Once upon a time, this dude named Nick made the mistake of inviting this dude named The Angry GM to be a guest on his podcast. Nick said that he’d interview The Angry GM for about two hours and then he’d cut the interview down to an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half, like he usually did. Now, The Angry GM was extremely wordy and extremely charismatic. People loved talking to him and they loved listening to him talk. And he could talk for hours. And The Angry GM knew it. He’d done interviews before. The Angry GM warned Nick to keep an eye on the clock and even told Nick that he could cut off The Angry GM at any time. But Nick said it would be fine.

I don’t know when the episode of Brewmasters will appear. Last I heard, Nick was still editing the five hours of raw audio and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it all. As soon as I know when it’s going live, I’ll tell y’all.

The reason I bring up my as-yet-unreleased appearance on Brewmasters is that I want to bulls$&% about something Nick and I had a rambly and haphazard discussion about. And hopefully, organize my thoughts and clarify them and expand upon them. Though I realize that my bulls$&% articles aren’t the best medium for organization, clarification, and expansion. But f$&% it. I work with the tools I got.

Now, this story doesn’t actually start with the Brewmasters interview. It starts months and months ago. And it hasn’t really ended yet. See, what I really want to do is share this neat little idea about how to make D&D cities and towns more explorable. But all I’ve got for that so far is one half-a$&ed, last-minute test of the idea during which I totally ruined the visual aids I prepared. See, the visuals aids only really work once and I forgot to scan or photograph them before I used them. Whoops.

Meanwhile, though, I really want to lay down some groundwork about exploration in D&D that not only figures into the idea I mentioned in the preceding paragraph, but also into other plans I have for the new year. So, let’s bulls$&% about exploration.

D&D claims to be about exploration. I mean, most TTRPGs—especially the fantasy kind—suggest that exploration’s a thing that they can do. But D&D’s 5th Edition actually makes the ballsy claim that exploration is one of the three fundamental pillars of the game. And I say that claim is ballsy because there’s literally nothing in the system to back that claim at all. And everyone knows it. At least, everyone smart knows it. Don’t be one of those other people.

You see, there’s been a lot of talk—both in my Patreon community and also the much bigger and much less awesome gaming community at large—there’s been a lot of talk in the community about how people want systems and mechanics that emphasize exploration. Or just encourage it. Or even just f$&%ing enable it a little tiny bit. And that’s because people can see there’s nothing backing up various games’ claims about being all about the explorations. And even when there is something backing up a game’s claims, it turns out to be mostly just duct tape and chewing gum holding up a cardboard sign that says ‘explurashun mode.’

The funny thing is that when you actually hold people down and demand they tell you what they think exploration mechanics should do or what they should look like or even what the hell they think is missing from the exploration mechanics that exist, they can’t give you a solid, useful f$&%ing answer. Usually, they just say, “please let me up or at least stop punching me.” And if you do get an actual answer, it’s usually something like, “you know, more rules for exploring the wilderness.”

As a rule, if you use the term you’re defining in the definition you’re proposing, you don’t know what the f$%& you’re talking about.

Worse than the vague non-answers though are all the flawed and misguided answers. The ones that have nothing to do with exploration. Or that are so abstract that they imitate exploration without actually feeling like exploration. And that’s a huge problem with lots of homebrewed solutions. Hell, it’s a problem with a lot of published solutions. They focus too much on simulating or imitating things and not at all on how things actually feel.

Truth is that when you’re trying to create a game that’s about something, it’s way more important for the players to feel that something than it is to create mechanics that simulate that something. That’s why realism makes a s$&% design goal.

Of course, every solution starts with an accurate description of the problem. I mean, that’s why they have that saying that a problem defined is a problem halved. Or whatever. I don’t know. It’s some British idiom, I think. Like “the exception that proofs the pudding” or “spotted dick.”

Anyway…

Take D&D for example. The designers can get away with claiming that D&D is about exploration because they’re working from a really crappy definition. It’s clear from everything they’ve written and said on the subject that they break the D&D game down into three kinds of encounters. There’s encounters where you kill s$&%, encounters where you talk to s$&%, and encounters where you do anything else. And they call those combat, role-playing, and exploration encounters. Their definition of exploration is “everything that isn’t slaying or speaking.” So they can claim that any rules that are not about shooting first or asking questions later are about exploration. Nice try guys.

