Incentives and rewards for Exploration

[Yora]

I don't remember where I got it from, but I got really stuck some time ago by the statement "Exoloration is not fun. Discovery is fun."

When talking about exploration in RPGs, it usually revolves around mechanics to track how to reach the dungeon, and how to reach the artifact chamber once you're in the dungeon. I would argue that this is not exploration. This is travel from A to B, or travelling at random until you run into what you were looking for. The procedures for dungeon crawling and hex crawling can take place at the same time as exploration, but they are not exploration mechanics.

Exploration also revolves around moving through spaces that are unknown, but I think to really make it exploration the players have to collect unformation and learn something from it, and I think ideally also can use what they learned to gain access to spaces and things that were otherwise inaccessible. Which is, the discovery part.

I've long wanted to run a campaign that has the focus on exploration. One that consists of characters who are not going on adventures because it promises wealth, or promisses glory, or who want to use their power to protect the innocent. But whose main drive to go into the wilderness, explore ruins, and seek out magical creatures is a fascination and deep interest in magical things. Characters who are motivated initially by curiosity. (Though that doesn't preclude that their discoveries lead to wanting to use their new knowledge to gain wealth or defeat a great evil.)

But I've never really figured out how to do this, and I think this might be something that requires to get down into the dirty and unglamorous business of working on theories of what is actually fun about RPGs, and equally umportant why?
If the goal for the players is not to claim a treasure or to destroy an evil, what does lead to a rewarding experience and a feelling of accomplishment? What is actually fun about exploration in general and in a game?

There's a lot of good material on exploration in videogamea, but a good part of that is often aesthetically pleasing visuals, or as one commenter called it, "sight seeing". Moving through interesting looking envirionments is rewarding even if you don't actually do anything other than moving. But this element doesn't translate to RPGs. Nobody wants to listen to GMs verbally describing the looks of landscapes, caves, and ruins.It's just not a comparable experience to seeing.
But one thing that is common in Metroidvania games and Soulslikes (which are really 3D Metroidvanias) that I think would translate very well, is to let players have brief looks of something that looks interesting, but will require considerable amounts of work to actually reach. And I think that's a good example of exploration including learning things and applying the knowledge. Finding a key is much more rewarding when you're already looking for a key that fits a lock that is in your way. And when that figurative or literal key is noy just in a random spot, but in a location that can be deducted from other information, even better.
You are searching with a purpose and not just for the sake of searching. And you are searching with a method that you chose for the situation instead of searching either randomly or everything (brute forcing it, to use the decryption term).In these circumstances the players do have an accomplishment that would hopefully be rewarding, independently from, what they actually get access to. Simply overcoming an obstacle is often fun. There are lots of simple videogames that are nothing but onstacles to overcome with no reward or payoff at the other side, and those can be enjoyable for many years.

Another thing someone recommended to me is that whatever the players ultimately discover can be more than a trophy for having overcome the challenges, or unlocking the next stage of character advancement. Instead it can also be something that the players can make use of. You also get this to some extend in Metroidvanias, where new attacks or movement modes provide alternative options to get past some kinds of onstacles. But in an RPG campaign, these can be resources that allow players to make big impacts on where the story goes.
I particularly like the idea of including discoveries that are of extreme practical value for rulers ot other powerful factions. The players have freedom to choose who they want to share their discovery with and what they want in return. And you can have situations with competing groups of explorers who seek to deliver the discovery to a faction that the players don't approve of. Such a campaign would still be about exploration and discoveries, but the gameplay could extend greatly beyond the activities of exploring. Looking at my own plans in particular, discovery could make for good hooks to get characters tangled up in larger situations and conflicts, even when riches and heroics are not on their mind when they innitially set out from their town.

Finally, it's probably best practice to set up places for exploration with more possible discoveries than the "main attraction". I feel exploration becomes much more interesting when there is not simply one thing that the GM wants the players to find. It's not super rewarding to reach something when you know it was always innevitable that you get there eventually. By having things that might not be discovered at all, and no clear indication how much if any is still there to be found, any discovery the players make feels more like it's something that they made happen. Not something the GM gave them.

Do you have any more thoughts on what really makes exploration and discovery entertaining in a game, amd how that can be used both in preparation and actual play?

[Quertus]

So, when I talk about wanting to explore new things, I mean that I want to see things like…

An orcish invasion. A lonely Driad. Dungeon mummies who "just came in to get out of the rain". A kidnapped princess. An evil king and his noble vizier. Cabbage migrations. The elemental plane of taffy. Phoenix extinction. A new technique for ascension. Floating rocks. A Wizard war. An underwater portal to the elemental plane of taffy, with invisible, incorporeal guardians. Troll bridges viewed favorably. Sentient bats. Dragonfire legions. The library in the mirror realm. The source of freckles. Suicidal immortals. A beaten dog. An artifact ice cream truck. Contagious visions. A lake of gilding. Mass enslavement of Kaorti for their weapons. Pumpkin-headed zombies spontaneously appearing.

And (using Floating Rocks as an example)

I want the GM to already know the underlying mechanics, and for those mechanics to be… hmmm… reasonably interfacable. I want to be able to research it, and utilize it. Maybe I use it to make Shoes of Water Walking, or super skipping stones, or juggling statues, or flying castles. I don't want to find that it's already been Explored, and is the home of the Flying Rock School of Martial Arts, the one and only possible use for this anomaly ever.

So, to me, making a character *based* on curiosity means one who *needs* the GM to provide cool, unique things that are outside the "normal" rules of the game, but which have a mechanical / game physics representation.

So, maybe we encounter metal flowers. Maybe my character doesn't care. Or maybe they pin one to their lapel, as a statement that "I've been somewhere exotic". Or maybe they do the same by having them grow around their home/base. Or maybe they create custom spells or enchanted items that require them as components. Or maybe they learn that the plants turn *any* matter into metal, and begin farming them for profit. Or maybe they genetically engineer new variants to create other substances.

To encourage Exploration, you need to include sufficient "generic parts" that the PCs can utilize however they desire that they hit upon one or more ideas that industry them, and begin poking at it successfully.

So, pick a "cool" thing that the PCs can Discover. Figure out how it works under the hood (the metal flowers convert matter to metal, growing like flowers. They operate at the "Platonic ideal" level, and, as such, are "unnatural", and die out in areas where "physics" overrides platonic ideals), then let the players take actions and experiment per the rules of the game. (For example, using my underlying physics, "genetic engineering" would have been useless, as they have no genetics - "Platonic engineering" would be required. Just as theories about them being / plans requiring them to be engineered by nanotechnology would have been probably false / failed.)

Is that even in the direction of a helpful response?

[Pleh]

I don't remember where I got it from, but I got really stuck some time ago by the statement "Exoloration is not fun. Discovery is fun."

I mean, by this logic, you could say, "combat isn't fun, winning fights is fun."

As if we really want to minimize the combat and skip to winning by fiat.

I think what people want to say when they share that expression is more like, "fighting is fun, but combat gets to be an endless slog if you aren't careful."

Exploration is actually much the same.

Except in Exploration, instead of a monster stat block to interact with, the challenge is the map itself.

Since D&D type games are about attrition, you have to figure out what resources they have to manage.

In metroidvania, it's health and keys.

In Dead Space, it's health and ammo (and a few keys). The game outright TELLS you where to go to reach your objective, implying that other path is a promise of risk vs reward. Expose yourself to more enemies for a chance to reach the next plot point with more ammo or stronger gear.

Soulslike is a bit different, where the expectation is to learn the map primarily through trial and error. "Well, I've died trying to get through there enough times. Maybe I need to go grind the other direction for a while and come back later." D&D doesn't usually allow for this kind of pull yourself by the bootstraps and try again style of exploration, because death is handled so differently. Other than that, it is pretty similar to metroidvania.

