D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[Lanefan]

I agree with @Mort. The party with the ranger has more time to deal with the cult, and that is a good thing. The feature is benefiting the party, which is what those features are intended to do.

It's only a problem for the DM who insists that the players need to interrupt the ritual at the last possible second, but also insists on using a clock. In which case the only problem is the incompatibility of those two agendas. It can still be done, but you can't be hamfisted about it. For example, you could have the ritual nearing completion whenever the PCs bust in, but the clock determines some other factors, like how many demons the enemy has been able to summon.

It's a problem for the DM as well if-when she's trying to run a published module built around a premise like this (and IMO far too many are); yet the PCs just won't stay on schedule. They're either early, which is good for them but bad for running the big set-piece climax ending; or late, which is just bad period unless the DM contrives to delay the climax point until they arrive.

 

[Chaosmancer]

And now Thesword has blocked me. I'm sensing a pattern of people condescending me and then refusing to continue to engage.

 

[Ovinomancer]

These are the ones that I was referencing, but honestly, they are very short, not that applicable to our groups because of the lack of flexibility in the process, and there is nothing about designing them. But I agree that they are mostly ignored by a lot of players.

They don't need to be long and are, actually, quite flexible enough to cover the large majority of any social interactions you'd have. I'm having trouble coming up with one that they don't work pretty well for.

 

[Chaosmancer]

There's a simple solution. Don't design your clocks to be so swingy. They can still have an impact, but it doesn't need to swing between trivial and impossible to be a meaningful difference.

Then how would you design that clock? It was an example from Iserith, not my own, and he seems to think you can always add a clock, so how would you approach "the princess will be sacrificed" (a classic adventure hook) without making it a binary clock?

 

[turnip_farmer]

If going through the Forest of Random Encounters is the adventure you want, why are you presenting it like a choice?

Are you intentionally trying to be obtuse?

Going through the forest of random encounters isn't 'the adventure I want'. I'm presenting it as a choice because I design adventures so that they contain choices! That's the whole point of the game.

This conversation is pointless.

 

[Chaosmancer]

But even here, there are different gradations.

Depending on when you get there, the challenge plays out differently. If the party gets there too late, for example, they encounter an empty hideout with traces of blood and not much else. The challenge now becomes, do we crawl back home? Do we try to track the kidnappers?

Once you move past binary challenges, lots of avenues open up.

Okay, but that isn't a challenge. You've failed the mission, how do you deal with failure, that isn't a challenge in and of itself.

You seem to be conflating decision points with challenges, and I don't know why. Choosing Apple juice or Orange Juice is a decision point, but it isn't a challenge. We failed the mission, do we go home and face the consequences or try and at least get vengeance, there is no challenge in this decision, it is a matter of priorities and fears of punishment.

I find your insistence of separating the pillars with a hard divide really confusing.

Sometimes combat results from exploration (eg. The players bumbling around accidentally set off a nest of giant hornets).

Sometimes exploration results from combat, the bad guy ran from the fight and into an environment that really needs exploring.

Sometimes the two are linked. My group had to recently fight their way through an ancient Suel city. Exploring rooms as they went and culminating in an escape on an ancient spelljaming vessel that they found when barricading themselves into a room. So the whole session flowed between combat and exploration and exploration during combat.

I'm seperating them because we are trying to discuss the exploration pillar, but people keep conflating it with combat and ignoring the lack of exploration challenges.

For example, strong winds mean you make ranged attacks at disadvantage. If you aren't making ranged attacks, strong winds provide zero challenge. Being in a thick fog means you can't see very far. If your only challenge in that lack of sight is that monsters can sneak up on you... then there isn't really a challenge here for you to engage with as exploration, it is a combat challenge.


And this is the point I've run into time and time again. I've asked "how do you provide a meaningful exploration challenge" and most of the answers have been "have them fight monsters". Which is not an exploration challenge, that is the same as saying that the only way to give an exploration challenge is to engage the combat pillar. Which should not be the exploration challenges we are relying on.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Yeah, we're definitely different players.

I'd take the woods every damn time. If nothing else, the party will have more xp when we get there, and maybe more resources as well depending what we can loot off the monsters.

Never mind that unless the original mission was hella urgent (many are not) I'd almost always be open to spending a lot more time in the woods and clear 'em out proper, if we could, so the next travellers could pass through safely.

Well, we don't use XP and if the DM already made the challenges past the woods, then we aren't going to be getting too many more resources or anything. Or, we do, and it makes the mandatory part of the adventure easier and potentially too easy.

I'm not against traveling through a dangerous area and fighting monsters, I'm just pointing out the different pressures on different groups.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Clocks in 5e are a bit of a challenge. This is due to the nature of how 5e generally works, with the party only expected to be able to handle so much without a retreat. If you set the clock to a binary win/loss state, then you have to pad it out so that it's rarely going to truly threaten to tick over or you're running a game where there's good failure pathways to continue the game. The latter is uncommon in most D&D approaches, with most adventures being designed to be won.

So, then, the way a number of other games use clocks is to add complications or to tick up the threat level. This is also fraught in D&D, because, presumably, the GM didn't start with the threat being pretty easy so that such ticks move to a more 'normal' threat and then only to high threat due to clock. Arguably, doing this kind of design doesn't work because players quite often find ways to circumvent or bypass challenges (it is strongly incentivized to do so) and can get to the end in time that it's a easy encounter and feels anti-climatic. This invites use of GM Force to prevent such outcomes, either by denying easy bypassing of obstacles, adding obstacles to retain the proper pacing, or adjusting the final encounter to a high level than was initially planned. In other words, the clock is acting only as a way to inflate the danger, but clever play to get to the end quickly needs to be discouraged lest the outcome be anti-climatic. On the other side, if the encounter is designed to be hard and challenging to start, then there's not a lot of room left to tick a clock and up the danger level without threatening to swamp the PCs and end in a much more final TPK.

