D&D 5E [+]Exploration Falls Short For Many Groups, Let’s Talk About It

[UngainlyTitan]

That's why describing what the challenges are is so important.

If the player wants to use a greatsword, the PHB still provides the rules for greatswords for them to not by.And the DM can learn that and not provide magic greatswords but magic greataxes.

Exploration should be the same. However there is a contingent who doesn't what players to even know option because they might do things the DM didn't prompt or players looking at their sheeet.

What?

 

[el-remmen]

That's why describing what the challenges are is so important.

If the player wants to use a greatsword, the PHB still provides the rules for greatswords for them to not by.And the DM can learn that and not provide magic greatswords but magic greataxes.

Exploration should be the same. However there is a contingent who doesn't what players to even know option because they might do things the DM didn't prompt or players looking at their sheeet.

Sorry but I don’t understand this response.

 

[iserith]

Thats just travel. I would argue exploration is about "searching and finding", literally exploring. If you just want to get to point B its just travel and in most DnD games I would handwave it or use an abstract method. Exploring starts if you don't know where point b is or if you don't even have a point B and are just exploring for explorings sake (finding treasures and such)-

I am really surprised to read these takes. Exploration is the core gameplay of classic DnD together with combat. There is much more "game" to play, than for the social pillar, where you have almost nothing besides charisma skill/ability checks. Most of the skill checks are relevant for exploration. There are rules for finding and deactivating traps, secret doors etc., navigating in wilderness, finding food. Thats all exploration. Exploration is that what you do between the combats in a standard DnD-adventure. You explore some sort of location to navigate between combats, social encounters and traps/hazards to find treasures and/or reach story milestones. I know that many modern DnD tables don't play like that and are much more focused on social game in a city, but social is actually the problem pillar in terms of gameplay. Exploration pillar is almost as big as combat pillar in terms of mechanics etc.

I think the main problem is that the exploration pillar is heavily dependent on (good) adventure design. You can improvise a social encounter and you can easily build a simple combat encounter, but you need more intentional and thought out design to build an exciting exploration location be it a dungeon, a wilderness crawl or a foreign city. And the rules are all over the place. To get all the related rules together you have to jump between dozens of different pages in the PHB and DMG. Furthermore these are just mechanics. The 5e dmg is heavily lacking in good instructions how to actually run a good dungeon or wilderness crawl.

Fully agree, though I would make two points:

1. Travel is effectively exploration. It comes more to the foreground in a hexcrawl, particularly when time matters. There are rules there around speed, forced march, and travel tasks that are all firmly in the exploration pillar.

2. There are decent social interaction rules in the DMG though honestly, outside of my group, I've not seen a single DM use them (and I play with a lot of different groups). Same deal with Inspiration which arguably supports the social interaction pillar.

 

[Krachek]

Exploration work well at our table because we don’t focus on the challenge.
Exploration is used to role play, introduce lore, npcs, interact with the world.
When big consequence are at the stake, DMs often use a structure and pacing close to a fight encouters.

 

[Minigiant]

What?

Sorry but I don’t understand this response.

Exploration challenges should be described but not explained in the PHB so that each group, players and DM, can decide which challenges they want to do and which ones they want to exclude. Because every group is different.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I’ve been using a modified version of what is presented in Cubicle 7’s Uncharted Journeys.

Yeah the journey rules those evolved from are excellent, so I can imagine.

I wasn't trying to edition war but stress the issues with 4e's very terrible layout causing people to miss that it's better base exploration skill rules that avoided all these problems.

Hopping over one pit just to jump into another.

I have no clue what you’re on about, here. Totally opposite experience. The skill descriptions in 4e, combined with skill challenges (ignoring the issues with those bc they don’t matter to this discussion) was a robust and easily understood and pretty front and center set of rules. Emulating them loosely in 5e would improve the exploration pillar.

It's not really a rules clarity issue. It's a game explanation issue.
It's more the rulebook is missing pages that is unclear.

Okay man. That is an issue of clarity. Like lacking explanation is an issue of clarity. The rules aren’t clear because there is no explanaition of how to use them.

 

[payn]

i think the primary reasons exploration fails in modern play is because it's tied up in a whole group of mechanics that are consistently ignored, rendered obsolete by other mechanics or just plain lacking: encumberance, food management, environmental hazards/weather and mapping.

exploration is about getting from location A to location B without dying on the way from starvation, monsters, diseases, 'falling off a cliff' or exposure to the elements,

correct me if i'm wrong but most people don't use any kind of distance map while travelling, the terrain is abstract challenge rather than concrete distance, oh sure the GM might look at the environment and say 'oh we're going through the swamp i'll throw in some apropriate challenges' but at most what'll happen is the trip boils down to a few battles against random monster or bandit encounters, but in previous editions it'd be a much bigger decision point: do we have enough supplies, there's no source of fresh water in there are we carrying enough, is it worth spending the extra days to go around the swamp for more safety, but spending more days meant that your food had to last longer and you had more chances to get lost which would cut into your food even more and if you didn't make your foraging check oh no we're all starving and have exhaustion

i think exploration could be improved by substituting encumberance's resource management for places of sanctuary, now what you're counting against is your finite class resources, without anywhere to long rest between locations every spell cast is permanently one less until you find safety, goodberries and create water chip away at your slots, do you cast tiny hut for a safe short rest or conserve the slot and risk a random encounter, your frontliners have taken a beating and are low on hit dice-best avoid that gobin cave even if you can see the fat stacks of treasure in the back, why cast fly or spiderclimb when your rogue or ranger can make an athletics check to climb the cliff and drop a rope down.

