D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[Nefermandias]

So, you rarely ever use exhaustion then. Because in the very few places it can show up, it is usually a DC 10 or lower check, which even untrained people can pass. That's actually true of most diseases too. I can't think of too many that a level 9 party wouldn't be able to pass with general ease.

And yes, if you change over to having the players go 7 days between restoring their abilities, then it is a lot harder to do anything. But the game should work with the base rules, not only the optional ones.

How you came to the conclusion that I rarely use exhaustion? Exhaustion is actually a very real and frequent danger in my games.

 

[Nefermandias]

It’s a system that has survived 17 years of robust use. You are free to dislike it but you can’t say it isn’t there or hasn’t done what it was supposed to do.

21 years, actually, since 3e came out in 2000.

 

[Mort]

Meh. Planar travel rarely features in D&D. I mean, good grief, we're 15 Adventure Paths in and this next one is like the first one to really lean into planar travel and most don't have any.

Doesn't change the fact that it's a great source of exploration. My players are having a blast exploring the astral plane.

Pass/fail. Snore.

But a trap or a puzzle doesn't have to be pass fail, not if it's interesting.

Take the simple concealed pit with spears at the bottom :

The PCs can learn A LOT about what /who they are facing just by examining the TRAP - regardless of whether they triggered it.

And it's not just a damage thing, it also slowes group down, warns foes of the groups presence, etc.

The key is to make the trap truly part of the adventure and not just some binary obstacle.

Water Breathing Spell - entire party breathes water for the day. What's the challenge?

An underwater challenge is MUCH more than just being able to breath underwater!

First, unless you ALSO have an underwater movement speed (which Water Breathing DOES NOT provide) you will not be fully effective with most weapons, and regardless of that, bow /crossbow users are screwed.

Second, you are now dealing with three dimensional movement and exploration, something that the group is, likely, NOT used to. So it can be quite novel.

Third, and most important :

It gives the chance to show the party something different. The terrain is different, the plants are different, the animals are different, EVERYTHING is different. It's a perfect opportunity to convey a sense of wonder.

 

[J.Quondam]

Complaint: "Exploration pillar is under-supported, and too easy to circumvent with win buttons!"
Also complaint: "If the DM uses obstacles in Exploration pillar, that deprives my Ranger of my win button!!"

Very strange.

 

[Chaosmancer]

First, I'm not dismissive about your claim that you have a problem. I believe you! I'm saying the problem is actually not with the rules that cover exploration in D&D 5e. Based on your comments, I think it's in your understanding of those rules, your preparation, presentation, and implementation. This doesn't make you or anyone else a "crap" DM, no more than it makes me a "crap" linguist that my Spanish isn't as good as it could be. It's just something to work on. Nobody's born with the ability to run D&D 5e exploration challenges well!

Many of your comments have come across as incredibly dismissive. Even here, you are insisting that it must be my understanding of the rules that is at fault. My presentation of the game. My preparations of the game. My implementation of the rules of the game. It must be me that is the problem, because that is the only thing that makes sense to you.

And when I go, as I'm about to do, and point out how this really doesn't apply... you will say I am dismissing your advice and how that makes it even more my fault, after all, what was it you said?

"But obviously, if something doesn't work perfectly right away, you should give up immediately. It's like the old saying goes, "If at first you don't succeed, give up and blame everyone and everything but yourself." "

Yeah, that wasn't rudely disimissive of someone who has spent years struggling with this, to imply they did it once then when it wasn't perfect gave up and blamed everyone and everything around them like a child.

Overland travel rules include forced marching which can cause exhaustion. It happened to my character tonight, in fact, when we pressed on further than we can normally in order to find a safe place to long rest. We didn't, as it turned out, and I didn't want to risk another level of exhaustion pushing further. So we didn't regain any hit points or hit dice that night which was not great.

Yes, a forced march can cause exhaustion. First, this requires your characters actually travel 9 or more hours. If you are on foot that is 27 miles, if you are horseback it could be much further, same if you are in a wagon. Which offers a few different questions. But, let us stick with 9 hours of marching.

Secondly, after 9 hours they all make a DC 11 con save. This is not a terrible hard save, most people will make it. If they happen to fail though they get a single level of exhaustion. A single level of exhaustion is removed by a single long rest, per the rules, so this is a non-consequence. If you march enough to get a single level of exhaustion, then camp, you have suffered no penalties.