The result of this is that clocks are not actually a terribly useful tool in D&D without quite a lot of GM curation and work. The place they best work is when there's not a specific goal, but a general goal, like "how much treasure can we get before the passage to the planar dungeon of treasures closes?" Here a clock works very well, because it puts immediate pressure on all choices, but it doesn't require adjusting difficulties, managing pacing, or specific planning. This is a case where the game allows for "failure" states by just not having an actual failure state, just a range of success states (from none to lots).

 

[Lanefan]

For me, ignoring the bigger picture story is... I don't think I could. I'm always trying to keep our context and the larger story in mind. I love that stuff. Now, I've never been in a decades long game, longest single campaign I think I was ever in was probably three years, so maybe it ends up coming down to game play pressures.

Could be, sure. In the big sprawling campaigns like we run there can be many storylines going on at once.

Actually, thinking about this more, this would explain a lot about how you don't seem to grok the pressures I'm talking about. And individual adventure that in no way ties to the larger plot is mostly a distraction to me, a filler just taking up space. It could be a fun filler, or not, but I always feel an urge to get us back on track.

Thing is, if done right something that seems at the time like a one-off adventure might have some serious significance that doesn't become apparent or relevant until years down the road; be it pre-planned going in or something that just happens to fit perfectly in hindsight.

It probably wouldn't. So, just because the character doesn't know a numerical score doesn't mean the player shouldn't. So, why should a player not know the DCs to shatter these crystals? What is the value of keeping this information from them? Yeah, their character doesn't see a big red 17 etched into the crystal, but I'm not asking about the character, I'm asking about the player.

Where I'm fairly hard-line on if the character doesn't see a big red 17 then the player doesn't either. I want the players to use only the info their characters would have in the fiction; and if that info is inadequate due to my poor narration that's on me, but if it's inadequate because the characters simply couldn't know it then too bad.

Why would the DM have to tell us? Does it really matter that much? To the point that if we don't hear if the door pulls open or pushes open we should stop the game and ask? This was literally the only time in nearly ten years that a door being pushed or pulled ever mattered, and it was because the DM wanted to laugh at us for saying the wrong word and looking like fools.

It matters every time someone wants to bash down a door; it's way easier to bash down a door that opens away from you than it is one that opens toward you.

Also, what do you mean their weapon-hand or shield-hand? That isn't a thing in DnD 5e, we don't specify the handedness of our characters. I've never told the DM once which hand I was holding something in, because it never mattered.

And I think highlighting a major hurdle in our discussion, there are a lot of assumptions of how things "should work" or "have always worked" that are not true in DnD 5e.

That's a fault of 5e. Easily fixed.

To us, defining handedness is every bit as much a part of roll-up as defining age, height and weight; and it's trivially fast: one die roll (if you want a shot at ambidexterity) or a player choice between left and right.

I'm not trying to have it both ways. I'm trying to highlight that running the game as written we have a lot of problems that the game as written doesn't have solutions for.

So yes, if you want to change the rules, you can, but that doesn't help anyone who buys the books and doesn't buy a pack of your homebrew rule supplements that solve all the problems in the rules. And, for a lot of us, it is clear that this pillar is sorely lacking.

I'm kind of sick of having this poison pill choice. Either there is no problem with the rules, it is with me. Or there is a problem with the rules, and I should stop being lazy and fix the rules myself, because it doesn't matter if the rules are bad if I put on my game designer hat and fix them.

RPGs are the only gaming in the world where poor game design seems to not matter, because the answer is always for the players to act as game designers.

Flip side: RPGs are the only games in the world where the players get to truly make the game system their own. It's one of their most outstanding features.

The designers can't possibly come up with a finished system that works for everyone. What they can do (and promised to do during 5e playtest before bailing out on it) is design a solid playable baseline framework* and then present independent modular options. Lots and lots of modular options, none of which are required or expected (and some of which alter the baseline framework; they'd not all be straight add-ons) and all of which are open to amendment by houserule or kitbash.

* - ideally this baseline framework would be extremely harsh on the players/PCs - a true meatgrinder - with the optional modules intended to generally make things easier on them; following the philosophy that says it's more positive to start hard and ease off later than to do the opposite.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Are you intentionally trying to be obtuse?

Going through the forest of random encounters isn't 'the adventure I want'. I'm presenting it as a choice because I design adventures so that they contain choices! That's the whole point of the game.

This conversation is pointless.

Then why did you reply "I'm not designing wilderness travel to waste time until we get to the adventure. I'm designing an adventure, part (or, perhaps, all) of which is set in the wilderness."

Was it because you just want to give the adventures the choice between a dangerous forest path and a safe road? Okay... why? It isn't a challenge, it is just a choice. And if the adventure ticking clock isn't going to run out while we are on the road, then what why would we take a route that could kill us and make it so we can't complete our mission? Do we not care about our mission?

Sure, people might take the more dangerous road anyways. They might see it as fun, but at no point are we being challenged by this decision. The only challenge is a lack of information about the consequences of our decision. Which makes it a gamble, not a challenge.