But then there are survival games like Subnautica, where you are constantly managing a set of timers that are counting down to your death while you explore. Food, water, and O2 all being a race against the clock (even day/night cycle can come into play at certain points) on top of managing health and gear. This seems to be the style most directly compatible with D&D rules, until you look at all the very early player options that make these concerns quite trivial.

But the biggest problem with exploration in TTRPG isn't tech or magic, but the openness of the world. The wilderness loses a lot of bite when players can reasonably leave it at any time to rest and recover in the comforts of civilization. That is precisely the primary reason civilization was founded, a communal shelter from the cruelties of nature.

So, you'll notice all these exploration based games have certain things in common.

• A map and/or otherwise predefined area. You don't want an endless or undefined map any more than you wsnt enemies with infinite HP or unspecified AC.
• A set of resources that exploration both consumes while having the potential to strategically resupply. This is probably the hardest thing to balance in a fun way that doesn't feel like tedious bookkeeping. It's easier in video games where the computer can track it for you, and many expliration video games STILL just give you infinite ammo and carry capacity.
• Tight controls over player powers, granting greater and greater freedom to roam as the players reach various locations. You want players to gain mastery of the map through exploration and not through instant win buttons unlocked by character creation minigames, like a teleport spell.
• Restricted access to social support or other safe spaces for rest and recovery. For Samus, she often "wouldn't leave til the job was done." In Subnautica, the player was literally shipwrecked and had no power to leave until they found plans to construct a lifeboat. In TTRPGs, this basically means you need player buy in to establish that they can't just return to town without quitting the campaign.

[Mechalich]

I've long wanted to run a campaign that has the focus on exploration. One that consists of characters who are not going on adventures because it promises wealth, or promisses glory, or who want to use their power to protect the innocent. But whose main drive to go into the wilderness, explore ruins, and seek out magical creatures is a fascination and deep interest in magical things. Characters who are motivated initially by curiosity. (Though that doesn't preclude that their discoveries lead to wanting to use their new knowledge to gain wealth or defeat a great evil.)

Traditionally exploration very much has been motivated by the desire for wealth or glory, if not for the explorer, then at least for whomever happens to be supporting them financially. Even exploration intended seemingly purely to advance scientific knowledge, like geological surveys, tends to have a fairly strong economic impetus behind it when you peel the layers back. Characters who are both motivated by discovery and free to indulge that desire via exploration on their own terms are mostly limited to the independently wealthy. Paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope was such an individual and burned through a huge fortune financing his expeditions, but this is uncommon, with government support - as in the case of Charles Darwin, whose seminal journey on the Beagle was part of a British nautical mapping expedition - or through the fruits of their expeditions themselves - as in the case of fellow discovered of evolution Alfred Russel Wallace, who assembled and sold vast natural history collections in order to finance his explorations.

So if you want characters to jump at exploring the wilderness they should still be looking for something, or at least financed by someone looking for something. Now, this can be very open-ended. Many an expedition was launched in the effort to 'plot a route' from one place to another in the hopes of facilitating later trade. If you give the party a very broad-open ended goal like 'find a way to that ocean thousands of kilometers away on the other side of this jungle' then you have a lot of freedom to have them investigate weird stuff that crops up along the path.

But then there are survival games like Subnautica, where you are constantly managing a set of timers that are counting down to your death while you explore. Food, water, and O2 all being a race against the clock (even day/night cycle can come into play at certain points) on top of managing health and gear. This seems to be the style most directly compatible with D&D rules, until you look at all the very early player options that make these concerns quite trivial.

Subnautica is a particularly tightly metered survival game. Many others are much less punishing in terms of the hunger/thirst metrics (and usually air just isn't an issue) so that characters can wander around fairly freely in ordinary human environments. In a survival game like Conan Exiles, for instance, you only really need to worry about food and water if undertaking a particularly long expedition to certain highly remote and exotic zones. Carry weight, however, remains very important, and you can only carry so much stuff with you and all of it gradually breaks down as you use it so you either need to stop and make more (which doesn't work with more than the simplest gear) or turn around to go back and resupply.

Consequently I think that an exploration-based game can largely finesse food and water assuming you're in a relatively accommodating area and the players can periodically stop to hunt and gather in order to stock up. This is more complex if you impose some sort of overall time limit like the looming onset of winter. However, you absolutely need to manage encumbrance to some degree, even if that reduces to 'our pack animals are carrying all our stuff, so we must make sure to keep them alive and prevent them from being stolen.' In Marco Polo's Travels, for instance, he almost never talks about what he was carrying, but mentions the availability/lack of food and water for pack animals constantly.

I think it also helps to make it clear that exploring areas around or along the main route will provide in situ resources that while they may not be absolutely necessary, will certainly be helpful. In Conan Exiles, for instance, you can stay in a good-sited base area and build a giant tower to the sky without any trouble, but all the really good stuff, including the stuff you need for the overall game goal of ending your enslavement (exploration as a punishment has a long pedigree, possibly worth a look as a campaign seed) means moving around and investigating weird locations and ancient ruins.

[Pleh]

Subnautica is a particularly tightly metered survival game. Many others are much less punishing in terms of the hunger/thirst metrics (and usually air just isn't an issue) so that characters can wander around fairly freely in ordinary human environments.

Yes, Subnautica keeps you on a tight leash and that is part of the challenge, though the point of the game is that it usually doesn't take all that much prep work to account for those limits. Carry a couple packs of spare food, a first aid kit, and a few bottles of water, and you should be good for just about any exploring you need, because you are much more likely to run out of carrying capacity collecting resources before you return than to run out of your life threatening timers.

I think that an exploration-based game can largely finesse food and water assuming you're in a relatively accommodating area and the players can periodically stop to hunt and gather in order to stock up.

I think this goes back to the age old question of whether or not your table likes tracking their ammunition. There is a bit of a slippery slope to handwaving survival strategies like this one, because on the one hand, any Character in their right mind would want to trivialize survival as much as possible so they can focus on other things. On the other hand, this could allow players and the DM to totally handwave the concern for food entirely by saying, "You have a ranger/druid in the party and their Passive Survival score is plenty enough to find food for everyone and your pack animals every day."

Boy, that sounds like a relief, doesn't it? But what if we handled combat that way?

If HP is the primary resource we track in combat, and food is the primary resource we track in exploration (just for the sake of argument), note that we DO often somewhat handwave away how Restoring your HP works. We don't have to roleplay out what using a Heal spell works or fight an intricate system that determines how successful the spell is (okay, roll to diagnose the injury, then check your herbal kit for medicines that heal that ailment, then roll to see how well you apply the balm, etc). So likewise, it is perfectly fair that a party with a Ranger/Druid or someone proficient in the Survival skill probably doesn't need to roleplay hunting and killing an animal for food. However, we also don't want this to become an excuse for the Heal Spell simply being a total health restore that ignores the HP numbers (unless its a very powerful and expensive form of the spell that players have more limited access to use). The Heal Spell is still limited to how many Hit Points it can restore at a time, and the Spells themselves are a resource that must be managed.

So, I would suggest that when the party Survival Expert does their daily hunting/foraging, the relevance of their skill along with any dice rolls they need to make should determine

1. The amount of time spent hunting/foraging that is then unavailable for exploration
2. Whether there is enough food to feed everyone or if there are leftovers that can be preserved for later

Beyond this point, it would be up to the DM to make sure the amount of food available to be found produces the intended pressure on the party. Too much food and the game becomes less of a tactical choice and more of a bookkeeping chore. Too little food and they can get frustrated never being able to get far enough ahead of the survival curve to actually pursue their main objective.

And again, some people hate tracking ammunition and the GM should just forget about trying to make their game be about survival or tracking resources. Some players just aren't into it.

But my point is, Exploration is the Map as Challenge the way Combat is Stat Block as Challenge. If the players have total freedom to say, "we take our time and just methodically examine every square inch of the map, from corner to corner," that's about like saying, "we pin the troll down and surgically remove its head from its shoulders."

