Exploration Without Limits

The characters have a goal. Between them and that goal lies a long road, or perhaps they don't even know exactly where their goal is. It's the DM's job to make this journey exciting and meaningful. A genuinely difficult task.

Across the vast reaches of the internet you can find many approaches to this topic. In this post I want to explain how I tackle this problem myself. Naturally (as always) with my usual focus on immersive storytelling.

The Journey Is the Destination

Whether it's a journey through a massive city, an untamed stretch of wilderness, a dungeon, or a winding fortress — for the characters in the game world, in the vast majority of cases, the destination is the destination. Some object, place, or person needs to be found. What's important to understand is that this often isn't true in the same way for the players at the table.

By choosing to play out the journey, on a meta level the path itself becomes the goal — in a sense, an expectation arises that the path will be paved with exciting scenes, decisions, encounters, and/or fights.

There can therefore be a bit of friction between the character's motivation and the player's motivation, which in my opinion is the reason these episodes often feel "off."

On the flip side, it becomes the DM's goal to enable as many meaningful decisions as necessary, so that both the players and their characters experience the journey as exciting and meaningful.

The Wrong Role Model

I want to talk briefly about dungeon crawls, which are often treated as the gold standard in published adventures and other D&D source material.

When it comes to immersive storytelling — and also min-maxed hack-and-slash — I'm personally not a fan of dungeon crawls or the style of slowly uncovering a contiguous environment the way you would in a video game.

Here's why:

Unnatural environments and a lot of work.

When we as DMs want to include, say, a gigantic castle in our adventure, there are usually very concrete reasons for it. Maybe the players need to reclaim a stolen artifact?

So we need some kind of treasure vault with security measures. Guards waiting around the grounds and in their quarters. A castle surely has a throne room, right? Bedchambers and a kitchen are important too... and then things start getting thin. What other significant rooms can be found in castles, and how are they logically connected?

Once you start working out a concrete, coherent layout for an environment, you quickly realize you have very little idea about castle construction, geology, city planning, and/or dragon hoard design (?). All the gaps between the interesting locations still need to be filled, after all. If you stubbornly stick with the plan anyway, you end up putting in a lot of effort to create uninformed, unnatural environments — usually constrained by the size and shape of a sheet of paper.

Some DMs may be especially gifted and, in a wave of inspiration, create a huge number of interesting locations and encounters to fill a map. But even that doesn't create a natural, immersive environment. Our world isn't packed with tension and adventure in every corner. The opposite is true.

Just for the sake of completeness, the environment gets padded out with uninteresting places and interactions that the players will inevitably run into — as becomes clear in the next point.

The players' curiosity becomes their downfall.

If the DM describes a concrete layout to the players, or worse, puts a detailed map in front of them, that understandably invites them to explore every single room and even the smallest broom closet. Out of fear of missing something, the exciting uncertainty of discovery gives way to the feeling of grinding through a to-do list.

Combined with the first point, this means the players can no longer focus primarily on the exciting locations that drive the story forward or have a meaningful impact on how the session unfolds, but instead on the filler material that's really only there to make the environment feel more natural.

If, at some point, the players decide to ignore rooms and unexplored spots on the imaginary or physical map, that doesn't feel good either — it noticeably drags down the fun.

Dungeon crawls lose their sense of mystery because they have to fill a map, leaving little room for improvisation and imagination. At this point it all seems a bit paradoxical. But there's a solution, as we'll see now.

Less Is More

Exploring and discovering is about surprises. Orienting yourself around a few distinct landmarks and filling in the unknown in between with your imagination. Discovery also means that both players and characters can be disoriented and don't always have a clear sense of their surroundings. Anyone who's ever explored an unfamiliar city in real life, or gone on a long hike, knows exactly what I mean.

We want the players to

• make many meaningful decisions
• encounter few uninteresting locations
• be exposed to the risk of failure
• get the feeling of exploring the environment

Achieving that takes relatively little.

Content.

Every environment is defined by at least the following content:

• A random table of waypoints (10-20 entries)
• A list of showdowns (1-3 entries)
• A destination

Optional additions:

• A list of regional effects
• A random table/timeline of regional events

Exploring the environment.

The characters move between waypoints and showdowns until they either reach their destination, abort and escape the environment, or die.

Whether and how they reach their destination is determined with group Wisdom (Survival) checks. If at least half the group succeeds on the check, that counts as a success.

The DC for the check is set beforehand by the DM based on the environment, and can be made easier or harder depending on circumstances — for example, if the characters have a map or a local guide with them.

The group's goal is to accumulate a certain number of successes to reach their destination. After a certain number of failures, they run into a showdown that puts them through a particularly hard trial.

If the group hasn't yet accumulated the required number of successes, the lead character rolls on the random waypoint table to determine who or what they encounter. The group can then decide to leave the environment via the known waypoints, or make another attempt.

That can mean they reach their destination directly with good knowledge and a bit of luck, or that after numerous setbacks and hard fights they have to retreat.

Running the exploration.

To give a sense of time and distance within the environment, the DM should communicate how much time passes between each waypoint. This is especially tense when the group is under time pressure and in a hurry.

Waypoints can be social encounters, fights, traps, natural events, or locations as small as a shrine or as large as an entire monastery. It all depends on the scale of the environment and what kind of story the DM wants to tell.

If the DM wants to depict a war-torn land, for example, one waypoint could be the wreckage of a plundered caravan with ghouls feasting on it, or the outpost of a scouting unit. A waypoint can also simply be a description of the environment, like a kind of cutscene, to reinforce the atmosphere. The only important thing is that they're not all the same type — they should be varied.

Showdowns are nothing more than particularly hard or significant waypoints that substantially influence the course and/or outcome of the journey by putting the group to the test. They aren't added to the general list of waypoints, since they only come into play once the group has accumulated a certain number of navigation failures. To continue the earlier example: a showdown could be that the group is ambushed by an overwhelming horde of hostile marauders trying to capture them to sell as slaves.

Compared to the group's goal, showdowns represent potential dark endings to their journey.

Expanding the system.

Regional effects can make exploration feel fundamentally different and special. Perhaps the regional effects can even be influenced by decisions made at the waypoints. For example, maybe the curse of an angered nature spirit hangs over the land, making it harder to cast spells. The group might get the chance to make an offering at a shrine to lift the effect for themselves.

The journey can be enhanced in a similar way with regional events. The simplest example would be a change in weather. These can occur randomly, with the DM rolling on a table at regular intervals, or on a set schedule — for example, the DM deciding that the event happens after 2 hours of travel time.

In general, the concept can very easily be expanded with your own mechanics, depending on the mood you want to create. In a horror adventure, maybe the characters lose sanity with each attempt to reach their destination, risking going mad?

The possibilities are endless.

It All Comes Down to Scale

The great thing about this method is that it scales freely. From the moment the DM needs to run a journey where the characters have to navigate through a sprawling environment, this approach can be applied — whether that's an underground temple complex, a battlefield, or the endless expanse of an unexplored ocean that the group crosses by sailing ship.

I hope this explanation has given some DMs a new perspective on the topic and offered them another way to run adventures like these.

For players, journeys are about getting a feel for their surroundings, experiencing stories, fighting battles, being surprised, and feeling the risk of not being in a familiar, safe environment: survival, essentially.