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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 8379241" data-attributes="member: 97077">First, I'm not dismissive about your claim that you have a problem. I believe you! I'm saying the problem is actually not with the rules that cover exploration in D&D 5e. Based on your comments, I think it's in your understanding of those rules, your preparation, presentation, and implementation. This doesn't make you or anyone else a "crap" DM, no more than it makes me a "crap" linguist that my Spanish isn't as good as it could be. It's just something to work on. Nobody's born with the ability to run D&D 5e exploration challenges well!Overland travel rules include forced marching which can cause exhaustion. It happened to my character tonight, in fact, when we pressed on further than we can normally in order to find a safe place to long rest. We didn't, as it turned out, and I didn't want to risk another level of exhaustion pushing further. So we didn't regain any hit points or hit dice that night which was not great.As for diseases and simple wilderness obstacles, I'm not responsible for other people's arguments, only my own. But I think you really need to be less dismissive of time as a limited resource in the game. It matters and it makes everything work better and gives meaningful choices and teeth to challenges of all sorts. I think you would also benefit from discontinuing this thing you have with separating the pillars to no good result. They work together to their mutual benefit. Leverage that.No, I didn't say it's only you that may have an issue, just that you can only speak for yourself.Heavy precipitation and strong wind is punishing. Penalties to Perception and disadvantage to ranged weapon attacks is not great. It means stealthy monsters like yetis can more easily get the drop on us and the ranger and my rogue scout have to switch from ranged attacks to melee which isn't always ideal. On days with particularly bad weather, we could just not travel, but then there's this ticking clock. We have to weigh if it's worth sitting around when bad things are happening. Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not. As an example, in my forest/swamp hexcrawl, the players stayed in town for a full month doing downtime activities because the weather was continually terrible. The players decided they'd let whatever events would unfold do so rather than risk it. Things are now worse and they're dealing with the repercussions.Avoiding wandering monsters by sneaking past them is by definition an exploration challenge. So is following their tracks back to their lair, if they have one. Or being tailed by some and picking up your pace from slow to fast, say, to keep ahead of them while risking a penalty to passive Perception and not being able to move stealthily. If you're only thinking about wandering monsters or random encounters as fights, then you are limiting yourself to no good end. And again, that's still just you separating the pillars in the game to no benefit. Use them all, more than one at a time perhaps to reinforce each other and your game is more dynamic as a result.As to your question about finding the alternate entrance, we had been in this dungeon before, but went through the fortified front gate, having been let in by the monsters guarding it. We explored only a small part of it at the time before wearing out our welcome and decided to return this session. Figuring they'd not be best pleased to see us at the front gate this time (which would put us at a distinct disadvantage tactically), we declared we would explore the mountains around it to see if we could find a chimney, sewer pipe, or some other means of entry. After some searching, climbing, and balancing our way on narrow icy paths, we found ourselves on the top of the structure where we could lower ourselves down using ropes into an upper window. We had to use over 100 feet of our rope which we were not able to collect on the way out. I also nearly fell off a path while traversing it, taking some damage while being rescued, which was embarrassing because my rogue, Icewind Dale, is actually really good at balancing given he's a legendary ice skater.</blockquote>

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