But the problem’s more widespread than that. As I said, if you pin down the average gamer and demand examples of exploration rules under threat of violence, they usually scream things like “encumbrance rules” and “overland travel” and “supply management” and “not in the face” and “starvation and exposure rules.” And none of that s$&% has anything to do with exploration. That’s all travel logistics crap. That’s all the s$&% that complicates exploring. The s$&% that keeps you from exploring or that punishes you for it.

Not that I’m saying complications, tradeoffs, and punishments aren’t important. But a cost for a thing is not the thing itself.

My point is, you’ve got to be able to describe how something feels if you want your game to be about that something. The feeling is what you’re trying to create. And while most people can kinda sorta give a passable definition of ‘exploration,’ they usually can’t isolate the feelings that make exploring feel like exploring.

And that’s where I come in. Because my schtick is all about describing things that seem so obvious and intuitive that they don’t need a description. I wanted to know what makes exploration feel like exploration.

But how do you figure out what makes exploration feel like exploration? Well, let me ask you a question: when you’re playing a game—video-, board-, or role-playing—do you think you can tell when you’re exploring and when you’re not? I mean, if I interrupted you at random intervals while you were playing your game and said, “hey, dingus, that thing you’re doing right now, is that exploring or not exploring,” do you think you could answer? Do you think you could answer honestly? Do you think you could answer based solely on your feelings and not on what the game told you what was happening? And do you think you could do it without getting pissed off at me for interrupting you and asking the same question over and over and calling you dingus?

Yeah. You probably could.

Hell, you probably wouldn’t even need me interrupting you and calling you dingus. If you practiced and stayed mindful, you could probably just learn to recognize when you were in an exploration frame of mind. You could probably even rate on a scale how explorey you felt. And you could record your experiences in a journal. In fact, if you’re interested at all in exploration in RPGs, you should try it yourself. Go ahead and do it right now for about six months and then come back here. I’ll wait.

Okay, I’m obviously just f$%&ing with you. No one would actually be crazy enough to do that s$&%. No one would log their gameplay experiences for months just to isolate the gamefeel of exploration. Nor would they ask anyone else to do the same thing. Nor would they encourage people to talk about their gameplay experiences, watch out for certain cue words and phrases, ask leading questions, and surreptitiously take notes. Nor would they troll through user reviews, comments, and discussion threads about different games. That’d be a huge, pain-in-the-a$& undertaking. But it’d also be a great way to isolate the gamefeel of a thing, wouldn’t it?

Anyway…

I hit the conclusion that there’s basically four keys to the gamefeel of exploration. But I have to be really f$&%ing clear about what I’m talking about. I’m not trying to define ‘exploration’. I don’t give a single, solitary, tiny little f$&% about the definition. It doesn’t f$&%ing matter. Because I’m not trying to simulate exploring. I’m not trying to replicate the act of exploring. I’m trying to make something that feels like exploring. And that’s a highly subjective, intuitive thing. You can’t define feelings. You can only describe them. And feel them.

The first key’s simple. When you’re satisfying your own curiosity, you’re exploring. In fact, at its core, the exploration cycle is a really simple one. First, you have a question. Then, you answer it. Bam. Exploring. The question itself doesn’t really matter. It might be a simple one that’s easy to answer like, “what’s behind that door” or “what’s over there?” Or it might be a more complex question that requires some digging like, “what did that lever actually do” or “there’s five holes here and I found three hole-shaped gems; so where are the other two?”

Now, you’re probably saying, “no s$&% Angry. It’s obvious that exploration’s about satisfying curiosity.” But don’t get mouthy with me. Because most people—probably including you—think that exploration begins and ends with the environment itself. That it’s a physical thing you do to a place. But there’s lots of ways to explore. And those ways are defined by questions like “who built these ruins and why” or “what the hell happened here” or “why is this one building so much older than all the others in town” or “why is the innkeeper so troubled” or “so what would happen if I put a portable hole inside a bag of holding while I was already on the Astral Plane?”

