D&D 5E (2014) Three pillars: what is "exploration"?

[Tony Vargas]

Oh, absolutely! In fact, I consider the other two pillars part of the Exploration pillar. Or is that one-true-wayist?

Sounds circular - zerotruewayist, perhaps...

 

[BoldItalic]

There are many terms of art in D&D that are only distantly related to the same words in the dictionary. A dictionary wouldn't be very helpful for understanding what class, level, feat etc. mean in this game.

You play OSR a lot, don't you? It's got your brain fuddled. Words in the 5e books mean what it says in the dictionary, unless they are defined otherwise. You are complaining that "exploration" isn't defined well enough in the 5e books? I'm explaining the idea of self-help. But, you make a perfectly cromulent point: there isn't a procedure in the PHB for looking up the meanings of words. First, you make an Investigation roll ...

I think focusing on the scenery rather than the logical structure of exploration gameplay is exactly the wrong way to go. That would suggest that a long boxed text description of a perilous journey or dungeon crawl is just as effective for balancing a combat heavy adventure as actually exploring those things, when it definitely is not.

You worry about the logical structure if you like, while my players just have fun exploring the scenery. Deal?

But you might not appreciate that since by your post history you appear to primarily play D&D in the form of PbP freeform roleplay.

Thank you for looking up my recent post history. I'm flattered. That was an example of exploration wasn't it? You have also provided an example of jumping to conclusions, but that's okay; the jumping rules come under exploration too ...

I'll tell my fellow players they don't exist because I haven't posted about them. They will be amused. I think that's more Social Interaction though. Unless they come and read this thread. That would be exploration. Confusing, isn't it?

 

[BoldItalic]

Sounds circular - zerotruewayist, perhaps...

The One True Way has many branches.

 

[schnee]

Any examples of fun exploration play would be good. Examples of tedious exploration play are easy to come by.

Yeah, environmental stuff is mostly interesting when it comes to 'scary place to do combat' or when it gets really unreal and weird and gives a GM a chance to get crazy, like another plane.

In lieu of that, I try to do things like describe an environment with several different paths that have different benefits and drawbacks. Like, 'tall craggy ridge cutting across your way; you can climb over it - that appears strenuous - pick along the rocky terrain at the base - the slowest but most stealthy - or walk around quickly on the flats surrounding it - the least physically demanding, but also the most exposed.'

By the same token, all three pillars are unequivocally Role-playing, and it would be doing the concepts a great disservice to conflate only one of the pillars with the whole.

The example above gives some role playing possibilities.

Also, the idea of a 10' gap over a deep crevasse - just run and jump across, or set up ropes and do it carefully, or start marking chalk on the ground and testing everyone's ability to do it before deciding? That can be fun if a player has their wits about them.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The main issue with the exploration pillar in 5E is largely tied to the default reward XP structure. The methods to award XP for exploration are sketchy and not well defined. Skill use isn't a finite resource and many exploration challenges don't deal damage so assigning XP for these types of things is a big black hole. The main reward for exploration by default is to get through it as quickly as possible to get to the next combat encounter because that provides the bread & butter of XP rewards.

Going back to treasure for XP takes care of that. Treasure is neutral with regard to pillars of play used to acquire it. Players can earn treasure by exploring, bargaining & swindling or by fighting.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The main issue with the exploration pillar in 5E is largely tied to the default reward XP structure. The methods to award XP for exploration are sketchy and not well defined. Skill use isn't a finite resource and many exploration challenges don't deal damage so assigning XP for these types of things is a big black hole.

That's not just, nor evenly mainly a problem if exp. You're describing a lack of structure - there's no clear method play. You're describing a lack of meaningful choice - you're just making checks, thanks to BA anyone might pass or fail any one of them, there's little else to decide unless a spell is applicable, even then it might be a trivial-resource ritual or trivialize the challenge or both. You're describing the absence of stakes - there may be no reward for success or consequences of failure, just a need to get through or the game stalls. The potential issues are myriad, and 5e puts relatively little into it.

Going back to treasure for XP takes care of that. Treasure is neutral with regard to pillars of play used to acquire it. Players can earn treasure by exploring, bargaining & swindling or by fighting.

XP for treasure was one of the most heavily and validly criticized oddities of the early game, contributing to it's stereotypical atmosphere of paranoia & greed. 2e made it optional, and the game had shuffled diffidently toward heroic fantasy ever since.