Note that neither of these is wrong, per se. GMs should just carefully consider exactly what player actions and/or special circumstances could allow them to handle the problem this way.

Because remember that, in a thread talking about the Incentive and Rewards for Exploration, the incentive for gameplay is overcoming the obstacles. For combat, the obstacles are monsters for you to overcome by vanquishing them. For Exploration, the biggest obstacles will be managing your time spent and the resource attrition. It's inherently less exciting in and of itself, so you have to keep the player focus on the real prize.

The Reward for beating the Map is standing on that mountain peak you saw from the beginning and looking back down on the trail you took to get here. It's the Soulslike freedom to go anywhere you can see, but this has to be paired with a map that is interesting enough to make players want to go everywhere they see. The Reward is in the Mastery of the Terrain, where an otherwise unbeatable BBEG's nefarious plan is foiled by clever PCs knowledge of the terrain (such as Disney Mulan using a single cannon shot to bury the Hun army in an avalanche).

No one likes drudging through wilderness day after day, hour after hour, making the same survival checks over and over to move from point A to point B when you don't even necessarily know where it is you are going until you find it. That's the price you pay to get the reward in Exploration, so it has to actually pay something out that is more valuable than the effort put into it.

Your Map is one of the most important NPCs in the game. If there is going to be any exploration element of your game, the Map needs to be an interesting enough character to be worth exploring, even if it means bookkeeping resources until you get there.

[Yora]

Does exploration have to be a resource managing survival game? You certainly can combine the two, but I don't think they are the same thing.

So, maybe we encounter metal flowers. Maybe my character doesn't care. Or maybe they pin one to their lapel, as a statement that "I've been somewhere exotic". Or maybe they do the same by having them grow around their home/base. Or maybe they create custom spells or enchanted items that require them as components. Or maybe they learn that the plants turn *any* matter into metal, and begin farming them for profit. Or maybe they genetically engineer new variants to create other substances.

So, pick a "cool" thing that the PCs can Discover. Figure out how it works under the hood (the metal flowers convert matter to metal, growing like flowers. They operate at the "Platonic ideal" level, and, as such, are "unnatural", and die out in areas where "physics" overrides platonic ideals), then let the players take actions and experiment per the rules of the game. (For example, using my underlying physics, "genetic engineering" would have been useless, as they have no genetics - "Platonic engineering" would be required. Just as theories about them being / plans requiring them to be engineered by nanotechnology would have been probably false / failed.)

Is that even in the direction of a helpful response?

Yes, absolutely.

I think.

Probably...

I really like the idea of expanding the mere exploration of places and finding things hidden away in them to also make the discoveries into things that can be studied and experimented with. That really goes beyond the basic sight seeing and finding stuff and lets the players do actual thinking, connecting the dots, and learn something.

That's way more interesting than putting the players into situations where they think "Alright, we found this weird thing at got experience for making a discovery. Throw it into the bag with all the other junk."

So if you want characters to jump at exploring the wilderness they should still be looking for something, or at least financed by someone looking for something. Now, this can be very open-ended. Many an expedition was launched in the effort to 'plot a route' from one place to another in the hopes of facilitating later trade. If you give the party a very broad-open ended goal like 'find a way to that ocean thousands of kilometers away on the other side of this jungle' then you have a lot of freedom to have them investigate weird stuff that crops up along the path.

I am working on these concepts simultaneously as I am doing the worldbuilding for the setting. And the setting approach I am going with is a world in environmental conditions gradually shift over the course of centuries, opening up and closing habitable areas at irregular intervals. When a new area becomes hospitable again and people are moving in after having been displaced from another area that is turning hostile, many thousands of years can have passed since the place was last abandoned and left undisturbed. After having settled in, the new arrivals would be curious about what has been left behind by the previous inhabitants of the area. Or what potentially threatening inhuman inhabitants might have made their homes in the ruins in the meantime.

There certainly is money that can be made from exploration, and most people would expect to eventually at least break even. But I think it's always a big gamble, particularly in a fantasy world where the dangers are extremely high. D&D-type adventurers have this balanced out with the potential profits being enormous, but I find this rather unsatisfying. People who take huge risks because they are hoping for massive riches just don't strike me as very interesting characters to have encounters with strange beings and supernatural phenomenons. That's the path that leads to monster bashing and tactical fantasy wargaming. And then you also have the situation that the characters have these huge amounts of money and need ways to spend it, leading to Christmas tree characters with golf bags of swords and wands.
"D&D is only good at emulating D&D".

Which is why i think "become fabulously rich" doesn't work as a default motivation for adventuring types. Or rather, it does work, but only for dungeon crawling games.

[Saintheart]

I find Pathfinder's Kingmaker AP - at least the first, Stolen Lands book - gets the idea of an exploration-based game partially right.

There, the party is given a royal charter to survey a loosely-defined region of unclaimed wild territory with the ultimate goal of eventually setting up their own kingdom at a certain point. The mechanics of actually surveying the area are pretty straightforward: stick around in a given hex X number of days depending on the type of terrain and your party's slowest speed, and the place is deemed fully explored, you pick up certain XP. And each hex has a sort-of unique site or little trap that the party can look into and pick up some mild benefits for.

The first problem with it, so far as exploration is concerned, is that it's really a narrative-based adventure disguised as pure sandbox exploration. The module is really designed that you don't get your kingdom started unless you smack down the local Big Boss. It also contains timeclocks in the sense the Big Boss will go and try to smash your 'operating base' if you futz around or don't deal with them in a period of time. That's the verisimilitude trap, the problem generated by too many idiots who complained that the guards in rooms in videogames don't step off their patrol lines even if someone's being mercilessly slaughtered ten feet away. So you find that over time people start to expect a clear narrative direction for the adventure and they're less likely to just do the whole 'let's see what's over the next hill' with it. I've seen complaints of there being too many sidequests in the adventure, which I can only shrug about since they're generated by player exploration and agency.

So the adventure sort-of undercuts itself. It has exploration mechanics, but it doesn't quite know what to do with them and ultimately falls back on the loose-ish structure of "Big Boss over here, you are under threat until he's dealt with, and the moment you deal with him, you get your fledgling kingdom to run and the mechanics of the game change entirely".

The second problem is really with D&D itself, or at least with some editions' rules around starvation and dehydration. It's pretty much impossible to succumb to either of these in practical terms, not when Create Food and Water is a level 3 cleric spell. And even if you do find yourself unable to cast that spell, your colossal penalties for being in that condition are a -2 to STR and CON. Hitting the 0 mark on nonlethal damage just renders you unconscious. It's, necessarily, nonlethal. And the problem is that the alacrity with which these problems can be solved makes it that much harder to present meaningful decisions for players in the exploration realm. Never mind that the DM is also not given express options to mess with or interfere with these options, resulting in rules lawyers very unfairly crying foul. Starvation and dehydration are not written as real risks for D&D parties, and one either accepts that when trying to design an exploration-based adventure or mess with the rules. (Oh, sure, I know the objection: "I CaMe tO PlAy DnD, NoT OreGOn TRaIL. WaI U BaN EvErLaSTinG RaTIONs AnD EVerFUll MuGs, lAmE" If a DM buys this middlebrow argument, that DM has zero right to whine about the 15 minute adventuring day, random encounters being meaningless, or get annoyed on the party's retreat to town when the trail rations hit 0. Or the fact you can't run what feels like a proper exploration game in D&D, at low levels or otherwise. Resource management might not be a major part of exploration, or even a large part of an exploration game, but you also need all the cogs to run one, and some cogs are small but vital for the machine to work. And on this one D&D built a rubbish cog.)


