Tundra Weather Exploration Subsystem Minigame

[Silva Stormrage]

Hello, for an upcoming campaign the players will be set in a frozen mountain region and forced to explore into the wilderness to figure out what happened to another destroy the capital city in the region/how to prevent themselves from suffering the same fate. I want the exploration aspect to be a bit more interesting than normal 3.5 rules will allow and while Frostburn has some good stuff past level 5 it's environmental dangers aren't that threatening. So I am trying to develop a subsystem/minigame for the campaign and could use some feedback/ideas. Thankfully the players already disrupted the material plane to such a degree that teleporting more than 500ft causes an automatic mishap so I don't have to deal with teleportation as much. The expected levels for the campaign are 3-12ish

The players will be exploring a hex based map with each hex being ~2-3 hours of standard movement 30ft walking speed. Every time they move into a new hex there is a chance for a random event to occur: (Magical Storm, random encounter, Negative Energy Infused Hail, etc). The basic gist of the system (I am still working on the fine details) is that each player will get a particular "Tundra Protection Score" based on various modifiers as well as a number of "Endurance Points" based on their protection score. Their protection score lowers the damage/protects them from the snow and random events and if they go out with a low enough score they will just flat out die within an hour or two. They can spend endurance points for various things, IE: Move through a hex faster, move through a hex while searching for treasure/secret passages, spend a point before moving into a hex to negate any ambushes from random encounters, etc. If they run out of endurance points they can lower their protection score by 1 for 24 hours to gain 1 endurance point. Endurance points are recovered by resting with low amounts of points being recovered if you rest in the snow or in a bad shelter.

I am still tweaking numbers and such but mostly I am curious about a couple things.

1: What are some good options for players to spend Endurance Points on. I wanted to make sure exploration was a bit more interesting but didn't want to fall into the trap of making all the options purely mechanical and then players just 100% going for spending them all on movement + search for treasure in every hex. Some more situational ones might be interesting and some endurance point spenders may require a knowledge or survival check to work.

2: What are some good modifiers/penalties for the protection score. I have bonuses for things like cold weather gear, endure elements spell, cold resistance and cold immunity (The blizzard bypasses cold immunity but it does provide a big bonus. Cold Subtype creatures can ignore most environmental hazards though). I want there to be enough options that players can choose different approaches but I also don't want every player to just stock up on their standard equipment and then have the same score for the entire game. Some temporary modifiers would be interesting but beyond some custom alchemical potions or spending an endurance point for temporary protection bonus I couldn't think of any good temporary bonuses.

Let me know what you think on this idea and if you guys have any ideas. It's still pretty early and WIP so nothing is set in stone atm.

[Maat Mons]

If the terrain is challenging for a 5th level party, no ordinary animal should be able to survive there. This should also mean no high-CR carnivorous monsters because there’s no base for a food chain that could support them. Seems pretty limiting, from an encounter design perspective. This is probably part of why Wizards mostly didn’t try to make environmental hazards relevant past low levels.

You should probably let the Survival skill boost the Protection score somehow. I’d give some sort of bonus for Large or larger size and some sort of penalty for Small or smaller size. It might not be an entirely bad idea to tie Constitution score into this somehow. Traveling inside a sleigh with furs piled on top of you should probably provide some sort of bonus, if you can somehow keep draft animals alive. Maybe just use the Mount spell.

By and large, any modifiers from equipment will just wind up standardized across the whole party. The only equipment that you can be assured will differ between characters is armor. I suppose you could punish people for wearing metal armor, with the degree of punishment depending on how much metal is in the armor. That would create a tradeoff between having the best AC and having the best Protection from cold. Then again, all the characters with heavy armor proficiency might just take Dragonscale Husk.

There’s a feat in Dungeon magazine that causes you to treat all Cold damage as Nonlethal damage. If you allow that, it should probably provide some sort of bonus to Protection.

The best option is to be a Druid with the Frozen Wild Shape feat, since that gives you the Cold subtype while using it. When the going gets tough, the tough transform into a Winter Wolf.