If you pay close attention to when you feel like you’re exploring and when you feel like you’re not, you discover some things that never seemed like exploration actually feel like they are. Remember those old, tile-based RPGs where you’d hit a new town and spend an hour wandering around talking to everyone? What about the hour you spent reading the lore descriptions of all the items you had in your bottomless treasure chest of storage in Dark Souls. I remember a very distinct moment during a recent replay of Dark Souls Remastered: Just Pay Us Again for the Same Damned Game Edition when I finally actually got how the New Londo Ruins and the Valley of the Drakes and Darkroot Basin all fit together and where they were in relation to Undead Paris. I was running from area to area, looking all around at the different landmarks until it all just fit. I had the same kind of moment in Bloodborne when I recognized the Cleric’ Beast’s bridge and figured out that they were behind that one door in Cathedral Ward.

And yes, I could have just looked up maps and 3D model dumps online, but that wouldn’t be exploring, would it?

Which brings me to the second key to the gamefeel of exploration. Exploration’s an act of intellectual conquest. It’s a way of gaining power. Not by becoming physically stronger, mind you. By becoming mentally stronger. Every time you ask a question about the world and then answer it, you gain power over the world. Exploration is a way of pushing back the darkness of ignorance and bringing things into the light of knowledge. Consider revealing a video game map as you explore the world. You’re literally beating back the fog-of-war. When you understand how the world fits together, you can navigate it better. And when you talk to an NPC—when you learn their motives and backstory—you can influence them.

The intellectual power that comes from exploring is particularly satisfying because of the third key. Exploration is self-directed. It’s not something the game—or the GM—can force you to do. The best a game or GM can do is give you opportunities to explore. It can’t make you explore. Which is why some exploration-based games fall flat and some open-world games don’t feel explorable at all.

Now, this is a tricky point. Some games—and some GMs—explicitly assign players the task of exploring. A GM might give you the task of exploring a dungeon or mapping a region. And that s$&% can work. But it can also fail. Take Darkest Dungeon. In that game, you’re literally told to explore some dungeons. Like, that’s the goal. To finish the mission, you have to visit 90% of the rooms in a randomly generated dungeon map. And that s$&% doesn’t feel like exploring at all. Especially when you compare it to the s$&% you get up to in, say, Breath of the Wild.

When I say exploration’s player-driven, I mean that the players have to either ask questions and then seek the answers or the game has to pose a question that interests the players enough to seek the answer. The players have to care about the answer enough to seek it. The ‘explore the dungeon’ quests in DD flop because DD doesn’t pose a question. It just provides a checklist of rooms to visit. And there’s nothing interesting to find in those rooms. Once you’ve explored one randomly generated dungeon in one of the game’s biomes, you’ve explored them all. And the stuff that is interesting and unique is scattered at random through the game.

By the way, that’s something else that can f$&% up the gamefeel of exploration. If the game’s being generated at random and the players know it or if the players help invent the game world by exploring it, it stops feeling like exploration. I’ve seen a few GMs and systems that add a sense of exploration by asking the players to conjure up answers to their own questions. Can that be fun? Hell yes. That can be a blast for the right players. But is it exploration? Does it feel like exploration? No. Because creating the world isn’t the same as intellectually conquering it. And receiving random whatevers from the dice gods whenever you enter a blank spot on a random map; that wrecks the idea that there’s a coherent, consistent world that you can possibly learn or understand.

Ultimately, the first three keys to the gamefeel of exploration can be summed up with two words: wonder and wander. Exploration starts with the players wondering about something. “I wonder what’s over there.” “I wonder what happened here.” “I wonder what this lever does.” “I wonder who built this place.” “I wonder what this dude’s story is.” The players have to wonder about things. You can give the players things to wonder about or point out wonderable things and hope the players wonder about them, but it’s down to the players to actually wonder about them. To wonder enough to wander over and wonder no more.

Goals are almost an anathema to exploration. When you’re searching for something, you’re not exploring. When you’re mapping a space, you’re not exploring. When you’re checking off 90% of the rooms, you’re not exploring. You’re exploring when you wonder about something and wander off to satisfy your curiosity.

But that’s just three keys and I said the gamefeel of exploration had four keys. The fourth has to do with human psychology. And it’s specifically that, however interested you are in doing something, if there’s no payoff, you’ll stop doing it eventually. So, all the wondering in the world won’t keep you wandering if there’s never anything wonderful to find. But even if you’re not wondering about anything, once you stumble over enough wonderful things, you’ll probably start wandering.

