I've had a lot of feelings about Exploration Mode over the years, including that Detect Magic and Investigate really shouldn't be lumped in with Search, Avoid Notice, and Scout because of how points of interest work. As a GM, I ask players what "exploration tactic" they are using (a term from the PF2e playtest I think should have made it to the final game) and as a player I always tell my GM my tactic. Turns out I was doing it wrong this whole time.
While you're traveling and exploring, tell the GM what you'd generally like to do along the way. If you do nothing more than make steady progress toward your goal, you move at the full travel speeds given in the table.When you want to do something other than simply travel, you describe what you are attempting to do. It isn't necessary to go into extreme detail, such as “Using my dagger, I nudge the door so I can check for devious traps.” Instead, “I'm searching the area for hazards” is sufficient. The GM finds the best exploration activity to match your description and describes the effects of that activity. Some exploration activities limit how fast you can travel and be effective.
Exploration activities that happen continually as the group explores are meant to be narrative first and foremost, with the player describing to you what they're doing, and then you determining which activity applies and describing any details or alterations for the situation. If a player says, “I'm Avoiding Notice,” add more detail by asking what precautions they're taking or by telling them which passages they think are least guarded. Likewise, if a player says they're looking for traps and keeping their shield raised and covering the group's tracks, ask them which of these they are prioritizing to narrow down the activity.
I haven't fully wrapped my head around what this actually changes, but I still think Investigate and Detect Magic aren't in the right category and are kind of wastes of your exploration tactic when actually moving through a dungeon.
I actually understand where you're coming from, as I had a similar issue myself. As someone who does a lot of Play-By-Post, Exploration Mode has been very helpful for getting my team's "default actions" out of the way and moving the story along without bogging down the exploration. I think that's pretty universal around most tables.
When we get to what I consider the "granular" activities (like Investigate), I see those as being things that you change on the fly for certain situations, but we don't consciously think of as changing. The member of the party is Scouting when they stumble upon some older ruins. The GM describes the room and the scout then asks to check out the murals. Their activity has changed to Investigate, but it's quick, right? Not something we think of as shifting. If suddenly a horde of rats strike out from the shadows, we wouldn't consider the scout as giving that Scouting bonus any more as they're preoccupied with Investigating.
I only bring up the PbP as I have more trouble getting to those granular moments without significantly slowing down an already slow format of play. Because of that, I have to rethink how those activities get used to keep the pace of my games snappy while also being fair to my players.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I dislike the idea of being punished when you use Stealth for Initiative (which requires Avoid Notice) by not being able to do anything else narrative-wise.
One, isn't that what feats like Warden's Step are for?
Two, I think that is kinda the idea. These exploration activities are intended for when there isn't much going on. It is a basic and overall idea of what your character is doing for long periods of time.
If you are wanting to do more than one thing at a time, then you are probably into some middle-ground territory. Not combat or Encounter mode where things are tracked by the action, but not long-term Exploration either. A version of the Exploration game mode that isn't using long-term exploration activities like Avoid Notice.
If you are trying to sneak past a known enemy, Avoid Notice is probably not the right idea. That scene would be better done using a skill challenge mode.
If you are entering a room to then check it out, but you want to do it stealthy in case there is something there, then this also isn't the time for Avoid Notice. This scene is more of a non-combat Encounter mode idea. Use your passive Stealth DC as you enter the room, but that isn't a full activity. If someone is there, then they will have to spot you by rolling Perception check. If nothing is there, then you can investigate the room as planned. The GM shouldn't be telling you that since you are using Avoid Notice that you can't investigate the room after entering it.
If you are moving from one room down a bunch of corridors/tunnels/passages/other rooms and the entire party is just trying to get from the one place to another, that is when Avoid Notice is used - or repeated Detect Magic, or Hustle, or . And you should only be doing one thing without special feats or abilities or partners. It is just an overview. If something interesting comes up, then the GM should switch back to the more nuanced and granular middle-ground again.
I dislike the idea of being punished when you use Stealth for Initiative (which requires Avoid Notice) by not being able to do anything else narrative-wise.
I wanted to circle back on this one to say that examples like I gave have been rare in my experience. I don't know of any GMs that use Exploration activities as a "gotcha!" They just allow us to translate what is happening narratively to what's occuring mechanically.
