Exploration might be considered the forgotten pillar of Dungeons and Dragons. While the first, Combat, really uses the character sheet and Social Encounters are all about the role play. Exploration is the one that is supposed to give you a sweeping sense of adventure which can be a harder thing to do. What makes exploration hard is that it relies a lot more on the dungeon master than either of the other two do. There’s give and take in combat as the players narrate their attacks, social encounters are back and forth as player characters interact with the non-player characters. Exploration can just be much more stagnant describing.

So how do you spice up your exploration so it doesn’t just feel like a description of the mountains in New Zealand but actually feels like you’re watching Lord of the Rings?

I’ll get into a list coming up here, but I would say that the first thing is, don’t let it just be a few rolls of the dice for navigation or not getting lost in the wilderness. It’s easy to do a survival or nature check and have them navigate and narrate off of that, but that’s going to end up being a little bit of the dungeon master talking. Unless it matters during those times just let them get where they need to go. So how can you spice it up?

1. Unique Locations
2. Unique Challenges
3. Story Driven Locations
4. Explore Non-Nature Locations

1 – Unique Locations

When we think of Lord of the Rings, to go back to that example, places like Helms Deep are interesting to describe, same with the Mirkwood. Describing a generic fantasy setting or a forest or a mountain or some caves, those are fairly dull. Be creative with your locations, if it’s worth describing, it should have some interesting elements. Instead of being in a a forest, make it so that the undersides of the leaves give off a faint glow, so even though it might be night time, the forest floor is never dark. The mountains instead of being jagged peaks off in the distance capped with snow, the lower sections of the mountains are all cliffs, no winding paths leading up them so steep that not even mountain goats would be able to climb them. Or the cave, instead of being black with stalactites and stalagmites in it, the walls are smooth and appear to be polished, you can look into it and see your reflection and things that seem to be moving behind the surface. If you’re going to spend time describing it, make it something memorable.

2 – Unique Challenges

This one is one that I’m not great at yet. When I’m talking about unique challenges, I’m not talking about random encounters, now some of those could be part of the exploration piece, but in the examples above for the unique locations, how can you turn the fact the forest floor is never dark into a challenge? Well, how can the player characters fall asleep? Or to get to the tops of the mountains, you clearly have a some rolls for climbing the cliffs, and do the players even have what they need to do that? Or in the cave, what sort of rolls can the players do, arcana, nature, religion, animal handling, history, to figure out what is going on with the shapes moving behind the surface of the wall? Give them rolls and challenges that are related to the uniqueness of the location that they won’t have to worry about or overcome anywhere else, but they matter here. A great example of that is previous editions, not so much fifth, of the Mournland in Eberron. That was an area of land decimated by some cataclysm. There are living spells roaming that area and healing doesn’t work as effectively as it should. Those are two highly unique things to that area that can create all sorts of challenges, especially the healing one.

3 – Make It About The Story
Really, this could have been rule #1 every time, to make anything more interesting in the game, make it about the story. If the location that they are in isn’t important to the story, don’t spend that much time on it, unless it’s meant to be a challenge for them to get to the proper location for the story, and then the survival itself is part of their story and the story of the place they are going. But if they are wandering through the desert because they happened to take a wrong turn at Albuquerque, that won’t be that exciting exploration as they try and get unlost. Again, there are types of games that this works with, if it is very strong survival, counting everything, and that’s the point of the game and the type of game you want to play, then it is part of the story, but everything is about the exploration and survival. In a lot of games, though, that’s not the case, so when you’re going to spend time on exploration, make it about the story.

4 – Explore Non-Natural Locations

The ruins of an ancient city that was thought long lost, that’s exploring. A mad wizards tower that no one has gone into and ever returned from because it’s so dangerous, that’s exploring. The dungeon under the a castle where there is allegedly great treasure, that is also exploring. All of these were made by someone, in Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Rings, they go through the Mines of Moria. There’s exploration in that as Gandalf tries to remember the way, and there are unique things about it, mainly a Balrog, but also just the drums in the deep, something that’s constantly there and very unique to the location. Yes, there was a cave location to it, but it was mainly dug out and turned into the city that it had been previously by dwarves, and that’s an easy one to steal and drop into your game. The advantage of Non-Natural locations is that nature tends to be big and sweeping, these locations are smaller, they can have a lot more challenges that can’t just be avoided by walking a mile to the west, and you can do a lot to make them very unique. The fact that it is more constricted also makes it easier to tell part of the story in it, because the players won’t have to search for the plot point or accidentally miss it.

