The Exploration Pillar

For years people have talked about 5e’s exploration pillar and is distinct lack of anything with it. The Player’s Handbook provides scant information and anytime it brings up exploration, it is typically from a class feature, background or spell that simply handwaves anything about exploration.

You have the ranger that doesn’t get lost in their favorite terrain, because apparently every forest or jungle or mountain is the same. You have the outlander background who can always find enough food for six people every day without fail. To top it all off, the druid can cast a goodberry spell at 1st-level and provide sustenance for the party… even if it is probably pretty bland… and who wants to eat just one berry everyday? That’s has to be terrible for your disgestion.

Even in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, exploration is more about how fast you can move or using a map or tracking a creature. Not really much going on there, and it’s pretty frustrating when you want to make traveling across the world meaningful. Journeying across a magical landscape filled with unknown horrors, strange creatures, and forgotten ruins should be exciting and fun!

Traveling

To begin traveling, the DM is going to have a small bit of work to determine - distance abstracted out to a number of days, how difficult it is to move through the terrain, and the danger level of that terrain. This is going to inform a variety of tools in this system, though everything should be very familiar to the players and DMs because similar terms are used that everyone is familiar with.

We will be creating hit points for the journey, the terrain will decide on the DC of the check and the players will be given damage dice that they use to deplete the hit points of the journey. These are all mechanics are players already know, and it helps keep things running smoothly.

Setting Up the Journey

As the journey begins, our DM first sets it up. Let’s assume that the DM decide that the party will be traveling through the forests, which is of moderate difficulty and has a DC of 15. That acts as the ‘armor class’ of the journey and will be what the players will be rolling against before they can roll damage, you know… like how they roll attack rolls against the AC of monsters.

Because the party is traveling through the forests, the DM also needs to determine the number of hit points that the journey has, each terrain type has its own hit die and you simply take the number of days the party will be traveling for and multiply that by the hit dice provided. So a journey that will last 15 days will have 15d8 for its hit dice, doing the math that is 67 hit points that that party will have to deplete before they can reach their destination.

DC 15, 67 hit points, now how does the party deplete that? Well, the DM then has to determine the Danger of traveling through the forest. Does the forest have lots of wild beasts? Is it regularly patrolled and very safe? These adjust how often the players will have encounters, what we will be calling events, but more on that later.

Let’s assume that the Danger level of our journey through the forest is only slightly dangerous, that means that the party will have a d10 for their ‘damage die’ against the hit points of the journey. If it was more dangerous, they’d get a smaller damage die like d8, d6, or a d4 for the most dangerous of locations.

And because we want the players to get to their destination while still enjoying the journey and not wanting this system to be focused on the problems of every day travel, they roll a number of damage die equal to their proficiency bonus. At the beginning levels, that means they’ll roll two dice. At higher levels, when a journey is a lot less dangerous for epic tier heroes, they might roll four, five or six dice.

Beginning the Journey

We now have the DC of the journey, a pool of hit points for the party to deplete, and the damage die for the players. Our setup is finished, and now it is time for the players to interact with the system. The first thing the party decides is who will be the navigator and safely guide them through the horrors of nature? For this system, the character with the highest Wisdom (Survival) check should be in charge and will take on the role of Navigator. They are responsible for guiding the party through the terrain and will also roll damage against the journey.

Before they can begin the journey though, the party, more specifically the Navigator, decides on what pace they want to take on the journey. If they go slowly, this decreases the difficulty of the DC while reducing the amount of damage that the Navigator deals to the hit points of the journey. On the flip side, if they go fast, the DC increases and the damage the Navigator deals increases slightly.

The hit points don’t change based on the pace of the party, instead the hit points are determined based on a regular pace and the Navigator depletes that pool of hit points faster or slower depending on the pace of the party.

Once the pace is set, and this can be changed after every event, the Navigator and the party can start out on their journey! The Navigator rolls a Wisdom (Survival) check against the DC of the terrain and on a success, the Navigator then rolls their damage die, for our previous example, they’d roll a number of d10s equal to their Proficiency Bonus and then add their Wisdom modifier to the total. They just dealt, if they have a +2 Proficiency Bonus and a +4 Wisdom modifier, an average of 15 damage to the journey’s pool of 67 hit points, reducing it to 52 hit points remaining.

They then trigger an event, once the event is finished they then repeat their Wisdom (Survival) check against the DC, roll their damage on a success, and then trigger another event.

Of course, what happens on a failed check? Well, no progress is made and they don’t get to roll damage, instead they are immediately brought into an event and lose a day of progress. They can then make their check after the event and, hopefully, succeed!

Once they deplete the hit points of the journey, they then arrive at their destination and the DM can quickly determine how long the journey actually took. If they never changed their pace from regular, and didn’t fail any checks, they arrive after the set amount of days. If they took a fast place the entire time, they arrived in two-thirds the time of a regular pace, while a slow pace took a third of the time longer to arrive. If they failed any checks, add a day to their total per check failed.

Events

We’ve touched on these a little bit but have not gone into any detail. These are the random, or pre-planned, encounters that a party will get into while journeying, but it’s not simply a bunch of goblins trying to murder your party. Instead, there are three main types of events that can be triggered while on the journey to keep the players having fun and engaged with the journey.

After every check against the DC of the terrain, an event happens. This happens on a success or failure and are aimed at expanding the world rather than being purely fight for your life encounters.

Dicoveries

Discoveries are a different type of encounter than being ambushed by goblins, but rather provides a moment to expand on the world and its lore. From creepy graveyards left unattended for decades to monuments of past heroes, discoveries provide the chance to explore the world and are part of the events you can roll for. Discoveries should entice the players to explore to uncover secrets, find treasure or find ways of expanding the lore of your world.

Encounters

While their are still encounters, because going outside is never safe, the focus of every encounter should also have the terrain play a role in the encounter. How often can characters be jumping across from stone to stone while a river rages only a foot from their feet? Oh, did I mention the angry and hungry alligators that would love to have a meal soon? Encounters in the wild are a fantastic way of bringing the strange and fantastic into a typical encounter.

Roleplay

Not every NPC in the world wants to kill the party, some of them just want to talk. Others want to steal, and others are just strange and abnormal. Adventurers can find a variety of different people out in the world, all with their own reasons of traveling and exploring the world apart from murder and banditry.

Other Parts of the Journey

We’ve gone over the basics of the journey, from set up to actually venturing through it, but there are a few other rules I provide as well as a d30 list of events that you can supplement with your own. Without adjusting the Outlander background and the Ranger class feature, I provide information on rations and carrying food, as well as how being a Ranger works while in your favored terrain. There is also information on following roads and how that works inside of the system, hint you don’t roll a check as you are assumed to always succeed, but you can’t ever critcally succeed nor find discoveries on your journey.

The Journey

That’s my new travel/exploration system. It’s simple, it uses many of the same components that we can find in the combat system and I can already think of ways of expanding the information I’ve provided. If you can make a journey interesting and non-montonous, I think we can get players and DMs excited for the exploration pillar. There’s a world out there to explore, you just have to go out there and look for yourself.

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