So, you probably need to march 30 miles, for 10 hours, to make a second check at DC 12 which is slightly more likely that at least one person will fail, maybe two, to have exhaustion be an actual factor from forced marching.


But, now let us turn back and look at why the forced march. Because, in general, the players could stop and rest after 6 or 7 hours of travel, with no penalty. So, firstly, there has to be some sort of pressure to make you want to get as far as possible as quickly as possible. Because if your group just decided to travel from one city to another just to see the city (you know, exploring for the sake of exploring) then there is no reason to push and no reason to risk exhaustion. But also, you said "there was no safe place to long rest"

So, what do you mean by that? What are the situations that make it a safe place to long rest? Because generally, our group long rests by making a camp on the side of the road and posting a watch. There are also ritual spells like alarm or Leomund's Tiny Hut to increase the security of the camp. Per some pretty contentious rules, being attacked in the middle of the night may not even break the long rest. So, how does this work? How did the group determine that there was no safe place to rest, and therefore skip a long rest? Why did they not find a place to rest somewhere between hours 6 and 9, a distance of 12 miles of terrain, nearly half the journey?

As for diseases and simple wilderness obstacles, I'm not responsible for other people's arguments, only my own. But I think you really need to be less dismissive of time as a limited resource in the game. It matters and it makes everything work better and gives meaningful choices and teeth to challenges of all sorts. I think you would also benefit from discontinuing this thing you have with separating the pillars to no good result. They work together to their mutual benefit. Leverage that.

I'm not dismissive of using time occasionally. It can be a great spice to add into an adventure. However, it is incredibly difficult to realistically have it for every single aspect of the adventure. You can't have every journey to a distant location be a clock, followed by every exploration of that location being a clock, with then every confrontation being a race against time to turn around and have a journey to a new location against the clock. That sort of rapid pacing doesn't always work.


And, you seem to misunderstand why I'm seperating the pillars. I'm not doing it because they don't work well together. I'm doing it to highlight the tools we have. If the greatest tool for the exploration pillar is combat, to the near exclusion of any other tool, then I see that as a problem, and constantly using the threat of combat to scourge your players and prevent them from using their tools and resources doesn't mean that those tools and resources don't cause issues when actually allowed to be used.

No, I didn't say it's only you that may have an issue, just that you can only speak for yourself.

Heavy precipitation and strong wind is punishing. Penalties to Perception and disadvantage to ranged weapon attacks is not great. It means stealthy monsters like yetis can more easily get the drop on us and the ranger and my rogue scout have to switch from ranged attacks to melee which isn't always ideal. On days with particularly bad weather, we could just not travel, but then there's this ticking clock. We have to weigh if it's worth sitting around when bad things are happening. Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not. As an example, in my forest/swamp hexcrawl, the players stayed in town for a full month doing downtime activities because the weather was continually terrible. The players decided they'd let whatever events would unfold do so rather than risk it. Things are now worse and they're dealing with the repercussions.

So, the only threat the weather gave was making combat more difficult. It was no challenge in and of itself. Also, ticking clock meant that you couldn't simply wait out the weather, and had to journey into it and risk combat.

Remove the combat, no challenge.

Avoiding wandering monsters by sneaking past them is by definition an exploration challenge. So is following their tracks back to their lair, if they have one. Or being tailed by some and picking up your pace from slow to fast, say, to keep ahead of them while risking a penalty to passive Perception and not being able to move stealthily. If you're only thinking about wandering monsters or random encounters as fights, then you are limiting yourself to no good end. And again, that's still just you separating the pillars in the game to no benefit. Use them all, more than one at a time perhaps to reinforce each other and your game is more dynamic as a result.

Again, this isn't about the fact that my peas can't touch my potatoes, this is looking at the tools we have.

Is sneaking past the monster an exploration challenge? Maybe. What's the consequence of failing that challenge? Combat. What challenge does it provide if there is no combat... none. It doesn't work. The entire threat of the monster is combat but removing combat from the equation highlights that and makes me question "what other than combat can I do?" or to phrase another way "is combat the only viable challenge for the party?"

Following tracks can be a challenge, I'll give you that, but in the context of the story it might be just as effective to stake a location out, because the goal is to engage in combat.