So, what are some interesting ways that you can use exploration? Or I think better, what are some interesting locations that you can drop into your game to make for some interesting exploration no matter where you use them.

Swamps of Death

The swamps of death are aptly named because it’s easy to become turned around and lost in them. In fact, there seems to be no real path through them and with a strong stench and a constant haze, it can be quite disorienting. The biggest concern, though, is that if you step off of one of many crossing paths and into the muck itself, it has a glue like tendency that seems to grab you and hold you there. Unless you’re lucky, you’ll get sucked down and under and join the dead below.

An interesting thing for the DM to know but not for the players, is that the players will always have a swarm of crows around them during the day, up in the sky. And it should be fairly obvious as the crows will rest upon dead trees near the players. But the crows, at night, will always fly off towards the nearest edge of the swamp as to not sleep in the swamp. So if the players can manage to survive for several days, they’ll be able to use the crows to navigate out whatever side they want to leave from.

Cole Mines

Artmis Cole was the original owner of the mines. It was said that he was a shrewd business man. He would push everyone hard to get the most out of his mines and for his money. Two hundred years ago, however, there was a collapse in the mines and Cole and twenty of his miners were lost down there with the minerals. It was rumored that Cole had a map on him for another mine, possibly, that would be worth a fortune.

The wall of the mine glow faintly and the PC’s can feel a tingling on their skin when they enter the mine. The mine actually was for a raw material that can more easily be enchanted and turned into magical items, such as weapons, armor, lamps, whatever it might be. However, in the raw for it’s unstable and long exposure to it can be dangerous.

For this, I’d have the player have to figure out where the collapse was, probably fight some twisted versions of Kolbolds, something easy to get down to it, and then they’ll need to excavate to get to Cole. Cole should be dead, but I’d have down with him some twisted version of elves, it’s only been 200 years, but they’ve been exposed to their radiation for a long time and living off of lichen and bugs that can thrive, so something has changed about them.

House on the Hill

I’m stealing this straight from the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill. There is some malevolent spirit that has created a house of horrors that the players can go through and explore. As they explore, they don’t know what room will be next because others who have explored it, the layout is different, just like in the game the layout can change every time. That means that there might be rooms that no one has ever seen that the players will see, but there also might be rooms that someone has explored before and written about that the players would know about.

I think what would be interesting about this location is the blend of rooms that the players know what they need to do to get through it, the question is can they and rooms that the players don’t know what they are and can they figure them out. At some point in time, maybe with something like a bedroom, I’d create one that looks similar to one that they know about so they can assume it’s that, but there’ll be something slightly different that they might not notice and they could try and do the wrong thing in it.

This one, I’d say, would be a little bit more challenging to pull off, I’d personally lean towards writing up some brief notes on the rooms the players know about, a little description, what the challenge is and how to overcome it. Let the players be able to look through that and figure out what rooms they think they are in when you describe the room to them, don’t point them in a direction, that would give the players more of a sense of exploration and discovery.

Now, these are just some ways that I think that exploration could be more interestingly done in Dungeons and Dragons or ways to make it feel special like combat or social interactions often can. What are some memorable moments of exploration that you’ve had in your games?

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So what are Social Encounters?

It can be talking with the shop keeper to learn about her in order to figure out ways to get a better deals on things. It can be searching for clues to solve a mystery or trying to seduce a dragon, because you’re a bard and in way over your head.

While combat is more “roll play” the Social Encounter aspect is more role play. Like in combat, most social interactions are going to have some point to what the characters are doing. While they might end up talking to the wrong person in the bar for a little bit, give them some interesting information about what’s happening or maybe a new quest. There is a bit of a temptation to make everyone into a quest giver or everyone have something useful, but that isn’t always needed, give yourself leeway to make Social Encounters, like we talked about with Combat, something interesting.

So, like I did with Combat, here are some things to help keep Social Encounters interesting.