Out of curiosity, how do Warforged interact with your minigame?

[Silva Stormrage]

No ordinary animal will survive, all of them will either have the cold subtype, be undead or be something that can burrow deep underground and ignore the worst of it. The region will be uttercold themed so negative energy and undead will be present as well for enemies to fight.

Survival currently gives a +2 as skill synergy but I think I should probably make it scaling to +2 / 5 ranks just so players are rewarded later.

Vehicles are a great idea I somehow didn't think of. I will need to make some common vehicles and prices so they can buy them if need be.

I do have a penalty for metal armor but also don't really have much of a concern if eventually the party gets dragon scale armor or similar.

I also have a bonus for if the players pick up the endurance feat but maybe a more general "+2 bonus/feat related to outdoor or cold survival) but that would also lead the PCs to sending me 60 feats asking which ones gave the bonus and I kinda don't want to deal with that.

Warforged and Undead will get a bonus to their protection score but won't be immune. Likewise if a player builds for a druid and can get the cold subtype I don't have a major issue with that. It makes sense for a frost druid to be able to resist magical tundra anyway and my players wouldn't feel overshadowed or anything if one of their companions was highly resistant to the storm more so than the others. .

[Saintheart]

I'm going a bit meta here. Let me start with the standard warning here not to take anything of what I put as a criticism or a suggestion you are other than a stellar DM, because the most boring threads are the ones where people asking for help then get defensive about what they put forward -- despite presumably knowing that because they ask for help it's inherent that what they have at the moment is either incomplete or not up to scratch in their own minds. I'm just trying to help.

Let's start with: what exactly is your definition of 'interesting', and does that match your players' definition of 'interesting'? And how does 'interesting' intersect with 'exploration'?

Reason I ask that is because you said:

I want the exploration aspect to be a bit more interesting than normal 3.5 rules will allow and while Frostburn has some good stuff past level 5 it's environmental dangers aren't that threatening. So I am trying to develop a subsystem/minigame for the campaign and could use some feedback/ideas.

So I take the word 'interesting' here as a belief on your part that no risk to PCs = uninteresting for players. That being because Frostburn's rules on cold environments aren't lethal enough to impose a serious risk of a PC dying, i.e. that exploration's interesting if there's a chance of a PC dying or being seriously put in danger and that if there's no standing risk of death or at least serious dysfunction exploration is not interesting.

The other references to 'interesting' I can see in your post are these:

I wanted to make sure exploration was a bit more interesting but didn't want to fall into the trap of making all the options purely mechanical and then players just 100% going for spending them all on movement + search for treasure in every hex. Some more situational ones might be interesting and some endurance point spenders may require a knowledge or survival check to work.

I want there to be enough options that players can choose different approaches but I also don't want every player to just stock up on their standard equipment and then have the same score for the entire game. Some temporary modifiers would be interesting but beyond some custom alchemical potions or spending an endurance point for temporary protection bonus I couldn't think of any good temporary bonuses.

These say to me that your concept of interesting is about there being a menu of modifiers available to players that go up and down and that there isn't a reliable set of pluses or minuses to exploration that can be countered with an always-on thing like wearing bear furs or whatever.

To me, though, I think the thing to focus on more is about whether there are meaningful choices in the subsystem or minigame.

Having lots of modifiers - temporary or standing - will generate choice but not meaning. And a choice that's meaningless is no actual choice at all. A hundred different options that all give me a +1 to my NotDyingFromCold score actually doesn't result in any real choice for me at all. The sheer number of options -- without anything particularly distinguishing them (which is to say - making me value one more than the other) means I could just pick at random and it'd wind up the same. Making the choices meaningful, or significant to the players, requires that there's some actual, tangible impact on the adventure that the players have by choosing one set of options over another, there's a reason you would choose a +2 over a +4 (and it being other than "Because only Wizards can take the +2 option.")