Why is moving at a fast pace and losing stealth and passive perception a problem if you are being pursued? Because you might be ambushed and pulled into combat. What happens if we remove combat as the threat though? Nothing. There is no longer a threat and a reason that increasing your pace is risky. It becomes all benefits.

You are correct, combat and monsters can add to the challenge, mixing your peas and potatoes can be good. My issue is the more I look and the more I ask... the only thing making the potatoes palatable is the fact that everyone is stuffing peas into them, and without the peas, you don't have something good.

As to your question about finding the alternate entrance, we had been in this dungeon before, but went through the fortified front gate, having been let in by the monsters guarding it. We explored only a small part of it at the time before wearing out our welcome and decided to return this session. Figuring they'd not be best pleased to see us at the front gate this time (which would put us at a distinct disadvantage tactically), we declared we would explore the mountains around it to see if we could find a chimney, sewer pipe, or some other means of entry. After some searching, climbing, and balancing our way on narrow icy paths, we found ourselves on the top of the structure where we could lower ourselves down using ropes into an upper window. We had to use over 100 feet of our rope which we were not able to collect on the way out. I also nearly fell off a path while traversing it, taking some damage while being rescued, which was embarrassing because my rogue, Icewind Dale, is actually really good at balancing given he's a legendary ice skater.

So, you needed to find an alternative entry to avoid combat. If there was no risk of combat, there would have been no need for that exploration at all.

It sounds like the main "challenge" was the icy paths and potentially falling, during which you took some damage, that would likely be easily healed. But spell slots had to be saved... because you were breaking into a monster's lair and expecting combat. Which made your hp damage actually meaningful.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Complaint: "Exploration pillar is under-supported, and too easy to circumvent with win buttons!"
Also complaint: "If the DM uses obstacles in Exploration pillar, that deprives my Ranger of my win button!!"

Very strange.

The pre-TCoE Ranger was a mess design wise. It had a number of class features that trivialized exploration...if the DM featured exploration heavily. If not, it was a bunch of class features that were effectively useless.

Thankfully, TCoE introduced alternative class features. Baldur's Gate 3 also so far features it's own alternate Ranger class features.

 

[iserith]

Many of your comments have come across as incredibly dismissive. Even here, you are insisting that it must be my understanding of the rules that is at fault. My presentation of the game. My preparations of the game. My implementation of the rules of the game. It must be me that is the problem, because that is the only thing that makes sense to you.

And when I go, as I'm about to do, and point out how this really doesn't apply... you will say I am dismissing your advice and how that makes it even more my fault, after all, what was it you said?

"But obviously, if something doesn't work perfectly right away, you should give up immediately. It's like the old saying goes, "If at first you don't succeed, give up and blame everyone and everything but yourself." "

Yeah, that wasn't rudely disimissive of someone who has spent years struggling with this, to imply they did it once then when it wasn't perfect gave up and blamed everyone and everything around them like a child.

My observations are based on things you say. It's not dismissive to read carefully and draw conclusions. You just don't want to hear the conclusions.

Yes, a forced march can cause exhaustion. First, this requires your characters actually travel 9 or more hours. If you are on foot that is 27 miles, if you are horseback it could be much further, same if you are in a wagon. Which offers a few different questions. But, let us stick with 9 hours of marching.

Secondly, after 9 hours they all make a DC 11 con save. This is not a terrible hard save, most people will make it. If they happen to fail though they get a single level of exhaustion. A single level of exhaustion is removed by a single long rest, per the rules, so this is a non-consequence. If you march enough to get a single level of exhaustion, then camp, you have suffered no penalties.

So, you probably need to march 30 miles, for 10 hours, to make a second check at DC 12 which is slightly more likely that at least one person will fail, maybe two, to have exhaustion be an actual factor from forced marching.

But, now let us turn back and look at why the forced march. Because, in general, the players could stop and rest after 6 or 7 hours of travel, with no penalty. So, firstly, there has to be some sort of pressure to make you want to get as far as possible as quickly as possible. Because if your group just decided to travel from one city to another just to see the city (you know, exploring for the sake of exploring) then there is no reason to push and no reason to risk exhaustion. But also, you said "there was no safe place to long rest"

So, what do you mean by that? What are the situations that make it a safe place to long rest? Because generally, our group long rests by making a camp on the side of the road and posting a watch. There are also ritual spells like alarm or Leomund's Tiny Hut to increase the security of the camp. Per some pretty contentious rules, being attacked in the middle of the night may not even break the long rest. So, how does this work? How did the group determine that there was no safe place to rest, and therefore skip a long rest? Why did they not find a place to rest somewhere between hours 6 and 9, a distance of 12 miles of terrain, nearly half the journey?

