Even sexy gaming geniuses like me sometimes get things wrong. I don’t know how. I mean, as a sexy gaming genius, I’m always right and I never make mistakes. That should preclude me from getting s$&% wrong. And yet, here I am cranking out the third iteration of this article. It doesn’t make sense.

When I wrote the outline for the first version of the article, I discovered I’d royally f$&%ed up my own Angry’s Open World Game. Even though I’d figured out how to present an explorable world filled with opportunities and adventures, I’d totally neglected to apply those lessons to my game’s wilderness. So now I get to redo my world map. Great. At least I can write a whole supplemental article now about presenting an explorable wilderness full of adventure and opportunity. It’s better than my original plan which was to write this article about explorable towns full of adventure and opportunity and then end it with a cop-out line like, “and I’m sure you can all figure out how to apply these same lessons to your wildernesses.”

So, I had to throw out an outline, redo my campaign wilderness map, and plan an extra article on this topic for a few weeks from now. No big deal. Business as f$&%ing usual at Angry Games, Inc. headquarters. But then, 4500 words into this draft yesterday, I suddenly realized things had gone totally off the rails. And while — as you’ll see — that would have been totally appropriate for this article, there is such a thing as being too meta.

Anyway, the article was off the rails. And I knew I’d need a few thousand words to get it back on track. And there was no f$&%ing way I was putting out an 8000-word behemoth of an article. I can’t believe people actually read the 5000-word monsters I normally put out.

I went back to the outline to see if I could figure out where I’d f$&%ed up and lost the thread of my brilliant and never wrong ideas. Turns out, I’d lost the thread partway through writing the outline. Because that outline was crap.

Long story short — or Long, Rambling Introduction™ slightly shorter, anyway — I had to throw out the draft and start over. And that’s why AOWG Lesson 3 is chopped up between two articles and a supplement. The important thing is that it’s not my fault. It can’t be. I’m a sexy genius who’s never wrong. I’m a victim of something. Society. The system. Careless time travelers from the future who keep changing the past. Who the f$&% knows?

Presenting: An Explorable World of Opportunity and Adventure

Time for the third of four lessons about running an Angry’s Open World Game just like your bestest buddy Angry. Except I’m not your bestest buddy. I am not coming to your birthday party. I don’t even like you.

Don’t touch me.

Anyway, this is an article for people who want to run an AOWG like the one I presented a bunch of articles ago blah blah blah f$&%ing disclaimer. Look, this article’s got good advice for open-world gaming, but it’s also good, general advice for most kinds of TTRPG campaigns. Take it or leave it. I don’t give a s$&%. There’s your f$&%ing disclaimer.

I’m talking about presentation today. How you present an open world that your players will want to explore. Or how you present any world so your players will want to explore it. Or, at least, how you present a world that the players can explore. How you present a world to invite exploration. Which is the best you can hope for.

More specifically, I’m talking about how to present explorable civilized locations. Towns and cities and villages and strongholds and camps and monasteries and s$&% like that. The hubs of the world. The places the PCs venture forth from on their mad adventures and then return to. The places where they keep all their stuff. All their resources. And the places where they seek their next adventures.

Why start with towns? Well, look, I could try to convince you that they’re the most important explorable spaces in open-world games. In any exploration-based game, really. But you’re not going to believe that, even if it is totally f$&%ing true. And it is. So, I’ll just say this: building explorable towns is hard. Harder than explorable wildernesses and harder than explorable dungeons. But the basic skills are the same. If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball, right?

All right. What if I do a supplemental lesson in a few weeks about explorable wildernesses? Is that cool?

As I said, this is all about presenting an explorable world. It ain’t about building an explorable world. I assume you’ve got one of those already. Or you’re ready to pull one out of your a$&. With help from slapdash lists and crappy maps and that lump of Silly Putty™ between your ears you call a GMing brain.