1. Make it Part of the Story
2. Balance Characters Being Truthful With Characters Who Are Liars
3. Give Players What the NPC Thinks Is The Answer (Unreliable Narrator)
4. If The NPC Doesn’t Know The Answer, Give The Players Another Option
5. Characters Who Know Nothing Should Still Know Something
6. Find The NPC’s Your Players Like And Reuse Them

1 – Make It Part Of The Story
First is pretty simple, even a random interaction with someone on the street can progress the story. Now, it doesn’t need to always, you can have the moment where the players realize that a character doesn’t know anything, but even that should progress the story. If the Archmage Deniphil sent the PC’s to talk to Lord Zuzu and Zuzu knows nothing and doesn’t even like Deniphil, well, maybe Deniphil sent the players away for a reason. Another example of this would be the Towers of Gods Session 2 that I just wrote about here. They are looking for two spies out of twelve different students, which include themselves, so two out of nine most likely. That means that they are having a lot of conversations that won’t reveal a spy to them, but it’s setting up a dynamic, friendships, enemies (?), that they’ll have to deal with in the story. It isn’t some big dramatic plot moment happening in each of those conversations, but it’s going to inform story going forward.

2 – Balance Truthful and Lying Characters
To me, this is one of the biggest issues that DM’s can run into with NPC’s. And that’s striking the right balance of the truth and the lies that the NPC’s are telling. More to come on the truth in point three, but here we’re talking about balancing the two against each other. The pitfall is that DM’s can have too many NPC’s lie, that’s the issue where it’s a bigger direction. That will mean that you’re PC’s/Players are going to start to treat each social interaction as an interrogation. Which, if you then throw a truthful NPC in front of that, now the PC’s are going to create enemies of NPC’s that maybe should have been their friends. So balance out the two, and by that I don’t mean an even 50/50 split, that’s lying too much. Use lying sparingly with NPC’s who have something to hide, even if it isn’t what the players might think it is. And using lying is even better when it seems like it could be a betrayal as well.

3 – Unreliable Narration
So, we just talked about lying, but I want to talk about the perceived truth at this point. And that’s talking about the unreliable narration of NPC’s. Much like in real life if you were to show people a scene and then ask them questions about it, separately, you’d get a wide variety of answers about things that might seem obvious. Two people who see a robbery happen might give very different description of a thief. Heck, a Gnome is going to see someone as much taller than a 6′ Dragonborn would. So let them get the general details right but get some specifics wrong here and there, and have them be inconsistent with others if it makes sense. This, unlike lying, isn’t being used to trick the PC’s. This is being used because NPC’s shouldn’t have photographic memories and remember every detail every time. There should always be something in there that can help point the PC’s to the right person that they are looking for, or the actual events of what happened.

4 – The NPC Knows Someone
So, sometimes it just makes sense that a NPC wouldn’t know anything. Maybe the players are talking to the wrong person in the bar. Or maybe the person, Lord Zuzu is clueless about where all the money in his land is going. That’s fine that those characters don’t give any story information to the PC’s. But they should be able to point the PC’s forward somehow. Get them closer to the person that they need to get the information from. Lord Zuzu might not know where the money in the land is going, but he’d have a treasurer that would be doing that for him, and he’d know who the treasurer is. The patron at the bar might not know anything, but if the PC’s are at the right bar, the NPC or bartender overhearing everything, will be able to point the PC’s in the right direction. I’d use this sparingly, unless you’re meaning to walk the players through several social encounters to eventually end up with the right person.

5 – No One Knows Nothing
To tie into the previous one, no one knows nothing. Aka, everyone knows something. I just got done talking about how the NPC should be able to point the players to the next person until they get to the information they want. But that isn’t always going to happen. In those cases, if the NPC doesn’t know who they should go to next or anything about what they are looking for, they should still know something interesting. This can be a side quest thing, this can be a contact that they know, it can be that they know about building ships or what mushrooms are edible. No one is going to just be a generic grunt who is able to lift things and punch things and know or care about anything else. Every NPC should have their one thing. This gives the players NPC’s to talk to in the future so that when they find a grove with thousands of mushrooms growing in it, they will remember that the one random NPC they talked in the bar and didn’t know anything useful then was an expert on which mushrooms are edible. Use this sparingly, it’s less interesting, and should maybe be in a situation where the players are going to be talking to a lot of NPC’s in a session to find the one they are looking for because they don’t know enough to narrow their search.

