So, last week, I posted an article that I didn’t intend to post because it turned out that a lot of people are doing a lot of weird s$&% with their narration and didn’t know how to narrate from decision point to decision point. Which I didn’t realize. I thought that was just something everyone “got.” That’s what I get for assuming, I guess.

The article I was going to write was actually the article whose discussion got derailed by all that narration s$&% in my private patron Discord. A Discord server which you can participate by supporting this site, which is good because the only thing keeping this site around is the fact that people like you support it. Anyway…

The article I was going to write was one about the nature of exploration and discovery and why it’s such a hard thing to get right and some general recommendations for including more actual exploration in your game. But while I was talking about that, I discovered people couldn’t even narrate wilderness travel. So, you got that article about how to edit your game while you’re running it and use narration to bury all the NOT GAME stuff.

Which means, now, it’s time to actually talk about exploration and discovery and why no one can get it right. Not even me. At least, until now. Because I think I cracked the f$&%ing code.

When is Exploration Exploration

Let’s talk about exploration. And discovery. Because exploration is a pretty hot topic among a certain subset of GMs. That is to say, GMs who want to have exploration in their games and do everything in their power to have exploration but who watch everything that happens and realize none of it actually feels like exploration. Which is all of them. Like, all of the GMs who go on and out about exploration and who have any shred of ability to actually critically analyze their game, all those GMs recognize that something doesn’t feel right. And all of the GMs who heard Mearls and Crawford and Perkins and the entire Player’s Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons 5E and all the GMs who were pinning their hopes on Pathfinder 2. All of them know something is still off. Something is still missing. Exploration in the game just doesn’t feel explorationy. And that’s when we can even get players to do something explorationy. Which they rarely do. And when they do, they don’t do it with any real sense of excitement.

That said, many GMs I know have had “moments” of exploration in their game. They’ve had those times when the players are actually exploring and it feels like exploration. And then it goes away. And it doesn’t come back for a long time. Honestly, it was me noticing a couple of those moments in my own game and then saying “okay, what the hell did I do to make that happen” that got me thinking about all of this.

So, let’s start with this assumption: exploration is supposed to be a part of the core experience of most fantasy adventure RPGs. I mean, hell, explorer and adventurer are practically synonyms. And while there are some players and groups who don’t care one squirrel’s favorite about exploration – and that’s perfectly okay – the design of the game strongly suggests exploration is supposed to be a part of the game. It’s a promise the game makes. And a lot of GMs and players are looking for it. And based on the popularity of certain video games and video game genres, it seems to be something a lot of people associate with fantasy adventure.

And yet…

The problem is actually hard to define. Because it’s a problem of feel. It doesn’t “feel” like there’s much exploration in most games. It doesn’t “feel” like the players are exploring. The exploration the players are doing doesn’t “feel” right. And maybe you don’t “feel” that problem. But I know from extensive discussion with lots of people – and recognize that when I say that, I often refer to many dozens of people, not just like, three buddies – I know from extensive discussions with a lot of gamers who play a lot of different styles and systems and have a lot of different levels of experience that something “feels” wrong.

And it may just be that we don’t know how to do it right. I mean, hell, video games seemed to be doing exploration right for many years. And then along came the entirely original IP Breath of the Wild to show everyone how to really do open-world exploration. It’s just a shame the game did literally nothing else even remotely right and every asshole giving it a perfect score is lying to you. Everything that isn’t exploring the open-world sucks. And it is NOT a Legend of Zelda game. Legend of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is a better Legend of Zelda game than Breath of the Wild.

Feel free to disagree in the comments. It gives me something to laugh evilly about while I hit the delete key.

So, before I could figure out how to fix the problem for everyone – like I do – I had to define the problem. In an explicit way. I had to figure out why exploration in most tabletop role-playing games doesn’t feel like exploration? But that’s not a question I could answer because there was another question that had to be answered first. And that was “what does exploration feel like?” And then, beyond that, there was the question of “what the hell even is exploration?”