Presentation’s a tricky issue though. And getting players to explore a town — and enjoy that s$&% — is even trickier. So I’m breaking this lesson down into three parts and spreading them across two articles.

• Lesson 3.1 What’s Exploration, Really?
• Lesson 3.2 Getting Your Players’ A$&es Moving
• Lesson 3.3 Sending Smoke Signals

And now that we’re all disclaimered and introduced and outlined and s$&%, let’s get started.

Lesson 3.1. What’s Exploration, Really?

So, what is exploration? More importantly, how does exploration feel?

You can’t have a thing in your game if you don’t know what it is. And when it comes to things in games, it’s all about the feels. I mean, yes, exploration is a thing players do. And yes, it’s a mode of play. But what makes exploration exploration is how it feels. Believe it or not — and really, you should just f$&%ing trust me at this point — believe it or not, players can do all sorts of things that look exactly like exploration and yet still piss and moan that your game has no exploration. Likewise, players can do all sorts of s$&% that doesn’t seem like exploration and think you run a great exploration-based game.

Exploration is… wait? Haven’t I done this before? I’m pretty sure I have. F$&% it. Whatever. Let’s do it again. Maybe this time it’ll stick.

Exploration is just the satisfaction of curiosity. You — pretend you’re the player — you feel compelled to find something out and then you do find it out. Exploration’s just about answering the questions that pop into your head.

Did you think exploration was “wandering around and looking for s$&%?” Yeah, lots of GMs think that. And it ain’t precisely wrong. But it also ain’t totally correct. Because that can be exploration. But lots of other things can be exploration too. You can explore physical spaces, but you can also explore stories and lore and you can explore game mechanics and systems and really anything else that piques your curiosity. Climbing a hill to find out what’s on the other side? Totally exploration. But so is sitting down at a stranger’s table in a tavern to figure out what their deal is. Or reading all the item descriptions so you can learn all about the mysterious civilization that built the magitech ruins you’re plundering.

By the way, all you fans of the Eight Kinds of Fun should take note that exploration is not Discovery. They’re not synonyms. Discovery’s a motivation. A reason for playing. Players who play for Discovery do so because they find some intrinsic value in the acquisition of knowledge. They enjoy understanding things. Finding things out. But exploration doesn’t always lead to Discovery. And Discovery isn’t the only reason to explore. You can explore without Discovering, you can Discover without exploring, and you can even wander through every square on the in-game map and light them all up without actually once exploring.

This is important. So, pay attention. It’s why so many TTRPGs think they’re about exploration and yet, why they just don’t feel very explorey at all.

Metroidvania games, right? You know the kind I mean. The genre’s practically required playing for membership in the Angrican Church. But if you don’t, they’re exploration-based games. They present a pseudo-open world and invite the player to explore it. And by exploring it, the player becomes more powerful and eventually wins the game.

Thing is, you can play such games for the sheer joy of exploring their worlds, right? For the fun that comes from Discovering everything. But you can also play those games to win. You still have to wander all the paths and find all the power-ups and locate the goals, but you’re not doing that because you’re driven by an insatiable lust for understanding. It’s still exploration, but you’re motivated by other things.

But you can also explore without really exploring. You know how some games keep track of your map coverage? That is, for every little square on the map you light up, your completion percentage ticks up or the map square turns blue or something? Have you ever filled in every square of the map just to fill in every square of the map? I sure have. F$&%ing Symphony of the Night. Well, that isn’t exploration. It looks like exploration, it seems like it should be, but at no point are you deliberately asking questions and seeking answers of the world. You don’t give a f$&% what’s in that map square or whether there’s a valuable sword upgrade at the end of the corridor, you just have to light up every corridor because that’s what you think winning is.

Now, most gamers — most people — have lots of different motivations and do lots of things for lots of reasons. And they switch back and forth. So, a Discovery-seeking gamer might cycle between Discovery-motivated exploration, exploration for extrinsic rewards or in the pursuit of victory, and just doing a checklist without giving a s$&%. And most other players dip into and out of the three as well. Which is why most Metroidvania games are actually built around cycles of exploring and goal-pursuit and task-checking-off. But I’ll get to that s$&% below.

