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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8105772" data-attributes="member: 70468">Today was the first time we got to do overland exploration in about ten sessions. Actually, looking at some old notes in roll20, it’s probably closer to twelve or more sessions. I’m posting because I wanted to follow up on the house rules I posted.The wilderness exploration stuff went pretty well. I had a mistake in my notes, so I used old (too high) random encounter DCs, but it otherwise went fine. The party went northeast after spending some time in town, then they ended up wandering east before doubling back along the coast to the west (because they ran into a swap to the east and decided that was too scary). Framing it as a kind of (group) exploration activity was a little confusing at first, but the players caught on quickly.We had one moment where we needed to zoom in a bit. I’d rolled a random encounter with a brontosaurus. It was in the middle of a badlands, and I failed my roll for it to be undead, so I decided just having a fight with it would be stupid. Instead, they found a wounded one. For that, we just switched right over to standard exploration activities. The transition went pretty naturally (with my rolling wandering monsters every two turns like normal).One guy was scared something was going to happen, so he hid (Avoid Notice) before deciding to stay behind his shield (Defend) when he came out of hiding. The wizard had his familiar his familiar fly around (Scout). The champion tried to figure out what’d critically injured the dinosaur (Investigate). Eventually, the champion healed up the brontosaurus, and they got on their way, but not before the wizard’s familiar caught a glimpse of a creature with glowing eyes watching them from a tunnel a little ways off.We also did a bit of urbancrawling. The party started out wanting to learn more about the area where they were going to explore, but I ended up just winging it. I think the timescale I have in my notes is too long. However, keeping things at the PCs level while they traveled the city (even if it’s just a montage as they know where they’re going) let me reveal little details as they went. That’s great for helping make it seem more real.I was really down on it when I first heard about it, but exploration mode is easily one of my favorite parts of the game. It integrates so well with an old-school way of running the game, and it lets us still get all the benefits of the system for doing exploration stuff.</blockquote>

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