D&D General Why Exploration Is the Worst Pillar

[Lanefan]

Oh, yes, finding a new vista in the sense that the GM tells you another cool description isn't the exploration pillar -- you haven't done anything. Just taking a trail and the GM saying, "oh, hey, you guys go past Beautiful View Point on this trail, let me describe the vista," doesn't require anything to be resolved. It's just a vista.

If, in real life, I walk a trail I've never walked before and in so doing see views and vistas I've never seen before, I'm exploring.

Not exploring in the sense of discovering those views for the first time ever, but yes exploring in the personal sense of discovering those vistas for myself. They're new. (which is why I dislike things like google street view; if I've already seen it on a screen it doesn't feel like I'm exploring when I get there for real, as it's not new to me any more)

Description isn't the pillar. Else combat would be, "Ok, Bob, Monster A... <clatters> inflicts 20 fire damage. What do you do?" Bob, asks, "Um, how, what happened? What does it look like?" GM, "This is combat, Bob, not Exploration!" No, this is silly, description is part and parcel of combat as well -- Bob needs to know if that was some fire breath, if the monster is made of fire, if they used a spell, etc, etc. Same with social -- you have to describe things. So, then, just description cannot be enough to support a pillar of play -- it's necessary but not sufficient.

Description isn't the pillar in and of itself, no; description is the results gained from engagement with the pillar. The fact that the PCs did what they did - even if just walking down a new trail - to provoke that description is the pillar writ large.

 

[Lanefan]

Now please, do it again, and pay more attention to "set aside the specific wording from WotC for a moment." Let us look at the concept outside of WotC's statements for a bit.

But, by your own assertion, Downtime doesn't fit well into these pillars - it calls for its own pillar, in your mind. Why are you saying every action of the table is 100% described by the three pillars, when you say there ought to be a fourth?

Because at the moment those three pillars are all we have to work with, meaning the "purple crayon" of Downtime gets shoehorned into one or another even if-when it doesn't fit well.

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I have three file boxes - Red, Yellow, and Green. I sort things into boxes by color.

Now, consider what we should do with this:
View attachment 142783

Many would just shrug, and put it in the Red box. Others would say they need a new box for things like this. And others might just leave it out, because it is one small item, and there's so many that cleanly fit into boxes.

Others might ask: What is the purpose of putting things in boxes? We can tell what box it should go in, if any, if we know the purpose for the exercise.

If the purpose of the exercise is, for example, to criticize how WotC talks about its games, by noting how one of the boxes is kind of battered and ripped, we can just stop now, because that is terribly uninteresting.

Well, first off as your intent is to cover the whole spectrum (which maps, as I believe the intent of the "pillars" idea is to cover the whole game) then ideally your boxes would be Red, Blue and Green.

That said, the pillars aren't hard-bordered boxes. They overlap and merge in places; meaning your purple crayon here would go into the area where Red and Blue overlap.

I see Downtime as more like a black or white or grey crayon that doesn't really fit well in any of the three colour-boxes and really needs a box of its own. But, as it doesn't have one, most of those those crayons currently get shoved in with the Exploration box as for some reason it's bigger than the other two.

 

[Lanefan]

And nothing in there restricts the DM to describing only the world and not what happens to the PCs.

And because I think that you will need convincing, here is an example:

Player: "I walk down the corridor"

But the DM knows that there is a trap in the corridor, and the PC has not declared that he was checking for them. Alternatives:

• Passive high enough: "Just before he puts his foot on a flagstone, your character sees that there is a trap, and steps back."
• Passive not high enough, but dexterity high enough: "Just as you get to the center of the corridor, you feel a flagstone give way, but you manage to catch the edge of the pit."
• "passive not high enough, and dexterity too low: "You don't see the hidden pit, and you fall in."

Of course, there is puppeting in the game, in the last example, the DM will not say: "The pit opens under your feet, do you decide to fall in it ?"

Personally, I'd replace both bolded bits above with the words "What do you do?", or something similar.

 

[Lanefan]

That's not the kind of thing that would allow for a take 20/automatic success, though. Because you've hidden something very well in a specific spot.

Some have said above that given enough time they'll automatically find everything, though, and it's that stance which I'm opposing.

If the room was just a mess and the "hidden object" was just sitting there under a piece of debris and the only action needed to find it was to move the debris a few inches--that's something you could allow for an automatic success.

You could even split the difference here: ask the players how long they're going to spend searching. If it's "we spend a minute searching," have them roll. If they spend longer than that, they find it.

Indeed; and it'd be situationally-dependent in any case.

And if there's no risk involved and it's merely a question of do they find thing-X or not, that's easy to sort.

It's when there's risk involved - e.g. under this bit of debris is the thing-X you're looking for but under this other bit of debris is some mold that, if disturbed, releases spores that on a failed save will cause disease in any Human, Part-Elf, or Elf within 10' - that more detail is needed as to which character is doing what, and where.

