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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Retros_x" data-source="post: 9257125" data-attributes="member: 7033171">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.</blockquote>

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