I’ve already mentioned two payoffs for wondering and wandering. First, there’s the satisfaction of curiosity. When you’re curious about something and then seek and find the answer, you get a warm fuzzy feeling in the cockles of your brain bits. Second, there’s intellectual conquest. When you explore, you learn, and that makes you more powerful. Basically, when you explore, you discover interesting and useful information. And those two information rewards—one intrinsic and one extrinsic—form the basic exploration reward structure. Intrinsic satisfaction and extrinsic growth. They make exploration worthwhile.

At least for a little while. Because all rewards have diminishing returns. And because of a few other things. To understand those other things, we can ask another question and keep another journal for another six months while trolling gamer forums and grilling our friends and family about their experiences.

The question is “why are some worlds more satisfying to explore than others?” And the answer has to do with the kind, scope, and scale of the exploration rewards. Let’s call them, collectively, discoveries. A discovery is any payoff you get from exploring.

The first problem is that a man cannot live on interesting discoveries alone. See, lots of games—especially open-world games and games that try to imitate different flavors of Soulsbourne—think they can make you happy if they just scatter lots of interesting information around. Usually, text dumps of expository info. Sure, some of it’s fun to read, but most of it’s irrelevant to gameplay. The thousands of pages of text in the Elder Scrolls games are a perfect example. So are the text dumps and logs in Horizon: Zero Dawn. Some players eat that s$&% up, sure. But most just get bored with it eventually. And if it’s all there is to find when you’re exploring, eventually, you stop wandering.

But a man cannot live on information alone. Even if the information’s actually useful—like maps hidden around the game world or clues that help you master wall jumps and shine sparks and dark metamorphosis spells or information about boss weaknesses or whatever—even if there’s useful information to be found, information’s just one kind of reward. People need variety in their discovery diets.

The most fun worlds to explore are the ones that have lots of different kinds of things to discover. Not lots of different things, mind you, different kinds of things. For a start, it’s fun to explore a world when, at any given moment, you might turn up an interesting bit of lore or a useful clue or a power-up or an optional upgrade or an ability unlock or money you can use to buy something cool. But there are a few games that have gone even farther. There’s games that include hidden areas to explore, hidden bosses to fight, hidden side-quests, hidden challenges, and hidden mysteries to drive further exploration. There’s even games that get easier to play the more you explore. There’s games with hidden shortcuts to find, for example, or extra checkpoints that make it easier to get around. Probably the most brilliant example of how this all comes together is with a hidden quest in Hollow Knight that tasks you with delivering an item from one optional, hidden area to another optional area without using the game’s fast travel system and without taking a single point of damage. Yeah, it’s a pain in the a$& and it’s much-maligned, but if you know the map really well and know which areas you can handle best and you can plot the safest, most efficient route, you’re much more likely to pull it off.

In fact, I have to say that Hollow Knight provides the hands-down best example of how to reward exploration of any video game ever. There’s just so many different kinds of things to find. And all the different things aren’t all useful to every player at every stage of the game, most of them are mostly useful to most players most of the time. Apart from the random bits of world lore and the clues that tell you how to complete the game’s main objectives, there’s health and mana upgrades, there’s sellable trinkets, there’s charms that basically work like feats and character abilities in D&D, you discover magic spells and spell upgrades, you can find hidden shortcuts and hidden areas and hidden bosses, you can follow hidden NPCs with their own storyline, there’s shops to discover, there’s weapon upgrades, there’s special combat moves, there’s hidden side quests, and there’s several different endings based on how deep you get into the game. And also—and this is a kind of exploration reward that gets overlooked a lot—most of the hand-drawn biomes in Hollow Knight are just beautiful. There’s a joy in stumbling on something unexpected or beautiful or awe-inspiring or even dreadful. Consider the first time you saw one of the dragons in The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild.

Compare that list to the pinnacles of exploration-based gameplay of yesterday. How many times in Super Metroid did you say, “oh, another f$&%ing missile tank; I sure am glad I came this way”? How often in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night did you not even bother to open the menu and check the stats on whatever piece of armor or weapon or useless consumable you just picked up. You knew it was garbage.

Players might have a natural drive to explore. But without payoffs—without discoveries—that natural drive will be driven right out of them. And if players don’t have a natural drive to explore, the right set of payoffs will push them to do it anyway. But the discoveries have to feel like payoffs. They have to vary in kind, scope, scale, and appeal. Especially in TTRPGs. Those are team sports after all and every member of the team values different payoffs differently. So you need information rewards and you need tangible rewards. You need permanent upgrades and you need temporary boons. You need things that make the game easier and things that offer new challenges. You need things that open up new options and things that pose new questions to answer. And you need surprising, delightful, wonderful, dreadful, terrible things.

