D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[SkidAce]

...on your 1d8+1d12 encounter roll as a 20 rolling every day and night. ...

Why this instead of 2d10? Just curious if there was a benefit.

 

[S'mon]

So the three pillars of play are combat, role-playing, and exploration. Combat we discuss a lot and have many rules to make dynamic and exciting, hordes of monsters, reams of magical spells, and numerous tomes of battle equipment. Role-playing is theatric, and we have seen it done with character arcs, accents, and know how it has been long elevated as the height of good Game-Mastering ("Role-play" NOT "ROLL-play.")
But exploration? It's the neglected middle child of the pillars. Why? I think because it's the in-between of interesting things.
It's the trek through the wilderness listening to the DM trying to use purple prose to describe the forest that exists to waste your time between getting the quest from the haughty noble (role-playing) to the bandit hideout (combat). It's the long, featureless corridors that may contain a ho-hum trap (which is likely going to be less dangerous than a single monster of your party's level), but that trap will be avoided with a Passive Perception check you don't even have to roll. That hallway may connect two exciting combat encounters, but the hallway itself is just a line on a flowchart.
Exploration is the session that you're buying supplies for your journey and making preparations, which can be easily avoided with a die roll. ("Did we bring enough food? Here, let me roll randomly. Good, you have enough food.")
How much game time is wasted on exploration? Would the experience be better by simply asking the players: "Do you want to go to Fight A with the troll barbarian or Fight B in the vampire's crypt?" We could speed through literal sessions of actual games that require wilderness travel from the starting town to the dungeon.
But the only advice I've ever seen for improving exploration mode is to use better descriptive phrases, wandering monsters, or have a few skill checks that are going to ultimately have no impact on the game (maybe you lose some hit dice, maybe have to spend a few spell slots, etc.). But even with most of that advice, it's telling you to make exploration mode better by adding combat (wandering monsters).
So what do you think? Am I wrong on this?

Well, sounds like 4e D&D is the game for you - Skip to the Fun!!!!
(I just GM'd 4e yesterday BTW - brilliant fun!)

'Exploration' as a pillar is primarily about the choices you make, more than the challenges you overcome or the sights you see. It's the choice of which path to take. It needs to be an impactful choice. A linear adventure has no Exploration pillar, even if the scenery is pretty.

 

[Nefermandias]

Well, sounds like 4e D&D is the game for you - Skip to the Fun!!!!
(I just GM'd 4e yesterday BTW - brilliant fun!)

'Exploration' is a pillar is primarily about the choices you make, more than the challenges you overcome or the sights you see. It's the choice of which path to take. It needs to be an impactful choice. A linear adventure has no Exploration pillar, even if the scenery is pretty.

As a huge 4e fan, I strongly disagree that 4e skips over exploration. As a matter o fact, 4e's tools to deal with exploration were more robust than 5e's.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But players will always look for ways to get out of consequences. I think it's an unrealistic expectation for Exploration to reliably cost something - I find players will put a lot more energy into negating the cost than actually Exploring.

So I think it would be a lot more fun for Exploration to be about rewards instead of costs. You could have a Random Encounter table with things like Treasure, Shelter, Resources, Shortcut, Knowledge, Allegiance etc on it. Then you roll or decide what's opposing the characters: dangerous creatures, natural threat, difficult to find, etc.

Maybe even steal from Level Up and roll up some Signs.

So let's say as a DM I roll Shelter, Dangerous Creatures, and Gossiping Travelers as a sign.

The characters encounter two traveling monks who tell them about an abandoned tower nearby. It would make a great, secure camp, except they heard the cries of some great creature inside and ran away.

The ranger searches for tracks and finds the sign of a griffon!

The group decides to kill the griffin and take the tower for themselves.

Of course, if there are no costs, exploration becomes boring anyway. Like a dungeon where the treasure is just lying there. I'd prefer not to lean into 5e's defacto denial of what travel is like. There's got to be a middle ground somewhere.

