My personal preferred style of D&D is pretty heavy on exploration. To me, D&D is about braving the unknown, confronting the wild, monster-filled world, and engaging with it. It is the different lands, different peoples, different ideas that make D&D interesting to me. I don’t play D&D for the encounters or the stories or the characters per se, I play D&D for the sense of discovery and surprise that comes with the new and the unexpected. I’ve got a unique cocktail of emotional goals I seek when I play, but those certainly rank near the top for me. I play and DM D&D like a mad scientist: a bit of ingredient X, a bit of ingredient Y, and smash them together. No, I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, and I love it that way.
When I am a player, this is demonstrated largely via characters who are either decidedly unusual (a rapping dwarf bard, a ditzy hamadryad swordmage, a mul bladesinger in Dark Sun), or highly archetypal (a gnomish artificer belonging to House Sivis in Eberron, an emotionless thri-kreen ranger in Dark Sun). When I am a DM, this is demonstrated by extensively using rules for exploration.
In fact, I’d say that when I DM, a lot of my “encounters” are mere set dressing for the location the characters happen to be blazing a trail through. Fight, talk, avoid, I don’t care – just engage it, somehow. My MacGuffins are destination-centered, and gameplay is largely about making it “there and back again.”
So you can imagine how eagerly I was anticipating D&D 5e’s exploration rules. Now that we’ve gotten a taste of them, I think it’s about time I really sink my teeth into these things. If you’d like to read along, you can find the playtest packet here. I’m judging this as a playtest, which means with an eye towards improving it. I’m going to be very specific as I go, as well.
THE EXPLORATION TURN
The big thing that the playtest rules bring to 5e is a codified “turn” that helps define what a party can do while exploring, making exploration into part of the gameplay. This is awesome for me: exploration rules are things I want to interact with.
The turn functions a lot like a combat round with two-sided initiative: each PC takes an action, and then the “enemies” take an action (represented here by a roll for a random encounter). The game goes into some detail about the things the PC’s can do on their turns, but everything opposing them is boiled down to a random encounter roll. I think there’s room for some more variety there, personally, but the turn itself helps give DMs a way to codify what the players do and what the environment does in a way that isn’t just “make it up,” but that also doesn’t need to be overly specific. A lot of different things could go into a player’s turn; a lot of different things could go into the “environment’s” turn.
One thing that instantly comes out at me is the possibility to swap around what the environment does and what the players do. What if you roll for an encounter before the party describes their actions? Then, you can have the actions specifically counter certain things for certain encounters.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself here.
THE TURN DURATION
The current playtest divides exploration into three different levels of focus: 5 minute (dungeon), hourly (wilderness), and daily (long-distance).
They come right out and say the rules are a little too “abstract” for dungeon exploration, but they’re not very clear on why that is – what important bit of dungeon exploration are we giving up in exchange for this abstraction? To help modularity, I need to know the trade-offs: what happens if I decide to use these rules for all of my dungeon exploration needs? A quick look at the “tasks” reveals that they think that 5 minutes is too short for “navigating,” but what if navigation provided some guidance on the endless litany of “Which direction do I take at this two-way intersection?” questions? Might not work quite the same, but a dungeon navigator could easily provide some hint as to which direction leads to what down the road.
The timescale chosen modifies far you move in a turn. Doing a bit of calculation reveals that a moderate pace over a 5-minute turn covers 15 move actions for your typical human, or, to put it in terms a grid can understand, 90 squares. A cautious pace reduces that by (about) half, while a fast pace bumps it up to double and a rushed pace quadruples your basic rate. The numbers run a bit different for 1-hour and 1-day durations, but the baseline for that is a normal party moving at a rate of one mile an hour, or ten miles per day.
The down side to hurrying is expressed in a “Readiness DC” that goes up the faster you go. You’re supposed to use this DC for “several circumstances,” defined later as pretty much surprise, and getting lost. The readiness DC is an interesting concept, and seems to play well, but it’s not used very often.
One potentially interesting area that the rules don’t go into is the idea of a chase scene, or an extended overland chase – a readiness DC and a rate of movement give some elements that were lacking in most previous editions where overland movement was largely at one basic pace.
EXPLORATION TASKS
The meat of these rules is taken up with “tasks” that party members can perform during a turn – essentially, a bucket of actions not unlike your combat actions (“attack, move, cast a spell,” vs. “navigate, sneak, search”). Each task involves some die roll that the character can succeed or fail at, and some fairly obvious consequences for success and failure. The tasks are basically broken down into “avoiding bad things” and sneaking, but I imagine this could be well expanded.
