What exactly is a functioning exploration system supposed to look like?I've been told to look up ryuutama and ironsworn but when I actually read the it was basically just "move on a hex grid and roll some dice." There were no puzzles, no adventure, no roleplay. It just looked tedious.Was I looking in the wrong places or is the exploration pillar just a pile of dogshit, and wotc was right to not even bother with it
Basically to make Wilderness Adventuring distinct from just an abstract Dungeon you need >A large scale, which is what the hexes are for>An impact of the passage of time, usually a Survival mechanic>A complication, typically some sort of weather system but just a decent random encounter system can serve>Finally, and this one is a bit tricky, you need a potential to become Lost. This basically requires you to keep the real map secret and have the Players attempt to create their own somewhat (but not overly) incorrect map.If you want to see a good early implementation of Hexcrawling in D&D check out Isle of Dread. If you want to see how a Hexcrawl can be procedurally generated with suitable depth for ongoing open play check out Hexroll.
>>93407314>move on a hex grid and roll some diceCongratulations, you are now aware of the best method to systemically represent journeying and travelling. What else do you need?
>>93407314>I've been told to look up ryuutama and ironsworn but when I actually read the it was basically just "move on a hex grid and roll some dice." There were no puzzles, no adventure, no roleplay. It just looked tedious.bro are you literally retarded? The adventure and roleplay comes from the results of the dice roll. Do you make all orc encounters in dungeons "you encounter 13 orcs in this room. Roll initiative"? No you fucking spice it up with what the orcs are doing, what the room is, if they have any desires that is relevant to the party etc. Exploration is the same way.
>>93407652I suppose OP's point is that this is nothing that isn't already in 5e D&D (most notably Tomb of Annihilation), so why switch games?
>>93407941If you reduce it down to "move on hex and roll dice" yeah, but that's like saying all rpgs are "roll dice and talk" and then ignoring every single other difference.
>>93408170>ignoring every single other difference.such as?
>>93408206Okyou go down a hex and roll on a table.So far, every hex and roll is the same.But what IS on the table you're rolling? How are you rolling? How often? Does it have detailed subtables? Does it have subsystems related to travel like food, rest, etc? Is it a good thing that it has those subsystems? Is the system focused on survival, gathering food and water, etc? Or does it just handwave them with magic spells that remove any difficulty of travel? Do you have to houserule a bunch of other parts of the system away to make the travel time meaningful?Etc.
>>93407314I know what you're saying. "Roll on random event tables!" is the shittiest kind of gameplay, there really needs to be a concept more mechanically interesting than that.Ultimately, in an RPG, everything is going to come down to a dice roll, I'm not saying it's the dice that's bad, it's the laziness that's bad. I should be able to add modifiers based on having cold weather equipment and a donkey, for example.
>>93408457Adding modifiers is in no way separate from rolling on tables. What else are the modifiers modifying?
>>93409389Every roll in every game boils down to rolling + modifiers. That's literally the fucking premise of the hobby.The issue at hand is how satisfactory the execution is, and it's pretty clear to me that practically nobody gives a shit about how good the execution of travel mechanics is.
>>93407436One thing that strikes me as different about a world map as opposed to a battle map is that a battle map has interactive parts to it, whereas with a world map it's just a static background. That seems very limiting.
>>93409993What's stopping you from interacting with a world map?
>>93407314I roll to make sweet love to Ohio.>In the game?No in real life.
>>93407314>What exactly is a functioning exploration system supposed to look like?It doesn't, because there's no such thing.
>>93410123largely the fact that the pieces can't easily be moved around, especially not by 5 people.
>>93407314>What exactly is a functioning exploration system supposed to look like?What system? What setting? What campaign? What group? What party composition after accounting for the previous four?>ve been told to look up ryuutama and ironsworn but when I actually read the it was basically just "move on a hex grid and roll some dice." There were no puzzles, no adventure, no roleplay. It just looked tedious.Welcome to hexgrid crawlers>Was I looking in the wrong placesProbably, but you forgot to FUCKING SPECIFY ANY DETAILS, so you've got exactly what you deserved.
>>93407314It's supposed to look like Earthborne Rangers, but slightly less gamey (especially in regard to discarding cards).Also Ironsworn doesn't give a toss about hexes, its a push your luck game with distance abstracted as hit points.>>93411341Suck a cock. You're making legitimate complainers look bad.
