blades in the Dark, or Burning Wheel. Despite its overwhelming popularity in the market, the game will never be complete enough, organized enough, or provide enough guidance to the DM to compare. No amount of discussion otherwise will change that opinion in my experience. And, fair enough, nobody has to like D&D 5e, but when someone says a thing doesn't exist in the rules, then someone else points directly with page reference to it, and this is just ignored, one has to wonder what's really going on there.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The players would opt in or out based on their preferences. I don't doubt that there are folks out there who enjoy tracking rations and managing inventory, and by all means they're welcome to it.

Special pleading? Come on dude. The rules themselves give you permission to ignore any rules you don't like. Saying that customizing your D&D experience makes it not D&D means that it's very likely that a significant majority of D&D games since it's creation have not been D&D. And if the conclusion your reasoning leads us to is that D&D is not D&D, I daresay it is your reasoning and conclusion that are at fault. D&D is D&D.

You've created a strawman, now. I haven't said that changing a rule makes it not D&D. I've said that D&D doesn't support a thing, and you've said it does, provided you ignore the bits of D&D that don't. These are different arguments, even if you want to make it sound like I've made an easily defeated argument that I haven't actually made.

The rules do not actually give you permission to ignore them -- you had that already, the rules give you nothing here. The point is that ignoring rules doesn't mean that the system supports a thing because you had to ignore the system to do the thing. The statement that you can ignore rules doesn't make your effort part of the game -- it remains your effort.

 

[iserith]

I think that it would depend entirely on how the NPC was presented. Can the DM pull it off playing a scared kid who sometimes blows stuff up, but who will respond to the player’s (hopefully) kind actions towards him? Or will the DM make the kid more troublesome (for the players) than he is interesting? And do the players enjoy this sort of thing?

I‘m sure my group would love this sort of NPC. But a group that only cares about murderhoboing, or with a DM who plays NPCs as insufferabl, may have a very different opinion.

I play my NPCs as insufferable in a fictional sense to the characters but funny to the players, and prone to being useless or troublesome when with the party. But I also make keeping them alive worth XP or gold, and there's always that One Time they do something that is great (usually before they die).

 

[Fanaelialae]

You've created a strawman, now. I haven't said that changing a rule makes it not D&D. I've said that D&D doesn't support a thing, and you've said it does, provided you ignore the bits of D&D that don't. These are different arguments, even if you want to make it sound like I've made an easily defeated argument that I haven't actually made.

The rules do not actually give you permission to ignore them -- you had that already, the rules give you nothing here. The point is that ignoring rules doesn't mean that the system supports a thing because you had to ignore the system to do the thing. The statement that you can ignore rules doesn't make your effort part of the game -- it remains your effort.

Okay? This just seems to be a rehash your "credit" argument, which I've already told you to go ahead and give "credit" to whatever you want, because I don't think it's relevant.

The game has rules for inventory management, starvation, and dehydration. Claiming that you can't run a survival game because you would need to ban Create Food and Water is a ludicrous complaint to me.

If you wanted to claim that 5e doesn't offer much support for running a spacefaring odyssey, I'd agree with you. Though you could nonetheless come up with the rules yourself, or use rules developed by someone else. But it's a fair "criticism", insofar as it goes.

Making food and water more important requires practically no effort at all. It's like complaining that in order to run an all fighter campaign, I would first need to ban all the other classes (and therefore this isn't something D&D can do, because the DM had to do that). It takes far more effort to develop a simple campaign, or familiarize yourself with a module. At the least, a modicum of effort is expected on the GM's part for practically every RPG. It's just not a reasonable criticism as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Maxperson]

I guess it depends whether you-as-DM are willing to have outright mission failure be an option, because that's the most likely outcome of failure to find clues.

You can set a mission up so that success or failure doesn't hinge on the success of a random roll, while still having outright mission failure be an option.

When I was first DMing back in junior high school I placed a necessary component behind a secret door, because the BBEG wasn't stupid and wouldn't just have it out in the open. They missed the secret door and the entire adventure ground to a halt. I realized right then that it was a mistake to have failure be possible through no fault of the players. It's not fair or fun to do that to them.

If a clue is there for them to find and they choose not to search, so be it. If they find a clue and don't interpret it correctly, so be it. Failure isn't going to come about because they rolled low and never found a clue that they looked for, though. That doesn't mean that no clues will be roll dependent. It just means that there will also be other means to figure it out that are not dependent on rolls

 

[robus]

Well, this cuts the legs out from under a lot of arguments made in support of exploration. We've dispensed with survival challenges, with travel challenges, with quite a lot of things and settled down on "does your PC make a life choice or does the GM tell you about a cool place." I don't find this at all useful, though, as a definition of exploration.

Right, if the trip does not provide any adventure then skip it. ”after three days of travel you arrive in Phandalin”.

 

[Maxperson]

"Together, the DM and the players create an exciting story of bold adventurers who confront deadly perils." - PHB, pg. 5.

^ That's the game. One doesn't have to be a bold adventurer confronting deadly perils, I suppose, but then one shouldn't be surprised if the game doesn't support whatever it is they are trying to be. Of course, a former tax collector could certainly be an adventurer now, paying visits to monsters in dungeons who are in arrears on their property taxes to the king...

Tsk! Tax collectors don't "pay" anything. They issue summonses, via departmental wizards if necessary.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Okay? This just seems to be a rehash your "credit" argument, which I've already told you to go ahead and give "credit" to whatever you want, because I don't think it's relevant.