'What about the random chance of a magic storm, isn't that making the choices meaningful?' No. Random shifts in conditions merely introduce arbitrariness and unpredictability to the system, to which the rational reaction is: I'll try to maximise my modifiers so they're as high as possible in any given circumstance, so I can best meet an arbitrary random DM screwjob. It is the hundred +1 options problem, but in reverse: I can't actually influence the course of the adventure, I will be hit with random events that damage me no matter what happens, so I must pick the highest score every time to be best prepared for those random events. I believe that's the number one underlying reason for the 15 minute adventuring day.

Random encounters or random 'you just realised all your food got eaten by invisible mice' screwjobs have their place in the attrition game that underlies D&D, certainly, but they are not engines for generating meaningful choices on their own -- they are just a part of how D&D is meant to do it, same as a nut and a bolt do nothing when separated.

I think you're intuitively - and rightly - aware of this risk when you say you don't want your players to just stock up on the same items and have the same score the whole game. The problem is that creating more randomness or arbitrariness alone to the system won't change that phenomenon. No matter how complex the minigame, no matter how many modifiers up or down you throw into it, if there's no meaningful reason why you'd voluntarily have your score less than the maximum you can amass, there is likewise no rational reason for a player to choose otherwise.

The simplest example of meaningful choice is to put travelling speed versus certainty of resources, and indeed it's right there in the Survival skill description: people tend to look down their noses at the indication in the rule that a mere DC 10 check is enough to forage sufficiently to get along in the wild, but they also ignore that you can only pull that check once per 24 hours, and that you're moving at maximum half speed while hunting or foraging, i.e. it's meant to be a massive imposition on your time and movement rate, literally costing you double the time to get from one place or another. The reason it's not often used like that is because most DMs don't make time a meaningful factor in the situations where that Survival check is going to be pulled up. And that in turn being because generally there's no real, tangible consequences for whether you take 2 or 4 days to reach one location or another.

So, like I said, this is a meta exercise, but maybe it's worth a step back and instead of creating mechanical complexity more or less for the sake of it, it's better to concentrate on how you can introduce competing considerations for players. Speed versus certainty of resources is one. Speed versus level of cold protection is another. Maybe time becomes a more meaningful factor because there's a set timer for when certain dungeons open, or when particular predators are on the move through an area? Maybe random encounters involving the local tribe of Others Frost Folk are lower or zeroed depending on the time of the week, or the month, or phase of the moon, or whatever? Stuff that makes the consideration of 'Endurance Points' introduce more benefits and drawbacks than simply 'be surer of not freezing to death by spending up your Endurance Points here'.

And we can talk more about what exploration means later, maybe.

[Maat Mons]

If you do have random storms, remember that players have ways of knowing the weather ahead of time. The Weather Eye spell gives accurate predictions up to a week in advance, though the players would probably travel far enough in a week that the forecast from their old location no longer applies. The Survival skill also allows predicting the weather. In that case, how far in advance they can predict depends on the check result. One way to handle such predictions is to wait for players to use the abilities, find out how far ahead they’ve predicted, and then randomly roll for each of those days. Another way of handling it would be to always have the weather rolled for a certain number of days in advance.

If the players know the weather ahead of time, that could help to encourage haste in some circumstances. If, for example, there’s a location that provides shelter, the players may wish to make sure they reach it before the storm hits. Or there might just be places the players know they really don’t want to be when the storm catches them.

If you’re going to have tiles representing the wilderness, I presume you want the choice of which tiles to visit to be a real choice. That means there needs to be some incentive to not just visit every tile. Time could be an issue. Or tiles could, on average, be a negative rather than a positive, motivating players to visit as few as possible. However, in that case, you don’t want things to devolve into always taking the shortest path to get to your destination. You’d like at least some of the tiles to present an opportunity tempting enough that the players might divert from the shortest path to reach them. You could also have tiles that are especially bad, but that’s only a real choice if the terrain necessitates going through at least one of the really bad tiles, and the only question is which one.

If you want the choice whether to make camp or keep pushing forward to matter, you should probably make some tiles better suited than others as campsites. Then players might not just stop to rest wherever they happen to be when they run out of Endurance points.

