D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[TheSword]

So, because the DM is trying to prevent me from finding traps, and forcing us to just walk face first into them... Unseen servant isn't an effective method of detecting traps?

When the Bard is using persuasion to haggle the price, does the DM say "So everybody, while you wait 30 minutes for Clyde the Bard to do this, what are you doing?" with the hope that Clyde will stop using their skills to benefit the party? Or, if they really don't want to do it do they just stop allowing haggling?

And what would that say if the DM just came up and said "Guys, stop looking for traps. If I want you to see them, then you'll see them." ?

I would be trying to stop you boring everyone to tears by monopolizing the party’s attention not stopping you finding traps.

Your example of the bard, doesn’t apply because A./ haggling is folded into the normal time for shopping B./ It doesn’t take 30 minutes extra even if it wasn’t. C./ It doesn’t happen as often as walking down a corridor in most campaigns.

You aren’t looking for traps. You’re trying to use a ritual spell as win button to made traps irrelevant. Why are you surprised that a DM, or even another player would think this is a good idea, or something to be lauded?

 

[Chaosmancer]

You're missing the in-between from the mystery and the reveal. Its like schrodinger's cat. In the player's perspective, its both a trap and a reward until the mystery is uncovered. The way a party processes both those possibilities discern whether or not they want to engage and how they engage.

No, I get that. But what you are missing is that if the only point of the door is to obscure what lays beyond, then the door isn't super important. You develop an SOP for dealing with the majority of possible dangers behind the door, then open it.

I've been in a game where we had dozens of doors to open back to back to back... we lined up the same way every time. To the point where if it wasn't a virtual table and we had to tell the DM, I'd have gotten annoyed, because it was the exact same formation and the exact same commands every single time. And there is no value in that. It's just repetition.

Assuming the book is a physical item and not some abstract improvised object created to punish players, there actually is more you could've done with the book to prevent yourself from getting hurt.

For instance, investigating it for traps. You have to tell the DM what you do with new information because its your character and what you do may not be obvious. You could decide you don't want to read the book. Maybe you use a spell or feature to read it without touching it. Perhaps you tell everyone to step aside so they aren't in a blast radius. Maybe you pour water on it.

What you think is a logical step-by-step scenario makes assumptions on the player's end.

Yeah, and sometimes you should make assumptions, because the player's are.

An actual real-life example. We were playing Dark Sun, we were working for the Sorcerer King and we had been tasked with going out into the desert and seeing what was going on with this ruin that was about two weeks out or something. So, we say that we head out.

About half way there the DM says we run out of food and water. We all ask "What are you talking about?" See, we assumed that as people who live on a desert planet, and knew we were going on a month long journey into the worst part of the desert, on the orders of the government that we were a part of, that we would have requisitioned supplies for the journey. The DM's response was "well, you didn't say that."

So, we had to travel back, the DM had to homebrew rules to allow me to burn gold to use the Create Food and Water Ritual (4e DnD, by the way) so we could live long enough to make it back, to be berated by the Sorcerer King for being so incompetent for not requisitioning supplies.


So, at some point, there is a choice. Either the players have to make a checklist, declare they check for traps. Declare they clear the area. Declare that they pour water on it. Declare that they run a magnet over it. Declare, declare, declare...

Or the DM can provide the information to make a decision. Maybe when I see the book, I see the glowing rune indicating it is trapped. Now, instead of me just blowing up, I have to decide how to deal with it. This is a far more interesting aspect than waiting and hoping I personally think of every possible thing I should do to find out there is something to engage with.

Great. And that hooked stick gets latched onto a trip wire and activates the trap. Hurray! But now the corridor is filled with blades and flames and noxious gas and it has a sharp right turn so you can't even reliably teleport to the other side.

Maybe it wasn't a good idea to trip everything...

And these are the reasons why having a "one-size-fits-all" solution simply doesn't work as well as one may suppose.

Great. This is awesome. Now we can wait for the noxious gas to disipate and start dismantling the traps, and the Rogue didn't get hit with noxious gas, flames, and swinging blades from a single trip wire.

Or, hey, maybe after a few minutes all of those traps stop going off, and since we now know where the trip wire is, we can step over it.

How is any of this a bad thing? This sounds like a great outcome.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Because the module is intended for a tournament, where multiple parties seek to finish the adventure in the least time.

The hidden treasures you place are rewards for PCs who explore creatively.

At least, that is why many OSR modules where structured that way.

This makes sense, it isn't good design in my opinion, but it makes sense.

Because they might look and they might see it.

Maybe the barbarian says something like "hm...well I want to climb down and see what's in there." Or the fighter says "I have tons of HP, I'll probably be fine if I hop down." Or the Druid says "I want to turn into a bat and check out the chasm."