And this s$&% should be easy for TTRPGs, right? Exploration is player-driven and open-ended and discoveries have to vary broadly in scope and scale and kind. All of that s$&% plays right into the TTRPG wheelhouse. So why do most TTRPGs have so much trouble with this exploration s$&%?

Well, first, there’s a weird separation between the RPG system and the RPG game. When something exists in a video game, the game’s engine—the rules that make the game work—the game’s engine has to support it. Otherwise, it can’t exist. But TTRPGs are just toolsets. Basic toolsets. They rely on adventure designers and GMs to put the tools together into fun games. And if the designer wants to put something in their game that’s not in the system, the designer must build it themselves or just, you know, not put it in. The thing is, it takes a lot of skill and design-savvy to assemble the pieces into a good game and even more to build new pieces out of whole cloth. And most TTRPG systems don’t help. They can’t even provide advice for how to dole out basic informational discoveries, let alone come up with good mechanical systems to govern that s$&%. And the ones that do try just boil it all down to weird abstractions. Like a divination ability getting handwaved down to “you get an unspecified clue in the form of an abstract bonus you can apply to whatever check you want later and then we’ll retroactively say the information you divined pertained to that particular check.” Yes, that effectively simulates getting a useful clue from the gods, but it doesn’t feel like getting a useful clue from the gods.

Imagine, for example, if every monster and trap in the DMG or the MM or whatever had a little list of ‘useful’ and ‘interesting’ tidbits of information the GM could scatter around the dungeon or give out during the research phase of the adventure. If the adventure included a certain monster, for example, the GM would have a prewritten piece of information that’d help the players defeat it to give the diviner. Or the sage. Or hide behind the hidden door in the library. That’s just a tiny example off the top of my head of how a system could facilitate information rewards.

Second, though, is this weird problem with how the nature of narrative gameplay interacts with player-driven curiosity. Because the game’s world is primarily presented as a verbal description, it’s impossible for the players to notice something completely on their own. And the players know it. Sure, in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, when you spot the three apple trees in a perfect row on top of a ridge, you know the designers put those trees there on purpose. But they didn’t make you notice them. You could have totally failed to notice them. You could have missed them against the background visual noise of the world. Or approached from the wrong angle and not seen they’re in a row. Or run by too fast to see them because you were busy fleeing a silver lynel. In a TTRPG, though, it’s hard to miss anything because the GM describes everything that’s important and leaves out everything that’s not. So the only thing you can really wonder is “why did the GM mention that?”

Third, a lot of games—and this is especially true of D&D 5E and its ilk—a lot of games just don’t have a lot of variety in their reward structures to begin with. So there’s not much the GM can use to payoff exploration. If you look only at what the system offers as core and not the optional s$&% buried in the back of the DMG no one read and not what creative and savvy genius GMs can create on their own, what can you hide around your 5E dungeon to reward exploration? Money? It’s pretty useless and the characters usually get pretty rich pretty quickly. Magic items? Yeah? Those are nice. What else? Yeah. Not much.

Remember Castlevania: Symphony of the Night? Remember how your pack was full to bursting by the end with magic swords and magic cloaks and magic armor and consumables and throwables? Remember how it was mostly junk you never used? And remember how bored you were with finding it all by the end? And C: SotN also had health and mana and permanent character upgrades to find. In D&D, you’re just handed that s$&% after you’ve killed enough wombats to level up.

D&D claims it’s about exploration, but there’s nothing in the system to back that up. D&D is only about exploration if the GM’s smart enough to make it about exploration on their own. And most GMs don’t understand what makes exploration feel like exploration. And if they do, they don’t know how to bring it to the table. It ain’t just a twisty, turning, maze-like map. It ain’t just a blank hex-grid and an invitation to fill it in. Though, interestingly, classic hex-crawl play does solve precisely one of the three problems with exploration in TTRPGs that I outlined above. See if you can figure out which one.

Anyway, it was months of working through this crap—trying to crap this game-design nit—combined with a random, happy accident at my game table over a year ago that made me start thinking about to build a truly explorable town in D&D. Particularly because, when it comes to exploration, everyone thinks about the dungeon and the wilderness. No one considers the town explorable.

But we’ll have to talk about that another time. After I make some new visuals.