D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[Chaosmancer]

I (hopefully) never said that I made no changes. I said that I would deliver concrete examples as to how I would provide a meaningful or interesting wilderness adventures (again, hopefully). I've made changes to all the pillars, actually. And, with the exception of Ritual Magic, my changes are mostly broad but shallow. I am also an inveterate tinkerer with rule sets. Can't help myself.

An aspect of 5e that I've noticed is that there are really no long term issues. Everything is resolved in rounds. If not rounds, then an hour or two. If not an hour or two, then certainly by the next day. lt takes some effort to inflict a (level appropriate) penalty that is not resolved by the next day after a long rest. I also think that "exploration" wasn't defined by the design team as "wilderness journey" but rather "what is of interest to explore over the next hill".

You never said you would make no changes, it is just that a lot of us are looking at this from the position of trying to change nothing or as little as possible. Our point is that things like ritual magic being included were not accounted for when designing the pillar.

So, when the first move is to remove ritual magic, then yes that aids the future play at that table, but it doesn't really address concerns of how to run the exploration with ritual magic still included.

 

[Chaosmancer]

No, I get it, but there's a difference, to me at least, between hard and impossible. The math in the Trial rules is terribly stacked against the PCs and there's nothing at all in those rules to let you know this so you can pick reasonable challenges. This is despite the fact that it provides a chart of success % for various skill levels against the DCs, because this is not the story of repeated checks. If you naively set a Detailed Hard trial, you're handing certain defeat to your players. The DC 20 is going to result in numerous failures, and only expert skilled characters have reasonable chances of success (a skilled PC with max stat in a skill is still only +11 at level 17+). Most people are not familiar with this stuff because it's not intuitively obvious that having a 70% chance of success means that you're still extremely likely to fail 5 times over 20 rolls (it's around a 60% chance!). The subtracting failures on 10+ successes moderates this, but not enough. And this is talking about ONLY experts attempting this task and ONLY looking at outright fails by accumulating 5 failures. You put this to a normal party, expecting it to work, and you're going to see it burn to the ground almost every single time.

The initial math on 4e skill challenges wasn't anywhere close to this brutal and it had to be dialed back hard with revisions to bring it into line. Granted, that was aimed at creating more successes at the challenge than failures, so a different approach might find the original math better suited, but this? This approach (and, don't get me wrong, I very much like the concept here, it's the math I don't like) will generate failure, and bad failure, most of the time it's used!

I was thinking a lot of the same thing as I was reading over it. The concepts are good, but the math needs some heavy tweaking.

 

[Asisreo]

Yes. I get this exactly -- it's the crux of my point. If these things are not player turns, then they're just places the GM tells you things and don't involve the play loop. The implication that it's all just resolution of the action declaration to travel is eliding that it's not optional stuff, here -- that there could be lots of player turns, but there aren't any. The skipping of turns is what changes this from just resolution to something else.

The key, then, is to avoid skipping player turns. In and out of combat, a DM is supposed to let players, well, play.

You can tell you're skipping turns when you either have a PC change their action or you change the situation and don't let the PC react.

"You stop to look at a note on the ground." Is a big time out. Nope. You, as the DM, only notify the player of what their characters see.

"As you walk through the grasslands, you pass by several villages until you reach the dungeon." Also bad. You indirectly told them that their characters ignored the towns when their characters very well could have wanted to inspect each town.

 

[Baron Opal II]

You never said you would make no changes, it is just that a lot of us are looking at this from the position of trying to change nothing or as little as possible. Our point is that things like ritual magic being included were not accounted for when designing the pillar.

So, when the first move is to remove ritual magic, then yes that aids the future play at that table, but it doesn't really address concerns of how to run the exploration with ritual magic still included.

Fair point.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The key, then, is to avoid skipping player turns. In and out of combat, a DM is supposed to let players, well, play.

You can tell you're skipping turns when you either have a PC change their action or you change the situation and don't let the PC react.

"You stop to look at a note on the ground." Is a big time out. Nope. You, as the DM, only notify the player of what their characters see.

"As you walk through the grasslands, you pass by several villages until you reach the dungeon." Also bad. You indirectly told them that their characters ignored the towns when their characters very well could have wanted to inspect each town.