[Silva Stormrage]

I'm going a bit meta here. Let me start with the standard warning here not to take anything of what I put as a criticism or a suggestion you are other than a stellar DM, because the most boring threads are the ones where people asking for help then get defensive about what they put forward -- despite presumably knowing that because they ask for help it's inherent that what they have at the moment is either incomplete or not up to scratch in their own minds. I'm just trying to help.

Ya no worries, I wouldn't ask for advice if I didn't want it. I have brought up this system with my players before and the only one who has replied so far was super excited about it. The others are two are highly mechanic focused players who like these kinds of structured systems and one who loves random crazy stuff happening.


Let's start with: what exactly is your definition of 'interesting', and does that match your players' definition of 'interesting'? And how does 'interesting' intersect with 'exploration'?

Reason I ask that is because you said:



So I take the word 'interesting' here as a belief on your part that no risk to PCs = uninteresting for players. That being because Frostburn's rules on cold environments aren't lethal enough to impose a serious risk of a PC dying, i.e. that exploration's interesting if there's a chance of a PC dying or being seriously put in danger and that if there's no standing risk of death or at least serious dysfunction exploration is not interesting.

The other references to 'interesting' I can see in your post are these:





These say to me that your concept of interesting is about there being a menu of modifiers available to players that go up and down and that there isn't a reliable set of pluses or minuses to exploration that can be countered with an always-on thing like wearing bear furs or whatever.

To me, though, I think the thing to focus on more is about whether there are meaningful choices in the subsystem or minigame.

Having lots of modifiers - temporary or standing - will generate choice but not meaning. And a choice that's meaningless is no actual choice at all. A hundred different options that all give me a +1 to my NotDyingFromCold score actually doesn't result in any real choice for me at all. The sheer number of options -- without anything particularly distinguishing them (which is to say - making me value one more than the other) means I could just pick at random and it'd wind up the same. Making the choices meaningful, or significant to the players, requires that there's some actual, tangible impact on the adventure that the players have by choosing one set of options over another, there's a reason you would choose a +2 over a +4 (and it being other than "Because only Wizards can take the +2 option.")

Agreed with what you are saying here, by interesting I more of mean I don't want players do be able to say, "We go to the X mountains in the distance to investigate" and them just hopping on a phantom steed and the next scene they arrive because 1) It goes against the survivalist/environmental campaign design I had going, 2) It can cause the players to kind of check out of the world and treat the world closer to a video game with fast travel.

Meaningful choices would be the more accurate wording here but I want the decisions players make to be 1) Impactful, 2) To have pros and cons compared to other choices). I was not planning on too many circumstantial modifiers for bonuses and penalties but as a DM I function much better with assigning circumstantial bonuses in game for creative actions if I actually have a baseline of bonuses/penalties existing for basic actions. The pros and cons for the actual bonuses is interesting in concept but I am not sure how to apply it in practice.


'What about the random chance of a magic storm, isn't that making the choices meaningful?' No. Random shifts in conditions merely introduce arbitrariness and unpredictability to the system, to which the rational reaction is: I'll try to maximise my modifiers so they're as high as possible in any given circumstance, so I can best meet an arbitrary random DM screwjob. It is the hundred +1 options problem, but in reverse: I can't actually influence the course of the adventure, I will be hit with random events that damage me no matter what happens, so I must pick the highest score every time to be best prepared for those random events. I believe that's the number one underlying reason for the 15 minute adventuring day.

Random encounters or random 'you just realised all your food got eaten by invisible mice' screwjobs have their place in the attrition game that underlies D&D, certainly, but they are not engines for generating meaningful choices on their own -- they are just a part of how D&D is meant to do it, same as a nut and a bolt do nothing when separated.