6 – Reuse the Popular NPC’s
Finally, but maybe as important as keeping it tied into the story somehow is keep track of who the players are attaching themselves to as a favorite NPC. Is there someone that they are trusting? Is there an interaction that people seemed to be having the most fun with? Reuse those NPC’s, even if they were just a one off NPC that you didn’t think was ever going to matter and you made up on the fly, if the players and PC’s love them, use them again. If the PC’s are tormenting them, use them again. Whomever the PC’s and players have a strong reaction to whatever way it might be, use them again. This can also give you future plot hooks if something happens to a favorite NPC or maybe a least favorite, but somehow beloved for how bad they are NPC is being framed for something. It’s going to give you leverage to get buy in on story hooks if the players care about the NPC’s that they are after or helping with.

I said that I was going to give some examples of this, and I think that Social Encounters are hard to give examples of because they should be closely tied into your game, so instead of an Encounter, here are some interesting NPC’s.

Marathe
– Shopkeeper
– She Likes to Smoke
– Doesn’t Like to Haggle
– Claims to have the best priced potions in town
– Was a fairly well known adventurer before something happened to her adventuring party

Golden Farb
– Investor
– Loves Money
– Very Shrewd with money
– Always on the lookout to make more money
– Will invest in questionable things but would never admit to it

Mic Taloc
– Barkeeper
– Warlock
– Bar Looks Normal But Actually is a Haven for Warlocks
– Willing to help Warlocks in Trouble
– Can Put You In Contact with Someone To Make a Deal

What I was trying to do creating those NPC’s is that they are all going to have something that they know. Marathe might be able to tell the players where a lost temple is, but also might have a bit of a history and some baggage if the players snoop around what happened to her party. Golden is going to always being try to show off his best side, so anything on a subject that’s questionable, he probably won’t answer. Mic is going to be able to help in a very specific situation when asking about Warlocks, but only if he thinks that you won’t be hurting or are targeting Warlocks.

Just by doing something as simple as that, you are going to have more interesting NPC’s, five simple things that are going to make them unique and hopefully more memorable. And, hopefully, even out of those three NPC’s, one of them will stick and be someone that the players are interested in dealing with or will consistently deal with in the future.

What are some memorable Social Encounters that you’ve had in your games?

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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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I think that this is a more interesting question than the party size question, but has just as vague and answer. It’s totally acceptable to have a party that is all wizards, as a DM, you just have to adjust for that, but there is an ideal party balance. However, 5e is built so you can ignore that if you want.

The ideal party balance goes back to what I said in the previous article, it assumes that you are going to have a Wizard, a Cleric, a Fighter, and a Rogue, or someone that fits into each of those archetypes. But I think a more useful way to look at it is do you have someone for each pillar of the game?

Wait, what are the pillars of D&D?

Exploration, Combat, and Social are the three pillars that most D&D games are built on, though fairly often I would say that exploration is not fully used. Some of that is because people just don’t like the resource management aspect that can be in exploration. It’s also more fun to fight something or talk to an NPC than it is exploring which seems more passive for the players and more on the DM to describe what is going on.

These pillars are important though when creating your adventuring party. You want to have player characters who do cover all of these. Now, I generally wouldn’t say that each character should be good at all of them, but all of them should be good at either social or exploration and then generally you want them to be competent at combat.

If the players and DM focus on hitting these pillars in session zero, the ideal party combination doesn’t matter much. For example, I’ve run games where we have two rangers, a paladin, and a wizard. We don’t have a tank character, but you just have to change which monsters you select and how they work. Maybe they are harder to hit, but don’t deal tons of damage as the paladin is the closest we have to a tank. Or were there was a fighter, wizard, and rogue. In that case, you have no healing, so you either have to hand out some healing potions, or have larger fights, but less fights during a day, so the player characters are less likely to die.

So, to recap, any party combo is going to work. It’s probably more important that they work in your world, such as don’t have a party of wizards when wizards are really rare, unless they are fine being extremely unique, and maybe that’s the plot there. But make it work for your world and your game, but any combo is playable in Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons.

What are some odd player character combinations that you’ve had? Are there any that you thought didn’t work or that were weird but fun to play?

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