I suspect the way to run an exploration game is to give the players a clear exploration-type task to cover area X ("map this area"; "there are six gold deposits in this zone, chart them"; "we want to know the rothe migration patterns through this area"), where X is an area in the larger area Y surrounding it, and then leave threads dangling for exploration found in X which invite the players into area Y. Start them with a certain task and branch out to the uncertain.

I also suspect you'd have to be clear as crystal, moreso than usual, when doing a Session 0 for a campaign like this. A pretty substantial majority of players come into a D&D session expecting a narrative or a videogame. Sad as it is to observe, this type of campaign is neither. The one thing you'd have to browbeat into them from the start is that this is not a game where you get to level up twenty times faster because you go to every part of the map 100% completion style, and neither is it one where you have any obligation as a player to explore any particular location in any particular order or in any particular timeframe unless something in that location creates one.

[Yora]

I also suspect you'd have to be clear as crystal, moreso than usual, when doing a Session 0 for a campaign like this. A pretty substantial majority of players come into a D&D session expecting a narrative or a videogame. Sad as it is to observe, this type of campaign is neither. The one thing you'd have to browbeat into them from the start is that this is not a game where you get to level up twenty times faster because you go to every part of the map 100% completion style, and neither is it one where you have any obligation as a player to explore any particular location in any particular order or in any particular timeframe unless something in that location creates one.

I would even go so far to say don't use D&D at all. This isn't what D&D is made for. The D&D system is made for D&D campaigns. When you try to make it do something other than dungeon crawling and tactical combat, it generally just doesn't turn out well.

[Pleh]

I would even go so far to say don't use D&D at all. This isn't what D&D is made for. The D&D system is made for D&D campaigns. When you try to make it do something other than dungeon crawling and tactical combat, it generally just doesn't turn out well.

If you insist on only using exactly RAW at all times and nothing else, yes.

But the other neat feature of D&D is that you can add custom content beyond dungeon crawling and tactical combat.

Like maps.

In fact, the game is something of a Mad Libs experience where SOME blanks are left quite intentionally blank with the implication that you are supposed to fill in the blank.

Like maps.

[Alcore]

I find Pathfinder's Kingmaker AP - at least the first, Stolen Lands book - gets the idea of an exploration-based game partially right.

My favorite AP! And it sounds nothing like what you describe...

There, the party is given a royal charter to survey a loosely-defined region of unclaimed wild territory with the ultimate goal of eventually setting up their own kingdom at a certain point. The mechanics of actually surveying the area are pretty straightforward: stick around in a given hex X number of days depending on the type of terrain and your party's slowest speed, and the place is deemed fully explored, you pick up certain XP. And each hex has a sort-of unique site or little trap that the party can look into and pick up some mild benefits for.

so far so good (100xp per hex) but there was a slight change between 3.5 and PF from the random encounter formula that is otherwise taken word for word. In 3.5 each time you fail to get an encounter in exploration the chance increases til one happens. PF doesn't have that clause. Still a party of 4 should be level 2 pushing 3 by the time they finish exploring (assuming they stop for nothing)

The first problem with it, so far as exploration is concerned, is that it's really a narrative-based adventure disguised as pure sandbox exploration. The module is really designed that you don't get your kingdom started unless you smack down the (1) local Big Boss. It also contains timeclocks in the sense the Big Boss will go and try to (2)smash your 'operating base' if you futz around or don't deal with them in a period of time. That's the verisimilitude trap, the problem generated by too many idiots who complained that the guards in rooms in videogames don't step off their patrol lines even if someone's being mercilessly slaughtered ten feet away. So you find that over time people start to expect a (3)clear narrative direction for the adventure and they're less likely to just do the whole 'let's see what's over the next hill' with it. I've seen complaints of there being too many sidequests in the adventure, which I can only shrug about since they're generated by player exploration and agency.

here is our disconnect.

(1. You don't get your kingdom til it is servayed. The Stag Lord is not the only requirement when i ran it. The IC reasons for being there was exploration and ending the problem with banditry. Here the module often assumed that any bandits the PCs killed could be replaced in a week like a respawn timer. Hated that.

(2. Nothing of that nature is written unless you completely ignore the bandits. And if you did ignore them completely they would be even safer; fighting Happs the first time causes the secondary camp to investigate (attack) when their people don't return.

And a few days later one named NPC arrives with 5 guards from Restov. It was established that the base was safe. The Stag Lord himself was slowly drowning into a bottle. Why; one group dawldled so long they arrived to a corpse.


(3. That is a problem. A clear narrative requires a DM willing to put in the time. I kept track of wolf, bandit, kobald populations. Once you exceed twice the scripted population in kills from random encounters i started either A; pulling dudes from the scripted areas or B; removed that result on the encounter wheel.

Kingmaker (book 1, at least) is not a narrative: it is a setting.


As for too many quests that problem lies in the culture. We are indoctrinated to find quest hooks. Any person that is described in any detail is investigated. So, like in a video game, we talk to all the quest givers and fill up our quest log. Kingmaker, if you ignore the bandits quest, requires a different type of player from the norm.

you get your fledgling kingdom to run and the mechanics of the game change entirely".

boy does it change... what a mess. Kingdom rules were not built for the faint of heart. The buggy rules in Kingmaker are forgiving if kinda incomplete. My playtesting of Ultimate Campaign verson has a roughly 50-50 of a kingdom surviving the first year. (That is with the house rule of a +1 nobody in every vacant spot)

Due to the nature of it playing it in play by post resultes in rapid back to back board meetings that can take a week irl to resolve one month ig. Next time i try it I'll either have a DMPC with the crown (who shall sit at home to prevent the usual problems with DMPCs) cutting the players out or have the players plan for a year and then i do all the rolling. Pausing for events or such things.

Everyone wants to be king. Its not worth it.

[Tanarii]

It's not just about discovery, it's also about meaningful decisions and consequences. The point of exploration mechanics is so the players aren't just drawing the map, without having to make decisions and face consequences. That'd be pure discovery, and I'm willing to bet most people wouldn't find that fun at a game session. Those that do are probably already a Map Maker DM.

So what's important is making meaningful decisions to be able to fill out each hex on the map, then making some more to find out what is in each hex, then finally making a bunch more to explore those things they found within the hex. And facing consequences of those decisions along the way.

If the "exploration mechanics" don't result have things on it the players can reasonably anticipate and try to prepare for, or suffer the consequences of failing to make certain decisions, or cause them to have to make meaningful decisions in response, they're not serving their purpose.

[Quertus]

"Exoloration is not fun. Discovery is fun."

I think to really make it exploration the players have to collect unformation and learn something from it

I've long wanted to run a campaign that has the focus on exploration… whose main drive to go into the wilderness, explore ruins, and seek out magical creatures is a fascination and deep interest in magical things. Characters who are motivated initially by curiosity. (Though that doesn't preclude that their discoveries lead to wanting to use their new knowledge to gain wealth or defeat a great evil.)

But I've never really figured out how to do this, and I think this might be something that requires to get down into the dirty and unglamorous business of working on theories of what is actually fun about RPGs, and equally umportant why?
If the goal for the players is not to claim a treasure or to destroy an evil, what does lead to a rewarding experience and a feelling of accomplishment? What is actually fun about exploration in general and in a game?

aesthetically pleasing visuals, "sight seeing".

noy just in a random spot, but in a location that can be deducted from other information, even better.

And you are searching with a method that you chose for the situation instead of searching either randomly or everything (brute forcing it, to use the decryption term).

You are searching with a purpose and not just for the sake of searching.

Another thing someone recommended to me is that whatever the players ultimately discover can be more than a trophy for having overcome the challenges, or unlocking the next stage of character advancement. Instead it can also be something that the players can make use of.

in an RPG campaign, these can be resources that allow players to make big impacts on where the story goes.

Finally, it's probably best practice to set up places for exploration with more possible discoveries than the "main attraction". I feel exploration becomes much more interesting when there is not simply one thing that the GM wants the players to find. It's not super rewarding to reach something when you know it was always innevitable that you get there eventually.