Again, this is all related to making time matter, which for some reason you appear to disdain except occasionally. Terrain also influences how far one can travel. And exhaustion is a consequence of note. The problem here it seems is, once again, your lack of caring about time or urgency.

One of the exploration challenges presented to us is needing to find a safe place to rest while traveling. If we do, we can long rest and gain the related benefits. If we don't, we can't (though we can sleep enough to get by). This is resolved usually by way of a Wisdom (Survival) check as one of the Activities While Traveling. In the example I mentioned regarding forced marching, I failed that check. We had the option to press on for an hour in hopes of finding something. We did and I failed the Con save for the forced march. Since I have the highest Wisdom (Survival) bonus and the ranger is navigating (so we don't get lost), I was now going to be rolling the check to find a safe place to rest at disadvantage with no guarantee of success and another Con save for level 2 exhaustion. We opted to just forgo the long rest rather than risk it.

I'm not dismissive of using time occasionally. It can be a great spice to add into an adventure. However, it is incredibly difficult to realistically have it for every single aspect of the adventure. You can't have every journey to a distant location be a clock, followed by every exploration of that location being a clock, with then every confrontation being a race against time to turn around and have a journey to a new location against the clock. That sort of rapid pacing doesn't always work.

And, you seem to misunderstand why I'm seperating the pillars. I'm not doing it because they don't work well together. I'm doing it to highlight the tools we have. If the greatest tool for the exploration pillar is combat, to the near exclusion of any other tool, then I see that as a problem, and constantly using the threat of combat to scourge your players and prevent them from using their tools and resources doesn't mean that those tools and resources don't cause issues when actually allowed to be used.

So, the only threat the weather gave was making combat more difficult. It was no challenge in and of itself. Also, ticking clock meant that you couldn't simply wait out the weather, and had to journey into it and risk combat.

Remove the combat, no challenge.

Again, this isn't about the fact that my peas can't touch my potatoes, this is looking at the tools we have.

Is sneaking past the monster an exploration challenge? Maybe. What's the consequence of failing that challenge? Combat. What challenge does it provide if there is no combat... none. It doesn't work. The entire threat of the monster is combat but removing combat from the equation highlights that and makes me question "what other than combat can I do?" or to phrase another way "is combat the only viable challenge for the party?"

Following tracks can be a challenge, I'll give you that, but in the context of the story it might be just as effective to stake a location out, because the goal is to engage in combat.

Why is moving at a fast pace and losing stealth and passive perception a problem if you are being pursued? Because you might be ambushed and pulled into combat. What happens if we remove combat as the threat though? Nothing. There is no longer a threat and a reason that increasing your pace is risky. It becomes all benefits.

You are correct, combat and monsters can add to the challenge, mixing your peas and potatoes can be good. My issue is the more I look and the more I ask... the only thing making the potatoes palatable is the fact that everyone is stuffing peas into them, and without the peas, you don't have something good.

It's not "incredibly difficult" to include time pressures. It's quite easy. You just don't want to do it. You don't even appear to want to recognize that time pressures exist in the combat pillar.

I'm not sure why you're saying that combat is the greatest tool for the exploration pillar either. @TheSword put a whole post above about things that involve exploration. You just seem to be focused in on this one thing about wandering monsters creating urgency.

As for the weather, go ahead and make it an exploration challenge if you want. Describe the snow drifts as deep as a man is tall, well beyond normal difficult terrain. How do you deal with that, PCs? Howling winds that threaten to push you off the narrow mountain trail - what do you do? How about it being supernaturally cold to the point where even cold weather gear isn't helping as much as it could? The falling snow and early darkness make it hard to see threats along the way - what do you do to mitigate that, if anything? What makes the weather challenging? Present that exploration challenge and see what the players do. Just because we didn't do that in my game last night doesn't mean such challenges don't exist or apply only to combat elements.

So, you needed to find an alternative entry to avoid combat. If there was no risk of combat, there would have been no need for that exploration at all.