Again, you're making assumptions about how the players play but every player is different and they may enjoy exploring and seeing new things.

This doesn't. If the barbarian decides to climb down a random ravine to look and see what is down there... then I might roll to see what is down there, and maybe put something down there, but I'm not going to put it there on the chance the players might get bored and jump in a hole.

Especially if it is something that is going to be important in some manner.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Do you use mage hand to deal with all the traps you encounter?

Truthfully?

Last four campaigns I've been in the only time people opened a door or a chest by hand is because they forgot they had mage hand or similar to do it for them.

And, the one time the guy got hit with a trap, he called himself an idiot, because he should have remembered to specify he used mage hand, like he had for the last two months, but had instead just said "I open the chest"

 

[Chaosmancer]

I would be trying to stop you boring everyone to tears by monopolizing the party’s attention not stopping you finding traps.

Your example of the bard, doesn’t apply because A./ haggling is folded into the normal time for shopping B./ It doesn’t take 30 minutes extra even if it wasn’t. C./ It doesn’t happen as often as walking down a corridor in most campaigns.

You aren’t looking for traps. You’re trying to use a ritual spell as win button to made traps irrelevant. Why are you surprised that a DM, or even another player would think this is a good idea, or something to be lauded?

Then the DM can just hand wave the time and say that Unseen servant either finds or doesn't find anything. I don't care about the spotlight, this isn't how I want to spend my game time either, but considering the number of horrific traps people have said this unseen servant would trigger that would be instant death or horrible maiming for the party... seems like we need to do this.

Also, haggling can take hours. Depends on where and how. And, funny how it is the number of times it happens that matters.


But, this last sentence is interesting "You aren’t looking for traps. You’re trying to use a ritual spell as win button to made traps irrelevant. Why are you surprised that a DM, or even another player would think this is a good idea, or something to be lauded?"

Why would making trap irrelevant be frowned on by the party? Do you want to get hit by traps? Does your character enjoy getting crushed by stones, hit by poison gas, caught on fire, shot by darts or sliced by swinging blades? It would seem to me that the party would want to be as safe from those things as possible. And it doesn't take any table time... unless the DM forces it to take a lot of table time. For the purpose of wearing people out, so that they stop doing it... so that they get hit by traps.

We actually had a guy, think it was Lanefan, who said that the entire point of four boring empty rooms was so that the party would skip the fifth room and miss the treasure. It is, in that view, about intentionally wasting time so that the party "makes a mistake". Why would we want to encourage that?

 

[TheSword]

That exploration is only challenging if you have combat pillar do the heavy lifting, or force a time limit on every single one.

Honest question. We know that the game can run on pure combat. May not be the most exciting, but it can be done and people have fun with arenas and things like that. We know that the game can run on pure social encounters, political intrigue games are a lot of fun for some people.

Has anyone ever actually run a pure exploration game in modern DnD? No monsters. No time limits. Just having the party explore an ancient ruin and get treasure.

That’s a very limited view on exploration you have there.

I’ve recently a couple of month ago, ran a game that involved exploring a haunted house, the haunting of which is represented by skill checks involving several generations of folks who dies in the house. By exploring these clues the party pieces together the true events of the house and were able to defeat the BBEG the youngest member of the family using the information they found through their explorations, not through combat. It ran over two sessions and was a lot of fun.

To heighten the effect, several of the haunts could only be seen by one person in the party and I used the whisper function to send them a full description that they had to explain to the rest of the group.

Does that qualify?

 

[iserith]

Anything that requires more than 60 lbs of pressure to activate and possibly magical traps depending on how they are worded.

Do I pass the test? Can we have a conversation now?

I'll still respond for now since we at least have it on the record that unseen servant can't overcome all exploration challenges.

So, how is this not a victory?

Other parts of the dungeon are still open, so we can go deal with them. Some random monster showed up and started the combat pillar, that has nothing to do with exploration at all. And this trap that could have killed the rogue didn't.

What's down the hall? Well, a giant stone pillar we can't get past. If there isn't a way somewhere else to reset it, then this passage is done and there is no point in worrying about it. We either try and force our way through (which we would have had to do either way if the rogue failed to spot this trap) or we ignore it and move on. And, no one in the party died.

Whether it's a victory depends on how the dramatic question is framed and with consideration of the total context of the situation. I went into this already. You seem to suggest that the trap going off is victory when that's far from always the case. It really just leads to other things - the next step in the exploration challenge maybe or to combat or social interaction.

