The essential D&D exploration is the
dungeon crawl.
So, it involves:
Imminent Danger. Around the next corner could be your demise. You are not safe. For the wilderness, this means
this is no camping trip.
Darkness. You don't know how the path is going to go. You don't know how the road is going to twist. You have to make active decisions at junctures in the path.
Traps. Broad enough to include "wilderness hazards" like wildfires or whatever, but broadly speaking: things could change suddenly, and that change could hurt you (the role of the ranger or druid is like the role of the rogue - protect the party from traps).
Monsters. The flavor of monsters changes depending upon terrain, but D&D is a world full of monsters, where wicked things lurk in every crack and crevice and shadow in this land. This is no walk in the woods, either.
Barriers. In a dungeon, this is locked doors. In the wilderness, this is impassible rivers, sheer cliffs, supernatural terrain. (Again, the druid/ranger parallels the rogue - get us through barriers)
Treasure. In a dungeon, there are rewards to seek - coin and magic and MacGuffins. In the wilderness, there is also coin and magic to seek.
Entrances/Exits, and Jacquaysing. A dungeon has many paths into it and through it. The wilderness does, too. Civilizations can be seen as entrances and exits, and the roads through the wilderness, like dungeon corridors, link sites of interest.
Attrition. A dungeon will take your HP. The wilderness will take your HD. They'll both take your spell slots.
This leads us to a few principles:
- Exploration is not routine. In D&D, we don't worry about the rules if there's no threat of death. If there is a safe path between Point A and Point B, there's no exploration. It's explored. The wilderness we explore should be deadly. That's where we use monsters and traps and barriers. You can rest, but resting is risky, and interruptions can happen - spells like rope trick are mostly for the avoidance of that threat. Note that the threat isn't really starvation or dehydration or infection or any of the things that normally kill people in the wilderness. The threat is climactic, cinematic, fantastic. We don't worry about boiling our water to avoid giardia, we worry about the kraken in the lake.
- Exploration is not direct. In D&D, we don't worry about the rules if we know how to get from A to B. Travel involves making decisions - do we go over the mountains or under them? Do we go left or right at the fork? If we have a good map, we don't need these rules (this is the realm of montage and skill challenges, where the outcome is already pretty clear and the main questions are about what getting there looks like). This is important both to retain meaningful player decision-making (the best way to engage!) and to keep discovery and uncertainty in play. You don't know when you'll stumble on a magical lake or a haunted ruin or whatever.
- Exploration is still about finding something in the wilderness. It's not just a trip from Point A to Point B. Point B is just another town, really, and there may be relatively safe roads between them (unless they are cut off from each other points-of-light style). We dive into the wilderness - this place of death and danger - to find something within. A site of magic. A place of hidden treasure. A geographical McGuffin (petroglyphs! a circle of standing stones!).
- There's magic in the wilds. Like, supernatural geography. Fey creatures. Weak points between worlds. Sentient storms. Just as a dungeon is a place of contrivance and machination, so is the wilderness.
- Class Matters. The "wilderness classes" (barbarian, ranger, druid) should feature prominently in the clearing of barriers, the disabling of traps, the clearing of the fog of war, etc. You rely on skill checks and spells when you can't rely on those classes. Those classes should have features that directly address the difficulties of the wilderness just as the rogue has features related to disabling traps, stealth, and perception.
- Exploration features all the other modes of play, too. You fight things, you interact with things, other creatures are part of this story. This isn't just the party by itself.
So how do we use this practically?
When you want to add a dose of Exploration to your games, remember that you are always Adding a Dungeon. The wilderness might be a bit more zoomed-out (hours or days instead of 10-minute rounds), but the mindset is the same. Don't use exploration as like a default for moving between Point A and Point B and roll for thunderstorms or whatever. Assume the party can move from A to B. Instead, use it as a challenge with a goal. It's something they can fail at, that they need to engage with and unknot. It's magical, it's deadly, it's interesting to visit at a fairly granular level. Maybe there's something in the wilderness that they need to find. The hostile nature of the place means that even our druid can't stay out there forever (thieves don't live in the dungeon!). This does mean that the place isn't somewhere you want the party to be able to safely and easily rest. It's dangerous. By definition, not a place you can let your guard down.
And then you make a dungeon. Hallways become paths. Rooms become villages or castles or sites of interest. Monsters live here. Potential allies do, too. There's treasure to be found. There may be a Big Bad here somewhere.
Which is part of why a mechanic like a skill challenge kind of fails to get at the interesting thing to me. The decisions need to be bigger and more impactful than "what skill do I use?" For exploration to matter, it has to be worth the details.