It sounds like the main "challenge" was the icy paths and potentially falling, during which you took some damage, that would likely be easily healed. But spell slots had to be saved... because you were breaking into a monster's lair and expecting combat. Which made your hp damage actually meaningful.

In fact, it wasn't just avoiding combat but the likelihood we couldn't even get in that way at all. We were let in previously. This place is a fortress. Going through the front doors, even without a combat was not a likely outcome for four PCs at our level. As well, the damage I sustained was not easily healed. We have one person in our group capable of healing and every spell cast to that end is one fewer spell for other challenges. These are the trade-offs some of us have been discussing from the beginning. The sort of trade-offs that make choices meaningful.

Again, you don't appear to see anything other than whatever point it is you're failing to make. You won't even recognize bonafide, specific examples of exploration challenges from a game I played just last night. There is no attempt at understanding here so far as I can tell. You can't seem to make it work at your table so it just doesn't work, full stop. I hope others are getting something from this exchange at least.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Just to go back to the Waterdeep to Neverwinter example. According to this site: Forgotten Realms (Faerun, Sword Coast) Interactive Map that's a trip of about 350 miles (it's 330 as the crow flies, and the road follows the route pretty closely. Now, there are several things I'd bring up before this campaign even started.

1. Why are we traveling overland? We can travel by water (both Waterdeep and Neverwinter ARE major ports after all) in half the time and a heck of a lot more comfortably.

2. Why in hell would that take 16 sessions?!?! We're talking 13 days of travel, on a major road with multiple communities along the way. We cannot get lost. Heck, we would only be sleeping outside of a town maybe half the time, and that's only looking at the major communities - there are small towns all along that route - it is a major, well maintained trade route after all.

3. How is this even remotely an "exploration"? We're on a road. A well maintained, pretty civilized route between two of the largest cities in Faerun.

To answer these questions, since it was my game.

1) We were hired as an escort for a caravan of goods. This was actually the core conceit of everything that followed. It would have been much faster if we didn't take that job

2) In a word, monsters.

A) We were attacked by goblins and a horde of beasts. Fought them off. Caravan master asked us to go investigate because they killed some of the guards and if we could destroy their base it would be safer for us to move again and make the road safer. This led to a ruined temple of an evil giant god, who a cult leader was trying and successfully summoned. We fought the avatar while the cult leader escaped. This all took multiple sessions (about 3?) This was our first adventure.

B) I know we were attacked at least one more time by monsters, ah right, an ambush disguised as a toll road by some hobgoblins. That combat happened, and I think we might have pursued them a little, but I'm fuzzy on the details.

C) We then found the road was closed by an inquisition of powerful paladins and clerics (all levels 9 and up) who were dealing with some monster threat. They refused to let anyone pass until the situation was dealt with, and we seemed like just the people for the job. So, we were sent into a swamp where animals grew to enormous size. There was an abandoned estate filled with massive fiendish hornets (and an intelligent queen), some tiny wall-living thief trickster creatures, and a cult of Yuan-Ti cloning super-soldiers. Clearing that out took about four sessions, maybe five. We had to go up to the attic, where the queen nearly killed us, to get to the basement where the cult was located. It was all based on some 2e adventure because the DM kept finding things that didn't translate, like a barrel full of instant death poison, that he immediately nerfed as soon as the party was able to safely get some for their own use, because we didn't just jump into the first barrel for the secret passage. I think we killed all the cult leaders, but our child warlock died.

D) So we went to the super powerful clerics to have him revived, but the only way we could do it is by one of them lending us a diamond, which she only did if we traveled up into the mountains to help a mine her brother worked at. So we traveled there, some more combats with random beasts. Found the area infested with wild magic because an archmage lived there. Went into the cave system underneath to find the missing dwarf. Fought some wild magic monsters, made a deal with a Demilich who fled, fought a spelljammer full of Neogi and saved some slaves. People did character changes via wild magic because they were getting bored with their characters. Decided to leave the spelljammer behind, because it would make travel too fast and too easy (also turned out that there were three patrolling spelljammers that would have attacked the ship if they saw it). This all took 3 sessions or so. The slaves joined us, one in particular becoming my character's servant. (She was a great foil for my fey noble character)

E) So we return to find most of the caravan left with the caravan master. Those who stayed wanted us to protect them, so we gathered them up and left. We found a bridge with trolls who had killed the caravan master, had to kill them. (1 session). Ended up in a town where one of the caravan people my character was friends with was killed, was a small murder mystery involving the slaves and my servant, that took a session.

