Exploration is one of the three pillars of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). Yet, it is often the least supported. Rewarding exploration is the key to making the gaming group excited about it. Groups that explore more build a more characterful world. It’s an opportunity many groups miss.
It’s The Destination, Not The Journey
There is a natural tension with exploration in many tabletop RPGs. Even in hex crawls, the party is usually moving towards a settlement, a landmark, or chasing a rumour. It’s very rare for a group to say “We ride north!” for no reason. The focus is on the destination.
Exploration, then, becomes an inconvenience. It’s a speed bump for the party to get over, delaying the actual fun. Additionally, it can feel like an obvious resource tax—a deliberate drain on inventory, party spells, and hit points—by the gamemaster (GM) so they don’t start an encounter loaded for bear.
Skip Rewarding Exploration & Go Right To The Action
Consequently, instead of having rewarding exploration, a common response is to skip it altogether. If the party starts the session right outside one of the dungeon’s entrances, they get right to the action. This is the easy option.
Combat and social encounters have obvious payoffs: loot, experience, information, story advancement. So, the temptation is to get to the dopamine hit without delay.
However, this misses a chance of meaningful player interaction with the world. Trevor Devall (of Me, Myself, and Die) points out if you cut travel from The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the 481,103 word epic that has defined much of modern fantasy becomes a relative haiku.
When there is nothing to gain, skipping to one of the dungeon entrances has its place. But there are other options, too.
The Montage
The other common response. This reduces travel down to a quick narration. Again, this an admission that party satisfaction is at the destination, and the gaming group wants to get to the good stuff ASAP—exploration not included.
Montages Plus Skill Checks
A variation on this is the inclusion of skill challenges. The GM introduces something like three difficulties faced by the party; players then describe how they tackled these problems, rolling skill checks as necessary. Rolls interpreted, the party arrives at their destination without much real-time delay.
The process doesn’t postpone the action for too long, with the added bonus of increasing player agency. Significantly, failure doesn’t threaten arrival at the destination, it functions purely as a resource tax.
Player-Created Montages
The One Ring RPG popularised a further variation to the montage approach. Instead of the GM creating the difficulties faced, the players do.
One player thinks up a problem the party encounters, and the next player narrates its solution. Then, they create a new problem, and the next player takes over; the process repeats until everyone has had a turn creating and solving a situation.
Dice rolls only have limited input and, in some systems, are optional or entirely removed from play. This will appeal to some groups a lot more than to others—some folk just want to roll fistfuls of dice.
It places a lot of agency with the players and exploration becomes meaningful. Its speed and comparatively light detail compared to combat and social encounters, though, suggests this style is still nervous about treating exploration as one of the three central pillars of play.
Similar to the travel skip, montages have their place at any tabletop group, but there are still m…
Verticality, colour palettes, spatial atmosphere, scale, difficulty in traversal, and danger levels are all variables the game’s developers shift.
But here’s the thing: Satisfactory is just a computer game. Computer hardware and its genre act as hard limits on what the player can experience. A TTRPG has fewer limits. Unleash the imagination: imagine giant glass pyramids hovering over fields of bone; crystal caves singing melodies that alter memory; pathways burned into the sky by shooting stars.
Rewarding Exploration Builds World Character
Another reason that systems find combat and social encounters easier to build around is they have an obvious focal point. The party has an NPC or creature they must find and engage with. Exploration has no obvious figure for the players to focus on.
Unless the world itself can feel like a character.
In Satisfactory, the player will encounter creatures of all dispositions—placid, territorial, and aggressive hunters. They will dash, waddle, skitter, gallop, and soar. Some will come up to the pioneer’s knee, others will be larger than a multi-storey building. The pioneer can harvest only a handful of them; some they can’t even touch.
At no point will the player ever know their real names. The pioneer is an engineer, not a scientist. They are focused on surviving and exploiting, not observing and cataloguing. Even the animals they can harvest are ambiguously referred to as hogs, stingers, spitters, and hatchers.
The wildlife are an extension of the world’s character: it’s weird and unknowable. The lore teasers communicated to the player are surreal and creepy enough they’d be at home on Citadel Station—not the Star Wars one, the scary one.
Have Little Opportunities Everywhere
For the TTRPG group, the land, the wildlife, architecture, the bones the current civilisation has been built on—all of these are windows into their world. How the locals treat their dead, their children, their foes—both defeated and current—as well as who their champions are give more hints.
Also remember people and cultures are rarely homogeneous. They are usually messy, a mix of victories, passions, and tragedies. The different perspectives will show as much about a people’s similarities—past and present—as they do their differences.
The granddaddy of fantasy worldbuilding, Tolkien, had five different Elven groups and seven dwarf clans alone.
Build While Playing
It isn’t necessary to have all this worked out before a game; these provide chances for the group to develop the world’s character during a session naturally. However, if players are going to enjoy interacting with the world, and wish to do it with any regularity, they must get worthwhile rewards for their efforts.
The best way to find these chances is to travel and explore. The type and range of rewards on offer will depend on the group and the game they’re running; however, for rewarding exploration, variety and availability should be high.
An Important Reminder
It’s worth stating, all of the methods of dealing with travel—the skip, montage, resource tracking, and others—are useful tools for any gaming group and all can find their way into the same game, even the same session.
Narrative pacing, tension, and table energy levels are all factors that might dictate one method is better than the others in the moment. However, don’t miss the chance for the table to make exploration more rewarding, the world more characterful.
Rewarding Exploration For A Great Game
The key to making exploration and travel more fun is in the rewards. Nothing should be game-breaking or quest-defining. However, a variety of rewards, readily available, will make players want to get out and explore the world a lot more than any resource tax system alone.
By travelling more, the group naturally has more chances to characterize their world. As these small opportunities build up, the world becomes that bit cooler, more special, unique. Give it a try.
Good luck!
