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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Don Durito" data-source="post: 8049033" data-attributes="member: 6687260">I think the key is giving the players meaningful decisions to make.  A lot of GMs confuse theoretical freedom which actual agency.This is why having four rooms, but only of them filled, can be a waste of time.  If it makes no difference which order you look, and if you're always going to get to the right one in the end because there's no cost, then it's meaningless.  So long as your earlier decisions affect future ones then it's not meaningless.  If every time you check a room there's a wandering monster check then it's not meaningless (still boring perhaps but the decisions have meaning).This is the whole point of having resource management in an exploration game.  There used to be in earlier editions explicit mechanisms for exploration turns that grounded this.  It's not the most interesting way to do this, just the most basic.This is also why so many GMs get things like travel wrong.Players: we travel to the town of Haven.GM: After several hours you crest a small hill and arrive at a fork in the road.  A sign in one direction says "Haven", the other says "Osterlich".  Which road do you take?Players: The one to Haven.Now if they have some reason to get to Haven in a hurry, but on the other hand they find an overturned carriage and it looks like bandits have hauled off some innocent people in the other direction, then they have a meaningful decision to make.We can see from this why wilderness exploration is an issue, because a lot of the basic mechanisms for making decisions meaningful, such as the need for provisions, water, the likelihood of finding a safe place to rest etc are taken away.  This doesn't make it impossible, but it does put a lot more pressure on the GM to constantly come up with creative ways to provide meaningful decision points.</blockquote>

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