NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9258989" data-attributes="member: 2067">I'm in agreement, essentially.I think this goes up to the idea of when do we use exploration mechanics? Point A to Point B travel over a known (but perhaps monster-studded!) path isn't a great place to use them, because there's little chance of discovery or surprise or meaningful choice. Roll a random encounter if you want, describe the scenery, and move on with your life. This means that an easy, no-tension montage travel sequence can be intended. Maybe they didn't want to spend a lot of time on what it takes to get through the Serpent Jungle to the Ruins of the Snake God. That's a valid choice, and while it might de-emphasize exploration, not every adventure needs to highlight exploration. And maybe most published adventures just don't value exploration! I'd say that this is the case, personally! There's also the other edge of adventures that might want to be about exploration in a meaningful way, but flub it by not designing it well. Skill check montage. Have a fight if you fail a check. These aren't strong exploration mechanics. They're useful for flavor, but they don't involve things like risk of failure or a need to make choices or a fog of war where you don't know the results of your actions. The combination of the above two points gives us our perceived lack of exploration in 5e. Not enough published stuff taking it seriously or flubbing the rules when it tries to. Yes! Which is why, when you want to take exploration seriously, the answer to the question "Anything else happen today?" is, "The next room in the dungeon, buddy." Or to put it in active play terms:Me: "Anything else happen today?"DM: (rolls for a random encounter during the short rest, gets nothing) "You spend the next 3 hours following the deer trail before encountering the corpse of a deer, studded with needle-like spikes, laying in a clearing. What do you do?"(in dungeon-metaphor terms, they moved say 90 feet down the hallway and entered the room with the manticore encounter)A wilderness with one ravine isn't much of a wilderness! A dungeon isn't just one trap, after all! Assuming we don't tweak anything with the RAW, the way you'd ensure that attrition happens and the threat is felt even if the party can long rest is through spending more than half of the party's HD between each long rest (since a long rest only heals up to half of your HD). So, same wilderness zone, one ravine might be fine for a single day up to about level 5. We could say:Me: (I am level 3 and have spent all my HD) "Anything else happen today?"DM: (rolls for random encounters, gets nothing) "No, you can take a long rest and recover two HD. The next day, you follow the deer trail for 3 hours before encountering the corpse of a deer, studded with needle-like spikes, laying in a clearing. What do you do?"Me, mentally: Wait if this keeps happening, I'm only going to last three days out here, and this isolated little hamlet I'm trying to get to is six days away, I might have to think about how to bypass some of these encounters....Me, out loud: "Give it a wide berth and try to stealthily move past it."That density is often missing from exploration. If one takes exploration seriously and wants it to be a significant part of the game, it needs to be deeper than one threat! There are unexpected threats just out of sight!Random encounter rolls help with this vibe, and are essentially the D&D-native way to keep rests risky. There's definitely better mechanics out there (I'm not a fan of the "encounter as prod" personally, but it has its place!). Yeah, basic D&D sez "starvation isn't a threat." That's in line with D&D's exploration mode being dungeon crawls. Starvation is kind of something you check a box to avoid. It's not the active threat. Starvation in the wilderness is like running out of arrows in a fight. Not something most parties need to concern themselves with most of the time. Maybe possible if you're big on granular detail, but ignored at most tables. The thing that D&D wants to threaten you with is traps and encounters. The terrain and the creatures that live there. I've never seen a character starve to death or run out of arrows in D&D.But opening a door that explodes? Or dropping down a 50 foot ravine? Yeah, sure!</blockquote>

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