D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[Chaosmancer]

Well, if they are not traveling through and are more or less settled in the area, knock yourself out.

So, the parry makes camp. The outlander gets food and they settle in for a long rest.

Well, it's not a bad thing if it suits your group's playstyle. Ideally, the DM and the rest of the group should be on the same page on what to expect from their play experience—with the group as a whole deciding, and that this should be discussed as a group before play. If there's a mismatch between your expectations and the rest of the group, I don't know—bear with it or play with a different group if it's too annoying to bear with.

I think this is the key, but I also think this highlights some of the biggest problems. There are a lot of DMs who feel like if they are just skipping the travel, then the game is nothing but fighting and then going back to town. But, then if you try and actually run the travel... it is tedium that the players generally don't enjoy.

Run 6 encounters every day for every day of travel (encounter being anything, not just fighting, this includes washed out bridges)? The game will never reach the point where you are arriving at your destination unless if it very close. Maybe one encounter per day? Then the party has full resources to deal with it, and it likely is little more than a speed bump. The balance is nearly impossible to find, or at least, many many many of us have not found it.

Yes, I do. And I agree with you that the background feature should get you a place of rest for free without jumping through hoops.

Thank you.

The key word is eventualy. Bruteforcing it will get you there, but it will likely take much, much more time than if the way to the destination is known beforehand. If you want to handwave the bruteforcing instead of playing it out (like the default rules represent), that's cool (assuming your entire group is of the same mind).

Sure, but again, playing it out can take FOREVER.

One of my recent games we were escorting a caravan from Waterdeep to Neverwinter, along the only major trade road in the area. The DM (I assume because he wanted to challenge us) put a challenge for us about every two days on the road.

It took us four months I think, IRL, to reach Neverwinter something like sixteen sessions... and the DM had advertised this game as being us returning to Neverwinter after the events of our last campaign there. Sixteen sessions to complete our first mission, because every few days on the road our progress was blocked and we'd have to go to a ruin and fight some monsters, which took two to three sessions.

Now, I'm not saying we didn't have fun. Since it was a caravan mission we had plenty of NPCs to RP with, and the guy was a good DM. But, extropolate this out to wandering the Dark Woods looking for the Tower of Evil... for how many sessions? How long do you play out searching the same place for the same location, when everyone knows you are going to get there? Do you run ten sessions of the players "totally not lost" as they comb the woods? In my expeirence, by about session 4 of being in a location like that, people are starting to get bored.

 

[TheSword]

Sure, but again, playing it out can take FOREVER.

One of my recent games we were escorting a caravan from Waterdeep to Neverwinter, along the only major trade road in the area. The DM (I assume because he wanted to challenge us) put a challenge for us about every two days on the road.

It took us four months I think, IRL, to reach Neverwinter something like sixteen sessions... and the DM had advertised this game as being us returning to Neverwinter after the events of our last campaign there. Sixteen sessions to complete our first mission, because every few days on the road our progress was blocked and we'd have to go to a ruin and fight some monsters, which took two to three sessions.

Now, I'm not saying we didn't have fun. Since it was a caravan mission we had plenty of NPCs to RP with, and the guy was a good DM. But, extropolate this out to wandering the Dark Woods looking for the Tower of Evil... for how many sessions? How long do you play out searching the same place for the same location, when everyone knows you are going to get there? Do you run ten sessions of the players "totally not lost" as they comb the woods? In my expeirence, by about session 4 of being in a location like that, people are starting to get bored.

It sounds like my idea of hell. I suspect some serious editing would be needed to turn that slogfest into a game I would enjoy. I’ve had whole campaigns last less than 16 three hour sessions.

I wonder how many of your experiences are influenced by some very odd DM choices. Remember there is no in game solution for out of game problems.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Why does being adults matter? Do you only play with the same six people every single time? There are no new players who might show up at your table and not know? Because while you may think it is blatantly obvious, it isn't.



The example was being surprised by a landshark, but I suppose that's fair that they might not be ambushed. Still, it seems strange that the first response was "but you will automatically be surprised by a wandering monster because you weren't keeping an eye out".

I play with three different groups, and have played with others. I make it known that I roll for random encounters, and at no point has anyone ever expressed surprise because I rolled a random encounter while they were doing something. Because if you know that random encounters happen, then you can reasonably infer that a random encounter could happen while you are searching for traps, or sleeping, or even foraging.

