D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[Chaosmancer]

Here’s the other thing that the exploration pillar offers the game: variety of pacing. If the PCs are constantly being challenged the players are going to burn out. Exploration offers a break from high stakes do or die moments and allow deeper aspects of the world to be brought into focus. Those deeper aspects leading inevitably to challenges and conflict because hey, it’s an adventure. But the ebb and flow of tension is important.

I agree, but often I've found players prefer that to come from RP.


And, also, I just want to say while they don't need to be challenged constantly, can't we still at least challenge them... occasionally? Like, are we now saying that exploration never offers challenges because it is the downbeat between challenges or are we just trying to acknowledge that you need downbeats?

Because the second I agree with, but the first is my problem, that finding a exploration challenge and making it worthwhile is incredibly difficult and has little to no guidance.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I don't get why you keep offering this as a choice? Would your players really say "We live the child to die a horrible death"?

Heck, I know a few DMs where if you tried that you'd immediately run into the kids sobbing parents as the DM tries to guilt trip you over your decision for the next few sessions, so even if you are heartless enough to abandon a child, then you still have the self-interest in not wanting to deal with that.

I don't see that as necessarily the DM guilting the players.

Sure, if the players head off to some distant land and run into the parents there, that's probably a guilt trip.

However, if they go back to the town where they found out about the kid and run into the parents, that's just a natural consequence of their choice. Much like if they robbed a merchant in broad daylight and weren't welcome in the town afterwards. Consequences are important in most styles (not so much for a hack and slash though, but in that style of game that kid would be a weird addition).

 

[Chaosmancer]

Sorry, but I'm not sure how failing to find those clues relates to the party hanging your character out to dry like they did (which sucks, by the way, unless your character had previously somehow earned their dislike).

They were too scared of reprisals from the sorcerer king and being beaten by his high level guards to help me. They figured if they did they would die.

It was a very self-centered group, very few people helped each other out at any point, especially if it came at a cost, which my character paid on more than one occasion. If they had seen the clues, and known it wasn't a risk to them, they would have fought. Even the DM expected them to step up without the clues, but they didn't.

This was also a game where I had told the DM during downtime that I was helping to smuggle former slaves and prostitutes out of the city, doing what I could to help others. He revealed a few sessions later that the person I was trusting them with was actually a villain and I had been funneling them to even worse slavery. You might think, why did you trust that guy then? Well, I never met them in-game. It was all done via background and off-screen talks. I don't think I'd ever even learned his name until the DM revealed that my downtime good acts were actually evil the whole time.

Lack of information can hurt the game just as much as anything else, and "your character wouldn't know" isn't always a good enough justification.

I guess it depends whether you-as-DM are willing to have outright mission failure be an option, because that's the most likely outcome of failure to find clues.

Me, while I usually want them to succeed at whatever mission they're on I'm not going to hand that success to them, and if they fail for whatever reason then they fail. So be it.

If they are going to fail, I want it to be because of their actions, not because the dice decided that they have no clue what is going on. Especially when if they really care about the mission, they will grind the stones to dust looking for clues.

 

[Chaosmancer]

The best answer for some people is to skip it. Others will prefer a different approach, such as leaning into exploration, which makes up a significant portion of my own groups' games.

There are lots of ways to make the game more survival oriented, which I'm fairly certain plenty of folks have already discussed. If you don't like the baseline, then you can modify things to make them more front and center. For example, you might say that long resting during a journey requires a week of uninterrupted rest. This make exhaustion far more serious, since you can't simply lose a stack overnight. Other ways include removing spells that negate those features that you want to focus on (like how my friend, who I mentioned earlier in the thread, made spells that create food or water not work in his desert campaign). Of course, survival doesn't need to be a focus for your campaign if you don't want it to be, and that's fine.

You can focus more or less on exploration, as you like. You can make it central to the campaign if you remove spells that circumvent it. You can make it an afterthought if you skip most exploration and just cut from one combat/social scene to the next. You can leave it at the baseline, which allows players to opt in based on what resources they want to allocate toward it.

This isn't really much different from running a combat or social focused game. You ideally want to adjust things there too, else it will likely result in a less than ideal experience (ie, a barbarian or fighter in a campaign where combat is rare or nonexistent, or a social bard in a hack-and-slash game).

D&D has a baseline, which allows you to opt out of a lot of exploration obstacles through your choices. You can easily modify the baseline to get your desired play. It would have been pretty laughable if, instead of simply saying that spells that make food or water don't work, my friend who ran the desert campaign had thrown up his hands and declared that such a campaign is impossible in D&D. Instead, he made the tweaks he needed for the desired result and ran a very memorable campaign.