A bit of an outlier here is the “mapmaking” task, which seems ill-defined mechanically. It’s apparently different from navigation, but it also involves no check, and offers no clear benefit other than “now you have a map.” It’d be nice to add something concrete to mapmaking, such as allowing the party to move through mapped areas with no risk of getting lost.
These exploration tasks seem like they’d be pretty easy to expand upon, such as including a “forage” check to gather food, or a “scouting” check to learn about the path ahead.
WANDERING MONSTERS
Essentially, 5e throws a random chance (from 10% to 50%) at the end of each turn that there’s an encounter, and this is what takes up the enemy’s turn in an exploration round.
There’s a bit of a conceptual problem, here, in that the wandering monster is not something that a party would want to avoid all the time. Monsters are worth XP in 5e, so defeating monsters is the goal of the game as it is written (though it certainly might not be each individual DM’s goal). Still, daily attrition means that at some point, these things will be not worth the risk. This is perhaps a mitigating factor: a hypothetical XP-maximizing party would go fast when they’ve already had a few fights in a day, but they’d go slow otherwise.
Of course, at the daily pace, you’re down to a chance of one encounter per day at most, meaning there’s no reason to -fear or avoid wandering monsters at that pace – slow and steady nets the best XP there.
The play example makes it clear that not all encounters with wandering monsters are meant to be explicitly aggressive (the blood hawk serves as a scout that sets up a future ambush, not an encounter in and of itself), but anything that ups the encounter rate is going to up the XP rate and so level up the characters faster.
It’s at times like this that alternate XP schemes (quest XP, XP for gold, etc.) become important. In fact, if you use these exploration rules, you’d be well advised to at least not award XP for random encounters. You could still use XP as a guideline to build the encounters, or gauge their difficulty, but monsters being “worth” that XP might inflate a party using this module well ahead of a pace a particular adventure has in mind for them.
GETTING LOST
The other element of exploration in 5e is that you could get lost. In fact, as written, if you go as fast as you can, and you’re not on a road, you’re guaranteed to get lost (your Navigation check is 0). Which is kind of an interesting rules interaction: as long as you’re rushing heedlessly through the underbrush, you can’t know where you’re going. Once you’re done rushing, you can maybe take stock of your location and find out where to go from here.
Personally, as soon as any rule starts talking about “degrees,” I kind of tune out, so there’s a little too much granularity in the rules for this as it sits for me (Roll 1d6 and travel to a random adjacent hex instead?).
WHAT’S MISSING
So, that’s the rules as they stand. A decent first effort, I think. The tasks are a solid contribution, the turn is a very good framing mechanic, the timescale difference is a clever parsing of the different needs of exploration, and the “readiness DC” something that shows promise (but isn’t much executed on here).
However, wandering monsters interact with the daily recharge rate and the XP rules pretty violently. There’s no pressure from encounters at a daily pace as long as a long rest recovers all your HP, and there’s a high score to be had there if you award XP for monsters defeated.
Crucially, there’s nothing about events during travel aside from wandering monsters. While wandering monsters are a pretty key component of the kind of exploration I like, just as important are NPC’s, interesting events, traps, treasure, special sites, etc. There should be some more diversity in what the “enemy’s turn” generates here. Cultists and blood hawks and gnolls, sure, but where’s the random magical lake in the woods, or the random peddler along the road? To a certain degree, information on how to create a random encounter table, and a Monster Manual that contains more than just fights, can go a long way to solving this.
Also of note is the fact that being encumbered or otherwise slowed (with heavy armor, or with halflings in the party) does nothing to affect your speed, even on a 5-minute level. This seems to erase one of the interesting choices that a PC must make, between taking everything that’s not nailed down, and traveling fast enough to survive. (As an aside, any encumbrance rule that relies on me counting poundage is doomed to failure at my table, WotC).
Finally, there’s not much info about starvation, thirst, exposure, or other weather hazards. I imagine these would be their own modules, but they’re also part and parcel of that “enemy’s turn” during exploration I was referring to, and would also likely be affected by the pace and timescale of the exploration. I’m not convinced they’re independent modules any more than “wandering monsters” is independent.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
I’m curious about what you like or dislike about the exploration rules in 5e as shown so far. Agree with me? Think I’m insane? Want to see some chase rules and some weather rules? What about the rogue – the “exploration master” in this scenario? Let me know in the comments!
But if it gave you an idea for an interesting scene (perhaps "oasis" in a forest context is a large clearing with a lake in it and a little town!), you could go with it.
