Exploration: My concerns for the new edition

[ExploderWizard]

If we're going to keep along with the 3 pillars, which I personally don't care for, then exploration is the toughest to make actually fun. Finding a locked chest is in the exploration pillar, but by itself it represents only tedium. It is a given fact that the group will find some way to open the chest and making them go through check after check is just boring. If it is inevitable, then why waste time? Unfortunately, a lot of things which are inevitable fall under the exploration category so a lot more attention to how it is implemented in-game in needed. The group needs to climb the rope up and there is no pressure? Inevitable. The only way forward is through a locked door? Inevitable.

The best way to portray exploration is that, if it isn't making the players paranoid, it isn't worth doing. The pit trap alone is a waste of time. The pit trap that also sets off a screaming alarm is great. Traveling from point A to point B is boring, needing to make it under time limit X is more interesting, needing to make it under time limit X but orcs are attacking village Y on the way is great. So, exploration treated completely divorced from other elements is tedium even if you throw in mundane resource management.

If exploration is nothing more than die check after check then yes it can get boring fast. Exploration is a time to more fully involve the player as opposed to the character sheet.

 

[Number48]

If exploration is nothing more than die check after check then yes it can get boring fast. Exploration is a time to more fully involve the player as opposed to the character sheet.

Oh, I agree. I was just pointing out that exploration actually needs the most care out of the 3 pillars. Social and combat easily give you things that react back and have a well-defined beginning and end, but exploration is a bit more nebulous. A good exploration encounter really should react back to you.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Oh, I agree. I was just pointing out that exploration actually needs the most care out of the 3 pillars. Social and combat easily give you things that react back and have a well-defined beginning and end, but exploration is a bit more nebulous. A good exploration encounter really should react back to you.

It certainly can, but not in ways that are immediately apparent. Take that locked chest for example. A simple locked chest with a few coins inside.

There are possibilities associated with this chest that go beyond a simple lockpick check and a bit of loot.

Why is the chest where it is? If it had a really simple lock why did the owner even bother? If it had a very tough lock for such a paltry amount of coin why waste it? Either way the chest wasn't hidden so the owner must know it would be found. Perhaps the purpose of the chest was simply to see if anyone had been in the room? Oh no what if one of the coins in our pack is being magically tracked!!

The environment itself can be an engaging place before it is even populated. Because there is no immediate feedback sometimes adds to the tension and mystery of unknown places.

 

[LordArchaon]

I have a rough draft of a "meta-mechanic" in my head for "out-of-combat situations". Roughly an equivalent to skill-challenges, but radically, deeply different. It could be used in Exploration as well.

I'd call it "effort-based problem solving", and it would basically work like this.

1. - DM explains situation, asks what players do.
2. - Players explain their actions
3. - DM knows how to adjudicate which of these actions are meaningful towards the problem solution (they could also be detrimental), and has guidelines to adjudicate how big/complex these actions are.
4. - Based on what skills a single character employs and how many efforts does he/she make (could take lots of in-game time, or little, context is important), the DM hands to the characters that are going in the right direction some "helpful tokens". They'd work like minor items, but they'd be more similar to 4e's Alternate Rewards. The characters actually gain new abilities through their efforts.
5. - Characters use these new abilities to either solve the problem, or continue in the right direction.
6. - Eventually, if the problem needed very different skills (or better yet, areas of exprtise) than those the characters had, the character(s) that worked the most and better in the solution of the problem may "retrain on the fly" their theme-based features/feats/skills or whatever, to basically become a bit of experts on what they've been doing. Example: A Wizard using a lot of divination spells towards the solution of a mystery could exchange some of his "Librarian theme" benefits for "Detective theme" benefits. These changes could be temporary or not, depending on what the player and DM agree on.
7. - The characters have done so many efforts and adapted so deeply towards the solution of the problem, that they arrive to the solution "naturally", possibly without even having rolled a d20 once (although it would be more of an exception than a rule).