If they were children, I might give them a list of examples to make sure that they understand, but since I play with adults, they can extrapolate. I don't need to spell out for them that 1+1=2; if I say 1+1 they understand that to be equivalent to 2. I think you significantly underestimate the intelligence of the average adult player, if you think otherwise.

Edit
As for landsharks automatically surprising people, we've never played it that way at any of my tables. It's a truck-sized creature that burrows rapidly through the ground. When the DM starts describing the ground shaking and rumbling, you can bet someone at my table is going to say "Oh crap, bulettes!". Pretty sure there's nothing in the lore about them being stealthy. We play them as being about as subtle as a jackhammer.

 

[Azzy]

So, the parry makes camp. The outlander gets food and they settle in for a long rest.

That doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the rules, but whatever.

I think this is the key, but I also think this highlights some of the biggest problems. There are a lot of DMs who feel like if they are just skipping the travel, then the game is nothing but fighting and then going back to town. But, then if you try and actually run the travel... it is tedium that the players generally don't enjoy.

Well, there are players that do enjoy "the tedium" of exploration by the rules. They're not much different from what was found in the B/X and BECMI editions. And, well, people did have fun with those. It may not be for you or your group, but it's not the universally despised thing.

Run 6 encounters every day for every day of travel (encounter being anything, not just fighting, this includes washed out bridges)? The game will never reach the point where you are arriving at your destination unless if it very close. Maybe one encounter per day? Then the party has full resources to deal with it, and it likely is little more than a speed bump. The balance is nearly impossible to find, or at least, many many many of us have not found it.

You don't need 6 encounters every day. (And, yes, encounters can be anything—from washed out bringes to strange obelisks to mysterious tracks or sudden weather changes to whatever.) You can vary the amount of encounters (less encounters that are more challenging or more encounters that are less challenging), you you could have 1 encounter in a day that require the expenditure of most of the party's resources. Speedbumps are okay, as long as the players are enjoying themselves—in fact, you can use speedbumps to allow the party to show off how awesome they are. Or you could even have encounters that don't require the expenditure of resources—that strange obelisk with some mysterious, ancient script could be an encounter just to be mysterious or to connect the players with the setting's history or be there to telegraph something that may play into the campaign in the future.

But the question I have is: What do you want from wilderness exploration?

Now, I'm not saying we didn't have fun. Since it was a caravan mission we had plenty of NPCs to RP with, and the guy was a good DM. But, extropolate this out to wandering the Dark Woods looking for the Tower of Evil... for how many sessions? How long do you play out searching the same place for the same location, when everyone knows you are going to get there? Do you run ten sessions of the players "totally not lost" as they comb the woods? In my expeirence, by about session 4 of being in a location like that, people are starting to get bored.

How much real time do you want your players to spend travelling/do you think the players will have fun with?

Size matters—how large an area are you wanting the players to explore/how distant is the location you want to travel to? The larger the unknown area the characters have to travel through will likely require more time spent. Though scale can affect this as well—for smaller areas, using the 1 hex = 1 mile makes sense, larger areas should probable use a larger scale like 1 hex = 6 miles (as the DMG suggests) or more (24 miles is a good one for represent 1 hex travelled per day).

How many encounters you have planned (and how often you roll for random encounters) will affect this, too. Do you want one planned encounter per hex or do you want 1 encounter per x hexes, leaving some empty hexes to breeze through? How often do you want to roll for random encounters (if at all)? Are the encounters interesting, or just rote—do they take place in terrain that affects the encounter (is there quicksand in some spots, iced-over lake, forrest fire, etc.)? Are there weather conditions (rain, heatwave, strong winds, etc.) that affect the encounter? Having a weather generator helps with this (especially if you generate several days or weeks in advance).

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to your question. You have to know (ask) your players what they think on the matter and base your answer on that.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Just checking in to see why this thread is so long(!).

Based on recent comments, my only observations are:

1. If you don't like 5e in general, you probably will find problems with more than just the exploration pillar.

2. If you assume an adversarial DM, then nothing works.

3. I have always viewed "exploration" to encompass a lot more than travel. And more than travel + survival. And even more than travel + survival + trap detection. The exploration pillar, IMO, is pretty much everything that isn't a combat encounter or a social encounter. Which is quite a bit of the game! Exploration is travel, sure, and trap detection, of course, but it all the ways in which players (through their PCs) learn about the world. Identifying magic items? Learning about a far-away town? Researching the lineage of the local royal family? It's all (IMO) exploration.

