It's not even rules clarity.
5e should tell you what the skills do.
Leave adjudication and resolution of the skill to the DM.
But make a list of what each skill does in order for players to feel informed of their options.
I disagree with the first statement. Rules clarity is a big deal.
As for skills, I do think that they should have more explanatory text, but I really like how they are accomplishing that in the UA rules, by describing the rules for actions you can take, which ability mod and skills are relevant to that action, etc.
what I absolutely would hate enough that if 5e had it from day one I wouldn’t be playing it, is the “you can do exactly these things with this skill” with every skill having extensive rules around it. Tell players that acrobatics is for getting around obstacles, showing off, maneuvering around enemies, and whatever else
in fairly broad terms.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely. Obscurantism is a selling point: by not telling people what things are for, you don't piss off the (extremely) vocal minority who believe that being told what something is for is identical to being told that it can't do anything else. If your goal is to stay within 5e design aesthetics, then obscurantism is an unavoidable stumbling block.
Please don’t bring this into the + thread about expanding and modifying exploration.
As for the actual thread topic, I agree with Minigiant that a big part of the problem is that it defaults to the least-game-like form of "gameplay": "DM decides." When essentially the entire process, from beginning to end, is "one person weighs the factors and then says what happens," there's...really no gameplay. It would be like if you took gridiron or association football, removed all of the rules, and then said everything had to be decided by a referee weighing the relevant factors and declaring a result. There wouldn't be a game anymore, and nobody would be interested in watching nor playing it.
In order to have gameplay challenges that are worthy of the name, you have to have gameplay more textured than "convince the referee that my plan works." You need player goals, tools to achieve those goals, clarity about how and why an adjudication is made, and steps/processes of resolution. In simple terms, you actually need a system to engage with, rather than a big empty nothing.
I will point out that there
are more rules for exploration than that. If you’re intentionally hyperbolising, that isn’t helpful. If you aren’t, another posted listed some of the rules in the game for exploration challenges or actions. They aren’t extensive, but they certainly aren’t “nothing but ask the DM”.
I push back on this because having clarity about what the rules are is necessary to having the discussion laid out in the OP.
I've put it front and centerline one of my campaigns atm. And in previous campaigns.
Mostly it's about risk/reward. I Give you exp per person per hex. At low levels explore a few and level up no combat required.
Also hide magic items in non obvious places that are a head of the curve for their levels. Philosophers stone in cesspit, magic sword hidden behind a fireplace.
Helpful NPCs with sidequests. Remember speak with plants and animals. That strange ox.......
Also mix it with social. Generally I don't have magic item vendors. Occasionally they might sell sonething though. If PCs have put the effort in.
Ranger ability to lead people through terrain fast? Early 5E refugees avoiding dragons and goblins. Experience points awarded per refugee. Few social checks tgey might join your settlement.
Find a landmark. Award xp. Map a region. Xp and rewards from who paid you.
It would be helpful for people who don’t want to just improvise that, but instead want players to know what is possible and what the stakes are, if the game had a system for rewarding xp for non combat challenges, rather than just “wing it”. I don’t remember any such guidance in the rules but I’d be stoked to be proven wrong. What amount of xp should finding a landmark give, and are there any other benefits like lowering navigation DCs while within X distance of the landmark?
This is an area that I have been thinking about a lot, though I have not reached any definite conclusions. I more or less completely agree with
@Minigiant's post above.
The big issue with the current system is that it is vestigial and also undermined by other game elements. It does not have to complete procedures, what the DM need to have in place to make it work and the kind of record keeping needed to make the old school logistics base exploration work.
Then there are all the elements that D&D has accumulated to bypass that kind of exploration, e.g. everything from goodberry to bags of holding and ranger survival features.
All of this needs to be addressed in the rules/DMG.
Then discuss alternative ways to abstract time other than strict accounting (May be a dice pool for time with rules to roll for random events as die are added). Similarly for supply.
Then look at one or two alternative approaches to the same issues. Like an extended skill challenge system or something like Cublicle 7's Journey system.
I do agree that the DMG needs an actually helpful section on each aspect of exploration and how different ways of running it can work.
The real problem though is that because D&D is in fact (as Matt Colville likes to say) a "monster fighting game"...
Colville is both overrated and also wrong about this, in that he’s being reductive to a point that just doesn’t match large swaths of player experience at the table.
And to be honest... I don't think this is a problem that can truly be solved. Because most players know in the back of their minds (as much as they might not want to accept it) that D&D IS a "monster fighting game" with almost all of its game rules that have maintained and sustained over the past 50 years designed purely for that gameplay. And thus anything not connected to it will never be anything more than an extraneous appendage from a "game rules and game play" perspective. And if an individual DM wants something else... they are going to have to go elsewhere to get it or make up a set of rules themselves. Because most other players just don't care.
This is a + thread. I explicitly asked in the OP to not do exactly this.
I think the main problem is that the exploration pillar is heavily dependent on (good) adventure design. You can improvise a social encounter and you can easily build a simple combat encounter, but you need more intentional and thought out design to build an exciting exploration location be it a dungeon, a wilderness crawl or a foreign city. And the rules are all over the place. To get all the related rules together you have to jump between dozens of different pages in the PHB and DMG. Furthermore these are just mechanics. The 5e dmg is heavily lacking in good instructions how to actually run a good dungeon or wilderness crawl.
This is exactly right, IMO. Scattered rules and bad instruction.