Over the years the game has moved from a survival sim to a post Hickman plot driven adventure story game. Surviving a day in the desert or a night in the tundra are boring in their own right. Simple survival and fortune collecting is no longer the expected experience. Though, if there are stakes involved suddenly its a lot more interesting. Get through the desert/tundra quick enough and you will be able to impact events A,B,C. Struggle and you may only get a chance to interact with a few or maybe not any. Suddenly, there are stakes involved and things get a lot more interesting.

The real problem though is that because D&D is in fact (as Matt Colville likes to say) a "monster fighting game"... few if any attempts at gamifying other parts of D&D have worked, gained any traction, or survived. Mass Combat? Attempts have been made to add it to the game but few people ever latch onto it. Social Combat? Attempts have been made to turn argument and negotiation into its own minigame within D&D but again few people have ever latched onto it. And in the Exploration sphere, Chase rule have been tried and tried and tried but nothing has ever stuck with anyone-- which is why ever few months or years we get people asking in places like this "Does anyone have any good chase rules?" They've all been half-baked because in my opinion it really goes against the ethos of D&D's "monster fighting game".

At its foundation, that's what D&D is-- a game about fighting monsters. And that's why like 90% of everything on a character sheet is giving numbers and rules towards that game. And anything that falls outside of that purview... like Exploration or Social... are not part of the game. Exploration and Social do not have a place in the monster combat game, and thus there are no substantive rules for it. Instead, things like Ability Checks are the closest thing we have to "game rules" for those pillars, and as a result each DM is forced to "invent" actions, reactions, and results from those Ability Checks to provide the win state or loss state from them. Which means that... yes... Exploration and Social is all determined by the dread "DM Adjudication".

And to be honest... I don't think this is a problem that can truly be solved. Because most players know in the back of their minds (as much as they might not want to accept it) that D&D IS a "monster fighting game" with almost all of its game rules that have maintained and sustained over the past 50 years designed purely for that gameplay. And thus anything not connected to it will never be anything more than an extraneous appendage from a "game rules and game play" perspective. And if an individual DM wants something else... they are going to have to go elsewhere to get it or make up a set of rules themselves. Because most other players just don't care.

Yeap, I think a lot of it is because D&D adventure design has never leaned into exploration and social rulesets. The Paizo adventure paths do this consistently, with of course mixed results. Though, the key to these subsystems working, and being integrated to the rulesets, has come from their demonstration via AP and organized play scenarios. It takes more than simply providing rules, you need good examples, testing grounds, etc... for GMs and players to engage. That is why, to me, Pathfinder is the exploration Indiana Jones fantasy RPG, and D&D is the monster hunting game with potential for more.

D&D 5e has a exploration game.
The problem is it is all DM facing so player have no direction on how to use it..
D&D has a history of either giving too little guidance or telling you what to do. Almost nothing in between.

You have two competing philosophies over time to thank for that. Rulings over rules, and the opposite. To be frank I dont know exactly what the middle would look like. I have a feeling both adherents of the philosophies would be disappointed. I do think being armed with knowledge of how the rules works is important as a player, though, the more ruleset laid down the more they can be gamed as well. I dont have the best answer on this one I have been aiming for the middle as a GM for most my gaming life. The best years I had were with PF1 and the adventure paths introducing interesting rulesets for exploration/social pillar as they relate to the adventure. I think D&D, for better or worse, has become that casual monster hunting game that can be more, but isn't motivated to be more. YMMV.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Exploration challenges should be described but not explained in the PHB so that each group, players and DM, can decide which challenges they want to do and which ones they want to exclude. Because every group is different.

Ok, I still fail to see the distinction between description and explanation, leaving that aside, I am not really advocating new player facing rules. Such things would fall afoul of backwards compatibility and would be best left to an explicitly optional supplements.
I think that entries in the rules section like the study action presented in the UA could cover what is needed. Perhaps, a few additional actions of a similar nature added in.
What I really want to see is a pretty good overview of several ways of applying this to exploration as extended ability checks and the use of a success ladder or fail forward as distinct to a binary success or fail.
Also more emphasis to DMs that ability checks should only be called for if there are some meaningful story consequences to success or failure.

 

[Minigiant]

You have two competing philosophies over time to thank for that. Rulings over rules, and the opposite. To be frank I dont know exactly what the middle would look like. I have a feeling both adherents of the philosophies would be disappointed. I do think being armed with knowledge of how the rules works is important as a player, though, the more ruleset laid down the more they can be gamed as well. I dont have the best answer on this one I have been aiming for the middle as a GM for most my gaming life. The best years I had were with PF1 and the adventure paths introducing interesting rulesets for exploration/social pillar as they relate to the adventure. I think D&D, for better or worse, has become that casual monster hunting game that can be more, but isn't motivated to be more. YMMV.

The middle ground is like I stated before: Stating actions you can do in the Exploration pillar to the Players in the PHB in the class or skills section but put the rules for those actions in the DMG where the DM can choose how you adjudicate them.

 

[Minigiant]

Ok, I still fail to see the distinction between description and explanation, leaving that aside, I am not really advocating new player facing rules. Such things would fall afoul of backwards compatibility and would be best left to an explicitly optional supplements.
I think that entries in the rules section like the study action presented in the UA could cover what is needed. Perhaps, a few additional actions of a similar nature added in.

But that is what I'm saying.

The Search and Study actions tell the player what they can do with the lore and detection skills.
They state that Monster Identification and Clue Finding are parts of the game.

Before your PC can have the Nature or Arcana skill and easily not know what to do with them.