Fortunately, I play a lot of exploration-based video games. And unlike most people, I play games pretty critically. That is, I spend a lot of time trying to understand what I’m feeling and why and how the game made me feel that way as I play.

Now, the thing is, I could sit here an analyze the hell out of various exploration-based games – both the open-world variety and the Metroidvania variety because they ARE different – but I’m not going to do that. Yet. I’ll get to it when I get around to building some solutions, some ways you can structure your game to focus on exploration. And I’m going to do that in three distinct phases because there’s three distinct states of gameplay in fantasy tabletop roleplaying games. As a fun activity, try to guess what they are. Hint: DOWNTIME IS NOT A STATE OF PLAY FOR F#&$’S SAKE!

Instead, I’m going to cut to the chase and tell you exactly what makes me feel like I’m exploring when I play video games. And, moreover, I’m going to give you an example of a moment in my game when exploration definitely happened that felt like exploration. And then, I’m going to tell how this relates to the biggest, most important, most often forgotten issue in table-top roleplaying games. And finally, I’m going to tell you why, as a GM, the harder you try to create exploration in your game, the harder you’ll fail.

Okay? Let’s go.

What makes exploration exploration? When is exploration happening? Well, exploration is always triggered by certain specific thoughts in my head. Thoughts that sound like, “Hey, that looks weird, what the hell is that?” Or, “it sure looks like there’s something hidden in that direction, I’m going to go check it out.” Or, “huh, I wonder what would happen if I brought this flower to that NPC who seems so sad and depressed and thinks dreams and hope are useless.” As I cataloged all the moments in video games when I felt like I was exploring, a pattern emerged. And that pattern boiled down to two important criteria and a couple of little additional observations.

The first thing that makes exploration exploration is that I – the player – have decided to satisfy my curiosity. Something in the game world has caught my personal interest. Some question has occurred to me. And I have decided to go check it out. Exploration is the satisfaction of personal curiosity.

Now, it is important to note that people have different reasons to satisfy their own curiosity. And this is always where GMs get tripped up. Because the actual moment of satisfaction – the discovery – may be extrinsically or intrinsically valuable for any number of reasons. And those reasons – and their worth – will vary from player to player. Some players – those who are in it to immerse themselves in a fantasy world – get a thrill just from adding to the sum total of everything they know about the world. Other players – those who are in it to become more powerful and overcome challenges – enjoy discovering things that make them more powerful. And some players – those who just love learning everything they can about worlds and systems – don’t even care what they find. The fact that they found something others might have missed is enough.

You might notice some strong correlations between those rewards and several of the Eight Kinds of Fun. And it’s very important that you see exactly what that means. It means that exploration is not merely the type of gameplay that gives Discovery players warm jollies. Exploration is something that – depending on the payoff for the exploration – can fulfill a lot of different needs. And, look, that was a BIG revelation for me. But I also feel like a jacka$& because I should have seen the inherent flaw in the logic that exploration is the thing that pays off Discovery. Because exploration is a game mechanic. It’s a game activity. Just like social interaction, combat, and crafting. And just like each of those other things, it can satisfy lots of different aesthetics depending on how it’s implemented and what rewards it provides.

The reasons a given player will enjoy exploration are deeply personal, as are the reasons why a player might like a good combat. Which is why you make sure that different moments of exploration and different combats provide a variety of rewards. But the rewards also don’t matter as much as the decision to explore. And the decision to explore is driven by a moment of personal curiosity.

GMs should also get really, REALLY excited about that idea because personal curiosity is a symptom of the players actually giving a s$%& about the game world. So, every GM should now be paying very careful attention as I analyze the real nature of exploration and then talk about how to get players to do it. For reals. In ways that feel like real exploration.

The second thing that makes exploration exploration is that exploration is, by its nature, a distraction from the current goal. Think about it. When you feel like you’re exploring in a video game, you’re either between goals in the game or else you’re putting a goal on hold for a moment. Exploration happens when you say, “eh, before I talk to these quest givers and get the next assignment, I want to go check out that cave.” Or exploration happens when you say, “this is obviously the path to the next boss, so let me check these side passages first.”