This has moved past identification of pillars of play and into preferences for how to run a game. I don't think the former relies on the latter. I have plenty of preferences on how I play.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The pillars can overlap and transition between each other.

There can be one character who is fighting, while another tries to negotiate a truce. There's no reason exploration can't be involved in combat.

And this dodges the questions, or rather, just asserts that any time you learn something it's the exploration pillar. So, when I engage in discussion and persuade someone to reveal something, the social pillar stops right before I learn new things and the exploration pillar takes over until I'm done learning new things. This is the assertion? Or is it that the moment the person starts talking and I start learning new things because of it, the social pillar bumps over and makes room for the exploration pillar on the couch?

 

[Chaosmancer]

I'm not sure the length of the DM's description of the environment matters to A) when Step 1 ends and B) what pillar you are in. The DM might describe a travel montage but eventually the description ends with an actionable environment which will end Step 1 and engage the players in one (or more) of the three pillars. Could be that the travel montage is interrupted by a Step 2 declaration by a player (h/t @Fanaelialae) that puts us squarely in exploration mode.

Or, one could say the completed travel montage is (and very much should be) such a small part of the time spent at the table that it is a true outlier. The odd purple crayon that @Umbran mentions upthread that is not necessary to categorize. Notice it, then move on to the good stuff before people start mucking around on their phones. (Nothing against purple crayons, of course).

Then again, at the end of the day, I don't really care what label the interstitial descriptions carry. All that matters is that the DM does a good enough job in Step 1 so that when they are done with the environmental description the players have some interesting thing(s) to engage with in Step 2.

I think the point more is that if you count describing the environment as exploration, then weird things might start happening. For example, you could go straight from the travel montage and into combat, in which case the description wasn't leading to an actionable environment for exploration, it was leading to combat.

This is the point, which I think is pretty basic, that Ovinmancer is making. A description alone does not count for exploration, and just because you have described an environment doesn't mean you are engaging in exploration. To give another example, I could describe a throne room as the players approach the king. I have described the environment, but we are not engaging in exploration, this is a social encounter.

Descriptions, in my mind, are not tied to any of the pillars, because they are part of every pillar.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

And this dodges the questions, or rather, just asserts that any time you learn something it's the exploration pillar. So, when I engage in discussion and persuade someone to reveal something, the social pillar stops right before I learn new things and the exploration pillar takes over until I'm done learning new things. This is the assertion? Or is it that the moment the person starts talking and I start learning new things because of it, the social pillar bumps over and makes room for the exploration pillar on the couch?

More than one pillar can be active at a time depending on the activities of the PCs.

 

[Oofta]

I agree. As for how I use them, I've been pretty straightforward. "I walk down the hall," doesn't contradict or conflict with the normal assumption of alertness to danger. "I walk down the hall while studying the tome we just found," does.

Or tracking. Or foraging. Or mapmaking. Or navigating. All in the rules, dude.

The DM can always enforce disadvantage or advantage as they see fit. I wouldn't in the cases you mention, it seems like you would be applying disadvantage in most cases. The examples in the DMG don't indicate any of those.

Consider imposing disadvantage when …​

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• Circumstances hinder success in some way.
• Some aspect of the environment makes success less likely (assuming that aspect doesn’t already impose a penalty to the roll being made).
• An element of the plan or description of an action makes success less likely.

Because advantage and disadvantage cancel each other out, there’s no need to keep track of how many circumstances weigh on both sides.​

​

For example, imagine a wizard is running down a dungeon corridor to escape from a beholder. Around the corner ahead, two ogres lie in wait. Does the wizard hear the ogres readying their ambush? You look at the wizard’s passive Wisdom (Perception) score and consider all the factors weighing on it.​

​

So, yes moving full speed down the hall gives the wizard disadvantage on their perception check. Tracking? Mapmaking? Navigating? I see no reason any of those would apply and I've never seen them anywhere. So, dude, feel free to do what you want. It seems like you're being punitive. Mapmaking and navigating may slow down progress, but you don't map as you're walking, you stop, map, continue moving. I've never in all my years of playing had a situation where a PC had their nose in a book while walking down a hall in a dangerous locale.

 

[Ovinomancer]

More than one pillar can be active at a time depending on the activities of the PCs.

Sure, but does exploration show up whenever I learn anything? Is it invoked by a successful persuade check that reveals a new fact?