That said, rogues tend to be in a tough spot when it comes to Exploration just because they're tasked with so much. While running PFS, I had a player using an eldritch trickster rogue who entered an old crypt and said that he was, "Sneaking along, searching for traps, and detecting magic" all the while. And I can understand wanting to do all of that! It doesn't feel like a big ask, but there are a few things to consider beyond the narrative-stretching ability to do so much at once. Something that PF2 really seemed to try to do is remove a "one-stop shop" solution across the board. If my example rogue was able to Scout, Detect Magic, Search, and Avoid Notice, the rest of the party has less of an active role to play during these sessions. It's also opened up some design space with feats like Trapfinding or Wary Skulker.
That doesn't mean our rogue couldn't enter a room sneakily, breathe a sigh of relief, and then get to work detecting magic and looking for traps. It just allows concrete rules for GMs and PCs to point to when Exploration mode butts up against Encounter mode or the natural challenges of the adventure.
EDIT: In this example, however, while our rogue is doing all of this, what is the rest of their party doing? It feels more interactive for the whole table to get involved and make choices about their character rather than wait idly with passive Exploration activities like Defend.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I dislike the idea of being punished when you use Stealth for Initiative (which requires Avoid Notice) by not being able to do anything else narrative-wise.
As Finoan notes, there are feats that open options like Trap Finder, Ongoing Investigation, Perpetual Scout and Swift Tracker. Not 'punishing' players for their exploration picks and allowing more fluid activities would reduce the value of such feats.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
[
EDIT: In this example, however, while our rogue is doing all of this, what is the rest of their party doing? It feels more interactive for the whole table to get involved and make choices about their character rather than wait idly with passive Exploration activities like Defend.
While I agree with you in principle, I don't think exploration mode engages the whole party that well in practice. Searching is the best activity for the group and in a perfect world you want as many people doing it as possible. But proficiency gating means your casters might not even be able to spot hazards, so you generally need to rely on certain martials. And those martials tend to be classes that are rewarded the most by Avoiding Notice instead (rogues, rangers, gunslingers.)
You can have one person with crap proficiency use Scout (which really really REALLY should be called Look Out because it is not actual scouting). That provides a tangible benefit, but one that doesn't stack with itself or a litany of feats which provides circumstance bonuses to initiative. (Or cover for Avoid Notice.) Avoid Notice is super strong on martials but less so on casters since their hidden condition breaks when casting a non-subtle spell, so no off guard on their opening shot.
Detect Magic while actually exploring is a trap. It is worse at finding magic then Search because most magic hazards have proficiency gating and those that don't, like the Armageddon Orb, are literally impossible to miss. You're not going to find a magic item in a hallway, you will find it in the rooms the hallway connects. (And if it's hidden under the floor boards you can't find it by RAW anyway because of line of effect rules. We lost that whole "one foot of stone, one inch of lead thing from PF1.) Investigate suffers the same problem. If you encounter something worth investigating, you just stop and do that. There's no need to do it as you travel. Adventures just aren't written to make Detect Magic and Investigate useful. That just leaves Defend, Sustain, or Repeat a spell. Any of these might be useful but they are super build specific.
Part of the problem is exploration mode isn't actually a single mode of play. It encompasses:
-Overland Travel at full speed (or even Hustling)
-Dungeon exploration, cautiously at half speed
-Investigating points of interest
-Post encounter recovery (may coincide with points of interest)
-Social scenes
-Quasi downtime activities like Learn a Spell
-Overnight resting/camping/setting watch.
One mode of play doesn't effectively capture all of these, IMO. And it annoys me that activities like Investigate and Detect Magic got lumped in with the dungeon exploration tactics. Detect Magic should count as Searching, at least as far as magical traps, doors, and hidden objects are concerned. It should probably give a bonus to it, honestly. It shouldn't make you worse at finding magic.
Investigate is a harder but to crack, but it should probably be combined with Track or Survey Wildlife. Spotting markings, scat, or tracks that seem innocuous to someone hyper vigilant for danger but might let you Recall Knowledge about creatures in the area.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I mean, I would be hard pressed to say that Exploration activities are perfect, too. When writing my own material I give them a glance over and feel like I am writing in reasons for PCs to remember them outside of very specific situations. Like you said, Exploration mode is a very nebulous area - if Encounter mode tracks the moment-to-moment decisions and Downtime mode tracks periods of time that range from a day to years, then exploration mode covers... minutes to hours to...? It's absolutely in a weird spot, but I think it isn't terribly flawed. Some edges just don't align as neatly into the puzzle as well as other modes of the game - especially from game to game.