This is actually a very important point because it gets to the essential nature of role-playing itself. Which I will come back to at the end. For now, though, I’m going to say that key to the feeling of exploration is the feeling of self-direction. Exploration is an assertion of agency. “I have a question about the world, and the world can damned well wait until I answer it.” If you’re doing what the game tells you to do, you aren’t exploring. In table-top roleplaying games, this translates to “if you’re doing what the GM tells you to do, you aren’t exploring.” And remember that. Because it will create a huge problem due to the nature of the game.

In truth, none of this should be surprising. After all, what is exploration but “going where you want to go and seeing what you want to see and reaping the benefits of whatever discovery you make?” But it does create some interesting problems because some of the things that GMs think are exploration actually aren’t. And that, as we will see, is precisely why exploration rarely feels like exploration in table-top role-playing games.

But first, let me give you an example of this from my own game. A moment of real exploration that happened in a recent game I ran.

One Time, My Players Actually Explored for Reals

Now, let me preface this by saying that I have had many true moments of exploration in my games. Most GMs have. But they are – like for most GMs – just moments. There are times when my players have actually stopped to explore. Let me also say that I know all about hex crawls and that insipid West Marches crap. And I will be the first to admit I should have been paying more attention to what those things were doing right. Because they do have a higher proportion of real exploration than more goal-oriented games. The problem is, they are a specialized taste and sit on a far end of a spectrum most players are closer to the middle of. Yes, it is easy to create real exploration when real exploration is the only way to get to the gameplay. Essentially, you hold the fun hostage and demand the players go find it. And that does force exploration. And players who love exploration for exploration’s sake will eat that s$&% up.

But I want exploration for the masses. I want exploration for players who want to get all sorts of things out of their exploration. I want exploration for games that aren’t ONLY exploration. I want exploration for everyone for every type of game. Moreover, I want to understand how to build tools and systems that make it easier for GMs of every stripe to build exploration into their games without having to throw away everything else. So that they don’t have to say “look, if you don’t search this map I drew, there IS no game.” And, as we’re going to see, that’s actually a weak form of exploration anyway. But back to the moment of real exploration in my game.

The heroes were in this mini-dungeon. I was going to say they were exploring a mini-dungeon, but they weren’t really. We’ll get to why dungeon exploration is rarely exploration. They were searching the mini-dungeon because outside the dungeon was a source of water that some villagers were using that had, inconveniently turned to blood. The ex-water was flowing out of a wall around an ancient shrine. The party had to into the ancient shrine and find the water source to figure out what had happened. This was part of a bigger adventure, so the dungeon itself was pretty small. Here’s a rough idea of the layout. The actual map is a little more complex, but I want this to be clear.

As you can see, the heroes entered at the upper right. The water source is in the heart of the shrine. However, the two passages that led from the right and bottom parts of the shrine into the middle had caved in and were impassable. So, the party had to circle all the way around to the left side and then go into the heart of the shrine.

At the point where they were at that left-hand intersection and about to head into the heart of the shrine, someone said, “before we head into the center of the shrine and find the water source, let’s check out that passage to the north and see what’s there.”

Bingo. Real exploration.

That is exactly the sort of crap I say in Hollow Knight when Cornifer’s map tells me that the passage to the left leads to something important and big and I see a side passage heading off to the right. That’s the crap I say when I’m suffering through Breath of the Wild and the minimap tells me that the Zora domain is up ahead and that’s where I’ll find out how to get into the next Divine Beast, but then I see a hollow in the ground and my shrine detector is pinging.

“I know my goal is over there, but I want to know what’s up with THAT first.”

Now, the design of the dungeon that the party was exploring was crucial. And I will say I knew exactly what I was doing when I designed the dungeon. I just didn’t really understand why the design worked. I just understood that it did. The design gradually tells the players where their goal is. It’s a shrine and it’s symmetrical, so the likely place for the thing of value is in the center. The passages converge on the center, though they are blocked off an inaccessible. And that inaccessibility is also a big clue to players who know anything about how games are structured. And, while the water flowed through a channel under the floor, there were grates where the party could see it. By the time they got to the left-hand intersection, they knew EXACTLY where their goal probably was.