And to disguise whether there's risk involved or not in any given search, I by extension then have to make that level of detail be the default.

 

[Lanefan]

This is what you did to me. I presented a clear example of "not exploration"

Well, it could be argued that your example very much was exploration.

You-as-DM describe 12 scenes the PCs see en route from Hicksville to Waterdeep, and the last scene is actionable. Excellent.

But why are you describing those other eleven scenes in the first place? Because somewhere back there the players declared the action "We'll travel on foot from Hicksville to Waterdeep" and describing those scenes is your chosen, if lengthy, means of resolving said action.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Thing is, it's not all about challenges.

A lot of the game involves non-challenging moments and activities - examples: talking to shopkeepers, travelling through previously-unseen parts of a safe realm, banter and discussion with other PCs, etc. - yet these still nicely fall under the pillars as currently defined (in order: social, exploration, and social).

To say something's not in a pillar unless it's presenting a capital-c Challenge seems...odd, somehow. And I wonder if that's causing some of the disconnect here: you (and maybe a few others) are trying to tie everything to challenges, where I (and, I think, some others) are not.

And this is relevant, in that the non-challenging portion of Exploration pillar activities will be higher than in the other two. Combat, by comparison, will have a very low non-challenge portion; with Social somewhere in between and more highly variable by table.

The reason Hussar is focusing only on challenges, and I think he is right to do so, is because that is the part of the discussion that matters most for the issues in the exploration pillar, and too many people are trying to have too broad of a view of “exploration” to be useful.

Is describing the majesty of Mount Crumpet part of exploration? Whether it is or isn’t, it would never be covered by the rules and it would be impossible to engage with. Describing a howling blizzard is easy, but when we describe it, set it up so that the players feel that going out tonight would be dangerous, but they do it anyways… we find that it isn’t dangerous. Per the rules as they are written, if they went out in winter clothes (a bare minimum that they should have) then traveling through a blizzard is just as challenging as traveling through a foggy morning by the coast.

And so, yes, there are non-challenges, and they can be important, but they are also things that are generally outside of the rules. And if there were strong ways to make challenges in Exploration without gutting the rules, it wouldn’t even be a question. But there aren’t, and since talking about “exploration in general” is getting confusing, then we need to focus in on the issue people are having. Which is explicitly exploration challenges.

It's the "automatic" part that bothers me, as so many things aren't automatic at all.

Realism, mostly. Using the "search the room" example, if I hide somethine really well in a room - say, in a very-hard-to-detect secret compartment in the floor - and I send 100 different people (or groups) in to search for it, even if they have all day the odds of all 100 groups coming out having found it are negligible. Ideally, if my hiding job is good enough none of them find it; but it's inevitable some will just by fluke and some others will by either skill or deduction or whatever.

But there also gets to be a point where the risks are nil and the chances of failure so low, that I don’t see the point in making failure a possibility. There have been times when my DM has the party split, and one group has to wait three hours in the guild hall to get a license or whatever, and my character is searching the victim’s home for clues. I’ll just tell the DM “I spend two hours searching every part of the room”

Is there a chance I missed something? Theoritically yes, but practically if searching a room takes 10 minutes, I could roll six times and take the best result, and we all know the odds that are incredibly low. And I know, you don’t like it that people don’t have to state every single place they look, in detail, but why take that table time for something that we both know I can do? Unless you are expecting me to mess up and forget something IRL, and I’m just not interested in having to constantly prove myself to get the clues. To me, it is just tedium.

And on the front of realism, what you just described is literally how they train law enforcement. Per 5e (and I know, the changes between editions) if you are proficient in a skill, you are considered good enough at it to have a job doing that skill. So, if you have someone trained in Investigation, they are just as good as law enforcement. Expertise might be the level needed to be playing in the spy-counterspy level. If you sent 100 spies trained in counter-espionage into a room where you hid something, even really well, and gave them all day to find it do you honestly think the majority of them wouldn’t?

You hid it in the floor? One of the things I’m doing is tapping, checking and running my hands along the entire floor, because people always hide something in the floor. Then I do it to the walls. Then I do it to the ceiling, then I door it to the door, and the wardrobe, and on and on and on.

Additionally, the more important you make the single roll, the more resources they will stack into that roll. They might fail a DC 20 when they have a +7 mod, but if they have +7, advantage, a +1d8 and a +1d4 the chances drop precipitously, and of course they are going to then do that for every single roll.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Y'know, I'm actually trying to think of the last time the players talked to a shopkeeper, in game, that wasn't related to what the players were doing. IOW, talking to the shopkeeper, for other reasons than the NPC in question had some information about the adventure. I'm really drawing a blank here. It's been a LOT of years, either as a DM or a player. I remember, vaguely, a DM back in early 3e days that did this kind of thing where he wanted you to actually RP out every single interaction with an NPC. But, it's been twenty years or so since I've seen it.

