Exploration in 5e

D&D's three pillars Interaction works well in the game, and I like how the 2024 revision cleans those rules up, and combat is great as long as your encounter design has interesting monsters and accounts for the action economy. We'll get to those two pillars in more detail later, but today I want to look at exploration.

Having played a lot of AD&D, Old School Essentials, and Shadowdark over the past few years, exploration is a bit of an orphan in the current game's design. When D&D focused on the dungeon, the exploration rules worked quite well. To understand why, we need to look at how the game functioned and how it framed the exploration pillar.

In AD&D, exploration is framed as the tension between making progress in a dungeon while avoiding traps and random encounters. Traps are often of the save or die variety, making one rash or foolish move a recipe for disaster. Combat in AD&D was usually a fight for survival, with a few unlucky rolls enough to kill off a character.

Modern D&D shifts both of these element. Combat is an exercise in resource attrition, with only the most significant combats posing a threat of character death. Traps are another drain of resources, as they inflict damage that drains away healing spells and potions. Unlike AD&D, neither poses a mortal threat to the characters.

The AD&D exploration system relied on that threat to function. Players had to carefully navigate the dungeon, burning time to search for traps or investigate their surroundings. Yet this careful progress came at a steep price. Wandering monsters lurked around every corner, meaning that a thorough search of a room led to a higher chance of a deadly fight.

5e also undermines dungeon exploration by making resource recovery easy. After a few fights, you can leave the dungeon, rest up, and return at full power. Smart players head out before their resources are low enough to threaten death, so even an encounter on the way out is manageable.

A good set of exploration rules for 5e needs to do the following:

• Give the DM a clear, easy procedure for managing the players. In combat, initiative allows the DM to structure the action so that everyone gets a turn. Exploration needs something similar, a simple tool to ensure that the DM gives everyone a chance to do everything and can manage timing as appropriate (did the thief check for traps before the barbarian bashed the door in?).

• Establish a core threat or risk to the players. If we're rolling dice and tracking exploration, we need to know why it is important. Does exploration sap resources? If so, how does it avoid easy resource recovery? What does "failing" at exploration actually mean?

• Build on what the characters can do to establish opposition or threats. The characters have skills, magic items, and other tools. How are those relevant to exploration? If a character is good at exploration, what do we mean by that?

As it stands now the game doesn't offer good answers to any of those questions. I think without them, exploration remains the outcast of the three pillars, sold short by the game and heavily reliant on DM skill to function.

So, what do rules for exploration look like? We'll get to those later this week, when I'll share the system I've been using the past few months.