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

[overgeeked]

The systems where I have had engaging exploration sequences have been 4th Edition and Savage Worlds, because the skill challenge/Dramatic Task subsystems gave me a way to easily come up with an exciting sequence off the top of my head. 4E's skill challenges had problems, sure - but nothing gets my table more excited than a Savage Worlds' dramatic task.

Absolutely. Having some kind of framework system or general mechanic in place for doing extended tests is really all you need. Even something as simple as clocks would do. 5E's group checks don't fly because it's one round of rolls and the situation is resolved. That doesn't provide enough tension. About 3-4 rounds is the sweet spot for me. That's enough to have highs and lows, great rolls and terrible rolls, and everything in between. Any shorter and there's no tension, any longer and it's a slog.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I largely consider exploration to be chiefly concerned with information rather than travel, good exploration content rewards putting together different pieces of information in ways the players can use and their ability to gather that information in the first place. Information in this instance is broad, it can include everything from solving puzzles (speak "friend" and enter) perhaps with lore playing a role in the solution, finding secret passageways by poking at the environment OR by perception check, noticing things in the way the space is laid out. If it gives you information, and that information adds to your understanding of the setting, or have some extrinsic reward, that's exploration.

Accordingly, my games feature a lot of hidden treasure and interlocking dungeon wings and such.

 

[Minigiant]

What "contingent" has ever made that statement? That's a heck of a claim.

There is a vocal percentage of the community who doesn't want hardly any mechanic for anything outside of combat.

Then you have the percentage who are okay with optional rules and advice for noncombat but not in the PHB nor DMG so they never become popular.

This is why exploration is so much up. Because D&D is caught between DMs who want rules and advice and DMs who don't what to be told to any outside combat.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The essential D&D exploration is the dungeon crawl.

So, it involves:

Imminent Danger. Around the next corner could be your demise. You are not safe. For the wilderness, this means this is no camping trip.

Darkness. You don't know how the path is going to go. You don't know how the road is going to twist. You have to make active decisions at junctures in the path.

Traps. Broad enough to include "wilderness hazards" like wildfires or whatever, but broadly speaking: things could change suddenly, and that change could hurt you (the role of the ranger or druid is like the role of the rogue - protect the party from traps).

Monsters. The flavor of monsters changes depending upon terrain, but D&D is a world full of monsters, where wicked things lurk in every crack and crevice and shadow in this land. This is no walk in the woods, either.

Barriers. In a dungeon, this is locked doors. In the wilderness, this is impassible rivers, sheer cliffs, supernatural terrain. (Again, the druid/ranger parallels the rogue - get us through barriers)

Treasure. In a dungeon, there are rewards to seek - coin and magic and MacGuffins. In the wilderness, there is also coin and magic to seek.

Entrances/Exits, and Jacquaysing. A dungeon has many paths into it and through it. The wilderness does, too. Civilizations can be seen as entrances and exits, and the roads through the wilderness, like dungeon corridors, link sites of interest.

Attrition. A dungeon will take your HP. The wilderness will take your HD. They'll both take your spell slots.

This leads us to a few principles:

1. Exploration is not routine. In D&D, we don't worry about the rules if there's no threat of death. If there is a safe path between Point A and Point B, there's no exploration. It's explored. The wilderness we explore should be deadly. That's where we use monsters and traps and barriers. You can rest, but resting is risky, and interruptions can happen - spells like rope trick are mostly for the avoidance of that threat. Note that the threat isn't really starvation or dehydration or infection or any of the things that normally kill people in the wilderness. The threat is climactic, cinematic, fantastic. We don't worry about boiling our water to avoid giardia, we worry about the kraken in the lake.
2. Exploration is not direct. In D&D, we don't worry about the rules if we know how to get from A to B. Travel involves making decisions - do we go over the mountains or under them? Do we go left or right at the fork? If we have a good map, we don't need these rules (this is the realm of montage and skill challenges, where the outcome is already pretty clear and the main questions are about what getting there looks like). This is important both to retain meaningful player decision-making (the best way to engage!) and to keep discovery and uncertainty in play. You don't know when you'll stumble on a magical lake or a haunted ruin or whatever.
3. Exploration is still about finding something in the wilderness. It's not just a trip from Point A to Point B. Point B is just another town, really, and there may be relatively safe roads between them (unless they are cut off from each other points-of-light style). We dive into the wilderness - this place of death and danger - to find something within. A site of magic. A place of hidden treasure. A geographical McGuffin (petroglyphs! a circle of standing stones!).
4. There's magic in the wilds. Like, supernatural geography. Fey creatures. Weak points between worlds. Sentient storms. Just as a dungeon is a place of contrivance and machination, so is the wilderness.
5. Class Matters. The "wilderness classes" (barbarian, ranger, druid) should feature prominently in the clearing of barriers, the disabling of traps, the clearing of the fog of war, etc. You rely on skill checks and spells when you can't rely on those classes. Those classes should have features that directly address the difficulties of the wilderness just as the rogue has features related to disabling traps, stealth, and perception.
6. Exploration features all the other modes of play, too. You fight things, you interact with things, other creatures are part of this story. This isn't just the party by itself.