F) I think this is where one of the players offered to DM for a bit, and so pulled a dream shenagin to pull us into a Domain of Dread. That was a nearly painful five sessions that involved traveling through a featureless wasteland doing nothing and a lot of railroading. Ended badly and that guy left.

G) Then after that we were attacked on the road again, and then found ourselves trapped in a hag covens illusion. That took about a session and a half to track them down and kill them so we could continue on.

H) And then we were attacked by land pirates on a boat with wheels, pulled by mammoths. Possible slavers, I don't remember, that was another session and half. We took the boat.

And I think after that we finally arrived at Neverwinter. Were we stayed for about two maybe three sessions before leaving. All told I think we figured that two week journey actually took our characters nearly two months to complete.


3) Exploration as travel was my thought, point out how throwing various challenges and side-treks in front of the players to create tension can drag a simple journey into a very very very very long journey.

2. A skill system that is actually more than just simple pass/fail. One system I recall from a game I used to play (Sufficiently Advanced - an SF game) gave characters a pool of resources to draw upon when attempting something. If you failed, your pool was reduced. Run out of the resource pool and you can't try to do that thing any more. So, in D&D terms, I'd base it on your stats. You want to climb a mountain? Ok, here's your pool based on your Str score (modified by athletics skill). Every time you fail, you do not make progress and your pool is reduced. Fail too many times, or simply give up before you run out of resources, and you have to wait until those resources replenish over time to attempt again. The system that that game used gave the challenge it's own dice pool and modifiers, so it was always contested rolls to win each attempt. Deplete the challenge's pool and you succeed.

To me, even a very simple system like that would go SO far towards making exploration actually interesting in the game. Instead of pass/fail rolls or just bypassing the challenge entirely, you have to actually leverage your character resources each time. Additionally, put it on the player to narrate events. You know how big the pool of the opposition is. You know how much you've depleted it. Tell me how close you are to completion. Or, conversely, let the DM narrate. I'm not terribly fussy on that part. I just like the idea of engaging the player that way.

That's a neat system. I've often wondered about adopting things like "pools" for other types of challenges. It makes marking progress a lot easier.

 

[Chaosmancer]

So while I agree that 16 days of fully detailed road travel seems a lot. Chaosmancer explained that there were all sorts of adventures along the way. If the PCs have an module at each stop over that could be more than possible. He did say he went up several levels and gained 1000’s of gold, so something must of happened.

I have to take issue with you hating on the exploration pillar. Exploration is everything apart from combat and roleplay. It isn’t just whether you navigate your way. There can be a whole heap of exploration on the road. As can anyone who has ever done a road trip can tell you. So if combat and roleplay is all you talk about then good for you. That definitely isn’t the case for me. It’s the places we saw that I find memorable as well as the things we saw there. Strahd is far more interesting with his castle and the castle is more interesting in the setting of Barovia. Acerak is made more interesting by the Tomb of Annihilation which is in turn more interesting because of its setting in Chult.

D&D is not going to adopt an abstract exploration pool system when there are lots and lots of people that enjoy the travel and exploration. They want to Hex Crawl they want to search. And DMs want the freedom to be able to drop encounters and adventures in when it suits them. If you want it, homebrew it or 3rd party it. If Chaosmancer’s DM writes a campaign made up of short adventures that the PCs experience on the way to Neverwinter then I see no reason why that can’t be a cool campaign if the PCs are enjoying it. It’s obviously going to be very different to hex crawling across Chult but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun.

You were right about a few things, but I want to stop you on one point.

There really weren't any memorable places. Maybe the chaos magic caves, I think they had a weird mushroom room, but it was all backdrops for combat combat and combat.

Actually, that is partially a lie, the mansion that was an old 2e module was memorable because of the BS it had. For example, there was a "trap" that was a skull that shot a beam of light. That was it, normal light. It didn't illuminate anything, it wasn't a clue to anything. Just a skull that shot light and had no other use.

Across from it was a statue worth 5,000 gp, that the module informed our GM was sovereign glued in place and utterly impossible to transport in anyway without chiseling out the floor and carrying part of the floor with us. If we hadn't burnt and exploded the manor (surprise explosive traps underground) we probably would have taken it just out of the spite of knowing we weren't supposed to.