 

[Monayuris]

Why this instead of 2d10? Just curious if there was a benefit.

You get a larger range of common results with 1d12+1d8 than you would with 2d10.

2d10 gives you a result of 11 as most common. D8+d12 give you 9,10,11,12,13 as equally most common.

 

[Asisreo]

Why this instead of 2d10? Just curious if there was a benefit.

All about probability curves. 1d20 v 2d10 v 1d12+1d8 v 5d4 all theoretically have similar ranges, but the probability distribution differs and affects results. Its useful for situations where you'd want "Encounter a friendly bugbear" to be more likely than "Encounter a lich" even if you want both on the same roll table.

 

[NotAYakk]

For exploration to suck less, make it matter.

In combat, what happens matters. Your characters live or die, foes escape or not. There is complex dependency between PC action and combat state.

In social encounters, NPCs like or dislike your PCs.

The boring exploration described, this doesn't seem to be happening.

The "classic" D&D exploration was the dungeon. A dungeon is a series of rooms connected complex ways, with secret doors and short cuts, and what you see along one branch changes what happens or what you find in another.

If the players are "blind" in the dungeon, then the decisions the players make -- left or right, up or down -- doesn't matter.

If the players are not blind -- if information can be gained, and from that, decisions made -- then the decisions matter, and the decisions can make a story.

Even a relatively boring dungeon, where you enter and there is a corridor to the left and one to the right. If scouting (or even barging in) along the left finds undead, and the right finds kobolds, once the players know this they now have a meaningful decision to make at that fork in the road.

We can extend this to a hexcrawl. The interesting thing about exploration isn't counting rations the like, it is gathering information about the world, then using it to inform later decision making.

Exploration isn't about the traps, or the listen checks, or counting rations. It is about learning about the adventuring "area", gaining useful information, and being able to apply that to make meaningful decisions.

...

So how can we do this in a game?

Well, ye old graph is always an option. In the campaign I'm working on (tm), T2 is going to be Indiana-jones inspired. Information about a bunch of dungeons (ancient "doors" to pocket dimensions made long ago) to plunder and explore is available to the PCs.

Picking which Dungeon to seek, finding those dungeons, exploring those dungeons, and getting the MacGuffins in them before rival powers do is the plot.

This is exploration -- seeing the world, picking where to go, having your choices matter. It interacts with Social (What factions are the PCs allies with? Which rivals? Who are their friends and enemies?) and Combat (What creatures will they fight? How well will the fights go?) but is neither.

When a group decides what to explore, and there are consequences, that is the exploration pillar.

When a group walks down the one and only path and searches for traps, or has no way to know which path leads where, that is a sad exploration puddle.

 

[mrpopstar]

The latest WotC survey about M:TG and D&D asked about if I would recommend either. I said I'd recommend D&D but the books look like they are written for people who have played the game before, which was fine for 2014. I also mentioned how poorly laid out the DMG is. It's not a good book on how to actually run D&D.

The 5th edition Dungeon Master's Guide is probably the single best Dungeons & Dragons reference of all editions combined. It may not be laid out the best, but its content is exceptional in comparison.

 

[mrpopstar]

I'll set aside my pathologically optimistic evangelism for a second and offer up something critical: How hard would it have been to include an illustration of the hexes overlapping as you zoom from province scale, through kingdom scale, to continent scale?

Something else: Guidance on the average time it takes to search dungeon chambers based on how they're stocked would be helpful. We know how long it takes to travel down a 30 ft. corridor based on travel speed, but how long does it take to explore a 30 x 40 ft. chamber based on its purpose, state and contents?

 

[S'mon]

As a huge 4e fan, I strongly disagree that 4e skips over exploration. As a matter o fact, 4e's tools to deal with exploration were more robust than 5e's.

As a huge 4e fan, I disagree that 4e's tools include any exploration tools. A Skill Challenge is an obstacle, not exploration. I've tried to do exploration in 4e and it is a lot trickier than in ye olde editions, or even 5e.