For myself, it feels as though someone at Paizo enjoyed how Burning Wheel's instincts cut out a lot of the chaff of the game and focused on that. But, like you said, then then wound up with certain activities that ended up being more useful or classes that leaned towards those more heavily. It's nice then that you're not locked in to your activity like you would be if it was a Burning Wheel character's Instinct - so when the Defending frontliner decides that he'd like to Track, it's a smooth transition.
Yes, Repeat a Spell is a weird one, but it does encompass more that just Detect Magic - it's just that it's hard to put a finger one what other spells you'd like to repeat. It all sort of reminds me of the days playing in college and having someone say "We move through in single file with Chuck in front looking for traps, Steve casting detect magic every 30 feet, and Jen holding the torch for them." It's somewhat anachronistic to how games are played nowadays, but I like having those options there.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
What I LOVE about exploration mode is it cuts down on a lot of the unnecessary dice rolling. I'm so sick of four characters rolling perception on every empty hallway, or rolling stealth checks to check on empty rooms. Just establish what people are doing and roll when it actually matters.
They just didn't make all of the exploration options actually matter. I don't think running with more narrative focus in mind changes that.
What I LOVE about exploration mode is it cuts down on a lot of the unnecessary dice rolling. I'm so sick of four characters rolling perception on every empty hallway, or rolling stealth checks to check on empty rooms. Just establish what people are doing and roll when it actually matters.
Flashbacks to high school -
"As you approach the-"
"I'm Hiding.... 23 and Moving Silently... 18."
"...As you approach the door, you can see that the trail of blood ends here."
"I open the door... stealthily. That's a 24 for Move Silently. I'm still Hiding, too. Nat 20."
"Okay, so inside you see three doors, each-"
"I'll Move Silently up to each one, checking for traps..."
Dice rolling intensifies.
Trapfinder is one of the best feats in the game and probably should have been built into the rogue chassis, except that I think they wanted other classes to feel like they could take on the role as well. It is one of the worst mistakes a rogue can make not taking it because your perception scales so fast, and yet you are excessively rewarded for avoiding notice in every encounter you can be.
I think a lot about exploration mode as a GM who designs a fair number of my own adventures and encounters, and I think the most difficult aspect of it is that “in the real world” exploring is very slow and methodical, with a heavy focus in the initial moments on identifying threats and dangers. In a game where the party is a cooperative team and not in competition too, even thorough searching of rooms for secret compartments, treasures and doors would be way down on the list of things you are actively looking fire if you are rightfully worried that a horrible monster is around the next corner preparing to kill you.
But that pace is not cinematic or heroic, and what is the fun of planting treasure that might actually be useful if the party is unlikely to find it until the whole dungeon is cleared and they are going through it with toothbrushes after it is cleared? So exploration mode should be like 3 or 4 different processes applied to each location of note in an adventure, but that really kills pacing. I really wish “encounter mode” was not so heavily reliant on being the scale of fast paced combats and that the investigate/explore encounter mode was something a little more established, like social encounter mode has become. Especially with skill feats designed primarily for combat mode or downtime mode, even things like gathering information but especially investigation can slip into “what are the stakes here in relationship to time?” In pretty unsatisfying ways.
For example:
If we have a day in town before a gala at night, do we get a downtime day? If I want to gather information during that time, do I get to make 8+ checks? If I only make 1, have I ruined my chance to do anything else? What about if I want to decipher a text or research a n artifact we found? These things slip through the cracks between modes of play very easily, and have led to awkward splitting up the party in multiple campaigns.
That house rule is fine, but it feels clunky.
Scout can be distinct from Search. Searching is studying your extremely immediate surroundings. Like the squares you are adjacent to and not much else. You're keeping your head down to spot trip wires. Scouting is instead keeping your head on a swivel and being hyper vigilant for movement anywhere in your field of vision.
The problem is investigate is a thing you do after the scout or searcher finds something worth stopping and examining.
Trapfinder is one of the best feats in the game and probably should have been built into the rogue chassis, except that I think they wanted other classes to feel like they could take on the role as well. It is one of the worst mistakes a rogue can make not taking it because your perception scales so fast, and yet you are excessively rewarded for avoiding notice in every encounter you can be.