Hard disagree here though, random nature from the PCs perspective is identical to having the storms pre set as they don't know the odds ahead of time. Survival/Knowledge Checks to predict weather, spending exploration points to get a heads up before a storm hits, divinations to determine the weather (A player is likely playing a diviner so I was going to allow them to divine events ahead of time via spells like divination and such), these are all options that let players interact with a system like this. Plus there will be a time limit to the campaign, encouraging them to go fast. Sitting and bunkering will almost certainly result in the players losing the campaign due to plot reasons (Not going too much in detail since I linked this thread to my players as well in case they had feedback they wanted to share).


I think you're intuitively - and rightly - aware of this risk when you say you don't want your players to just stock up on the same items and have the same score the whole game. The problem is that creating more randomness or arbitrariness alone to the system won't change that phenomenon. No matter how complex the minigame, no matter how many modifiers up or down you throw into it, if there's no meaningful reason why you'd voluntarily have your score less than the maximum you can amass, there is likewise no rational reason for a player to choose otherwise.

The simplest example of meaningful choice is to put travelling speed versus certainty of resources, and indeed it's right there in the Survival skill description: people tend to look down their noses at the indication in the rule that a mere DC 10 check is enough to forage sufficiently to get along in the wild, but they also ignore that you can only pull that check once per 24 hours, and that you're moving at maximum half speed while hunting or foraging, i.e. it's meant to be a massive imposition on your time and movement rate, literally costing you double the time to get from one place or another. The reason it's not often used like that is because most DMs don't make time a meaningful factor in the situations where that Survival check is going to be pulled up. And that in turn being because generally there's no real, tangible consequences for whether you take 2 or 4 days to reach one location or another.

[b]Agreed, and that was the main goal of the exploration points system was to introduce those kinds of decisions and options and was one of the main things where I wanted to get ideas for. Spending points to gather resources is also an actually good idea. I haven't decided how abundant food is (IE how much magically created food lasts in the tundra as this place is not great at sustainable agriculture obviously) but perhaps resources for alchemical potions or similar could be found. Time is certainly going to be a factor considering the campaign comes in with a fairly strict timeline the players are aware of (In the vein of accomplish job by X time or calamity happens)

So, like I said, this is a meta exercise, but maybe it's worth a step back and instead of creating mechanical complexity more or less for the sake of it, it's better to concentrate on how you can introduce competing considerations for players. Speed versus certainty of resources is one. Speed versus level of cold protection is another. Maybe time becomes a more meaningful factor because there's a set timer for when certain dungeons open, or when particular predators are on the move through an area? Maybe random encounters involving the local tribe of Others Frost Folk are lower or zeroed depending on the time of the week, or the month, or phase of the moon, or whatever? Stuff that makes the consideration of 'Endurance Points' introduce more benefits and drawbacks than simply 'be surer of not freezing to death by spending up your Endurance Points here'.

And we can talk more about what exploration means later, maybe.

Yes the mechanical complexity is mostly to take a mental task off of my mind while running the actual game. I can adjust the system on the fly if I need to but as a DM I strongly dislike narrative heavy handed nature like "The storm will occur when they reach X regardless of when they arrive" so I need some underlaying system if I don't want to just make things up on the fly and if I am making such a system I might as well add meaningful choices for the players to interact with it.

If you do have random storms, remember that players have ways of knowing the weather ahead of time. The Weather Eye spell gives accurate predictions up to a week in advance, though the players would probably travel far enough in a week that the forecast from their old location no longer applies. The Survival skill also allows predicting the weather. In that case, how far in advance they can predict depends on the check result. One way to handle such predictions is to wait for players to use the abilities, find out how far ahead they’ve predicted, and then randomly roll for each of those days. Another way of handling it would be to always have the weather rolled for a certain number of days in advance.

If the players know the weather ahead of time, that could help to encourage haste in some circumstances. If, for example, there’s a location that provides shelter, the players may wish to make sure they reach it before the storm hits. Or there might just be places the players know they really don’t want to be when the storm catches them.

Agreed, one of the players is planning to play a diviner and that was how I was going to handle it. Probably with the when they use the ability I roll the dice and see what the results are. There will be outposts in the wilderness for players to get to as well if necessary.

