When going through the Dungeon Masters Guide (DMG) you’ll find that they talk about three pillars of D&D. The idea is that you’re going to want to try and get all of the pillars into a game that you’re running, though fairly often the balance of those pillars leans more heavily on some of them than others. The pillars are Combat, Social Interaction, and Exploration. I want to cover each of them briefly here but then delve into ways that you can really utilize them in non-traditional ways in future articles.

Combat

Often this is the main pillar that a lot of D&D games rely on. If you are used to playing with a play grid and with minis, you’re going to have a lot of combat. Also, so much of the character sheet and skills you get from a class are built for combat as well. You’re casting fireball, that’s for combat. Critical hit on a 19 or 20, that’s for combat. Sneak Attack, that’s for a quick combat. But we have sections for hit points, armor class, weapons and spells, most of that is going to be used mainly in combat situations, now because we’re interacting with someone peacefully. And because of that, even if you aren’t trying to use minis on a grid, to fully use the character sheet, most sessions will have some combat in them.

Social Interaction

Probably the next most used pillar. This can just be talking with the “quest giver” in the tavern before you go out to fight someone or something to get the MacGuffin back for the that NPC. However, you can set-up situations where social interaction is just digging for information from a lot of people. An example of this was the last session of Tower of the Gods (you can read about it here). In there, I presented the problem to the players, two of their classmates are spies put in by the school itself as part of a test. It’s the job of everyone in the class to figure out who the spies are or the spies to not to be found. That lead to the players interacting with almost all of their classmates. There wasn’t anything in particular that the players were trying to get out of it, they were just trying to trip up any of the other classmates to see if they could figure out anything that would give them information. So that’s another way that you can end up with social encounters as well.

Exploration

The hardest pillar to implement, going and exploring the world. It seems like it should be pretty easy, but walking across miles of wilderness looking for a long lost cave system where there’s allegedly treasure, that isn’t that exciting. The common answer is to drop in combat, so you “explore” for five minutes with a couple of dice rolls and then a random encounter happens, they come across a pack of wolves or a boar charges them or a group of goblins shoots arrows at them. But that’s not really part of the exploration, it’s part of the combat pillar. And if you spend twenty or thirty minutes of real time going through everything and having them roll for survival to navigate and explore and not get turned around every half hour of in world time, it’ll end up being a fairly dull twenty to thirty minutes because not much will have happened. Or they’ll end up frustrated because rolls haven’t gone well and now they are lost. Now, exploration could be exploring a dungeon as well, which would still lend itself to being combat a lot, but gives you a different sort of setting rather than wandering through a land.

So, the upcoming articles, three of them, are going to be looking at the three pillars of Dungeons and Dragons. I’m going to tackle how you can make them work and what interesting twists you can put on them so that a combat doesn’t feel as static or so that your exploration has a sense of adventure to it more than just a random encounter waiting to pop up around the corner. With that, I’m going to try and create unique encounters that you’re able to use in your own game, or maybe I’ll drop into mine, that’ll give the players an interesting challenge.

But before we do that, I want to talk about how and if you should balance the pillars of Dungeons and Dragons so that they are even for your game. I think the idea that it’s three pillars that D&D is built upon would make you think they need to be even. They really don’t. The most important thing is to balance it to your group. If you think they are going to like to explore dungeons and solve the mysteries of them, lean on exploration, if they talk to everyone that they meet to see what information they might have, lean on social interaction. If they are built for fighting and everything is min-maxed, they probably want a lot of combat to show off their characters. You can easily have one be more important and take more of the weight than the others.

Now, with that said, don’t only rely on a single pillar. If all you’re really doing is marching from combat to combat and it isn’t a war based story where the players are part of the army so of course just going from battle, you’re going to want to change it up. Throw in a little bit of role playing and some social interactions so that there’s something between the combats. Or send them off on a mission that requires them to explore and figure out a cave system that might lead underneath the city that they are about to lay siege to. It pushes the players to fully engage with the game, even for the people who love an epic social interaction, if that’s all that any of the sessions are, it’s going to end up being monotonous, so don’t over use the party’s favorite thing.

Which of the pillars do you find easiest to use in your games? Is there one that you prefer or your players prefer, if you’re running the game?

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