Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8378947" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Why not? The Outlander finds food per day, no need to travel. They can only take the "foraging but no passive perception" while traveling. If you knew that you couldn't pay proper attention in a forest full of deadly monsters, but that you safely get food when you stopped to camp while paying enough attention to potentially avoid deadly monsters... why wouldn't you?Sure, some people like it. But if the exploration pillar is only something that people with very specific tastes enjoy... there might be a problem in the exploration pillar. Maybe not if you share those tastes, but if you don't.Sure, sometimes a squash match is good for the players to feel awesome. But it is also time spent at the table on something that is usually not relevant to the larger picture. But, the other issue is that if we are just montaging until something interesting happens... that feels like we aren't actually doing the exploration pillar at all. But if we do the exploration pillar, things grind to a halt.For the sweet spot in the middle. If I knew the exact rules and things to do to make it work, I don't think this would be an issue that comes up so often, and I don't necessarily expect you to have a perfect answer either. There needs to be something in the middle. A point where players can make informed decisions, and that isn't just wasting their time. Something that takes into account the abilities of players, including high level abilities, but doesn't just cancel those abilities and make them pointless. Something that doesn't drag exploration on for dozens of sessions, but doesn't feel like you are cheating like skipping over it in minutes does.That's the crux, isn't it? How much time of this is fun. That does depend, but I don't think it should depend on the player's patience, I think it should depend on the tools and systems they can interact with. And I think that is something getting lost a bit in the noise.Distance traveled in game shouldn't affect time IRL. Also, this is something completely outside the player's control. They make no decisions regarding any of this.Again though, while the number of encounters and the DMs plan for those encounters matters.... players get no say in this. The only thing they can choose is whether or not to engage. They can't make decisions based on this.Which, is an interesting point, when you start looking at the questions you are asking. Because you are asking "what do you as the DM plan for the players to do or encounter" and at no point do the players get a say, except whether or not to engage. And, to reiterate a point I think I'm going to be saying a lot, a blind choice isn't a choice. I actually had a DM who put us in a wailing blizzard in the mountains. It was an eternal storm from the Plane of Ice, never-ending and the DM wanted to challenge us. Did we turn back, did we go right, did we go left, or did we continue forward. I asked what we knew about navigating the storm (my character was the local expert on such matters) and we were told... basically nothing. We had no idea which decision would mean which thing. We knew we had to get past the storm to reach our goal, and nothing about what the various paths would lead to. The DM got a little upset when I told them then that our choice didn't matter, so we might as well move forward. They seemed upset, telling me that if we chose wrong we could be stuck in the blizzard forever, or reach the center of the rip in the planes and face worse consequences. And, I told them, "Look, we only know one thing. That we can turn back and head back to the ship, abandoning our mission, and that is the one thing we won't do. Since every other path is identical, it doesn't matter which path we take. So, we might as well go forward. It's all luck." Soon after that the DM had us meet Yetis who guided us the rest of the way to our destination. But, I remember that feeling from that scenario. It was utterly pointless. Our decision didn't matter, because it was basically a coin flip. We had no tools to figure out anything, and the DM basically told us we couldn't figure out anything, and since we literally couldn't turn back and abandon out mission, we realistically had no choices to make. And, it isn't the only time that that has happened. I've run into this a lot. Where we are given a choice, but zero information, and so the choice is pointless.</blockquote>

Verification