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="iserith" data-source="post: 8246641" data-attributes="member: 97077">Basically I differentiate between "traveling" and "exploring." Traveling is moving around the dungeon and, unless other stated, you are alert to dangers. Marching order matters for noticing traps or hidden monsters at the front of the party. Passive Perception applies when there's uncertainty and a meaningful consequence for failure. Speed and distance travelled is mostly estimated, not as rigorously tracked as OSE. I tack on an extra 10 minutes and possibly a wandering monster check when it seems like they've travelled about that long/far. When the players decide they want to have the characters stop to explore an area, then we go into "exploration mode." The players all state what tasks they want to accomplish in the given area (about 1000 square feet) - find traps, search for secret doors, pick a lock, loot, keep watch, etc. - and we resolve those over the course of 10 minutes of in-game time. I then roll for a wandering monster (or possibly it ticks toward the time when I will do so, if on hourly timer, and/or it gets closer to some other deadline/time constraint). Anyone who wasn't keeping watch is automatically surprised if the monster is a stealthy one. (Not all monsters are, but I make it a point to include some percentage of the wandering monster table that are.)That exploration process plays out until the PCs move on. Notably, this process doesn't "feel" like a process in game because naturally I'm describing the environment and the players are describing what they want to do followed by my narration of the results at which point I loop back around to describing any changes in the environment. And so on.Mostly this procedure is meant to make sure that there are meaningful choices to be had within the core resolution framework and that spotlight sharing is maintained while also creating tension with time and potential conflicts. I also find that if you do this in the context of wandering monsters never having treasure and/or monsters not being worth XP, it increases the incentive to take precautions or be more strategic about how they engage in these tasks.</blockquote>

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