Do you have any more thoughts on what really makes exploration and discovery entertaining in a game, amd how that can be used both in preparation and actual play?

This is a great post. Even trying to whittle it down to the main talking points, I'm still left with so much content. I'm baffled that, despite this, most seem to be discussing the *costs* of Exploration, rather than the joy of Discovery.

So, much more clearly than my post, you have laid out various levels/layers/types of "usefulness". They include:

• none
• Eye candy
• Trophy
• Unlock new zone
• Unlock new capabilities (self)
• Unlock new capabilities (other)

As you correctly pointed out, "eye candy" is much more suited to a visual medium. However, that doesn't mean that it is completely incompatible with RPGs. It just means that you have to spend more effort for less reward. Striking that balance is something very few GMs get right.

-----

You have talked about directed exploration, exploring for a specific purpose, to find things placed there for a specific purpose - "keys" to unlock specific "doors", as it were.

Although both can be rewarding, it is important to note that this is not the same as Exploring for the joy of exploration. Do not mistake one for the other - they do not scratch the same itch, they satisfy different people in different ways at different times.

-----

As you probably noticed from my initial haphazard lists, "unlock new ability for others" wasn't really on my list. It's not that there's not a place for such things so much as that, when talking about a game based on the "jot of exploration", this feels more like a gotcha: you made this cool discovery of nuclear fission, now the man is going to turn it into a bomb. It highlights how the NPCs are so much colder than you, and has them abusing your innocent discovery, leading to players who never want to publish their discoveries ever again.

Again, it can be done right, but it's something that needs to have the tone properly telegraphed, and to be handled with care.

-----

I strongly agree that you should make *lots* of things for the PCs to discover, and that they should all feel (and be) optional. I go one step further, and say that *utilizing* these discoveries should *also* feel optional, and that, while they should be prepared for these discoveries to have a huge impact on the campaign / world, it should be entirely up to the PCs *how* they are going to have their discoveries impact the world.

Or, as I like to discuss it, "discoveries" should be treated as a toolkit for the PCs to leverage as they see fit.

[Yora]

Thinking about it for a bit, I think eye candy can still be a meaningful element as long as it is some kind of indicator for something else. Something that is described to look strange and amazing can still be genuinely fascinating for players as long as it can serve as a clue that helps with understanding what the place is about and what's going on there.
Stone thrones with half-crystallized skeletons on them may not have any practical use for the players, but they can be hints for something that is somewhere else in the place that turns bone into crystal. The players might also be wondering if the process happened when the creatures where already dead, or if it was the crystallization that killed them. In other parts of the location, their knowledge about the crystals could warn them that they are entering the lair of a dangerous creature, or that old containers contain a highly hazardous substance.

To be useful, a discovery does not need to be an object that the players can take with them and use.

[Mechalich]

Thinking about it for a bit, I think eye candy can still be a meaningful element as long as it is some kind of indicator for something else. Something that is described to look strange and amazing can still be genuinely fascinating for players as long as it can serve as a clue that helps with understanding what the place is about and what's going on there.

If you're plotting a course through the wilderness recognizable landmarks have value all on their own. During the Lewis & Clark expedition the team had no idea where they were after leaving the Missouri River until they sighted Mount Hood and recognized it from descriptions, putting them back on the map again. Likewise ascending a high point allows you to see for a long ways, which is highly valuable in terms of both determining which way to go next and surveying the land around you.

I think this goes back to the age old question of whether or not your table likes tracking their ammunition. There is a bit of a slippery slope to handwaving survival strategies like this one, because on the one hand, any Character in their right mind would want to trivialize survival as much as possible so they can focus on other things. On the other hand, this could allow players and the DM to totally handwave the concern for food entirely by saying, "You have a ranger/druid in the party and their Passive Survival score is plenty enough to find food for everyone and your pack animals every day."

I think it's important to emphasize that, in most typical wilderness environments in a pre-industrial setting (meaning with pre-industrial levels of plant and animal life) keeping a small group of humans and even their pack animals alive isn't actually that difficult. Even most desert environments usually have some level of water, food, and forage available, yes there are areas like the Empty Quarter in Arabia or the Taklamakan Desert in Central Asia that have no resources available, but people generally do not try to cross them and there is little reason to do so because a giant expanse of nothing but sand dunes is uninteresting.

It is true that there are some biomes almost completely without supporting resources. Arctic exploration was notorious for a high death rate among explorers, but that has a lot to do with attempting to cross vast expanses of nothing but ice. Many stranded explorers managed to survive in place living off native wildlife for quite some time even if they ultimately succumbed to disease or injury rather than being rescued. Regardless, it's very important to determine the general hostility of the overall terrain type you're going to be exploring before you start exploring, since that will greatly influence what sort of resources you need to track. As a general rule of thumb, if there are already humans living in the landscape at all, even at very low densities, survival for a small group isn't a huge deal (if the players are something like scouts leading an army this obviously changes), it's only when the environment cannot support humans at all that survival issues become paramount.

One thing I do think that it is useful and perhaps even essential to track for an exploration campaign is time. Time spent doing things like foraging, conducting repairs, waiting for the sick to heal, and so forth is all time that is generally not spent moving, and some sense of time limits makes sense. It need not be lethal in any way, but it could be that if you take too long someone else reaches your objective first (this can get really esoteric, in the famous 'Bone Wars' paleontologists Cope and Marsh competed to see who could dig up species first, ship them back to universities on the East Coast and get their names published for scientific priority, fortunes and lives were risked over this), or the seasons could change and you'll end up stuck somewhere for six months, or monetary support will run out, or something.

Time limits are, of course, generally annoying in games, but I think it can be made to work, especially if it's made clear that the price of failure isn't death but rather the loss of vast economic opportunity, and if characters still retain the achievements they made along the way.

[Quertus]

Thinking about it for a bit, I think eye candy can still be a meaningful element as long as it is some kind of indicator for something else. Something that is described to look strange and amazing can still be genuinely fascinating for players as long as it can serve as a clue that helps with understanding what the place is about and what's going on there.
Stone thrones with half-crystallized skeletons on them may not have any practical use for the players, but they can be hints for something that is somewhere else in the place that turns bone into crystal. The players might also be wondering if the process happened when the creatures where already dead, or if it was the crystallization that killed them. In other parts of the location, their knowledge about the crystals could warn them that they are entering the lair of a dangerous creature, or that old containers contain a highly hazardous substance.

To be useful, a discovery does not need to be an object that the players can take with them and use.

There is that, too.

What I meant was, things like "mood music" can work simply to, you know, set the mood. Descriptions of how the fetid undead smells of a mix of grapes, rotted tacos, and feet cost little, but can add to the encounter. (Brief) character descriptions, descriptions of recurring NPCs, descriptions of rooms and towns and monsters do add to immersion, and swing-by-swing descriptions of battles can also help immersion. And I, personally, only hate about half of those.

Done right, a picture or description can leave a really cool impression, regardless of its tactical value. Just, IME, it usually falls flat, at least in an RPG setting.

[Pleh]

If you're plotting a course through the wilderness recognizable landmarks have value all on their own. During the Lewis & Clark expedition the team had no idea where they were after leaving the Missouri River until they sighted Mount Hood and recognized it from descriptions, putting them back on the map again. Likewise ascending a high point allows you to see for a long ways, which is highly valuable in terms of both determining which way to go next and surveying the land around you.

I think it's important to emphasize that, in most typical wilderness environments in a pre-industrial setting (meaning with pre-industrial levels of plant and animal life) keeping a small group of humans and even their pack animals alive isn't actually that difficult. Even most desert environments usually have some level of water, food, and forage available, yes there are areas like the Empty Quarter in Arabia or the Taklamakan Desert in Central Asia that have no resources available, but people generally do not try to cross them and there is little reason to do so because a giant expanse of nothing but sand dunes is uninteresting.

