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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9258753" data-attributes="member: 2067">No one's talking about old-school resource management and bookkeeping. Talking about hit points and spell slots - the same things that everyone is already managing. Nothing in a "wilderness is a dungeon crawl" style requires "old-school resource management and bookkeeping." The two are not tightly intertwined.No one's talking about spending torches. You're attacking a strawman.I am talking about a diversity of player engagement. Just skill checks for exploration is analogous to just attack rolls for combat - it risks eliminating interesting complexity and can become rote. It's not sufficient, IMO, for a mode of play that strongly relies on an exploration element. It'll wear thin.Again, that's a strawman. My argument is not that we must eliminate skill checks. My argument is is that part of the reason a lot of people aren't satisfied with exploration in 5e is because "make some skill checks" can be very bland in practice.In comparison, consider the different modes of engagement that a dungeon-crawl-style approach brings:Saving throws, triggered by environmental conditions or sudden wilderness traps, help players to feel reactive and defensive.Choosing paths helps players to feel empowered and that their decisions affect the game in significant ways (and serve as moments of RP between party members - WHY did you choose Path A over Path B? Is it because you're a dwarf and Path A is underground?)Attack rolls are involved in encounters that happen on the path.Taking damage keeps a feeling of tension and consequences high.Spending class resources (such as spell slots) helps increase that tension, to characterize what your character cares about, and to give you options for dealing with challengesSkill checks are a part of the package, but asking them to carry the full weight is like asking attack rolls to carry the full weight in combat.Sure. I do think, as I mentioned above, spending class resources (like spell slots) on solving exploration issues is a useful part of making exploration engaging. So my concern with adding risk to those spells is that they may become trap options or the like. But that's more about specific spells than it is about exploration in general, I believe.The central idea with resting is really an argument about deadliness. Resting is just a way to reduce the deadliness of an area. And deadliness itself is really just a way to say "engaging consequences for failure."So, there's a lot of space to play with there, even if the high level characters aren't threatened by HP attrition.High-level characters have a bigger foothold in the world, which means that threatening their bonds could make more sense. The scaling of D&D tiers already plays into this - high-level characters deal with world-shaking threats. So, time becomes a resource that can threaten the PC's, or at least the things they care about. It doesn't need to be a countdown to doomsday (though that's fine, too!), it could be a countdown to it gets worse. Save yourself by resting, but take too much time, and towns start disappearing off the map, your friends start dying, etc. Traditional D&D where you get a stronghold as a class feature would have your keeps falling and your wizard towers blowing up or whatever. In 5e, it sounds like "Bastions" could play this role a bit.That can be a little numbing if repeated often, but on the other hand high-level play is usually pretty rare, too. In practice, maybe that problem solves itself. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />As long as the party has to actively do something to avoid failure (success is not guaranteed, they must take actions and make decisions to reach it), and that failure matters (character death, end of the world, the pie goes stale, you go mad, you loose hope, your wife leaves you for a younger man who plays in a band and your children end up resenting you, whatever), the stakes of exploration are high enough to be engaging.Where a lot of approaches fall short is that (a) no one makes a choice during exploration that matters (the procedural "roll a survival check" and "point a to point b montage"), or (b) those choices don't matter (nothing will happen if we get lost, we long rest and roll again, why are we even rolling). A dungeon-crawl mindset nips those problems in the bud, but it's not the only way to do it (though it is the way D&D kind of wants you to do it out of the box, in a rather maladroit and opaque way).</blockquote>

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