RPGaDay 2025 #8 Explore

Even though it's one of the pillars of D&D according to 5e, it's also one of the hardest to define. We often think of exploration as being about going somewhere new and finding something there that no one else has. But exploration can be quite small, as well. Looking at the early game, many monsters were intended to be explored as well. Many of them incorporated an odd trick or exploitable quirk that would have to be discovered by someone. It's old hat now, but someone had to be the first to learn that the only way to permanently defeat a troll is with fire, for example.

When thinking about encounters, it's easy to identify Combat encounters, or Interaction encounters, but what is an Exploration encounter? In a dungeon, Exploration encounters are traps, puzzles and secrets. Things that have something to manipulate and discover.

I also thing it's useful to think about encounters using different pillars as a manageable way to think of how PCs might interact with them. So what does it mean when the players try to Explore a Combat encounter? Typically, I think that means using the environment to overcome the encounter. So the party might try to evade the squad of orcs rather than face them directly. Or maybe using the environment to kill them, like causing a nearby boulder to crash on top of them. Then there's the possibility of exploiting a trap elsewhere in the dungeon, like luring the orcs to follow them into a pit trap or spear trap.