>>93412160>Daytime in States reaches West Coast>Quality of posts instantly plummets
>>93412189I doubt West Coasties are getting up at 5:30am even to accurately point out that Ironsworn is not a hex grid game. They probably also don't say "give a toss"
>>93412225Shitposters of any time-zone start to be active around 5 AM of local time, so he might be actually right.
>>93412236Let's try to raise the quality then.Here's your hexcrawl seed bro.
>>93412637Ok, but serious question - what's with the "stuck in Ohio" meme?t. Czech
noooo i don't wanna go to ohioooo
>>93412726Ohio is like a sargasso of typicality. When you're in Ohio you have a quite real sensation that the borders of the state are like the borders of the US and there's really no reason to go to any other state since the microcosmic Ohio version of it is only a couple hours drive away.
>>93407314AHHHHH GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF OHIOOOOO
>>93412779>>93413692All Hope Abandon
Oh shit it goes so deep!
>>93413685>sargasso of typicalityWhat that mean in English?>rest of the postI still have no idea what the hell you are talking about. And I don't think this is a language barrier here.
>>93416317Why would anything smugchud says be worth reading
>>93416317I'm saying that Ohio is like a miniature representation of the entire USA. It even looks like a chibi USA - or a bit like a heart, even being positioned in the right place to be a heart. For this and other reasons this area is known as Heartland. We're a bellwether and not just politically. All kinds of products are test marketed because we're so typical. You do understand what typicality is I assume - maybe not the Sargasso Sea, although I would hope you do. There's just really no really great reason to leave Ohio once you're here and cost of living is quite low besides. I'm not sure what kind of an answer you're looking for about why people get "trapped in Ohio"
>>93417173Massive Ohioan cope. There's no microcosm here. Sure, Cincinnati feels more Southern, Cleveland feels more New England, but that's only when you compare them to each other. Ohio feels like Ohio when compared to everywhere else.>>93412726Most of the people posting that meme are from Ohio. Ohio is the epitome of depressing mediocrity. I was in Serbia recently, which might be too out of the way for you to make a good comparison, but a town I passed through that reminded me most of home was Zajecar. If you were to copy and paste that town over and over until it filled all of the inhabited areas, you'd get a good idea of what it's like here. Just instead of culture or history we have shitty football teams. Ohio conditions you to put up subpar everything in the fear that life might be harder anywhere else.
I feel like exploration has always been folly in TTRPGs. It's fine in big, open-world video games that were made by hundreds of staff to ensure a good amount and variety of stuff to find/encounter, but that's not what a TTRPG is. Your DM can't have 1,000 different things ready to go on a map that's measured in square miles rather than 1-inch squares. Your players also can't naturally, organically see something of interest off in the distance/on the horizon and go to it, so there's always going to be an element of the DM leading the players toward something that the DM wants them to do.
>>93417466>Your DM can't have 1,000 different things ready to go on a map that's measured in square miles rather than 1-inch squares.Skill issue
>>93407314>vore>nonfatal>unwilling>entrapment>objectum>teasing
>>93407554Something that is more than just "oh you succeeded on the arbitrary skill check to X congrats you do X" with zero roleplay or potential for interesting interactions.The idea that this is the best travel/survival/exploration mechanics can be is what holds back doing something different with them. Its why OP is absolutely correct that the smoothbrains who recommend Ryuutama as "the exploration" game are just parrots with no thoughts in their own brain. Ryuutama is a pretty okay system on its own, but its travel mechanics all boil down to rolling a single skill check a day. Its boring and feels like playing a board game more than a TTRPG
>>93407314I disagree, WoTC did design an exploration pillar for the game and there's a number of tables and systems to support an exploration focused campaign, including biome based encounter tables and character features that make traveling to or operating in certain areas easier.Almost universally, however, these are the most maligned of the character options in 5e because they don't contribute anything to a character's combat potential and are seen to drag it down due to opportunity cost. Those tables and systems are some of the least well known because they live in the DMG, a book ignored by most of the people who would benefit from reading it.As if that weren't enough, there's some realities of the meta game that kill exploration. Combat, notably, is pretty time consuming and the projected number of encounters in a day would take multiple play sessions for the average group to churn through. Critical Role was not the only force driving people to play "set piece" DND, it was a prevailing attitude before live play series turned it into a doctrine. Most people play, and therefore most balance complaints come from the circumstances of DnD played on the absolute edge of its main balancing mechanic, attrition. Who fucking cares that my fighter can jump more at level 7, the main thing that matters tonight is the one huge combat encounter we're going to do.When people recommend you Ryutama, it's not because the systems are unrecognizably different, there's not so many ways for ttrpgs to be THAT distinct. It's because they take up a more important spot in the game's hierarchy, or are blended more harmoniously into its spirit. It doesn't feel like a drag to get handed a character feature that makes traveling easier because it's a bigger part of what you do. Something that works in the favor of many Japanese games is their exceptionally narrow scope. Ryutama is about travel, change that and you'll end up with a different game. DnD not so much.