Point is exploration is both way more simple and way more complicated than you probably realized. And most of what makes exploration exploration happens inside the players’ heads. And that’s a problem because, without some expensive tools and a degree in neurology, you can’t just make things happen inside your players’ heads. And it’s illegal to try in most states.

The Exploration Cycle

To truly understand exploration, you need to remember one simple phrase:

Huh! What’s that? I’m gonna find out.

That’s the entire exploration cycle in one line of text.

First, there’s “Huh!” It’s an exclamation. An emotional thing. It happens when a player notices something in the world that catches their eye. Something that piques their curiosity. The ruins of an abandoned keep, a strange light in the distance, a mysterious stranger with a glowing tattoo, a crying woman in the corner of the tavern, whatever. The player perceives something that makes their brain stop and take notice.

“What’s that?” is a question. It’s when the thing they noticed gets turned into real, actionable curiosity. The question doesn’t matter so much. It can be a vague, Discovery-esque question like “what the heck is that mysterious light; I have to know.” Or it can be a concrete, materialistic question like “I wonder if there’s any good treasure in that keep.” It can tie into the character’s needs or wants, as in “I wonder if that tattooed stranger is a wizard who can teach my character new spells.” And it can even play on the player’s emotions, like “I wonder why that woman is crying and if I can help.” The motivation doesn’t matter. What matters is that the player has a question in their head now.

The “I’m gonna find out” part is a declaration. It’s a statement of intent. Question in head, the player now weighs the worth of the answer against whatever else they’ve got going on. And they decide that answering the question is worth more than any other thing they could do right now. That’s role-playing there, remember. Making decisions.

And now you know why clearing every map square doesn’t count as exploring. And also why handing the players a quest to map an ancient ruin won’t feel much like exploring to most players. Not automatically. Exploration starts with a player taking notice of something, recognizing the value of investigating, and then choosing to act. It’s personal, subjective, and deliberate.

And that’s the f$&%ing problem.

The Narrative Flashlight Problem

That whole “huh! What’s that? I’m gonna find out,” thing has to happen inside a player’s head or else whatever they’re doing won’t feel like exploration to them. Even if it looks like exploration and involves exploration-type activities. There’s a lot of agency wrapped up in it.

Most Metroidvania games — yeah, we’re back to that again — work because the designers use all sorts of tricks to keep players from getting too lost for too long. From getting frustrated. There’s all sorts of tricky little invisible hands and rails guiding players toward their goals. And most designers are really good at hiding that s$&% really well. Nonetheless, some players notice them anyway. And once they notice them, they end up feeling a little unsatisfied. That why, sometimes, the Metroids and the Vanias aren’t the best choices for true explorers. That’s why Breath of the Wild and Outer Wiorlds — whichever one wasn’t Fallout in Spaaaaace, I get them confused — are a better choice for video game explorers. But there’s a really good reason not to model your D&D campaigns on true open-world exploration and why I use the Metroidvania model.

Point is, some people are sensitive to invisible guidance. Just like some people have more delicate sensibilities when it comes to tonal discordance or the willing suspension of disbelief. The feeling that someone, somewhere, is pulling the strings saps them of their feeling of agency and personal choice. And that wrecks exploration. Now, imagine if someone like that realized they had no control over their own senses. Because that’s just what TTRPGs are like.

Tabletop role-playing games are driven almost entirely by narration. That is, the only things you — as a player — perceive about the world, the only things you know about the world, are the things the game-designer-narrator tells you. The world of an RPG is totally pitch dark. Completely invisible. The GM has a flashlight and they use their narrative word powers to shine the flashlight around the world at all the interesting bits they want you to notice. Everything else — all the s$&% they don’t shine their spotlight on — it might as well not even exist.