As I said, I knew what I was doing when I designed the dungeon. But that moment was very jarring because there were some things about it that I’d never noticed before. And, more importantly, I recognized the implications in those realizations.

Exploration is a State of Mind

Okay, so exploration happens when the players choose to suspend whatever goal they currently have – or to forgo a goal – in favor of satisfying their own curiosity, right? Just smile and nod because I’m right, even though I know you can think of an example that disproves that statement. I can too. But, here’s the thing, those examples are all of the things GMs try to get players to do that look like exploration but don’t feel quite right.

For example, “you enter yon dungeon. Somewhere therein lies the treasure you seek. Go forth and find yon treasure.” That seems like exploring, right? Go into an unknown place and find the thing? What about, “this trackless wilderness has not known the tread of a human boot in centuries. I shall pay you fine adventures to map this region for me.” Those are exploration-based quests, but what the players are doing is NOT exploring. Searching for something is not the same as exploring. Mapping something is not the same as exploring. If the goal is to explore, the players are not exploring. And, in fact, the players CAN’T explore if the goal is to explore. Paradoxically.

And this gets down to an issue that is at the very existential core of role-playing games that GMs always forget. Role-playing is choosing. It’s the act of imagining a situation, imagining yourself as a specific persona in that situation, and decided what that persona does. Describing the action, executing it, and seeing the results are not role-playing. They are part of a role-playing game. And they facilitate the next moment of actual role-playing. But they are not role-playing.

Now, what makes a choice a choice is that it resolves an internal dilemma. That is to say, there exist two – or more – desirable things in a player’s head and they can’t have both. They have to choose one. And the more equally desirable those two things are, the more the choice says about the person. The more the choice becomes unique to the person. Which is central to role-playing. It’s not just making choices; it’s making the unique choices your character WOULD make in every situation.

Now, role-playing is something the players don’t do through the whole game. They dip into it and they dip out of it. Role-play, execute, resolve, role-play, execute, resolve, ad infinitum. Remember that. I’m coming back to it.

But let’s look again the situation my players found themselves in. On the one hand, they needed to find the source of the water to determine why it had turned to blood. On the other hand, there was this passage that led in the wrong direction and they were curious – for whatever reason – about what was down that passage and whether it might be valuable.

Now, the thing is, that doesn’t seem like a dilemma at all. After all, the party knew that, after they explored the side passage, they could proceed to the goal. In fact, that was their plan. They weren’t giving up their goal. So, what choice were they actually making? Well, the dungeon was dangerous. It had proven that. Trust me. They were not having a great time in that particular little cave. And they suspected they’d encounter yet more resistance as they proceeded to the heart of the dungeon. But if they explored the side passage, it might cost them more resources. It might chew up more of their spells. It might suck up more of their HP. It might consume their supplies. And some of those resources could be regained, sure, but others would be lost forever. And they had a reason to worry about what was going on back at town while they were dicking around in this dungeon.

So, their goal was to reach the heart of the dungeon as efficiently as possible so they could handle whatever had corrupted the water and to waste as little time as possible. Exploring any unnecessary side passage would cost them time and resources. So, that’s the dilemma. That’s the choice. Exploration is the choice to risk valuable resources to satisfy your curiosity, to divert resources from a goal into pursuing curiosity. And remember, again, it doesn’t matter WHY the players are curious. It doesn’t matter whether they are curious because they want to know the backstory of the dungeon or because they think there will be useful magical treasure down there. What matters is they are diverting resources from their goal to find out what lies the other way.

But what if they didn’t know where the heart of the dungeon was. What if there were no clues in the layout and design. What if they simply came to a “left or right” decision while they were searching a maze for a thing? Well, there’s no dilemma. Because they have no way of knowing which direction the thing lies, they can’t divert resources from finding the thing to satisfying curiosity. If the left path is more enticing for any reason at all, it’s as good a choice as any. No internal conflict has been resolved. At least, no meaningful conflict has been resolved. It might look like exploration because the players are wandering an unmapped location however they want to, but it isn’t. Because they are not choosing to explore. They are searching.