So how do we use this practically?

When you want to add a dose of Exploration to your games, remember that you are always Adding a Dungeon. The wilderness might be a bit more zoomed-out (hours or days instead of 10-minute rounds), but the mindset is the same. Don't use exploration as like a default for moving between Point A and Point B and roll for thunderstorms or whatever. Assume the party can move from A to B. Instead, use it as a challenge with a goal. It's something they can fail at, that they need to engage with and unknot. It's magical, it's deadly, it's interesting to visit at a fairly granular level. Maybe there's something in the wilderness that they need to find. The hostile nature of the place means that even our druid can't stay out there forever (thieves don't live in the dungeon!). This does mean that the place isn't somewhere you want the party to be able to safely and easily rest. It's dangerous. By definition, not a place you can let your guard down.

And then you make a dungeon. Hallways become paths. Rooms become villages or castles or sites of interest. Monsters live here. Potential allies do, too. There's treasure to be found. There may be a Big Bad here somewhere.

Which is part of why a mechanic like a skill challenge kind of fails to get at the interesting thing to me. The decisions need to be bigger and more impactful than "what skill do I use?" For exploration to matter, it has to be worth the details.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Absolutely. Having some kind of framework system or general mechanic in place for doing extended tests is really all you need. Even something as simple as clocks would do. 5E's group checks don't fly because it's one round of rolls and the situation is resolved. That doesn't provide enough tension. About 3-4 rounds is the sweet spot for me. That's enough to have highs and lows, great rolls and terrible rolls, and everything in between. Any shorter and there's no tension, any longer and it's a slog.

I agree with this hard.

In my group's system, the players choose their character's role, like navigator or defender, and when an encounter is rolled, the roll determines what kind of encounter it is, such as a discovery, a fight, an obstacle, etc.

The party then can roll or just the subtype of the encounter. Maybe the discoery is a landmark that helps with subsequent navigation. Each type of challenge has 2 roles that can take point on that type of challenge, and is the first character to interact with the encounter. Encounters have opportunity and consequence, and which you get is determined by how well you roll. First roll is always the pesosn who Takes Point, then a group check, and then 1 or 2 further checks depending on what is goiing on and needed. Always at least 3, usually no more than 5.

I don't have my notes to hand, so this is from memory, and we are still working on finding the balance of what is decided by the DM, what by the dice, and what by the PC that Takes Point. What the Point character is rolling is currently up to the player, and the player helps the DM describe the detains of the scenario. So you might roll that they Discover a Landmark, but it's on the player of the Point Character to decide what kind of landmark, what what opportunity they want to have which sets the momentum of what skill or tool they use to roll for the encounter, and then pass it back to the DM who tells them what the consequence is if they flop the rolls. The other players need something to do, even though the point is to spotlight one PC at a time.

 

[Hussar]

Darkness. You don't know how the path is going to go. You don't know how the road is going to twist. You have to make active decisions at junctures in the path.

Fantastic points as always.

But, here's the trick - if we're doing exploration - as in we don't know the end destination - making active decisions becomes really difficult. After all, just like in a dungeon, if there's no real difference (from the PC's POV) between the left fork and the right fork in the dungeon, they might as well flip a coin. In fact, I've seen players do that more than once.

Something that behooves DM's, I think, is getting information into the player's hands as fast as possible. When the druid talks to animals (or the barbarian or whoever), don't be coy. Flat out tell the players what's up ahead. If there's a river five miles down the path, tell the players. If there's wandering trolls? Tell the players. Constantly be giving the players more and more information.

It's something I struggle with sometimes. The idea that you don't want to spoil things in advance and make things too easy to learn, counterbalanced by being too parsimonious with information.

Of course, then this whole balancing act can really become difficult once the party has more and more magical options. Speak with Animals gives way to Speak with Plants and then Commune with Nature and so on. Eventually, there's not really much exploration going on at all - the areas that you would have explored in the past become more or less just bypassed.