And yes, I know that video game designers only include the s$&% in the game they want you to notice too, but it doesn’t feel like that because you can see an entire, visual world all around you. There’s no missing bits. So your brain gets fooled into thinking it really is a whole other world.

How to Make an Explorable World

So, if you can’t control whether players are exploring and whether they even want to and if the players have no agency over their own perceptions of the world and if some players are sensitive enough to notice that, how the motherloving f$&% can you actually have exploration in your game?

First, you’ve got to train the explorers to explore the world. Teach them that exploration’s rewarding. That there’s value to it. You can’t count on having a table full of Discovery seekers. So exploration’s got to offer a variety of different rewards. Or, as I called them a few articles ago, opportunities. Resources, contacts, magical items, tools, and information. Some of it’s got to be super useful, some of it’s got to be merely interesting.

This is where all those slapdash lists come in. All the useful and interesting s$&% you can drop into your world.

But you can’t inundate players with rewards either. If something’s too rewarding, it stops being a choice. And some people stop doing altogether. I mean, if every act of exploration pays off with a super cool resource, the players will be compelled to explore. It becomes a task. A thing they have to do or else they’ll miss out. Or worse, it becomes a thing they don’t have to bother doing because they’ll always have an opportunity to do it. I mean, if every rock you turn over has a treasure under it, you can stop turning rocks over until you need more treasure.

The best way to train someone to do something is to reward them at random. This is psychology, folks. Look it up. About two-thirds of the time, exploration should turn up something. And about two-thirds of those somethings should be useful. Yes, your players must sometimes unearth a big pile of merely interesting. And they must sometimes explore their ways to nothing.

By the way? This is why a good dungeon is 33% empty rooms.

The more they explore and the more it randomly pays off, the more they’ll associate exploration with payoffs. And thus, the more they’ll want to do it.

But what about all that deliberate agency curiosity crap? What do you do about that? Because you can’t change the nature of the game. It’s still a dark world and you’ve still got the narrative flashlight. Ideally, what you want is for a player to sometimes snatch the flashlight out of your hand and shine it on something and say, “huh! What’s that? I’m gonna find out.”

Of course, it’s easy to do that in a metaphor. But you don’t have an actual flashlight people can snatch. You’re narrating a game. At the game table, the flashlight trick involves two parts. First, get the players moving toward something. Then, show them some smoke on the horizon.

Lesson 3.2. Getting the Players’ A$&%es Moving

If you want to run a good, exploration-based game experience that any player can enjoy — especially an open-world game experience — you must make sure your players are always moving toward a goal.

Seriously.

Open-world gaming ain’t about dropping your players in the middle of a blank world, handing them a piece of hex paper and a pencil, and saying, “okay, have at it kids.” Yes, some players love that hex-crawl s$%&. But most don’t. Most can’t function that way. Moreover, many players end up in a “fill in all the hexes” mentality that moves away from real exploration and into the realm of a f$&%ing chore.

The trick to giving your players the agency they need to explore the world is to first establish that they’re not, right now, exploring. And I know that sounds f$&%ing bonkers. But nothing feels like exploring so much as walking off the path in front of you solely because you want to. That is undeniable exploration. It feels like exploration to everyone. Well, mostly everyone. Some people are stupid and some people are crazy and some people like hex crawls. But that’s kind of redundant.

Point is, if someone’s walking on a beaten path and then they choose to veer off of it of their own f$&%ing volition, they will feel like they’re exploring.

So, the players need a path to follow. They need a direction. They need a goal. Doesn’t have to be big. Chores, tasks, adventure goals, things to do, places to go, people to see, questions to answer; they’re all good. As long as the players can move in a direction with a purpose, they’ve got something to do. “Kill the dragon in the cave,” is a purpose — if they know where the cave is — and so is, “research vampires at the temple library.” For that matter, so is “buy some rope” or “find an inn.” Last session, I had a player whose deliberate purpose was “just go to the shrine for a few hours and sit in quiet contemplation of the f$&%ed up mess that is my life.”