If you’re going to have tiles representing the wilderness, I presume you want the choice of which tiles to visit to be a real choice. That means there needs to be some incentive to not just visit every tile. Time could be an issue. Or tiles could, on average, be a negative rather than a positive, motivating players to visit as few as possible. However, in that case, you don’t want things to devolve into always taking the shortest path to get to your destination. You’d like at least some of the tiles to present an opportunity tempting enough that the players might divert from the shortest path to reach them. You could also have tiles that are especially bad, but that’s only a real choice if the terrain necessitates going through at least one of the really bad tiles, and the only question is which one.

If you want the choice whether to make camp or keep pushing forward to matter, you should probably make some tiles better suited than others as campsites. Then players might not just stop to rest wherever they happen to be when they run out of Endurance points.

That is a good idea though, I could include major sites which are fixed and then minor campsites which are places they can spot one hex away if they are spending exploration points to "Scout" or in hex if they move through it. I already had an idea that the amount of endurance points they gain is based on their campsite so thats a good way to add that to the map.

I can add other spots on the way for them to investigate, they will have a decent map of the general locations so sticking a few interesting spots that they would want to investigate could make them want to chain travel points together to maximize time spent outside.

Thanks for the comments, my responses are in bold

[Saintheart]

Agreed with what you are saying here, by interesting I more of mean I don't want players do be able to say, "We go to the X mountains in the distance to investigate" and them just hopping on a phantom steed and the next scene they arrive because 1) It goes against the survivalist/environmental campaign design I had going, 2) It can cause the players to kind of check out of the world and treat the world closer to a video game with fast travel.

Well, if we take that example of the lazy practical players who just say "I conjure a Phantom Steed and ride there", there's a couple of ways I'd attack that as a DM:

(1) Details. Most vague travel requests can be broken down into smaller subjourneys or multiple stages, which in turn generate choices, and most choices can be turned meaningful if they are phrased as a tradeoff of some kind.

"Okay. Where exactly are you going in those mountains you can see as a blob in the distance? Not sure? How about the most common sense approach, which is to proceed as the crow flies until you see a landmark of some kind that gets interesting? No problem. So, how are we making this trip? Because there's a couple of routes. Given you're riding Ye Olde Phantom Steed, you can fly, and that's doubtless the fastest and straightest route, but given you're kinda distinctive, all those brightly coloured wizard robes flapping around and whatnot ... if you fly, there's a high risk of running into hazards, because you certainly are not the first snack riding a ghost horse that the creatures of this area have come across, and high movement speed doesn't do anything about the archers in this area who are pretty good at bringing down targets flying in straight lines with no cover. The other alternative is to stay low or indeed stay on the ground at relatively lower speed, but it's not as direct and it'll take longer ... but you'll have a much better chance of getting through without being accosted by passing pedestrians."

"...Right, so having lost a few hitpoints to that lucky Cragtop Archer a few miles back, you've gotten close enough to the mountains that a couple of landmarks become apparent. Particularly distinctive is a tall rock formation that looks like a gigantic spear was petrified and left standing up off to the northwest, and to the northeast you can see a gap in the hills which has some sort of localised aurora borealis flickering close to the ground. You could go to one of those locations, or you could just stay on your path and see if anything else distinctive comes up. Or you could do something else. It's all up to you."

"So we're going to the borealis? Okay, direct flight, or a more cautious approach? Well, the ground between here and there is mostly rockfields with moss on them, and as for flight, there are a few distant-looking raptors circling the peaks ..."

See? With travel that's ill-defined, the question "by what route are you getting there?" is one a DM should always have in his back pocket. Because options are choices, and a tradeoff supplies meaning.

(2) Exploration is deciding to go off track. I try to remember that. I think you've got a good shot at getting players to actually explore things if it's not a case of "choose between Ye Olde Undead Graveyard or Ye Not Soe Olde Orc Cavern to walk into", but rather: "While on your way to Ye Olde Undead Graveyard, your Ranger spots what he believes from his rather psychopathic obsession Favored Enemy class feature looks like an orc cavern. What do you do?" Throw the interesting ruin at them while they're doing something else.