I think that there are interesting and credible discussions to be had about this pillar in D&D in general, 5e specifically, and even TTRPGs overall. For example, I imagine that people who are heavily into player-side creation of narrative might have different views of how the exploration pillar should work.

But that seems kind of orthogonal to the conversation going on now.

 

[iserith]

I wonder how many of your experiences are influenced by some very odd DM choices.

Feels like there's a lot of this going on.

 

[jayoungr]

1. The skill/power system in D&D is very binary. You either succeed or you don't.

To be fair, that's partly on the playerbase, not the game itself. The core books include suggestions about degrees of success or success-at-a-cost, and some of the early adventures, such as LMoP, include examples. But that seems to have fallen by the wayside in published products at some point, and I think a lot of tables just forget that those options officially exist. If the published adventures had continued to provide guidance for these alternate rulings, I think DMs would embrace that style of adjudication more.

 

[Ovinomancer]

To be fair, that's partly on the playerbase, not the game itself. The core books include suggestions about degrees of success or success-at-a-cost, and some of the early adventures, such as LMoP, include examples. But that seems to have fallen by the wayside in published products at some point, and I think a lot of tables just forget that those options officially exist. If the published adventures had continued to provide guidance for these alternate rulings, I think DMs would embrace that style of adjudication more.

The DMG does offer these, but they are anemic, do not match well with the way DCs are set, and end up being just more work for the GM to implement and don't offer much reward. Now, if you've played other games that implement range of success, then you have a better handle on how you might modify that system to do a better job of it, but this requires some hefty houseruling. @loverdrive has a pretty darned good take on this approach but it replaces the setting of DCs with a fixed set of target numbers for any task, which divorces the approach from the DC to succeed and isn't very happy-times for everyone. Just the DMG advice is, well, not great at all and requires a lot of work with little guidance for a GM inexperienced with other range of success systems.

The DMG does this a lot -- tosses out little blurbs about options in a paragraph or three and leaves them there. These get cited as 5e supporting these things, but, well, it's more mentions them and leaves them to the GM to actually figure out how to implement than support.

 

[jayoungr]

Just the DMG advice is, well, not great at all and requires a lot of work with little guidance for a GM inexperienced with other range of success systems.

Eh. I don't think it's as terrible as you're making it out to be, but I'm also not saying it's great as is. My point is that the option to handle skill checks in a less binary way does officially exist and is often simply forgotten.

I think, rather than greatly expanding the descriptions in the DMG and/or PHB (though a couple of examples would not have come amiss), a better way of normalizing this kind of play would have been to continue referencing supporting it throughout WotC's other publications. Listing degrees of failure in the adventure paths and periodically suggesting "succeed with a cost" outcomes for various situations, for example. Or building subclass features that allow mitigation of the penalties for extreme failure. Basically, reinforcing that these options exist and providing examples of how they can be applied.

(As a side note, "success with a cost" is mentioned in the PHB (page 174), so it's not DMG-only. I can't find anything about degrees of failure in the PHB, though.)

 

[Ovinomancer]

Eh. I don't think it's as terrible as you're making it out to be, but I'm also not saying it's great as is. My point is that the option to handle skill checks in a less binary way does officially exist and is simply often forgotten.

I think, rather than greatly expanding the descriptions in the DMG and/or PHB (though a couple of examples would not have come amiss), a better way of normalizing this kind of play would have been to continue referencing supporting it throughout WotC's other publications. Listing degrees of failure in the adventure paths and periodically suggesting "succeed with a cost" outcomes for various situations, for example. Or building subclass features that allow mitigation of the penalties for extreme failure. Basically, reinforcing that these options exist and providing examples of how they can be applied.

(As a side note, "success with a cost" is mentioned in the PHB (page 174), so it's not DMG-only. I can't find anything about degrees of failure in the PHB, though.)

Rather than derail the thread here, I'll just say that I find the implementations suggested to result in some very odd things if followed without serious adjustment by the GM, and that I do not find that this is useful at all for a new, inexperienced GM to tailor their game.