>>93417173> I'm not sure what kind of an answer you're looking forSomething akin to what you just provided
>>93418129Well then I'm glad we've cleared that up
>>93417173 Michigan has cheap weed and, as it turns out, isn't infested by the worst namefag on the board.
>>93422521Ohio recreational dispensaries opening this month. The legislature literally had to make regulations banning music, food trucks, ribbon cutting etc because it would be too much fun to handle.
>>93407314You have to pre set all terrain exploration and possibilities, then you make players roll dice to get in a table what they can see. Not that hard.
>>93417466>Your DM can't have 1,000 different things ready to go on a map that's measured in square miles rather than 1-inch squares. as the other anon said, skill issue.
>>93417357This anon is probably from the Akron area. Only dipshits from Akron hate Ohio. It's the best state, invented flight. First to orbit, first on the moon. No one else can top that achievement.
>>93428527Birthplace of Presidents, Roller Coaster capital of the World
>>93422521At least we didn't drop a mint to make a robocop statue that utterly failed to drum up tourism.Michigan is good because... drugs? Jesus Christ dude. Won't defend the namefag though
>>93410684>Pieces can't be moved aboutMark trails, hire locals to build a few miles of road, leave caches behind hidden in certain hexes, ask follow up questions ('The water is brackish? How long would it take me to dig a shallow pool and pour some of the water into it. Next time we come through here I'll have a few hundred golds worth of salt to ferry back'), ect, ect.
>>93412726Ohio used to be this center of commerce, trade and culture within the Midwest. Then much like its perineal rival Michigan, the factory work that was it's lifeblood was traded overseas and it's kind of been in a weird malaise. Despite this, it's still a political powerhouse as a swing state. There's nothing wrong with OhioExcept the snow and the rain~
The inconvenient truth is that a good exploration focused campaign needs a lot of effort and prep on the GM's part. Combat stuff is easy to design, all you need is a stat block and some environment. Exploration recquires more intricate care, so most exploration is lackluster as GMs tend to be just as retarded as players.
>>93410684After a campaign, my hexmaps are usually very different from how they started. Newly discovered places, destroyed places, new roads, trails, bases...In the age of digital, there's no reason to make your map static, unless don't like the idea of occasionally reprinting it, in which case you should just leave a tv/monitor on the game room connected to a pc with the map on it.If it's about the capabilities of your players, remember that these games usually have domain play, and modern games give players absurd magical powers. So, either by being powerful enough themselves or having people working for them, players should be able to significantly alter the map during the course of a campaign.
>>93431119>The inconvenient truth is that a good exploration focused campaign needs a lot of effort and prep on the GM's part.Unironically depends on the system.Played this march a semi-open table campaign for 4 weeks, that was "you are here, you need to explore this, and reach here with your findings". But we were using some custom pulp system that just carried it all on its own, simply generating a really big variety of regular, civilian, non-combat events and was always engaging.Played prior to that an exploration heavy hex-crawl using MorgBorg and it was a fucking shitshow, because the GM didn't do any prep and we were just getting dry descriptions from his d100 list, while the system didn't provide anything on its ownPlayed even earlier a Traveller game that was about charging new site for a mining company, essentially the classic colonial scenario, but IN SPESS!. Traveller did fuck-all to help with that, but the GM did a monumental prep for this, effectively having to pre-design it from scratch prior.
>>93428969Not even saying Michigan's good because drugs, just saying that a fair number of Ohioans I know as far south as Columbus have had a fairly regular habit of leaving its borders for dirt cheap weed in Detroit.t. lifelong Ohio resident
>>93413815>>93414859Good grief, how do you know so much about Rifts and Greyhawk and Ohio... oh.
>>93435383Hey I can see my house from here!
>>93435383This is inaccurate. Dwemer is placed almost exactly on the Kinnickinick, not Athens.