 

[I'm A Banana]

But, here's the trick - if we're doing exploration - as in we don't know the end destination - making active decisions becomes really difficult. After all, just like in a dungeon, if there's no real difference (from the PC's POV) between the left fork and the right fork in the dungeon, they might as well flip a coin. In fact, I've seen players do that more than once.

Sometimes, that's probably fine. It's a moment of player agency!

It's something I struggle with sometimes. The idea that you don't want to spoil things in advance and make things too easy to learn, counterbalanced by being too parsimonious with information.

Of course, then this whole balancing act can really become difficult once the party has more and more magical options. Speak with Animals gives way to Speak with Plants and then Commune with Nature and so on. Eventually, there's not really much exploration going on at all - the areas that you would have explored in the past become more or less just bypassed.

The wizard version of this is Arcane Eye, and the rogue version of this is a Stealth check of 20. Any of these options can give a lot of intel about what lies ahead.

But thinking like a dungeon, this isn't too concerning. Surprise can still come from traps or hidden things, the intel is rarely perfect, and the PC's must either spend resources (that they aren't sure of recovering!) or risk a die roll (a Stealth check of 20 isn't d20-proof!), escalating the tension. Also, the supernatural is common - illusion, transmutation, various "gotchas". Speak with Animals and Commune with Nature are pretty good moments of RPing, and let the druid work as the rogue in the wilderness (becoming a very good scout). It's just a part of how the party overcomes the threat, like Action Surge is.

IMXP, the big bugaboo of this approach comes when we don't apply the idea that the danger level is high and constant. If you can get a safe long rest, the attrition element is mitigated or removed, which means there's little danger of having to retreat. You wouldn't do this in a combat, but in the "logic" of the wilderness, making camp sounds like something that should be relatively straightforward, while that sounds like a dicier proposition in the dungeon. It should sound like a risk in both circumstances.

Which is also why not every road needs to be a full-on Exploration. Not every wilderness is going to try and kill you. But the interesting ones - the ones we challenge our intrepid party with exploring - probably should be.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The more I wrote the system out and then was talking to my wife about it, the more I realise it neeeds revision.

Things I'm adding, and I'll try to write up a more readable version tomorrow

The encounter die. The norm is a d6, but it can be increased or decreased by circumstance. Starting off, the encounter threshold is 6, which means you have to roll a six for an encounter to happen. Every time you roll the encounter die without an encounter happening you drop the threshold by 1, until you don't need to roll because it isn't possible to roll lower than 1 on the die, so an encounter happens.

The encounter die resets after an encounter.

Having rolled an encounter, the DM now rolls for what type of encounter. If it lands on a type you've done already during this session, you reroll, and the second result is used regardless. (so more often you'll get a variety, but it is possible to get multiple fights in a row). Everyone at the table knows what encounter has been rolled for. Like players know that 3 is a fight.

Having rolled a 3, the DM chooses what kind of fight they're looking at, what the scenario is. Could be an attempted ambush, a monster that has been disturbed, unquiet spirits from the nearby barrows, a classic highway bandit situation, etc.

Next the Point Character declares a desired opportunity, which the DM can veto and ask for something else, but this should only happen if it really needs to. The DM then announces the consequences of failure and the difficulty of the encounter, which determines CR of creatures in a fight, or average DC difficulty in other things. This system assumes that the DM is using the Very Easy, Easy, Hard, etc scale in the DMG, with plus or minuses to DCs based on the scenario and the group's resources.

I like the idea of rolling, so maybe a player rolls for the difficulty?
I also might want more back and forth in this step, but honestly I want the setup phase to be over quickly.


Next the Defender is the natural point character for fights, so the Defender steps up, the DM describes the scenario, and asks what the character does, the character describes or roleplays their action, and rolls. The DM records or notes whether it's a success or failure.

Next, the rest of the group gets involved, or uses their turn to try to push the scenario in a direction without retconning anything. Everyone rolls, including the point person, and it's adjuticated as a group check. If you succeed on your check, but the group check fails, it is a failure for the encounter, but what you were trying to do still works and changes the scenario.
Based on the actions used in that group check, and how the DM chooses to respond, At least one more check is made, usually a group check again but if there will be more than 1 further roll then it can be resolved in turns of by group agreement who takes the next action and makes a check.
I'd like to involve the Point Character more in actual resolution, and find a way for the character to mechanically be taking point as further checks are made, but I don't have any ideas right now.

Depending on the difficulty of the scenario and how well preceeding checks went, you might not need any more checks after that, or might need one or two more. Each encounter should have 3 to 5 checks, with room for little checks that don't count determine whether you succeed/fail/get a mixed result, because that wiggle room is where a lot of fun lives in dnd, as long as you can also keep things moving.