Like @Ovinomancer said earlier, what you are mostly saying is that to run a exploration challenge I must first change the rules of the game and remove the abilities that counter those challenges.

This doesn't happen with combat. It doesn't happen with social. But it seems it happens quite often with exploration. Either skip it, or change the rules to make it work. Neither solution is running the game as it is written, which leads to threads like this where people disagree that exploration is broken in the game, because they fixed it and so their version is working.

 

[FrozenNorth]

The basic "exploration pillar" explanation seems less than a page long (I'm estimating because I'm looking at it in DnD beyond and not the actual book right now) and has no example play loop. While the DMG has multiple chapters that are about exploration, it doesn't fit them together and doesn't properly tell a new GM how to integrate them into his game. It certainly doesn't tell a new GM the various ways to conduct exploration and that if he wants to do a "survival heavy" game what needs to be emphasized and what needs to be deemphasized/eliminated.

To build on this, when dealing with the exploration pillar, the DMG makes no attempt to distinguish between the rules and guidance that are absolutely essential to running a survival challenge and a large amount of chaff.

In my opinion, the DMG is much weaker than the PHB and the MM.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Again, I'm not "crediting" anything. I don't care about your concept of "credit". Sorry, but I think it's wrongheaded. Perhaps a good way to "win" a philosophical argument on a message board, but absolutely useless for a DM who is actually interested in running a good game. I'm only concerned about results.

Sure, but the result didn't come from playing 5e as written. So if the criticism is that 5e as written has massive problems in running an exploration game, turning around and saying "but if you remove all of the problems yourself, it works great"

It's like saying the engine in your car was great, but the mechanic had to pull out the engine and put in a new one... so the original engine wasn't great, it had to be replaced to run great. That's the issue.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I am back against my better judgement.

No snark intended here, just genuinely trying to understand what seems to me a very unusual perspective.

Here's a genuine example from an adventure run by a much better DM than me. The party were helping a young boy escape from the clutches of an evil wizard who had been abusing him. They were racing across the wilderness with pursuers on their heels.

Due to the abuse he had suffered, this boy was very highly stressed and distrustful. He was also a budding sorcerer who couldn't really control his powers. When he got too stressed, he would either cause some sort of magical explosion (potentially hurting his allies), or he'd try to run off alone into the wilderness so that he didn't hurt anyone else.

Now, the only reason for including all this was to make things difficult for the players. To complicate their wilderness travel and bring in an extra inconvenience they had to deal with.

I thought it was a great idea, but if I understand the feedback here some of you think that it would just make players decide they won't help any more NPCs because NPCs are too much hassle.

Is that a correct interpretation? Because it doesn't really fit with how I see people play the game.

To me there is a HUGE difference here.

The original example was not a magical child who exploded while stressed, it was a child. And the only reason they ran into the woods was to pull the players out of their Tiny Hut.

You know what I would add to this to make this really good though? The ability of the players to de-stress the kid with rolls. Then, when you have him have a nightmare and run out of the safety of the camp, there is a chance to stop him, calm him down and then not deal with that. And that detail makes all the difference. It gives players agency, instead of taking it away.

 

[Maxperson]

And, also, I just want to say while they don't need to be challenged constantly, can't we still at least challenge them... occasionally? Like, are we now saying that exploration never offers challenges because it is the downbeat between challenges or are we just trying to acknowledge that you need downbeats?

Absolutely, and if the challenge is important and they overcome it, I'd grant exp like an encounter. For example, if they need to scale the cliff to the mountain temple to speak to the Yeti druid about X, Y and Z, and there are strong, gusting winds, making it to the top would be worthy of exp. Those winds would be imposing disadvantage and perhaps checks to see if they fall, so it's worthy.

 

[Imaro]

I don't get why you keep offering this as a choice? Would your players really say "We live the child to die a horrible death"?

Heck, I know a few DMs where if you tried that you'd immediately run into the kids sobbing parents as the DM tries to guilt trip you over your decision for the next few sessions, so even if you are heartless enough to abandon a child, then you still have the self-interest in not wanting to deal with that.

I have had players whose characters certainly would... and I don't guilt them into anything because most of my games are sandbox and I am interested in seeing the actual choices they make, not controlling them.

 

[Imaro]

Sure, you can make up DCs, but then you are simply ignoring the guidelines in the book, which means those guidelines aren't actually doing anyone any good.

I'll be honest this single statement right here makes me think our fundamental philosophies when running D&D are so different that I'm not sure further discussion would really serve a purpose. I wholly buy into rulings, not rules while using the D&D 5e framework and tools... I don't think that's how you view the game at all.