Meaningful choices would be the more accurate wording here but I want the decisions players make to be 1) Impactful, 2) To have pros and cons compared to other choices). I was not planning on too many circumstantial modifiers for bonuses and penalties but as a DM I function much better with assigning circumstantial bonuses in game for creative actions if I actually have a baseline of bonuses/penalties existing for basic actions. The pros and cons for the actual bonuses is interesting in concept but I am not sure how to apply it in practice.

I think the best general phrase I can say here is to think of options more in terms of tradeoffs they generate for players. That's where meaningful choice comes from. Hence why I keep going on about "pit time versus assurance of resources" - that's a tradeoff. Another is visibility of movement versus availability of armour: no sneaking for the dude in full plate. That sort of thing. "Yes this glimmering silk of Inexplicable Cold Protection will keep your body toasty warm in the middle of a glacial storm, but it has basically +0 AC, explodes if it touches metal or leather armour of any kind, and imposes 50% arcane spell failure chance, funny how that'll work if something jumps you for your fashion choices out there."

[Silva Stormrage]

Well, if we take that example of the lazy practical players who just say "I conjure a Phantom Steed and ride there", there's a couple of ways I'd attack that as a DM:

(1) Details. Most vague travel requests can be broken down into smaller subjourneys or multiple stages, which in turn generate choices, and most choices can be turned meaningful if they are phrased as a tradeoff of some kind.

"Okay. Where exactly are you going in those mountains you can see as a blob in the distance? Not sure? How about the most common sense approach, which is to proceed as the crow flies until you see a landmark of some kind that gets interesting? No problem. So, how are we making this trip? Because there's a couple of routes. Given you're riding Ye Olde Phantom Steed, you can fly, and that's doubtless the fastest and straightest route, but given you're kinda distinctive, all those brightly coloured wizard robes flapping around and whatnot ... if you fly, there's a high risk of running into hazards, because you certainly are not the first snack riding a ghost horse that the creatures of this area have come across, and high movement speed doesn't do anything about the archers in this area who are pretty good at bringing down targets flying in straight lines with no cover. The other alternative is to stay low or indeed stay on the ground at relatively lower speed, but it's not as direct and it'll take longer ... but you'll have a much better chance of getting through without being accosted by passing pedestrians."

"...Right, so having lost a few hitpoints to that lucky Cragtop Archer a few miles back, you've gotten close enough to the mountains that a couple of landmarks become apparent. Particularly distinctive is a tall rock formation that looks like a gigantic spear was petrified and left standing up off to the northwest, and to the northeast you can see a gap in the hills which has some sort of localised aurora borealis flickering close to the ground. You could go to one of those locations, or you could just stay on your path and see if anything else distinctive comes up. Or you could do something else. It's all up to you."

"So we're going to the borealis? Okay, direct flight, or a more cautious approach? Well, the ground between here and there is mostly rockfields with moss on them, and as for flight, there are a few distant-looking raptors circling the peaks ..."

See? With travel that's ill-defined, the question "by what route are you getting there?" is one a DM should always have in his back pocket. Because options are choices, and a tradeoff supplies meaning.

(2) Exploration is deciding to go off track. I try to remember that. I think you've got a good shot at getting players to actually explore things if it's not a case of "choose between Ye Olde Undead Graveyard or Ye Not Soe Olde Orc Cavern to walk into", but rather: "While on your way to Ye Olde Undead Graveyard, your Ranger spots what he believes from his rather psychopathic obsession Favored Enemy class feature looks like an orc cavern. What do you do?" Throw the interesting ruin at them while they're doing something else.




I think the best general phrase I can say here is to think of options more in terms of tradeoffs they generate for players. That's where meaningful choice comes from. Hence why I keep going on about "pit time versus assurance of resources" - that's a tradeoff. Another is visibility of movement versus availability of armour: no sneaking for the dude in full plate. That sort of thing. "Yes this glimmering silk of Inexplicable Cold Protection will keep your body toasty warm in the middle of a glacial storm, but it has basically +0 AC, explodes if it touches metal or leather armour of any kind, and imposes 50% arcane spell failure chance, funny how that'll work if something jumps you for your fashion choices out there."

