Manbearcat
Legend
This is not what I mean by exploratory play. To me exploratory play is "You are there, what do you do?", not an abstracted dice game of skill challenges and pass-fail branching. And I find that 4e does not support this style of play well; eg my first 4e campaign was the Vault of Larin Karr sandbox converted from 3e, and the environment-exploration element never really worked well IMO. If I do that kind of exploration game again I'll probably use Pathfinder Beginner Box, which gives me the Simulation-oriented design I want without the heavy crunch of full Pathfinder.
Understood (your position, that is). But I'm not sure I understand the difference in play if the execution is there. This sort of play has historically been one of my favorites (whether narrative-directed or simulation-oriented or a hybrid of the two) and I've leveraged it just enough to change the pace and dramatic tension of a game (sometimes randomly without foreshadowing which has served the purpose of keeping the PC's feeling of "safe" from setting in...sort of like a typical Stephen King, misdirection writing convention...nothing of consequence, flavor, "hey look at this non-eventful thing here", BANG...one sentence...everything changes). For my mileage, "lost in the wintry wilderness", "fell into a sinkhole in the underdark and then subsequent cave-in" and/or "find the lost, sunken temple in the vast bog/wasteland" all require specific elements; (i) pacing through resource attrition and the PC's "desperation agenda" wrought by the former, (ii) the aggregate of a strongly DM-advocated "fictional-unknown" + said resource attrition combining as a "threat-delivery system", player character resource deployment or player ingenuity delivering the PCs from either imminent death or to their intended location.
I'm uncertain why
- "You are there, what do you do?"
cannot be successfully actualized by
- an abstracted dice game of skill challenges and pass-fail branching
I think this is likely one of those things where I would need to see the difference between what I do in 4e (which is, in effect, the same as I've always done) by using an extended Skill Challenge (to move through the exploration resolution and diminish PC resources) and the Disease Track system as a "Condition Track" system (to maintain nervous tension/foreboding by ensuring that the precious resources are not refreshed) and what you are describing (in play). Personally, within the fiction, what I've done from Basic to 3e remains the same (actually better I'd say). Its just the mechanical interface that has changed and thus the "danger" (in the stakes game of "how exposed are we when our resources are lost") becomes more explicit and therefore the sense of foreboding (at least with my players) made more palpable. Further, with less grainy, fiddly resource tracking, I am freed to focus more on the fiction and deliver it with a genre-relevant, harsh tone.