Why is it so important for the players to have a goal? So that they can put it aside. Yes. Seriously. The reason to include goals in an exploration-based game is so the players can ignore them. Because, again, nothing tricks the players into thinking they are agents of their own exploratory fates like letting them go off the rails. This is why the goal must be something the players can stop doing.

Consider, for example, the goal of “search the dungeon for the MacGuffin that’s somewhere in there.” If the players have no idea where the MacGuffin is, they can’t stop looking for it. Every twist, turn, and side passage might lead to it. So, they can’t ever say, “hey, that passage looks weird and interesting; let’s stop looking for the MacGuffin and check that out instead.”

That’s why it’s harder to build truly a explorable dungeon than you might think.

Anyway, the key to getting the players moving along a path is to use the most important slapdash list in your GMing bag. Remember, in my last article, I told you about the Second Most Important Slapdash List in Your GMing Bag? Well, now I’m finally going to tell you which list is even more important than the list of all the interesting s$&% there is to find in the world.

The First Most Important Slapdash List in Your GMing Bag: The Party-Do List

Before every session of my own Angry’s Open World Game — before I even sit down to prep for a session of my AOWG — I prepare the Party-Do List. In fact, these days, I do it before pretty much every session I prep and run. Because it’s really useful.

The Party-Do List is just a list of things the party is either currently doing or is very likely intending to do in the very near future. Basically, it’s a list of the player’s current goals. As guessed by me. Obviously, it starts with whatever thing the players were working on actively when the last session ended. And it also includes anything the players specifically told me they wanted to pursue. But it also includes the tasks, chores, goals, and other loose ends I’m pretty sure the party is interested in pursuing. Basically, it’s a list of my best guesses about what the party intends to pursue at the start of the session and then what they’ll pursue next and after that and then and so on.

The Party-Do List is actually useful for lots of reasons. Obviously, it helps you figure out what you should probably be prepared for. It also gives you some idea of how many different directions the party has to choose from. And it’ll also warn you when the party doesn’t have a direction to go. If you can’t fill out a Party-Do List, the players probably can’t either. That means you f$&%ed up. And you need to start the next session by giving the party a definite thing to pursue and a direction to go.

I feel like there’s a whole, separate article about the Party-Do list outside the context of open-world games just begging to be written. Because it’s a really powerful tool.

Anyway, just understand right now that if your Party-Do List looks like this:

Travel to Capitol City
Find an Inn
Wander, maybe?
…
Profit!

You’re in for a rough session.

The Party-Do List gives you a sense of your next session’s explorable space. That is, from right now, where the party’s standing, how many directions can they go? How many things can they choose to pursue? See, for all my harping on agency and breaking off the path, the truth is some players feel perfectly content exploring on the rails. Not all of them. But some of them. They’ll be happy just to have a good Party-Do List. And your job’s done.

But the Party-Do list also establishes the next session’s beaten path. The critical path along which the players are currently barging. And therefore, the path they can deviate from when they spot some smoke on the horizon.

I’m going to end with an example of a Party-Do List I prepared for my own Angry’s Open World Game. Because, apart from showing you what a good list looks like, it’ll also show you a bit about how you can set the players up for a good Party-Do List as they adventure. Besides, I’ve got to fill out the word count. And sharing a list I already wrote is easier than writing new words.

AOWG Party-Do Example: Homecoming

At the start of my campaign, I had four PCs who’d all left their hometown — Perrin’s Mill — years before. They were all on their way back to Perrin’s Mill for a once-a-decade festival thingy and they ran into each other at a roadside inn a day from town. After an awkward few minutes of forced interaction between players who knew nothing yet about their characters, they encountered a merchant who’d been attacked by spiders on the road. Like good adventures, they helped the merchant and then cleared the spiders from their nest in a nearby ruin.