I think a lot about exploration mode as a GM who designs a fair number of my own adventures and encounters, and I think the most difficult aspect of it is that “in the real world” exploring is very slow and methodical, with a heavy focus in the initial moments on identifying threats and dangers. In a game where the party is a cooperative team and not in competition too, even thorough searching of rooms for secret compartments, treasures and doors would be way down on the list of things you are actively looking fire if you are rightfully worried that a horrible monster is around the next corner preparing to kill you.
But that pace is not cinematic or heroic, and what is the fun of planting treasure that might actually be useful if the party is unlikely to find it until the whole dungeon is cleared and they are going through it with toothbrushes after it is cleared? So exploration mode should be like 3 or 4 different processes applied to each location of note in an adventure, but that really kills pacing. I really wish “encounter mode” was not so heavily reliant on being the scale of fast paced combats and that the investigate/explore encounter mode was something a little more established, like social encounter mode has become. Especially with skill feats designed primarily for combat mode or downtime mode, even things like gathering information but especially investigation can slip into “what are the stakes here in relationship to time?” In pretty unsatisfying ways.
For example:
If we have a day in town before a gala at night, do we get a downtime day? If I want to gather information during that time, do I get...
Yeah, time pressure barely ever matters and when it does it often aligns poorly with how many encounters PCs can actually handle.
I also wish there were more concrete rules for social encounters without needing to resort to full blown influence encounters. I love influence encounters, but they are a lot of work and hard to do spontaneously.
I've been dipping into Blades in the Dark lately and I like some of their unified mechanics. Most progress in the game is measured by filling in a "clock," which is kind of like filling up an XP bar. When a thing happens, you fill in a number of clock sections proportionate to how successful the thing was. You level up when your XP clock fills. You defeat a powerful enemy when you've filled its damage clock. You convince a crime lord to align with you by filling up his persuasion clock. And you can use clocks to measure actual time, as well. The closest Pathfinder comes to this is victory points, wand I've found Pathfinder victory based subsystems tend to work better than most other subsystems APs come up with.
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think the problem with exploration is that it has two different ideas going into it.
The first is an attempt to streamline repetitive stuff like "I search for traps, I move 10 feet, I search again..." or "I keep casting detect magic every 15 feet".
The second is trying to turn exploration into its own minigame where there needs to be something valuable to do for everyone.
The first idea is pretty successful. Exploration mode has streamlined a tedious aspect of PF1. (To be fair, it's officially codifying something that some groups had already started doing.)
The second idea isn't really successful. The activities are not really comparable with each other in value. And if you look closely, there's particularly few valuable things to do for the back row of the party. Since Searching has a maximum range, you sorta need to be in front to make sure nobody else in front of you walks into a trap before you have a chance to find it. Defend doesn't really reach its maximum potential either if there's three people between you and the enemy.
I think the easiest thing to do is just accept that exploration tactics are only a time-saver and it's not important that everyone is eking out maximum optimal results.
If you really want the second idea minigame to work, I think you may need to come up with better alternative activities. For example, why can't Detect Magic find any hazards with a proficiency tier? Why doesn't it let you make an Arcana check as an alternative to Perception (and checking expert/master in the skill)? Even so, I think it'll be hard to come up with enough interesting things for the back row to do.
I agree with the majority saying Exploration Mode is a tool to smooth gameplay more than a rigorous rule set (or mini-game, *blech*).
And yep, in PF1 my regular veteran players would develop routines, sometimes simply saying the phrase which stands for the series of activities their PCs perform (so that they at least had to remember rather than assert they're "always" taking these precautions). Ex. (at door) Check for traps, listen at door, open in standard door-opening formation.
Thing is even with PF2's excellent adoption of a time-saving narrative tool, it seems one could also develop their PCs' routines further, as long as time is of little bother to the PCs. Why Detect Magic or Investigate on the first pass through? This suggests maybe adventure writers should give a reward for taking these actions on one's first approach, like a clue to an upcoming enemy. But generally they don't. So sweep once for danger, again to double-check, perhaps with the scout-types moving ahead (albeit barely) looking for enemies and traps, then everyone sweeping that section, then on to the next increment.
While this wouldn't make sense overland, in a (perhaps static) dungeon crawl this would be expected in-game; danger could lurk anywhere.
Which is to say, players might develop meta-routines on top of the already kinda meta Exploration Modes, and the table might benefit from developing a shorthand for those too.