I'm going have to point out we're talking about Fantasy Exploration as a game.

TTRPGs don't usually model realistic combat all that well, but no one minds, because it makes a fun game anyway.

No harm in learning what we can from realism, but we're shooting ourselves in the foot if we pursue simulationism over versimilitude.

After all, Lewis and Clark never had to worry about goblins, trolls, and dragons in their wilderness adventures. Some things just do not translate.

It is true that there are some biomes almost completely without supporting resources. Arctic exploration was notorious for a high death rate among explorers, but that has a lot to do with attempting to cross vast expanses of nothing but ice. Many stranded explorers managed to survive in place living off native wildlife for quite some time even if they ultimately succumbed to disease or injury rather than being rescued. Regardless, it's very important to determine the general hostility of the overall terrain type you're going to be exploring before you start exploring, since that will greatly influence what sort of resources you need to track. As a general rule of thumb, if there are already humans living in the landscape at all, even at very low densities, survival for a small group isn't a huge deal (if the players are something like scouts leading an army this obviously changes), it's only when the environment cannot support humans at all that survival issues become paramount.

On the other hand, if the terrain isn't especially dangerous, it is all the more likely it will get mapped out by NPCs commissioned by a king. It can be often safe to assume if Adventurers are tasked with exploration that the NPCs who went before already failed to return safely.

If the exploration isn't Adventurous or Fantastic, why in the heck are we playing these characters in this story?

Time limits are, of course, generally annoying in games, but I think it can be made to work, especially if it's made clear that the price of failure isn't death but rather the loss of vast economic opportunity, and if characters still retain the achievements they made along the way.

"You have six seconds to act before your turn in combat is over."

I was recently setting up a halloween game for friends in 5e and I started to notice you can make an adventuring day line up pretty squarely with an actual in-game day when traveling on province scale. I forget the specifics, but with 24 hours, players could expect to spend 8 hours long resting, 8 hours traveling (moving 2-4 province hexes per hour, assuming no delays), leaving 8 hours to spend investigating key locations (ie, dungeon delving). Funny enough, if you try to keep travelling more than 8 hours, you start running a risk of exhaustion.

8 hours is an ample time for adventuring in a day, giving time for short rests if needed and allowing players to choose if they want to search the abandoned ruins for minutes or even hours.

They can obviously try and squeeze a few extra hours out of their day, but it starts increasing the risk of exhaustion.

[Mechalich]

After all, Lewis and Clark never had to worry about goblins, trolls, and dragons in their wilderness adventures. Some things just do not translate.

They had to worry about hostile indigenous peoples though, which is um, well, uncomfortably similar is about as much as I can say without violating forum rules.

On the other hand, if the terrain isn't especially dangerous, it is all the more likely it will get mapped out by NPCs commissioned by a king. It can be often safe to assume if Adventurers are tasked with exploration that the NPCs who went before already failed to return safely.

This is assuming an unwarranted level of specialness on the part of PC groups. A PC party is not inherently more competent or better than an NPC party (of equivalent level or point buy value) in any way whatsoever. If a king hires twenty surveying parties to examine some big chunk of terrain he just acquired access to for whatever reason, the PCs are just one group among many.

Also, overall danger level is not the same as survivability. In most 'unexplored' areas the most dangerous thing to the explorers is the people who already live there, or in a fantasy game the monsters. However, barring major fantasy ecology cheats, any environment that can support one group of humanoids can, in a stretch, support another group of humanoids (though they will usually lack a tradition of finely honed survival skills and may struggle to be suitably efficient as a result).

At the same time, the less habitable a region is, the more difficult it is to justify going there because even if it does turn out to harbor some valuable resource, the effort necessary to extract that resource may not be economically viable given the burden on survivability. This sort of thing is why there are so many mountain climber bodies still lodged in places in the Himalayas and Andes - because it's not considered worth the risk to try and retrieve them.

In speculative fiction, of course, you can change the calculation. You can invent some incredibly valuable McGuffinite that only occurs in some exceedingly hostile environment in order to kick up the pressure to go there. Science fiction does this all the time, James Cameron loves the trope and used it in both Alien and Avatar. Historically the resource worth risking everything for was spices - Magellan's expedition lost 4 out of 5 vessels that it sailed with and still managed to make money - but while spices grow in inaccessible locations, they aren't especially dangerous or desolate. In the Draconis Memoria by Anthony Ryan the vaguely steampunk society is dependent upon drake blood, which is harvested from vaguely draconic creatures living only on one poorly settled continent.

If the exploration isn't Adventurous or Fantastic, why in the heck are we playing these characters in this story?

If you think adventurous or fantastical stories are the only stories worth telling um...honestly I don't even no where to start. Regardless, an exploration can still be extremely adventurous or fantastical without continually offering an immediate threat to life. There's a difference between 'challenging' and 'a single mistake away from death.'

[Pleh]

If you think adventurous or fantastical stories are the only stories worth telling um...honestly I don't even no where to start. Regardless, an exploration can still be extremely adventurous or fantastical without continually offering an immediate threat to life. There's a difference between 'challenging' and 'a single mistake away from death.'

Fantasy has a way of getting the best of both. The danger can be "a single mistake away from death," and that not really be a very large challenge anyway, because resurrection is a thing.

But Lewis and Clark never had to deal with Troll regeneration forcing them to use fire or acid, nor deal with an intelliegent reptile that could fly and breathe fire on them. It is just not the same.

In most versions of D&D, NPCs are not equivalent to PCs. They get different stats that have an intentionally low cieling. NPC wizards are generally cloistered scholars, advisers to kings, spellcraft service selling their spell slots, and a few near PC level that become villains and/or archmages. PC fighters are not "just a soldier" like the rest. They are war heroes and action movie badasses.

There is pretty much zero reason for these people to waste their time doing things that NPCs are capable of doing unassisted, especially when there remain other things that actually require a PC level of competence to manage.

[Vahnavoi]

I've ran a lot of exploration based D&D and OSR games, and I've played a lot of exploration-based videogames that honestly sort of stole their best ideas from early D&D, so I'm sort of confused about what is supposed to be hard about this???

Mechanically and psychologically, extremely trivial things can drive exploration: seashells, golden spiders, korok seeds or pieces of heart hidden under a rock (Legend of Zelda), an ammobox or a new gun behind a secret door (DOOM), extra magic items and potions in optional dungeon branches (ADoM, Nethack), extra energy tank or five more missiles on a hard-to-reach cliff (Metroid), new creatures to capture and tame (Pokemon) so on and so forth. Many people are natural hoarders, whatever gets you a tiny bit ahead in the game can make a sidetrip feel satisfying.

As far as game elements go, it's harder to find a matter with an easier answer. I think a more fundamental issue is this:

Nobody wants to listen to GMs verbally describing the looks of landscapes, caves, and ruins.It'st not a comparable experience to seeing.

You're right that listening isn't the same as seeing. But that's missing the forest for the trees. Before we had visual media, we had orators, poets, storytellers etc.. Today, we have radio and audiobooks. If you're leading a game face-to-face, when people come to your game, they're fundamentally signing to listen to you (and each other) speak for an hour or few.

If what you speak of, and how you speak of it, is something "nobody wants to listen to", you need to become a better speaker. Seriously. Take a poetry course or something. It's a skill, you totally can get a whole room of people shut up and listen how awesome a single flower is, if you just want to.

[Saintheart]

Other tip for not-boring exposition? Don't just use visual details. Hit all five senses. It's one thing to say a cave is the size of a dragon's mouth and as black as Red Fel's soul, it's another thing to say even your bootheel on the stone echoes off the far wall, the air is moist on your face, but a smell like rotten eggs, sulphurous, burns the back of your throat.