And you can apply this same logic to “map the dungeon” or “clear the dungeon” or “investigate the murder.” The essential missing component will always be the party being forced to choose whether to risk their resources on satisfying their own curiosity or on their goal.

And that brings me to another point about exploration. Remember when I said that players dip into and dip out of role-playing throughout the game? Well, the truth is, they also dip into and dip out of exploration. Because exploration happens in a single moment of choice. Everything after that is just execution.

When my players said, “let’s check that side passage before we plunge any further into this dungeon,” that was the moment of exploration. At that moment, if there had been a quest tracker floating above the table that could only track one quest, it would have blinked from “locate the source of the water corruption at the heart of the dungeon” to “investigate the side passage.” After they made that choice, they walked down the side passage, found some treasure, found a monster, killed the latter, gathered the former, and then they were done. More or less.

Exploration isn’t a constant state that the game settles into. Instead, it’s a moment in which the players choose their own goal. And they choose their own goal based entirely on what has piqued their curiosity. Of course, Breath of the Wild shows us how you can string those moments along so that the player is ping-ponging across the map, following one moment of curiosity and then another and then another. But it is still a series of choices, executions, and resolutions. If there had been two more side passages at the end of the side passage the players had explored, their curiosity would be pitted against their desire to efficiently accomplish their goal again. And again.

That said, exploration is a moment that flavors all the future moments. So, once the players decide to explore something, each decision they have to make during the execution carries the additional option of “… or do you return to pursuing your goal.” “At the end of the side passage, there’s a locked door. Do you break down the door or pick the lock… or do you return to pursuing your goal?” “Inside the room is an ogre, curled up on some dirty skins, sleeping soundly. There are two doors leading out of the room. Do you try to sneak past the ogre or get the jump on the ogre and kill him… or do you return to pursuing your goal?” “The ogre is dead. There’s two doors leading out of the room. Do you go left or do you go right… or do you return to pursuing your goal?”

And if every action the party takes in the dungeon carries some kind of risk or cost, like the danger of wandering monsters or the nebulous risk of rising tension or the fact that the town is on the verge of violence and every day that passes means someone is likely to be killed, the balance between the options keeps pitching more and more in favor of returning to the goal. Whereas if spending time and actions wandering the dungeon has no risk or cost, there is never any dilemma at all.

So, exploration is not an activity. It is a series of choices. A series of moments in which the players have to pit the risks or costs of exploring against the desire to accomplish their goal. And that only works if there are risks or costs and if the players know which direction their goal actually lies in. And, of course, exploration is the satisfaction of curiosity. It has to be driven by the players. Which is where the whole thing can fall apart for a careless GM.

How the GM Can Screw All of this Up

Curiosity is a deeply personal thing. And the motives behind curiosity are also deeply personal. Every player will be curious about different things for different reasons. As a GM, you can’t create curiosity, you can only invite it. You can only entice it. If you try to do anything more than that, you are actually f$&%ing with the essential nature of exploration as a choice to satisfy one’s own curiosity over pursuing the goal the game has laid out. And the game itself can also sabotage exploration.

For example, if the rewards for exploration are almost always very valuable, then exploration ceases to be about curiosity. For example, if you are always hiding powerful magical items off the main path of the adventure, your players will eventually pick up on the pattern. They will know it is ALWAYS worth exploring the side paths because the magic items outweigh pretty much everything else. And if the costs of breaking away from the main path are always cheap and easy – or nonexistent – then the players will know exploring is ALWAYS worth it. The removal of things like random encounters and rising tension from dungeon exploration actually wrecks the very essence of exploration. Remember, for something to be a dilemma, there has to be a good reason NOT to pursue what you want. There have to be reasons to NOT explore for exploration to be a choice.