So, as far as I'm concerned, no, Social interactions are almost never not-challenges. They are part and parcel of the adventure and, we haven't played out mundane shopping in I don't know how long. Again, the whole advice about skipping the town guards wasn't a surprise to me. It was how I had been playing for years before 4e came out.

I'll be honest, we don't RP every interaction, but I do RP a lot of non-essential stuff. I usually try and give a quirk to characters the PCs ask to interact with. So, if the PCs are listing things off and someone says "I want to go buy twenty days of rations" I'll end up asking if they want to RP it, or if they want to just buy it. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

And sometimes those minor interactions end up changing my game a bit, when I am the DM.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think upon seeing the orc we're still in the exploration pillar, since you just gained more information about the environment.

Whether you engage with the combat or social pillars is up to the players (assuming the orc isn't aware of their characters). If the orc is aware, it might force that choice by attacking or talking to the characters.

If the orc in this example attacked you, then that would be combat. If you won initiative and ran away without a single attack ever being made, it would still be combat.

No, simply seeing a vista of trees and assuming that they're evil treats does not make it combat. Assumptions aren't necessarily the same as reality.

You just told me that choosing to not engage is a choice that makes a thing the exploration pillar. Why does the same logic not apply to the other pillars -- if I have a choice to engage combat, but don't, that should be combat pillar, right? Same if I don't engage in social stuff, still social stuff. You've outright said that players having the opportunity to interrupt some description but choosing not to means that's still exploration because they could. Why does this not apply elsewhere?

 

[Ovinomancer]

You seem to have a very odd definition of passive abilities. It's assumed that people get passive values all the time.

It is not, and the rules you've quoted do not say this. A passive score is either a repeated task or it's a tool for the GM to secretly check the results of an action.

A passive check is a special kind of ability check that doesn't involve any die rolls. Such a check can represent the average result for a task done repeatedly, such as searching for secret doors over and over again, or can be used when the DM wants to secretly determine whether the characters succeed at something without rolling dice, such as noticing a hidden monster.​

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This is just a convenience - instead of rolling a dice every 5 foot to find a secret door (or a trap) we use passive values. It saves a lot of time and keeps the game moving along. Unless you think it's for when the PCs state that they state that they sit and actively stare at the same 5 foot section of wall to detect secret doors?

I assume that passive values are always in use unless there's some reason not to do so, otherwise the PCs would never see that hidden monster.

I assume passive values are in use when the players have their characters doing things that require either evaluating a repeated use of a skill or if I need to secretly check how successful the PCs are at a thing they are doing -- just as the rule suggests. What you're doing here is taking the other statement from the rules that says that PCs are generally assumed to be staying alert to danger when in dangerous places, which establishes a default of attempting to perceive danger, as an always on things. It's not, it's a default. If the player declares a different action that would conflict, then they are no longer paying attention for danger. This is actually covered in a number of examples in the rules -- doing any of the other travel tasks other than keeping watch while traveling is automatically disadvantage on perception checks. There's space there for some actions that aren't on that list to deny perception checks altogether. This is part and parcel of the rules.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Can you point me to the posts where you actually explained why this is different?

The major difference is this.

When you set up a combat, you have devised a set space and set of rules. And those are generally not going to change, even if players utilize a new ability.

But, when we discussed exploration challenges, that isn't how things went. For example, we said a Ranger couldn't get lost in their favorite terrain, they always know the route. So, in the "challenge" "Get to Point A from Point B, without getting lost" the ranger always succeeds. However, then posters challenged us, the ranger doesn't always succeed, what if there is an impassable river on that route?

The challenge shifted, in direct response to the players abilities.

OR, for the example of the Tiny Hut. It was said that the challenge of finding a safe place to rest was a viable challenge. We refuted saying that Tiny Hut creates a safe place to rest, wherever we happen to be. You then put forth "what if you are escorting an NPC, who despite knowing the dangers and despite the players having a watch, runs into the dangerous territory?"

And there are two problems with this. One, it is clearly a direct DM action against the hut the way you described it. However, the second problem is more fundamental... it doesn't even change anything. You go, get the kid, then go back to resting in your Tiny Hut. It was a ritual anyways, so you can just create it again.

Additionally, you hit upon a pretty serious faux pas. Have the NPC run into a clearly dangerous situation and force the party to choose between them dying or going to rescue the NPC. Sometimes this can be worked in a good manner. But more often that not it is a galling and overt action. Because the player's know you control the NPCs, and so they know you set it up so that the NPC would run into danger, to force their hand. Therefore it has to be done very very carefully, if at all. And your example wasn't careful, and was a direct response to a player ability.