That said, awarding exp for successfully reaching a goal via exploration (or either other pillar), whether that goal is acpuisitive or not is a reasonable, story-based approach. It may not make any more sense than treasure XP, though - that would take a learning by training & doing system, like that of BRP - but it'd support more than murder-hoboism or serial home-invasion robbery.
Granting exp for successfully overcoming challenges (or even merely facing them, since learning from failure is a thing) is also perfectly reasonable, and maybe the current system is sketchy on the exploration side, and bringing back more structured guidelines/mechanics like Skill Challenges could help.
:shrug:

 

[Hriston]

Sounds circular - zerotruewayist, perhaps...

It is circular the same way the "basic pattern" of gameplay is circular: 1. The DM describes the environment, 2. The players describe what the adventurers try to do in response, and 3. The DM narrates the results, bringing the conversation back to step 1. I think PHB p.8 is correct in associating this "give-and-take" primarily with the Exploration pillar. That's where the game begins by default. It's only in step 2, where the players describe the adventurers' response to the environment that things can veer off into one of the other two pillars, or stay with Exploration. I think it's also instructive that the pillars here are talked about as three categories of activity the adventurers can undertake, rather than three modes of gameplay, as many seem to take the concept to mean.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It is circular the same way the "basic pattern" of gameplay is circular:

The basic cycle of play in 5e is not circular in the same sense as a circular definition.

 

[iserith]

The main issue with the exploration pillar in 5E is largely tied to the default reward XP structure. The methods to award XP for exploration are sketchy and not well defined. Skill use isn't a finite resource and many exploration challenges don't deal damage so assigning XP for these types of things is a big black hole. The main reward for exploration by default is to get through it as quickly as possible to get to the next combat encounter because that provides the bread & butter of XP rewards.

Going back to treasure for XP takes care of that. Treasure is neutral with regard to pillars of play used to acquire it. Players can earn treasure by exploring, bargaining & swindling or by fighting.

I tend to award XP for overcoming social and exploration challenges and stick all the treasure in places where you need to poke around to find it in order to reward exploration. Monsters won't tend to have any gold or items on them (especially not wandering monsters), with the odd exception.

That just leaves the issue of making gold actually worth acquiring once everyone has whatever armor they want.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

I was looking at the explanation of the "three pillars" of D&D (5e PHB, p.8), and I was disappointed to find that exploration is not well-defined at all.

"Exploration includes both the adventurers' movement through the world and their interactions with objects and situations that require their attention, Exploration is the give-and-take of the players describing what they want their characters to do, and the Dungeon Master telling the players what happens as a result. On a large scale, that might involve the characters spending a day crossing a rolling plain or an hour making their way through caverns underground. On the smallest scale, it could mean one character pulling a lever in a dungeon room to see what happens."
​

This doesn't help very much to differentiate exploration from social interaction and combat. In particular, the bolded part is just the basic pattern of D&D play (p.6) that happens during any kind of interaction or encounter.

It looks like exploration is just a catch-all for everything that happens between social and combat encounters. And yet it seems like when people use the term here, they have something more specific in mind. I've even seen references to exploration pillar encounters (traps? navigational challenges?).

What does the exploration pillar mean to you?

I think that one of the main reasons that exploration is unclear to many people in 5e is that the game itself actually tries pretty hard to prevent it.

A dungeon-crawl is pretty much a classic example of exploration. At its most basic, it's exploring the dungeon. You aren't interacting socially with NPCs, nor are you in the midst of combat. This can include traps, puzzles, tricks, secret doors, decision making, mapping, difficult terrain, managing resources, and clues to what's going on in the dungeon. That sort of thing.

The problem is, that many players replace the PC side of exploration with skill checks (passive or otherwise), spells (while always useful) have become easier to gain or recover, and in particular the ones tied to exploration are much easier to use. For example, with Leomund's tiny hut and Tenser's floating disk being rituals it has eliminated a choice that would otherwise have to be made. Do I cast another fireball in this combat to end it more quickly, or do I save that so we can get an uninterrupted long rest? It also didn't prevent attacks from entering or exiting, just obscured them.

One interesting approach that's largely lost is the placement of hidden rooms. When players regularly drew maps when exploring, you'd be able to spot locations where there is probably a hidden room, and then have an idea of where to look for secret doors. Now that people notice secret doors with a high passive Perception, that's gone away. (In my campaign, a passive Perception might key you into that hidden space instead, but you still have to go looking for the secret doors).

