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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 5635339" data-attributes="member: 3400">There are rules about exploration or at least certain elements of exploration. From the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, Wilderness Survival Guide, the environment sections of the 3x DMGs, Planar books of a variety of stripes. But let's take a step back and figure out what the rules get you and what they do.How many people, over the course of D&D's history, have found the rules for combat confining? There's a number of people who have said or intimated that the more defined maneuvers you have the less freedom you have to do something creative. This is, in part, because the definition of the maneuvers leaves you not really wanting to do it (outcome simply not as good as ablating hp) or requiring you to build to really use it (which probably precludes you from building for other maneuvers). How many people have been touting the value of page (what is it?) 42(?) in 4e because it's liberating in this regard? (Though I'm not really sure it keeps up with your typical powers and their funky positioning goodies or with a PC's main attack bonuses, at least it gives you a shot at still doing damage with an off the wall maneuver.)Having well-defined rules can be both a positive and a negative. They give you structure, but confine your freedom. That's why some gamers prefer rules light systems. Fewer rules to get in the way of doing what it is you really want to do. What they want is general guidelines and broader resolution systems.D&D already has plenty of guidelines for all sorts of activities. Profession skills for broad proficiency in areas exploration-friendly - porter, guide, sailor. Skills like animal handling and survival. Edition-appropriate task resolution systems that can take a character's talent and skill into account. Overland movement rates in various terrains. Environmental hazards and weather. Typical dungeon dressings and DCs for opening stuck dungeon doors, hardness of many dungeon dressings as well. Spells like Find the Path. Specific campaign-oriented modifications to these particular issues in resources like Dark Sun, Frostburn, Al-Qadim.Given the tremendous variety of ways characters may go about exploring their environment, I think the approach of providing general guidelines to the DM is probably the best approach, rather than tighter, more detailed specific rules. It's a level of abstraction that works reasonably well.</blockquote>

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