And to clarify, I meant 16 game sessions at least. Four months of gaming, and the journey took out characters around 2 months of game time to complete.

 

[Chaosmancer]

By this I'm guessing you're also not a fan of Roguelike computer games, where most of the point is simply to see how far you get before you die - and you 99.9+% likely will die; actually winning the game is extremely difficult and-or takes many hours (or days, weeks, months!) of grinding and-or a lottery-ticket-crazy run of good luck. Die, and you start over from scratch; there's no save points.

I play these all the time.

I see playing a D&D character in a similar light as playing in a Roguelike - I'll run it till it drops, and see how far it gets. Then I'll roll up another (or get the first one revived; this doesn't map to a Roguelike as it kind of is a save-point) and try again.

No, I do not enjoy Roguelikes. I would also say that there is a comparison to Roguelikes that highlights why I think they are a bad fit for an RPG style game.

The few Roguelikes I have tried, and the majority I have heard people talk about have little to no story. In fact, a plot would almost ruin the point of a game. I play games like DnD for the story. And so, I find Roguelike elements completely at odds with that.

Do the characters know the numeric odds? No. The the players shouldn't either.

The characters also don't know that they have a numerical Intelligence score, do you think that we should hide all ability scores from the player's too?

Just because the character doesn't know the numbers exist, doesn't mean the players shouldn't.

It is when you survive against all those things that were trying to kill you, and come home with a whack o' loot, more xp, and a heightened reputation.

But I don't care about the loot or the XP. I didn't sit down at the table to make my imaginary numbers bigger. I can play an idle game and make quindeciliion golds doing that instead. I sat down to have fun, and being hyper paranoid and having to run the proper checklist and pray that I don't misstep into a death trap isn't fun.

Yes you are, otherwise your PC would be a tavernkeeper or a stonemason or a sailor instead of an adventurer.

Choosing to sit down and play a game of DnD, and wanting to go on an adventure =/= wanting to be transported to the worst of fantasy Vietnam where we move forward inches at a time for fear of death.

Your play style would only encourage me to turtle up and take fewer risks. This is probably why you have the issue with player's vehemently hating you ever saying "your character does X" and need them to confirm every single action, because something as simple as picking up a sword to examine it could be death if they pick it up by the handle instead of the blade. So you back them into the corner of stating every, tiny action, marking what treasures they missed and what traps they trigger when they aren't precise enough to say what they need to say.

I actually just remembered another "hilarious" story, of the time I had a DM (I think it was a con game but I could have been wrong) who let our characters struggle for a good few minutes because I carelessly said "Okay, my character pulls open the door and looks inside" and when we couldn't figure out why the door was stuck he laughed and informed us that this was a push door and I had said I pulled it open, not that he had ever told us it was a push door, but boy, was I so silly for trying to pull open a push door. Because I guess I should have asked "does the door pull open or push open" because my character can't see that automatically and I have to ask the DM specific questions.

What's a bit ironic here is that years ago, in-character as Lanefan the Fighter, I wrote a guide on how to safely field-test magic items. One of these days I'll post it here somewhere just for fun, if I can figure out how.

No, I don't find that ironic. I find the idea that I might need a guidebook to give me a step by step instruction manual on how to not die just to learn what my rewards might be utterly depressing.

A simple Detect Magic tells you if the item's enchanted, and the strength of said enchantment; and if something's strongly enchanted some caution is advised, yes.

Sorry to say that this is yet another place where you are bringing in older assumptions of the game. Detect Magic tells you that something nearby is magical.

Then as an action you can get any magical item you can see to visible glow, and learn the school of magic it belongs to, if any exist. So, at best you could learn that the rod has Evocation magic on it. Does it deal necrotic damage? Does it deal fire damage? Does it heal you? Detect magic doesn't tell you, and it also doesn't tell you how strong the item is. And for a lot of magical items, the best you are going to get is "this item is magical" and that's it.

I think the issue with providing decent exploration challenge might lie in the 5e rules themselves:


Summary:
5e has gone to considerable lengths to make the game easy* on its characters and its players; and this shows through most clearly on the exploration side. To make exploration challenging again probably means porting in some ideas from older editions.

* - relative to older versions of the game.

This is what I have been saying. I've been told that I am wrong and am just not understanding the rules correctly or presenting the proper challenges to my players.