Applied to exploration, in a long exploration session, character could have fun using their best abilities, skills, and theme-determined areas of expertise to address various challenges.
Characters who were already tailored to be good during Exploration would shine more, or maybe less since they'd be the ones that don't need to adapt.
Adaption is fun because it actually involves rebuilding (temporarily or not) a small part of the character, if enough effort/time is spent.
A trap-finder Rogue with high Wisdom could become, with a bit of trial-and-error or mentoring by the Ranger, an expert at finding curative herbs in the wild.
A Wizard with a good selection of divination spells could become a nature-themed seer able to commune with nature a bit as a druid would do.
A Ranger would use his tracking and scouting skills normally, providing the fast progressions in the task that the party needs while not-yet-adapted members struggle to be useful.
A noble fighter might use his high Strength and knowledge of tactics and battlefield to set traps and thus provide food, or he could help the ranger choose the best spots to avoid ambushes or set up them.
Possibilities are endless.

The point is: characters should feel dynamic even in their character sheet "stats". A high Strength character shouldn't just be creative in using his Athletics skill for everything, "being useful with it". He would often need to actually learn something new, in order to be useful where his athleticism is not needed. This allows for everyone to really participate in every "adventure phase", be it Exploration, Stealthy Infiltration, Political Intrigue, Information Gathering, Crime Solving and so on.
Also, i see D&D Next "DM Modules" on these "adventure phases" as adding the needed guidelines, possible retraining or acquirable "mini-themes", "effort rewards" and so on. They would encourage completely different thinking depending on the context, and each of these phases could put each player on the edge of their seats just as much as adrenaline-rich combat!

 

[Grazzt]

The pit trap alone is a waste of time. The pit trap that also sets off a screaming alarm is great.

The pit trap that has poisoned spikes at the bottom, that seals the trap door shut, and floods with water, while setting off an alarm is even better.

 

[Number48]

The pit trap that has poisoned spikes at the bottom, that seals the trap door shut, and floods with water, while setting off an alarm is even better.

If there's no fire, I can't get behind this.

I do like the thought of taking the 4E skill challenge and removing the static DC from it. The DC of each thing you might try is judged on its own basis. That alone would get away from much of the silliness I've heard/read with skill challenges. If the objective is straightforward, the challenge ends when the objective is met or failed in some way which should be clear and probably involves fishing the wizard out of the wizard a quarter-mile away. If the objective isn't straightforward, say trying to convince the duke, then you could go with # successes vs. # failures.

Anything, anything, to do away with the silliness of, "I use Athletics to convince the Duke of our sincerity."

 

[ExploderWizard]

If the objective is straightforward, the challenge ends when the objective is met or failed in some way which should be clear and probably involves fishing the wizard out of the wizard a quarter-mile away.

Man its a wizard eat wizard world out there!

 

[Consonant Dude]

I'm very worried about this element. It had a very strong presence in the very early versions (OD&D/Holmes, maybe 1E) and seems to have been on the decline since then.

The core element was facing & exploring The Unknown. This extended not only to the environment but to the creatures as well. I'm going to use a dungeoncrawl in my examples.

Exploring is about resource management. Going slow lets you detect traps and search for secret doors, but also expends your torches and food and increases the number of wandering monster checks. Do you press your luck when your resources are expended or retreat out to a basecamp or try and sleep where you are? More wandering monster checks! or maybe the monsters are now more ready for you if you left to rest in a camp nearby. Or maybe they raid you at night! Without these controls the players can simply take their time in a VERY cautious exploration, with no risk to manage at all.

I wouldn't know about OD&D, never played that. But I started playing in 1980 and used various old school editions of DnD and I have continued to do so for over 30 years. I'm not flashing "geek creds" here. I don't think there's anything mind-boggling about this and there's plenty of folks who started then and some even before me. But I do think some people exaggerate how primordial the style of play you describe was to early DnD. What you describe as "exploration" is ONE iconic style of DnD play among many others. Its early preeminence has more to do with how the game grew an audience than anything else.

See, when we started playing my friend and I, we had nobody to teach us. So we learned by ourselves. We basically flipped a coin to decide who would DM. It was very clear to us that DMing was an immense responsibility cause, you were in charge of the whole world as opposed to players who took one responsibility, being a cool protagonist. Fortunately, DnD had a basic mechanism for that: the dungeoncrawl. The dungeoncrawl was not cool because you were advancing at a slow pace and counting how many torches were left. The dungeoncrawl was cool because it solved a lot of headaches for the DM. You buy a module and you have this restricted environment. The toughest part is motivating your players to explore the dungeon but once that's done, they can "screw up" your world. They can't say they want to go to some other village you haven't created, or cross the other side of the river you have no map for. Whether they turn left or right, you have AN ANSWER.