There's one level of difficult terrain, and when traveling overland it's entirely negated if you have a ranger with you. I have slightly different rules: terrain does slow you, but you can try to move at a normal pace and risk falling, you also have disadvantage on attacks when in difficult terrain. In addition, some creatures have advantage when attacking a creature that is at a disadvantage in difficult terrain. I also have very difficult terrain. So you might have what's obviously a shorter route, but more difficult terrain, or a longer option that isn't. It gives a meaningful choice, knowing the risks if they are attacked in the difficult terrain.

Another aspect that I think is lacking (and has for most editions) is a decent fatigue rule. Exploration is tiring. There's a park near me with a tower on a ridge. Getting up to the ridge itself is the equivalent of something like 24 flights of stairs. It's tiring. And the ridge is not level either. A couple of hours of that sort of thing in armor with packs is going to have an impact. Sure, better trained individuals less so than others.

There is almost nothing with regard to puzzles and tricks, and the published adventures pretty much avoid them altogether. In the original A-series, the designers had very specific guidelines (since they were tournament modules) and one of those was that a room needed a puzzle or challenge for the players to solve.

It's very difficult to do that, because you don't know the types of skills the players themselves have, nor whether they like that sort of thing. Plus, you can't assign a DC, and therefore XP for it because it's not addressing the characters, it's addressing the players. So they have pretty much disappeared entirely.

Good puzzles work when they figure them out and when they don't. In a recent catacombs, which were huge and I based them off of maps of the miles of catacombs beneath Rome and Paris, I had a very large room entirely filled with a mist that prevented any sort of vision. So the natural thing is for them to go along the walls to start. So they did. They came to another hall, then wend a bit farther, and a corner. Followed that around to more of the same, until after corner number four, and came to a passage that wasn't the one where they started, and then found corner number 5. Once they came to number six, without finding their starting point, they were thoroughly confused, and decided to just pick a passage instead.

The room itself of walls that very gently curved back toward their entry point. They had opted to use a rope to follow each other, but if they had joined hands along the wall, they would have detected the slight curve. Those curves ended in a corner, which they mistook for the corner of a rectangular room. They never figured it out, but it didn't really matter, since they were able to continue anyway. They had marked the passage they had entered from, so if they returned, they would just need to continue around the walls until they found it. In the end, they found a different way out.

When I design traps, I also know how they work so I know what might be helpful in discovering them. That way, as they describe their actions, I can determine what sort of modifiers (advantage/disadvantage) are needed, and if a die roll is even necessary.

All of these issues can be addressed by play style. The problems aren't unique to 5e either, although it does make some of them worse. A rule in my campaign is that a player can't request an ability check. You tell me what you're doing, and how, and if I feel an ability check is warranted, I'll ask for it. I do make use of passive skills a lot, and I also take into account their abilities and skills so I can avoid a lot of die rolls. But mostly it's to make the players work through and engage the world rather than just ask if they can make an ability check.

Don't skip "the boring stuff." This was a direct instruction in 4e, and there's still a bit of an undercurrent in 5e with that idea. Obviously, part of the key is to not make it boring. But more importantly, as the DM you should always be feeding them information, and preferably information with choices. But exploration also calls for relatively unimportant information. It calls for setting information. It sets the stage. Tombs in my campaigns are lots of atmosphere and little activity. A trap here or there, and as you move deeper, constructs and undead guardians, but mostly just a feeling of being very alone. Those last four uneventful passages set up the trap in the fifth. You start to ignore the statues that attack you in the 17th room, because the ones in 9 other rooms didn't.

Exploration is also a good way to add dynamics to the game. It's not all combat, combat, combat. Combats with space between them become more interesting, more directed. There's more purpose to them if they are grounded in the setting - that is the dungeon - and the process of getting there. The periods of exploration are also times where the players/characters are interacting among themselves. This is far more effective if they have things to talk about. My campaigns have lots of plot hooks and threads running through them. I don't write a directed story line. So they always have things to discuss, and the exploration is also providing clues and direction to those discussions. The funny thing is, you don't even have to provide much actual information at that stage. They start making things up on their own, anything can be a clue, and they often read much more into things that intended. And later on they figure out it wasn't that important. Every game is different, but a classic dungeon might be 50% exploration, 40% combat and 10% social interaction or something like that. Exploration is really the opportunity to set the stage, flesh out the narrative, and to add context to the other aspects of the game. I think there's a tendency to replace exploration with a "cut-scene" approach where you provide this information in short bursts rather than to let the PCs experience it themselves.

I recently picked up the 5e Adventures in Middle Earth and they have a ruleset specifically for journeys which is interesting. I probably won't use it as written, but some good ideas. Of course, you still have the normal type of exploration once you're in a dungeon as well. But it's definitely worth checking out.