[Tanarii]

If what you speak of, and how you speak of it, is something "nobody wants to listen to", you need to become a better speaker. Seriously. Take a poetry course or something. It's a skill, you totally can get a whole room of people shut up and listen how awesome a single flower is, if you just want to.

Poetry reading (and verbally storytelling) are boring as heck. Just like long winded descriptions of landscapes, or dungeon rooms for that matter. Ain't nobody got time for that. Keep it to relevent details. Anything that isn't potentially important or a red herring or something that might otherwise impact player decision making should be left out.

Note that still includes a lot of stuff that will result in a player 'visualizing' the scene (be it actually visual or not). But thats not the goal. The goal is to give them the ability to make meaningful decisions.

[Yora]

To bring back an earlier question: Are Exploration Games synonymous with Survival Games?

[Vahnavoi]

Poetry reading (and verbally storytelling) are boring as heck. Just like long winded descriptions of landscapes, or dungeon rooms for that matter. Ain't nobody got time for that.

There are demonstrably loads of people who will pay money to listen to someone read Lord of the Rings aloud. People buy and listen to audiobooks that last for literal days. Your subjective opinion on what's boring isn't what counts, what counts is the opinion of your audience, in case of a game, your players'. The premise that "nobody wants to listen" to a GM's description is provably false, so instead of fixating on people who don't want to listen to you, you start by finding someone who does want to?

Keep it to relevent details. Anything that isn't potentially important or a red herring or something that might otherwise impact player decision making should be left out.

Note that still includes a lot of stuff that will result in a player 'visualizing' the scene (be it actually visual or not). But thats not the goal. The goal is to give them the ability to make meaningful decisions.

When talking about rewards, being able to describe them in a rewarding way is important. Pure functionalism doesn't carry you when the game approaches a lull or and end state. I mean, there are a lot of things you can do with a princess and half the kingdom, but you often don't get to try because the game is over at that point. So if you can't sell it as a happy ending, it will still feel anticlimatic.

---

On a different topic:

To bring back an earlier question: Are Exploration Games synonymous with Survival Games?

No, but making an exploration game into a survival game is one of the easier ways to flesh out the game part. The survival parts answer the question of, "what am I supposed to do, like, right now?" It creates the steps of the decision chain that takes you from place A to B.

If you want to do exploration without survival, you need some other central conceit to answer that question, some reason to move from A to B. I'd say Pokemon is a good contrast point. "What am I supposed to do?" Catch Pokemon. Caught all Pokemon in this are? On to the next one, there might be more there. So on and so forth.

[farothel]

There are ways to do this. If your PCs are members of the Pathfinder society, they can be send out to explore ruins and such, and the knowledge of such can gain them renown. They will get membership of exploration guilds, are known in their city and later their country, things like that. Of course, you need players who want to play for that kind of reward (although they can still encounter things in these ruins, and get some monetary reward out of it).

It's the easiest in games with a strong social component in the rules. Games like 7th Sea or Wolsung (just to name 2 I'm familiar with, I'm sure there are many others), where getting famous can be a goal on its own rather than a by-product of you doing whatever it is you do and you don't need to gain that much money as you level up to get ever better magical equipment.

[Yora]

Yes, I am thinking pure exploration in a vacuum is not sufficient to drive an adventure. Walking around to see what you find has no stakes. You can't fail at that, and the only bad consequence of it is that you could get hurt or killed. Which is easily avoided by simply not exploring.

To have stakes, and a way to determine success or failure, you also need to have something to search for. When you set out, there needs to be some expectation for when you have succeeded in your search and can return home successfully.

Gold is the easiest answer, because gold has an inherent value of being easily traded into whatever else you might want. Even of you want nothing for yourself and only help people in need, gold lets you do that.
But this universal value of gold also is a limitation in a narrative sense, in that it's completely interchangeable. Any gold is as good as any other gold. It's an innert, nonperishable substance that can be stored and transported in any way umaginable. That makes it so useful as a means of exchange, but does not lend itself to a great variety of stories that come from it. Someone might try to stop you from taking the gold, and someone might try to take your gold away from you, but that's about it. In reality there is of course the moral minefield of the gold mining industry, but that's not something that comes up in adventure RPGs. You could do something with the piles of golden treasures being in the possession of a local population, but the ethical problems of stealing and robbery are not exactly complex. Either the players are okay with stealing or they are not, that's generally the end of the story.

I think for interesting exploration stories, there are probably two main things that the players could be searching for. A useful resource, or information about possible threats. Discovering a reasonable safe passage between to points would be a third thing, but probably not one that comes up in adventures and campaigns often, and is more about large scale surveying than hands on exploring of caves, ruins, and dungeons.

When you find a resource, it first has to be transported before it can be useful.
When you discover a hidden threat, it first needs to be neutralized before there is any benefit.
Both things are something that players could do, but not necessarily have to do. If their role is more one of scouts, then simply reporting their findings to workers or warriors can conclude their part in the whole undertaking. If resource management is to have a major role in the campaign, then extracting and transporting the resources can be a second task for the players. If combat is meant as a focus, then they could take care of neutralizing the threat. This probably would have a stronger feeling of closure.
But it could also be tedious busywork, depending on the game system and the characters and the players' preferences. Establishing a mining colony or clearing out an entire fortess might not be very interesting to play (though it also could be) or not feel appropriate for the tone and style of the campaign. To drag up the most overused classic reference for fantasy adventures, you could have a dramatic adventure about scouts trying to make it back to Gondor to deliver news that Sauron has returned to his fortress that is being rebuild. Having the players deafeat all the evil in Barad-Dur would be ridiculous.

[Asisreo1]

I'm going have to point out we're talking about Fantasy Exploration as a game.

TTRPGs don't usually model realistic combat all that well, but no one minds, because it makes a fun game anyway.

No harm in learning what we can from realism, but we're shooting ourselves in the foot if we pursue simulationism over versimilitude.

After all, Lewis and Clark never had to worry about goblins, trolls, and dragons in their wilderness adventures. Some things just do not translate.

That's why you should lean into the fact that its a fantasy by leaving landmarks that have a distinctly fantasy feel.

Levitating Obelisks, Crystals that expand and shrink in a cave, mushrooms that spew out pixie dust, Lava but instead of being fire-based its ice-based.

Even if your world isn't necessarily magical, it's not like our world always plays by the same rules. Just as there are schools of bioilluminating shrimp, you can have bio-illuminating dolphin-like creatures that follow their boat. You can have trees that contort to look like faces because evolution deemed these trees to be less likely to be cut down by the prevailing race. You can have seas filled with a mundane chemical (baking soda) that's so highly concentrated that everything that tries to live in it dies like our own red sea.

Just because its fantasy doesn't mean there can't be eye-popping sights to see that warrant enough wow for the players to stop and imagine it.

As for visuals, you can commission artwork or find a picture online that looks similar. Load it onto the VTT or mirror it on your monitor/TV to give the players a sight they actually get to behold.

[Pleh]

To bring back an earlier question: Are Exploration Games synonymous with Survival Games?

No, but making an exploration game into a survival game is one of the easier ways to flesh out the game part. The survival parts answer the question of, "what am I supposed to do, like, right now?" It creates the steps of the decision chain that takes you from place A to B.

If you want to do exploration without survival, you need some other central conceit to answer that question, some reason to move from A to B. I'd say Pokemon is a good contrast point. "What am I supposed to do?" Catch Pokemon. Caught all Pokemon in this are? On to the next one, there might be more there. So on and so forth.

Agreed. Exploration games tend to boil down into Survival games, because Games are essentially about imposing meaningful and in some way tactical decisions for the player to make.

That's part of why there is so much stigma in video games about what are called, "Walking Simulators." It begins to call into question what constitutes a game if your core game "mechanic" is barely more interactive than a casual walk through a park.

