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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6012251" data-attributes="member: 42582">I have some sympathy for S'mon's response here.Now, given that I'm a despiser of the "dissociated mechanics" label, and a notorious 4venger, let me explain.When I use the term "exploratory play", I tend to have in mind play in which the main goal of play is discovering the nature of the gameworld. The gameworld may be hostile to the PCs, but it is not - in the dramatic sense - an antagonist. It is scenery, and the goal of play is to appreciate the scenery.I think classic D&D has a fair bit of this, with its large dungeon layers, and its mapping, and its prepared expeditions to find suitable targets to hit (as set out by Gygax in the last few pages of his PHB), etc. It's true that the dungeon, at a certain point, also becomes a source of antagonism, but the exploration part is sufficiently prominent and self-standing that it becomes something of an end in itself.Whereas the sorts of scenarios that Manbearcat describes seem to me to be much more about the gameworld as antagonist. And the focus of play isn't on exploring the scenery, but rather overcoming that antagonist. Exploration is a means to an end.I have done the sort of thing Manbearcat describes, although - because I personally tend to find the environment as antagonist a bit boring - not on such a large scale as set out above. I mostly use it to introduce a bit of colour and to help pace resource recovery.I've given my attempt to answer this above. "You are there, what do you do?" can, I think, be handled well be a skill challenge. But its the very nature of the skill challenge to shift the focus to the "what do you do?" Whereas I think of exploratory play as wanting to prioritise "You are there.As I mentioned, I tend not to run heavy wilderness scenarios, but I've done this sort of urban thing, generally using sequential skill challenges. That's not what I've had in mind when I've talked about exploratory play, because (as I see it) the main aim isn't exploring the city, but freeing the slave. The city is more of a means to an end - scenery, rather than the dramatic point of play.My solution to this is to treat the modules as sources of maps, and story elements (NPCs, towns, organisations, etc) but to more or less disregard the pacing and do that myself (levelling up or down, interpolating other scenes, etc, as needed).In Thunderspire Labyrinth the PCs negotiated with the duergar slavers in the Chamber of Eyes, because they didn't want to have to invade a duergar fortress, and they reached a mutually agreeable redemption price. A very interesting skill challenge with a quite unexpected outcome!In the Well of Demons they negotiated with the tieflings. I wanted to run a rot grub encounters, and so I decided that the gnolls had placed a rot grub in the drink of one of the tieflings, who - as the PCs were talking to them - trasmuted into a rot grub zombie from MM3. The surviving tiefling, after mourning the death of his companion and realisig that he was severely outnumbered and outclassed, tried to get the PCs in on a diabolic pact. Unfortunately for him, the PC wizard was fanatically hostile to this suggestion, and when the temple was collapsing after the PCs stopped Maldrick's ritual (I added in a collapsing temple skill challenge because it seemed pretty approriate, all things considered) the PC wizard shot him down with a Magic Missile (I allowed a successful Arcana check to "minionise" the lone NPC).</blockquote>

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