I can see how you'd want to dismiss this as irrelevant, because it goes directly to who has to do the work to make the game work. You'd rather argue 5e requires no work, being fully functional as is, while ignoring the effort put in by the GM to fix it. The enabling argument here is that 5e anticipated that GMs would have to do work and lampshaded it, so it's fine now.

The game has rules for inventory management, starvation, and dehydration. Claiming that you can't run a survival game because you would need to ban Create Food and Water is a ludicrous complaint to me.

No such claim made. Claim was made the 5e doesn't support survival because it also has rules that thwart it's other rules, and does so intentionally. That any support is enabled by requiring the GM to change the system to support it. Ergo, 5e doesn't support survival games because it is GM alterations to 5e that support it.

If you wanted to claim that 5e doesn't offer much support for running a spacefaring odyssey, I'd agree with you. Though you could nonetheless come up with the rules yourself, or use rules developed by someone else. But it's a fair "criticism", insofar as it goes.

Arguably, it offers more support, because you just have to make stuff up, you don't have to remove things already in the system. But, as I note, that's arguable.

Making food and water more important requires practically no effort at all. It's like complaining that in order to run an all fighter campaign, I would first need to ban all the other classes (and therefore this isn't something D&D can do, because the DM had to do that). It takes far more effort to develop a simple campaign, or familiarize yourself with a module. At the least, a modicum of effort is expected on the GM's part for practically every RPG. It's just not a reasonable criticism as far as I'm concerned.

Here's where I strongly disagree with you. It takes you and me little effort because we have 1) long experience with RPGs, 2) this enables our ability to quickly identify parts of the system that are actively fighting each other, and 3) our experience allows us to quickly make some changes that satisfy the need while avoiding common pitfalls in houserules (ie, failure to address core issues and instead targeting superficial ones). These are practically no effort at all, but instead long practice and experience that do not generalize. What you can do while relying on your experience is not something someone else does -- they have to first learn there's an issue, which takes time and dealing with the pain points. They then have to get over the idea of changing the rules, something that isn't universally accepted as immediately okay. Then they have to make the changes and playtest them to see how they balance out, possibly having to reiterate. That I can skip all of that isn't because it's super easy, but because I've done this so many times that my experience allows me to fix it quickly and with little effort. This then doesn't accrue to 5e as a feature, though, because that's my work and experience. 5e has no help at all for a neophyte GM to even recognize the problem until it shows up in play, much less any suggestions on how it might be fixed or even if it should be.

You have to evaluate RPGs from outside your experience and comfort with them -- to look at them as is and not with your years or decades of experience or your personality. 5e does have rules that support survival, yes, but then it also has rules that effectively turn those first rules off. This is what the system is -- however you deal with it isn't the system, it's you. Let's stop confusing the two things.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I can see how you'd want to dismiss this as irrelevant, because it goes directly to who has to do the work to make the game work. You'd rather argue 5e requires no work, being fully functional as is, while ignoring the effort put in by the GM to fix it. The enabling argument here is that 5e anticipated that GMs would have to do work and lampshaded it, so it's fine now.

No such claim made. Claim was made the 5e doesn't support survival because it also has rules that thwart it's other rules, and does so intentionally. That any support is enabled by requiring the GM to change the system to support it. Ergo, 5e doesn't support survival games because it is GM alterations to 5e that support it.

Arguably, it offers more support, because you just have to make stuff up, you don't have to remove things already in the system. But, as I note, that's arguable.

Here's where I strongly disagree with you. It takes you and me little effort because we have 1) long experience with RPGs, 2) this enables our ability to quickly identify parts of the system that are actively fighting each other, and 3) our experience allows us to quickly make some changes that satisfy the need while avoiding common pitfalls in houserules (ie, failure to address core issues and instead targeting superficial ones). These are practically no effort at all, but instead long practice and experience that do not generalize. What you can do while relying on your experience is not something someone else does -- they have to first learn there's an issue, which takes time and dealing with the pain points. They then have to get over the idea of changing the rules, something that isn't universally accepted as immediately okay. Then they have to make the changes and playtest them to see how they balance out, possibly having to reiterate. That I can skip all of that isn't because it's super easy, but because I've done this so many times that my experience allows me to fix it quickly and with little effort. This then doesn't accrue to 5e as a feature, though, because that's my work and experience. 5e has no help at all for a neophyte GM to even recognize the problem until it shows up in play, much less any suggestions on how it might be fixed or even if it should be.

You have to evaluate RPGs from outside your experience and comfort with them -- to look at them as is and not with your years or decades of experience or your personality. 5e does have rules that support survival, yes, but then it also has rules that effectively turn those first rules off. This is what the system is -- however you deal with it isn't the system, it's you. Let's stop confusing the two things.

I'm not arguing that 5e requires no work. I'm saying that all RPGs require work. It seems like you want to wax philosophical about 5e requiring more work than some other unstated game, which may or may not be true, but please realize that I don't care. It doesn't matter. It's almost certainly true that 5e requires more work than some RPGs and less than others (and I seriously doubt that it's a significant outlier on either end of the spectrum).

Only allowing fighters for an all fighter campaign, or banning abilities that create food and water for a campaign where that is meant to be front and center, is not difficult. Walking and chewing bubble gum is arguably more challenging.

At what point is it reasonable to assume that the GM has a brain, rather than simply being a calculation machine incapable of more than running simple procedural algorithms? Personally, I prefer the game that assumes the former, as opposed to the latter.