The line "Exploration is deciding to go off track" is good advice but I am somewhat confused at what you are actually suggesting here. Are you saying that a subsystem of exploration is doomed from the start regardless of mechanics and there are better ways of handling exploration or something specific with the ideas I have proposed. I agree that simply using this system as the only thing players have to go off of is not going to work that well but just because I am using it doesn't mean I am not simply going to avoid giving descriptions or details or have NPCs give them cryptic hints about a particular haunted treasure filled cave network in the far east or something. I don't see how having the subsystem and giving players those in character suggestions/hints isn't the better option (Assuming I like building the subsystem and the extra work it entails obviously, which I do)

Trade offs are a good thing to focus on and will help to make sure decisions are meaningful, the main advantage of having the endurance point system is by definition spending points on X means you aren't spending it on Y. So as long as decent options exist and I allow players to be creative while spending points that will help. However, I have a couple players which will almost never spend endurance points on anything but what is specifically given to them as an option so I like to have a decent list of options to 1) Give them options out of the gate 2) Ground their expectations and hopefully help them suggest things that are out of the box easier.

The armor is good insight though, at the moment the alchemical cold resistant armor is just that. + Cold Protection. I can add some drawback to make it more interesting.

[Saintheart]

The line "Exploration is deciding to go off track" is good advice but I am somewhat confused at what you are actually suggesting here. Are you saying that a subsystem of exploration is doomed from the start regardless of mechanics and there are better ways of handling exploration or something specific with the ideas I have proposed. I agree that simply using this system as the only thing players have to go off of is not going to work that well but just because I am using it doesn't mean I am not simply going to avoid giving descriptions or details or have NPCs give them cryptic hints about a particular haunted treasure filled cave network in the far east or something. I don't see how having the subsystem and giving players those in character suggestions/hints isn't the better option (Assuming I like building the subsystem and the extra work it entails obviously, which I do)

Trade offs are a good thing to focus on and will help to make sure decisions are meaningful, the main advantage of having the endurance point system is by definition spending points on X means you aren't spending it on Y. So as long as decent options exist and I allow players to be creative while spending points that will help. However, I have a couple players which will almost never spend endurance points on anything but what is specifically given to them as an option so I like to have a decent list of options to 1) Give them options out of the gate 2) Ground their expectations and hopefully help them suggest things that are out of the box easier.

The armor is good insight though, at the moment the alchemical cold resistant armor is just that. + Cold Protection. I can add some drawback to make it more interesting.

Really all I'm getting at is what you're already focused on: in designing a subsystem, my recommendation is that tradeoffs produce more meaningful choice and therefore make a system better. That's probably where my comments stop.

The other comments on exploration are really more tangential - as in, if you're told, "We wanna go there", ask for specifics and sneak choices in that way.

The other comment - about throwing interesting stuff while the characters are doing something else - is just general advice on sandboxes or exploration-type settings. The feeling of exploration in play comes down to knowing how to pique and then indulge people's curiosity -- which is a bit different to just offering a choice of two places to go - it's more like "I wonder what's up in there," than "pick one of these three places to go".

[Silva Stormrage]

Really all I'm getting at is what you're already focused on: in designing a subsystem, my recommendation is that tradeoffs produce more meaningful choice and therefore make a system better. That's probably where my comments stop.

The other comments on exploration are really more tangential - as in, if you're told, "We wanna go there", ask for specifics and sneak choices in that way.

The other comment - about throwing interesting stuff while the characters are doing something else - is just general advice on sandboxes or exploration-type settings. The feeling of exploration in play comes down to knowing how to pique and then indulge people's curiosity -- which is a bit different to just offering a choice of two places to go - it's more like "I wonder what's up in there," than "pick one of these three places to go".

Ah I understand now thank you, you have been giving good advice so I appreciate it.