Exploring Overworld Exploration
TTRPG Travel can be fun, yeah?
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Introduction
Exploration is a fantastic pillar of the tabletop roleplaying thing. It can also be the most elusive in pinning down for a guaranteed positive experience. I’ve been playing from the GM’s side of the screen (when I use one) for over seven years now, and compelling exploration has always been one of the things I’ve had to work the most at. It is where I have found myself taking the biggest leaps and then ending up a little lost. The first two games I game mastered were A Song of Ice and Fire by Green Ronin - which seemed a mess to me, and then D&D 5E - which the 2014 rules left newer GMs high and dry as far as both overworld AND dungeon exploration rules/norms out of the box.
I’ve been thankful to find Shadowdark, and many OSR/NSR games have the text in them to give a GM a mindset to approach dungeon exploration from. A structure and rhythm that makes sense and is built to let the players hang themselves or the dice to be the tyrant, which is always helpful in keeping the game fun even in the case of a total party kill.
But even Shadowdark, for me, struggles to bring forward common-sense overworld exploration. There’s lots of roll tables, which are great, that imply a setting and give the players things to interact with as they go from hex to hex - but it is kind of zoomed out and just trying to get you to the “dungeon”. There seems to be alot of old wisdom that was commonplace in older entries, like original D&D and its clones, that had overworld exploration baked into the rules.
So what are we looking at with exploration and how can we improve?
Different Games Doing Different Things
D&D 5E does have things it does well. The high-fantasy epic “avengers team” story. The big damn quest. One of the reasons it can be such a pain to get and keep a weekly D&D 5E game running is because when life happens and someone must miss a session, their character might be the center of the story being told at that table right now. Even newer games that are “Powered by the Apocalypse” with a more action oriented play style still seem to have the bottom fall out if a player who was pivotal to the motivation for where the group was going has to step out. So what do you do? It’s just a constant problem to deal with.
Some older games had a player running multiple characters and their attachments like squires, torchbearers, and acolytes. Fashioned after this more old-school open ended style, I have thoroughly enjoyed running an open world game of Shadowdark in the “west marches” mission exploration style - BUT - there is a give and take here. The player’s have to bring motivation and direction that I would have provided previously. One of my main complaints about the epic 5E style game of today is it relies so heavily on the GM to provide a show for the players. Suddenly, it is harder to create stakes and interesting pull for some players. Characters die easier, and they can play forever making new characters, but now you’re riding a line between something being deep or disposable. I want my players to care about what’s going on in the world and that means I want their characters to have weight and meaning to them in the game. This balance is an interesting one to strike that seems to come down to an artistic choice.
Making The Best Game I Can At My Table
I tend to try a lot of things. Some of them are zoomed in, smaller focused and just on the current session, and some things are wider focus and structural. I am always trying to run the best game I can for the situation I’m in. My current theory is the more focused on individual class builds a game is, the harder it is to generalize rules for exploration. Your Ranger needs to get some benefit from being “outdoorsy”, but you can easily over or under-power anything you give them. Are there rules for getting lost? Foraging? How are we making the mundane act of finding and setting up camp interesting to players that are devoting a couple hours to getting from this place to that place? Are we wasting time when we could just warp to the dungeon? Where should the focus be? Older school games that have more generalized or “rules-lite” ways of handling these abstracted things seem to handle it simpler and more effectively. Travel speeds, weather, chances of getting lost or finding a point of interest, these are some basics that must be there to make overland travel have any support from the game rules. And if the game rules support it, it suggests to the players that it is important.
I have recently received my backer rewards from the Kal-Arath Kickstarter from
and it’s got all the things in there you’d need for this. Don’t worry, I plan to review the zines I got from that soon in a separate piece. The point being, when I look around at how games support and focus or ignore overland travel it can be simple to imagine players becoming bored at the table. I want to make getting to the place as interesting as exploring the dungeon. Maybe it’s a different kind of interesting…maybe players will be more interested in something their characters wouldn’t’ be interested in if it is filling out the blank spot of a map…maybe just having more interesting things on the roll table of options for POIs while traveling could do it…which players enjoy the risk of travel into different biomes? does the table find value in this gameplay? These are all specific and important at your table and I think the main reason it is so hard to pin down and make universal.Finding the minigame with resources seems to help give weight to the players. In Shadowdark, thanks to the slot inventory limitations, the food rations the party has and is able to scrounge up becomes to the overworld resource - where as when you’re in the dungeon it is the torches. These different “timers” provide different amounts of pressure, but it’s up to the GM how much that pressure is applied.
If the party can just run to the corner store for food, it undercuts the rations as a resource. I like to use some rolls at a target DC for the situation. At least there’s a chance the players could fail, they could get lost, and I want the players to at least “feel” like there’s some threat even if it is minor. If it is ignored completely, your characters could still die. Mechanics of the game you’re playing will support exploration to some degree, and in thinking about this I am sifting through the many options I have seen in rules on my bookshelf and looking for what will make for the most fun at my table.
Conclusion
This entry is not a definitive advice column. I am as much asking the question as providing the thought process I am going through in determining the answer. As I discover what works best at my table, I’ll add more to this thread.
Finally, here’s a video from WebDM from 3 years go (I miss these guys doing regular vids)
Web DM
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