Unwanted attention from what? Monsters we are likely going to have to kill anyways? There are certainly going to be fights in the dungeon no matter what we do, unless these monsters apparate out of thin air, then loudly fighting in one room is going to draw them anyways.

Spending resources? Other than time rituals cost no resources. None. Zero. Once you have them, they are unlimited and free forever.

Taking Too Much Damage? How much is too much? That is a question that really depends on your resources and the party. I once had a conversation that if you are splitting gold evenly that by the time a heavily armored character is wearing full plate (1500 gold) that a character who doesn't use a lot of equipment like the monk could have purchased 30 healing potions. At 2d4+2, that is an average of 210 extra health for the party. Before short resting to use HD. Before spells that heal.

And if we do take too much damage then we retreat, find a place to long rest, then go again another time. Unless we are on a time limit or there are infinite monsters, eventually the players can stop taking damage from fights and focus on the exploration. In which case, they have the tools to succeed. Because, notice, the biggest challenge in exploration... is monsters that you have to fight in the combat pillar....Weird, right?

I get the impression that time is not really a factor in the games you play or rarely is.

I still don't understand why you're trying to draw some sort of distinction between the pillars here as it pertains to exploration challenges. There's exploration (as defined in the rules) and there's exploration challenges. Either one can lead to other pillars or indeed involve more than one at a time.

 

[Asisreo]

No, I get that. But what you are missing is that if the only point of the door is to obscure what lays beyond, then the door isn't super important. You develop an SOP for dealing with the majority of possible dangers behind the door, then open it.

Yes, and if you clarify that every time you open the door, you'll go along with those procedures, then that's fine.

But I have a hard time believing any player would be okay with this set of events:

DM: You see a door. You check for the traps on the door by first checking the handle but turning it releases a blast of cold air!

Player: Hey, we didn't say that we did that!

DM: you always do that, though

Player: Yeah, but you obviously railroaded us into that trap.

And the DM did. The DM gave them no chance to re-evaluate their SOP and they got hurt because of the assumption. At that point, it really doesn't matter what you were about to say, the DM already violated your agency.

If you're a fighter in melee against a single enemy, the DM has no right to make your attacks for you.

This doesn't. If the barbarian decides to climb down a random ravine to look and see what is down there... then I might roll to see what is down there, and maybe put something down there, but I'm not going to put it there on the chance the players might get bored and jump in a hole.

I don't get what you mean. The point isn't that you purposefully put something in there, the point is that the player was curious and decided to check it out. Whether you put something in there is the icing on the cake but even an empty chasm says that nothing has fallen into it since it was created, which could be useful information. It might even alleviate any fears of an ambush coming from within the chasm.

How is any of this a bad thing? This sounds like a great outcome.

You're assuming the trap has a reasonable time limit. Sure, you could wait for the gas to dissipate but it might either be magical gas that doesn't dissipate or it may take days for it to clear.

The flames could also be magical and continuous. The scythe traps don't need to stop.

Now its a dangerous corridor with plenty of saving throws against damage and debuffs but you don't know how long it will take to bypass it.

Taking things as a general procedure for checklists can easily work at your own disadvantage.

 

[turnip_farmer]

That exploration is only challenging if you have combat pillar do the heavy lifting, or force a time limit on every single one.

Honest question. We know that the game can run on pure combat. May not be the most exciting, but it can be done and people have fun with arenas and things like that. We know that the game can run on pure social encounters, political intrigue games are a lot of fun for some people.

Has anyone ever actually run a pure exploration game in modern DnD? No monsters. No time limits. Just having the party explore an ancient ruin and get treasure.

A game of pure combat sounds umnplayable to me. Combat in DnD is not that good - I'd play Mordheim or something if that's what I wanted to do. You need to context to make combat worthwhile. A session which was almost all combat would be okay.

We did have a session recently in the game I play in with neither combat nor any NPCs to talk to. The entire thing was spent poking around a dungeon trying to find something. There was a puzzle we had to solve and some traps. Obviously, there was context to explain why we were in the tomb and what we were trying to accomplish. I enjoyed it.

 

[Yora]

Yes, and if you clarify that every time you open the door, you'll go along with those procedures, then that's fine.

But I have a hard time believing any player would be okay with this set of events:

DM: You see a door. You check for the traps on the door by first checking the handle but turning it releases a blast of cold air!

Player: Hey, we didn't say that we did that!

DM: you always do that, though

Player: Yeah, but you obviously railroaded us into that trap.

And the DM did. The DM gave them no chance to re-evaluate their SOP and they got hurt because of the assumption. At that point, it really doesn't matter what you were about to say, the DM already violated your agency.

The key thing is that not every door should be the same. That's just bad dungeon design.