So they were easy to create for TSR and easy to run for newbie DMs (which we all were). My friend and I initiated well over a hundred players during our elementary and high school years. As we gained experience as DM, we would make our own "modules". They would be dungeoncrawls at first but over time they would involve more and more stuff that had nothing to do with crawling with torches. Of course, many of those people we initiated eventually wanted to try their hand at DMing. So they look for a place to start. They would try and find a module we hadn't run that had the simplest kind of setup possible. You guessed it: a dungeoncrawl.

In support of this there must be a core decisions the players make that have consequences. Does the wizard take exploration spells or combat spells? Do I detect magic now or save it for later? These sorts of decisions result in raising the tension of the game. Making searching easy (from a time standpoint) or minimizing the agony over which spell to take will help eliminate the RIsk Management portion of the exploration game, which is a core element of Discovering the Unknown. In 4E terms, if the wizard has "detect magic" and "find secret doors" as an at-will then a significant portion of the risk management mini-game has been eliminated, along with the associated Exploration element. This extends to healing. There has to be consequences for getting in to a fight, or being stupid in one When the party gets low on HP then they have to decide: push in further, retreat outside, or make camp? If healing is free, as it tends to be in 4E, then that aspect of the resource management game is significantly reduced. Any no, I don't buy the "controlling your surges" as a resource management issue. This element, more than anything else in this note, is critical to the exploration element of the game.

I also don't buy that high heroism is a threat to dungeoncrawling. Ironically, if there is anything that is a dungeoncrawl-stopper, it's grittiness. For instance, once we started playing around with other systems like Fantasy Hero, Harnmaster, etc... we discovered we couldn't run the type of dungeoncrawls we used to because the characters were way too battered. It's a myth that systems empowering characters prevent "exploration" as you define it, because that exploration is very much about trial and error. And if error means you have to start from scratch too often, it doesn't take long before it's pointless.

With regard to monsters, first time you face a Gibberring Mouther you're horrified. What are it's attacks? What's it vulnerable to? Is it very strong or are our attacks ineffectual? I was very disappointed to see a recent poll inquiring what monsters should be featured in the first adventures: Kobolds, goblins, orcs, skeletons. The featured monster should be something no one has seen before and that the PLAYERS don't know how to deal with.

See? These old monsters were amazing because the game was new to many of us back then. It's got NOTHING to do with core rules and principles. It's about the fluff. People have found memories of the owlbear because back then, when they were introduced to it, they had no idea what was going on. They might not have known the troll regenerated and so on.

But today, we're screwed because the only way we can recapture that magic of discovery is by having new monsters, except whenever "old schoolers" (and I use the term loosely because it seems a lot of those weren't around at the time or have greatly distorted memories) see new stuff, they complain it's not iconic and not in tune with the original flavor.

Do I think exploration is bad? No. But the way to capture it is in adventure building, much more so than in the core rules. You pick a DnD system, you build really cool adventures with great puzzles and wonderful creatures and you let your PCs try stuff. And a system too unforgiving tends to make the process a little silly.

I still run dungeoncrawls, BTW. But there are so many other styles of DnD gaming and they were all possible and played back in 1980. And they're all equally iconic.

 

[Hassassin]

If the objective is straightforward, the challenge ends when the objective is met or failed in some way which should be clear and probably involves fishing the wizard out of the wizard a quarter-mile away.

Man its a wizard eat wizard world out there!

Sounds like someone had an accident with extradimensional spaces.

 

[Starfox]

Exploration is fun, resource management is boring. I can play Advocates and Accountants all day in real life, in RPGs I want to be at least somewhat heroic.

For me, exploration ties in to another thread, the one about Combat as Sport and Combat as War. Exploration to me is Combat as War. Basically you do exploration carefully to get the drop on your opponent - learn things about them, sneak on them, bypass some of them. This is motivation enough for me.

The real resource spent on exploration is real life game time. What does it matter that it takes 2 minutes to take 20 on Search in 3.5 if you can spend 10 seconds of game time to simply say that you spend the next 4 days searching? But to me, the problem here is not resource management, but flair and style. If the players are so cautious, they are either doing it because of role-playing concerns (for example, archeologists in Call of Cthulhu) or the DM has given them past experiences where bravery and daredevil exploration failed badly. Some DMs may enjoy this style, I do not. (Perversely, I can enjoy it as a player.)