Technically, walking through a park you've never seen before can be entertaining and branching paths through the park might offer the "player" certain choices. But you note that there generally aren't any meaningful choices (except maybe when you decide to leave the park and do something else). If anything, the distinct uneventfulness is one of the objectives of a park, offering a slow pace and unobtrusive moment of peace in an otherwise busy and frantic life.

Most people wouldn't call that a game, except that certain video games try to capture a similar experience.

To make Exploration have a set of meaningful choices, there has to be something to be lost and/or gained by what you do and don't choose to explore (or at least in how you choose to explore it).

In essence, there has to be some Stake to the Game to make Exploration have some kind of meaning behind the decision the game poses to the players.

Survival pairs naturally with Exploration. It is the fundamental state of the animal kingdom: search for food/mates while avoiding threats. Survival Exploration works because it is the foundation of the experience of all living creatures, making it very easy to turn into an engaging form of Gameplay. If anything, it's probably TOO easy and many game designers get into trouble relying on the formula rather than putting effort into fleshing out their own specific take on the genre.

I also agree about the point in Pokemon, though I'll add that this can be generalized to say that Exploration can be a game about Completionist Item Collection. Survival doesn't have to be a factor. But there's also a reason most games will add this on as a secondary objective. Collect Them All Exploration games can be very unsatisfying unless you manage to get that 100% completion rating, so it can get sour pretty fast if you hit a roadblock on even a single collectible you can't figure out. To downplay this and protect the game from derailing on a single missed collectible, most game designers set it as a secondary objective OR they make it so you don't actually need 100% to unlock the ending. Making it the central theme of an entire TTRPG campaign could be interesting, but you'd have to be careful to make sure it's still achievable. I could easily see a good campaign ripped straight from the original Pirates of the Caribbean plot, with players trying to reclaim the cursed treasure they stole to lift the curse that haunts them, but you can see why the Game version of this would have to resolve differently than the movie version.

Another version of Exploration game is Exploration as Puzzle, getting back to the Metroidvania. Granted, in Metroidvania, there's SOME survival elements, more or less linked to the combat system, but the meat of the gameplay is that the entire dungeon/map is actually a Puzzle Box, where each step of progress unlocks the next and you solve the puzzle through familiarity with the map. You really don't NEED a Metroidvania game to be based around any kind of survival. A Metroidvania game where nothing in the game could kill you would probably feel like Baby's First Metroidvania, but it could still be a good game if the puzzle is engaging enough.

But the basic point is that Exploration isn't a game by its own nature. Exploration becomes a game when the process of Discovery by Exploration has the potential for Loss and Gain based on Tactical Choices.


EDIT

That's why you should lean into the fact that its a fantasy by leaving landmarks that have a distinctly fantasy feel.

Levitating Obelisks, Crystals that expand and shrink in a cave, mushrooms that spew out pixie dust, Lava but instead of being fire-based its ice-based.

Even if your world isn't necessarily magical, it's not like our world always plays by the same rules. Just as there are schools of bioilluminating shrimp, you can have bio-illuminating dolphin-like creatures that follow their boat. You can have trees that contort to look like faces because evolution deemed these trees to be less likely to be cut down by the prevailing race. You can have seas filled with a mundane chemical (baking soda) that's so highly concentrated that everything that tries to live in it dies like our own red sea.

Just because its fantasy doesn't mean there can't be eye-popping sights to see that warrant enough wow for the players to stop and imagine it.

As for visuals, you can commission artwork or find a picture online that looks similar. Load it onto the VTT or mirror it on your monitor/TV to give the players a sight they actually get to behold.

I mean, yeah, but I don't sit down to play TTRPGs just to hear a pretty story about fantastic things. I play TTRPGs to role play a character DOING fantastic things IN fantastic places AGAINST fantastic challenges.

I hear Levitating Obelisks and my first thought is: Can I shape one into a box to make a magic wagon?

I... really don't care about aesthetics very much in a tabletop game. It's more important in a Video Game that is based on conveying information to the player through a visual medium. But the real power behind a TTRPG is Corporate Creative Imagining. If the DM puts something pretty in front of me, it should be implied that I am free to use this thing tactically to advance my goals and objectives (or that it's a warning of a potential threat to those goals and objectives).

Seeing something pretty isn't really an end of itself in a TTRPG, because that's mostly just signing up to listen to the GM read a book to you. Kinda stops being a game at that point.

I don't mind going to a friend's concert to listen to them perform prose if that's what they want.

I just shouldn't have to roll up a character sheet to do that.

[Asisreo1]

EDIT



I mean, yeah, but I don't sit down to play TTRPGs just to hear a pretty story about fantastic things. I play TTRPGs to role play a character DOING fantastic things IN fantastic places AGAINST fantastic challenges.

I hear Levitating Obelisks and my first thought is: Can I shape one into a box to make a magic wagon?

I... really don't care about aesthetics very much in a tabletop game. It's more important in a Video Game that is based on conveying information to the player through a visual medium. But the real power behind a TTRPG is Corporate Creative Imagining. If the DM puts something pretty in front of me, it should be implied that I am free to use this thing tactically to advance my goals and objectives (or that it's a warning of a potential threat to those goals and objectives).

Seeing something pretty isn't really an end of itself in a TTRPG, because that's mostly just signing up to listen to the GM read a book to you. Kinda stops being a game at that point.

I don't mind going to a friend's concert to listen to them perform prose if that's what they want.

I just shouldn't have to roll up a character sheet to do that.

Agreed, and that's why such things need to be included in the game, and why a DM should be flexible in their approach when introducing these locales.

I'd have never thought of you using the obelisks to make magic weapons, but that's incredibly interesting so I'd ask you how you'd plan on gathering the obelisk's materials and work with you on gathering these resources to make this magic item. In this way, you've made a discovery and made it your own. You could have decided to leave the obelisks be, it was a 4-5 word mention anyways, but you or your character has interacted with these.

And I think that shows how a curious or efficient type of player or character can also gain something meaningful to them when they see these sights.

In my eyes, "you can't do anything with that" is a punishment worse than damage because it means both you and the DM just wasted everyone's time on nothing while also disrupting immersion by saying its impossible to break a wooden box the DM put in the first place. It's as annoying as invisible walls in videogames except the game put something extremely interesting on the other side of the wall, never to be touched.

[Mechalich]

I think for interesting exploration stories, there are probably two main things that the players could be searching for. A useful resource, or information about possible threats. Discovering a reasonable safe passage between to points would be a third thing, but probably not one that comes up in adventures and campaigns often, and is more about large scale surveying than hands on exploring of caves, ruins, and dungeons.

Discovering a safe passage works if the players are on a short leash, whether physically or temporally, and also if the players are the sort of swords-first explorers who find a safe route by making it safe through force of arms. For example, if you're say, plotting the route for a railroad, the best route goes through flat land with high soil stability, which means its probably occupied and you're going to need to negotiate, fight, or otherwise get the beings currently in your way to let you through. This isn't an idle example either, a significant portion of the China Mieville's Iron Council involves building a train route through a fantastical landscape.

Also, one way to pair exploration of static landscape elements like caves, ruins, and dungeons, is to have those elements be the source of some sort of corrupting influence that needs to be removed in order to make the landscape safe for development. This is a useful contrast to the wealth-based motivation for exploring the same, which tends to ultimately boil down to some form of grave robbing or pillaging.

[Quertus]

I think for interesting exploration stories, there are probably two main things that the players could be searching for. A useful resource, or information about possible threats.

When you find a resource, it first has to be transported before it can be useful.

About that: I love playing a "D&D Wizard". What that means to me is, a totally weak playing piece compared to the godlike Fighter Explorers, whose goal is to collect scraps of arcane knowledge from the ruins of the ancients.

Note that that involves "collecting resources" and "can be used without being transported first".

"Knowledge" is another resource that often gets collected during adventures.