What is exploration & why is it fun?

[Agamon]

. I am a bit worried about Caves of Chaos for this reason. Not only does it batter my limits of plausibility but it seems to be a giant monster buffet. (That's giant buffet not giant monsters...)

And here I thought you were confusing the Caves of Chaos for the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief.

Not sure it's something to "worry" about. The is a pretty basic playtest. The weird thing would be if it included some long, strange, convoluted adventure.

Also, the CoC is what you make of it. It can be a proving ground for the PCs to run around, killing things in, or it can be a pot of intrigue waiting to be stirred....

 

[Pickles JG]

By worried about it I really mean it is so far removed from what I want/am now used to in D&D that it will overshadow testing the system.

 

[imurphy943]

I think of exploration as finding weird things and poking at them to see what they do.

At the entrance to the cave there is a large rune on the floor, engraved and then painted in. We spent about five minutes debating about it, and tried everything from throwing rocks at it to hitting it really hard with a 10' pole, until I finally decided to just scratch up the paint with a dagger, hopefully preventing it from working if it was a trap or alarm. Everybody else thought I was crazy and stood way back. I scratched at it- and spider-people dropped from the ceiling in front of me. Thus began the combat...
---
There is a room, 30' by 30', with a fountain in the middle. Inside the fountain are many coins. As was learned in the last visit to the dungeon, the water will reach up out of the fountain and gruesomely dismember any who disturb it (it seems to have acidic properties). I tried throwing a coin in, standing in one of the entrances ready to run. A watery pseudopod lunged for me, but stopped short, unable to reach beyond the room. We debated various ideas including trying to communicate with it and sacrificing a corpse, until the cleric just decided to throw a flask full of pure alcohol into it. The water went crazy and started flailing around everywhere, though still unable to leave the room. Then he held a torch-flame to the alcohol-infused liquid. There was a massive conflagration, resulting in an unconscious cleric, a now empty fountain full of coins, and an excellent war story.
---
One of my adventures was adventured without a single hostile encounter, though we had hired mercenaries and bought mantlets in preparation for a tough fight. We found a dead kobold in a cell, cut him open, and discovered a number of rot grubs in his stomach. I immediately decided to try and collect some in a glass flask (for use as grenade, terror weapon, interrogation tool). I failed a dexterity check, got one in my arm, and had it immediately chopped off at the elbow by an elf with a large axe. My greatsword immediately became useless to me, and that flask of rot grubs was the closest thing to treasure that we found. Thankfully, none of the other party members wanted a share of it very badly.

When you've had adventures like these, you don't doubt the fun of exploration.

 

[Pickles JG]

If any of those sounded like fun I might agree with you.....


(Well the middle one does & the last is a good story but like Stalingrad better not to have been there)

 

[imurphy943]

I've gone through several less deadly explorations; the ones I mentioned are simply the ones which were most fun for me, and my definition of fun is closely related to Dwarf Fortress.

D&D = Adventure
Adventure = Risk
Risk = Eventual Loss

Therefore, if D&D = Fun, then Losing = Fun

 

[77IM]

What Exploration Means to Me

Puzzles, mysteries, investigation, and following clues. Figuring stuff out. The other two pillars (combat and interaction) are just a means to this end.

-- 77IM

 

[Dragoslav]

I also find it hard to get excited about taking the corridor on the left with the smoke or the one on the right with the dire wolf spoor. We are going both ways eventually.

Not necessarily. Like I showed in my example, you might go one way and then decide that you don't need to go the other way. Or, by going one way, you may find something (information, an item, etc.) that will help you against what you find when you go down the other corridor. Beyond all that, though, isn't it just more fun to forge your own path through a dungeon rather than the DM leading you directly from set-piece to set-piece?

Ultimately, if it doesn't matter to you either way, then whatever works for you is great. I'm just throwing out some ideas that you may or may not find intriguing and might make your experiences even more fun.

 

[LordBill]

Exploration sometimes means "Roleplay in addition to just killing things"



I tend to see 'exploration' as having a fleshed out campaign instead of just back to back combat with no actual theme or story of substance.