Unearthed Arcana Into the Wild: New Unearthed Arcana Covers Wilderness Exploration

Ohh the Nentir Vale - Moon Hills example that Mearls had showed a screenshot of before. Nice.

 

[pemerton]

That's one of the big issues we had with 4e at the end, the other two being that you had to have a lot of fights to "draw out the dailies" so that you in the end get a fight which cannot be "won by daily power". The third thing is it is so balanced most classes feel the same

We never had an issue with daily powers so I'm not sure what your talking about.
Only DM'ed, but I never noticed anyone having an issue with sameness

Grinding down the party’s resources over the course of the adventuring day is how every Edition has worked. Only difference is it isn’t just the wizard with daily resources in 4e.

For what it's worth, my 4e experience is like dave2008's. The "sameness" thing has been a non-issue (our focus is on effects, not recovery times). And at least on the GM side I've never had an issue with daily powers, nor with "grinding down". I guess my players worry about their resource management, but I don't, except that when they're completely out of juice I might dial back a bit, or start to be more lenient about the prospects of getting an extended rest.

 

[Chaosmancer]

So, I missed when the UA originally came out, so perhaps this was discussed elsewhere and I'm just missing it.

However, after reading this thread and this UA... what are people seeing in this that is leading to such a generally good response?

In terms of "things I'd like to see in the future" exploration and wilderness rules are definitely up there, but that isn't exactly what I'm seeing here.

The "rules" presented here are:
1) Choose a place to go -> Is this a step we really need to figure out, I mean, this is painfully obvious in a way
2) Roll Survival versus a DC -> Yes... this was already how it worked right? If there was going to be a roll to see if people got lost, it would be a survival roll, since survival is tracking and navigating in the wilderness. I guess having a more codified set of DC's is sort of helpful, but giving me a list of DCs a new set of rules does not make
3) Do the things in the PHB, with the added table of potentially being lost by 2d6 miles -> So... people who fail the check could get lost. Yes, this is a thing I already knew, sort of implied by the idea of failing the check involving finding the place you are going.

Then some of the rest of it is things like "You should determine what kinds of terrain are in an area" or "You should determine what kind of creatures and monsters are in the area"

Well, again, this sort of thing is a bit self-obvious isn't it? I don't think many DMs decide that there are "Dangerous and Dark woods" to the west and then never consider what it is that is inside them that makes them "dangerous" to the players.


So... where are the rule ideas here that everyone is liking? As far as I can tell, there is nothing here except a standardized DC chart and the idea of 2d6 miles of being lost. Even the idea of regional effects, while implemented in a cool way for those moon hills, isn't even something new. We've seen those sort of rules for planar locations and legendary monster effects, the hills are even explicitly connected to three different planes of existence, so a forest or set of hills without that influence wouldn't have them, and we have no idea on what kinds of regional effects would be appropriate.


I get it, if it is simply "I appreciate they are looking at rules for exploration, because that is an area under-explored by WoTC", but... couldn't we get some actual rules and guidelines?