As it stands, exploring the entire dungeon usually ISN’T a choice. It’s something most players just do automatically. Players very rarely leave any stone unturned in a dungeon. That’s partly because the game has made the costs of turning over every stone really cheap and easy and partly because, in most dungeons, players can’t really see the path to their goal anyway. And if they can’t see where their goal is, they can’t divert resources from pursuing it.

Beyond that, exploration requires optional, extra content. Extra content with a variety of different payoffs. Sometimes, a side path only leads to a monster. Sometimes, it reveals an interesting bit of backstory. Sometimes, it leads to a valuable piece of useful information. Sometimes, it offers a powerful treasure. And sometimes, there’s nothing at all. Extra content requires time and energy to create and it requires time and energy to play through. And that, by the way, should vary too. Sometimes, extra content is just a room or scene. Sometimes, it’s a series of passages. Sometimes, it’s a whole sprawling extra level of the dungeon. The point is, GMs aren’t super f$&%ing excited about spending a lot of time and energy creating content that might never get used. And that, if it does get used, will suck up thirty minutes of playtime just to “reward” the players with a dead end.

And, the thing is, because curiosity is so personal and it can’t be relied upon, the GM can’t get by with just one little side passage here or there. If the GM really wants exploration to be a part of the game and does everything else right, there’s going to be a lot of extra content and only a fraction of it will ever get used. The extra optional s$&% to explore needs to be densely packed. Why?

Because of narration. See, there’s an interesting facet to exploration. Exploration partially hinges on saying “f$&% what the game wants; I’m going to do what I want.” There’s a certain amount of rejecting the way the game is pushing you, right? And the importance of that facet of exploration varies from player to player. There are some very contrarian players out there who rebel against any perceived rails in the game, and most GMs label them as problem players. But some of them are probably just explorers who came to D&D because it promised real, open exploration and is not delivering on that promise. Of course, some of them are really problem players. Or, in the Angrican Lexicon, a$&holes.

See, the thing about role-playing games is that there are no visuals. There’s nothing on screen. The players literally only see what the GM tells them they see. And the GM, because narration is boring, has to pick only the most important details to shine the GMing spotlight on. So, the GM has to pre-pick the things that might entice curiosity and make sure to list them and describe them.

Again, have you ever wondered why some players fixate on seemingly small things in the GM’s narration and pursue them even though they are just flavor text? Well, I’m now convinced many of those players are just trying to explore, to satisfy their curiosity, and the only thing they’ve got to pursue is the words in the narration.

Anyway, this narration problem f$&%s things up in two ways. First, it means the GM has to predict the whims of personal and subjective player curiosity and generate the list of things to be curious about accordingly. And good f$&%ing luck doing that right every time. Second, though, it means that literally everything the players might be curious about is technically something the GM is pointing them toward. Everything the GM shines a spotlight on is basically the game adding another thingie to the quest tracker. When the GM says, “ahead lies your path into the dark forest, but off to the side of the road is an old abandoned hut you could check out,” the player’s quest tracker updates to list “(Optional) Explore the abandoned hut.” And if part of the reason you explore is to get free from the shackles of the game and satisfy your own damned curiosity, you cute little Expression-seeker you, well, there’s this vague, disquieting sense that you really can’t do that.

Now, a smart GM – me, mainly – can find ways to solve these problems. The key is understanding the problems and understanding exploration for what it is. Exploration is not merely the gameplay mode Discovery-seekers use to get what they want. Exploration is about satisfying deeply personal curiosities for deeply personal reasons. It is a choice, not an action, and thus requires a dilemma. It is something that the players dip into long enough to change their goals and then dip back out of to pursue said goals. And its something the GM cannot force, that they can only entice. And if you’re remotely smart – and you’re reading my site for advice, so that speaks well of you – you can probably figure out the workarounds too.

That said, it is worth delving into some very specific ways to implement tools into different parts of your game. And there are three specific parts of the game I’d like to look at in terms of enticing real exploration. Which means I’ll be back to talk more about this topic in the coming weeks.

In the meanwhile, though, feel free to explore your own solutions. Assuming I’ve piqued your curiosity.

See what I did there?