Anyway, checks made, successes are tallied, and compared to the difficulty number of successes required to get mixed result or success, and opportunity and consequence are resolved (sometimes the mixed result is simply that both happen).

So that's what the outline of the process looks like, with a call and response conversation between one player and the DM and the rest of the group to determine what the scenario is, and then DM setting the scene and players reacting with character actions and ability checks, and an outcome determined.

This works whether you're mapping wilderness, traveling, lost and trying to find a settlement, travelling by ship, looking for a lost person or item, etc. Using exploration turns helps, because you can have an encounter roll every round at the top. Exploration turns move quickly because it's just bird's eye view of working toward the goal, and making checks whenever an obstacle arises or you wish to push in a direction.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

There is a vocal percentage of the community who doesn't want hardly any mechanic for anything outside of combat.

Then you have the percentage who are okay with optional rules and advice for noncombat but not in the PHB nor DMG so they never become popular.

This is why exploration is so much up. Because D&D is caught between DMs who want rules and advice and DMs who don't what to be told to any outside combat.

There have been so many threads about this or derailed into being about this, can we not in a plus thread about constructive idea sharing on how to make exploration more satisfying and engaging for groups that currently don't enjoy it?

Whether a given person or percentage of people want a given thing isn't really speaking to the point of the thread. People who don't want exploration rules aren't relevant to a plus thread with a premise that exploration is lacking for many poeple and what can we do about it for our tables, and what would we like to see wotc do in the new core books.

Fantastic points as always.

But, here's the trick - if we're doing exploration - as in we don't know the end destination - making active decisions becomes really difficult. After all, just like in a dungeon, if there's no real difference (from the PC's POV) between the left fork and the right fork in the dungeon, they might as well flip a coin. In fact, I've seen players do that more than once.

This can be challenging to gamify without doing things to "force" the PCs to move. I have some ideas, but I just posted a very wordy post about the system I've used and am iterating on, so I'll wait to see other's ideas.

Something that behooves DM's, I think, is getting information into the player's hands as fast as possible. When the druid talks to animals (or the barbarian or whoever), don't be coy. Flat out tell the players what's up ahead. If there's a river five miles down the path, tell the players. If there's wandering trolls? Tell the players. Constantly be giving the players more and more information.

That can certainly work, but how do you give it structure that players that struggle to move without prompt can grasp and leverage?

It's something I struggle with sometimes. The idea that you don't want to spoil things in advance and make things too easy to learn, counterbalanced by being too parsimonious with information.

Of course, then this whole balancing act can really become difficult once the party has more and more magical options. Speak with Animals gives way to Speak with Plants and then Commune with Nature and so on. Eventually, there's not really much exploration going on at all - the areas that you would have explored in the past become more or less just bypassed.

I will agree that travel and survival before less common, but expanding on the extraordinary environments chapter of Tasha's would be a good place to start to lessen that, as would some of the encounter areas in Bigby's. They're magical weird places and might be impossible to teleport away from or have cursed land that attacks the Druid's mind if they try to commune. An important goal is to train players to see that cursed land as an opportunity for the Druid to grapple spiritually with the curse, and weaken it so that a ritual done as a group check can lift the curse.

What is lacking is guidance on this sort of thing, and ways to give any of it structure without inventing mechanics on the fly, which players can see and engage with and become more engaged with exploration as a result.

I will also remind, however, that exploration in terms of the Pillar of 5e DND includes interacting with the enviroment. That means that some of what "kills exploration" actually is an action in the exploration pillar. With better guidance, and with some game mechanics that are well organized that give more structure to these sorts of scenes, Commune With Nature, Plane Shift, Magnificent Mansion, Tiny Hut, all of the exploration breakers can be opportunities and levers PCs have to engage with the gameplay of exploration. I'm curious if you have ideas on how to do that.


Fantastic points, and I'm glad you ended up joining in the discussion.

 

[Hussar]

As far as ideas go? No. I honestly don’t. It’s something I really struggle with. To the point where I largely give up on exploration after a certain number of levels. It’s just too much work with too little reward.

My honest opinion is that most of the utility spells should simply give skill check bonuses and that’s all. No more pocket dimension camping. No more distance traveling (at least 5e did go some ways to remove this). Most of the information gathering spells need to be either ejected or reworked.

Because no, a rogue’s 20 Stealth is not the same as an Arcane Eye. That stealth check only applies to that one group of observers. The rogue is going to have to make multiple checks. And deal with the consequences of failure.

Arcane Eye never fails.