Then, they headed for Perrin’s Mill. Knowing they’d reach Perrin’s Mill at the start of the next session, I prepared a Player-Do. And it looked like this:

Travel to Perrin’s Mill
Find an Inn
Sell Loot, Maybe?
I Don’t Know

Except it didn’t. Because I don’t suck at this GMing thing.

First, two of the PCs still had family in town. Family figures. I knew they’d want to reconnect.

Second, one of the PCs — the wizard — had had a childhood run-in with a crazy old lady who lived on the edge of town and who everyone thought was a witch. I was pretty sure she — the wizard — would want to connect with the supposed witch and learn some spells or something.

So, thanks to the minimal amount of backstory I’d allowed my players to force on me, the Player-Do List had a few extra lines, right?

But wait, there’s more.

On hearing about the attack on the merchant, the innkeeper told the PCs that the local lord would probably pay the players a bounty for making his roads safe. So, they should hook up with him and maybe bring a spider carcass as proof.

While exploring the ruins, the PCs found an ancient bronze and horn short bow. It had some good stats, but what it didn’t have was a bowstring. So, it’d need to be restrung before it was either useable or salable. And it’d probably need some tender loving care and maintenance besides.

The party also found a really nice suit of banded mail armor that was totally an upgrade for the cleric. Unfortunately, the armor’s previous owner had been liquified by spider poison, mummified in a spider silk husk, and then slurped out of the armor like a protein shake. So, the armor was a bit… unpleasant to wear. And also in need of some basic repair, maintenance, and adjustment.

Meanwhile, the PCs also found a recently abandoned camp in the ruins that they’d surmised belonged to some goblins. The goblins had, apparently, been fighting with the spiders. Or using the spiders for something. It wasn’t clear. But the goblins had left tribal marks on the walls. And those marks might be identifiable. And the whole scene suggested goblin trouble in the area. Definitely worth investigating.

Meanwhile, also, the party’s rogue flubbed an Open Locks check on a vault door. The party really wanted to get in there because it was the sort of door that definitely has something awesome behind it. The rogue took a wax impression of the lock and made some notes about the mechanism in the hopes of having some specialized tools or a skeleton key made.

So, the Party-Do List actually looked like this:

Travel to Perrin’s Mill
Secure Lodgings at Hartwood’s Inn
Hewan: Visit Ulric Hartwood, Father
Evendur: Visit Priest Wellyt, Adopted Father
Vestra: Contact Mad Gwylda
Seek Audience with Lord Ulric Fraenken and Claim Bounty
Find Someone to Repair Armor, Probably Blacksmith
Find Someone to Restring Bow, Probably Blacksmith or Bowyer
Find Someone to Sell Gems To, Probably Market or Ask Around
Find Someone to Make Skeleton Key or Advanced Lockpicks, Probably Blacksmith or Tinker
Investigate Tribal Goblin Marks/Goblin Trouble; Ask Around, Maybe Lord, Guards, or Hunter’s Lodge

So, that was the Party-Do List when the players walked into Perrin’s Mill. Note that it’s written from their perspective, not mine. And notice I guessed at the direction they’d probably head to accomplish their goals. In this case, note that a direction refers to a specific kind of professional they’d look around for. The players, in this case, had some vague ideas about what stuff existed in Perrin’s Mill, but they’d have to do some investigating to accomplish some of their goals.

Next time, I’ll show you how I gave my players a massive runaround and ran them right past a bunch of smoke on the horizon.

Meanwhile meanwhile,

Homework

Prepare a Player-Do List for your next session. Write down the best guesses you’ve got about everything your players want to accomplish. Include notes about how the players will likely start pursuing the items on their lists. If your list is pretty thin, if it includes only one item, or if it trails off into “I don’t know,” well, you’d better fix that s$&%.

And for those of you who support this site on Patreon and get early access, note your homework’s due on Wednesday. Because the next article is hot on this one’s heels. See you June 30 for the rest of the lesson.