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Message: <blockquote data-quote="steenan" data-source="post: 5167582" data-attributes="member: 23240">For me, exploration is defined by four main traits. By focusing on them, you may build an exploratory aspect in your game.1. Exploration is about learning something new. It requires surprises and twists. A dungeon crawl or visiting a town to buy something is not exploration. Dungeon crawl that lets you encounter monsters you didn't know that existed and learn history of long lost empire, or visiting a town during a holiday full of strange customs is.2. Exploration is player-driven. You explore by interacting with something in a way you choose. It may be finding and evading traps in a "old school" way, it may be searching for a weakness of a seemingly invulnerable enemy, it may be finding your way through a courtly intrigue. Exploration is never a fixed plot. The GM presents a situation and lets his players decide what they do with it.3. Exploration requires consistency. When you explore, you connect facts, you find meanings. It's impossible to explore something that is random, that has no real causes and effects, no internal structure. For this reason, it is easier to play exploration scenarios in a pre-existing game world (published or homebrewed), though a GM good at improvisation may run such a game making some things on the fly.4. Exploration requires immersion. Players look at the game world through their characters' eyes. It's GM's responsibility to supply fun, colorful descriptions of places and creatures, to picture his NPCs and strange cultures. You can't really explore if you do not care about the game world and what happens therein.I would never, ever show my players a hex map - and I would only show them any kind of map after they learn given place a little. I may have such things behind GM's screen, but I would work hard to make my players feel like they are there. Similarly, I would never just put PCs in a sandbox with no goal or motivation. It may be seeking fame and fortune, it may be searching for something (an item, person or information), it may be running and hiding from someone. These goals may well change during a campaign, but then the players already have their own ties to the game world.Exploration has many faces; it's not always going through wilderness or dungeons. Players may explore cultures and customs. They may explore relations and interactions between people, like in a detective story or political intrigue. They may explore cosmology, religion and history (I use these themes quite often in my games). They may explore their own feelings, reactions and morals, being faced with hard choices and complicated interpersonal situations. Each of these fits into the general structure I described above and creates similar emotional ties to the imagined world.</blockquote>

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