Why is forest exploration so much less interesting than dungeon exploration?

Why is forest exploration so much less interesting than dungeon exploration?

(Pic unrelated)

I've never thought this..
Man in my setting each forest has a few druids in it that are charged with protecting the forest. Some are fucked up, some travel solo, others are whole groups of druids keeping the forest in line. It turns each forest into a little adventure if they've somehow pissed off the local druid tribe or seek them out for help or aid.

It's not, it's just less common because dungeons are half of the name of one of the most well-known RPGs out there.

OP again.

I've been thinking...

How would one implement random forest generation with the same level of detail as the random dungeon generation in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide?

Instead of rolling for shape/size of rooms and chambers would you roll for size and type of trees? Would you roll that into a more general table for forest landmarks?

Romanticism of the genre.
By all means; conquistadors, taming the American West, and Silk Road against the Mongols are all great campaign hooks.

Because your DM doesn't know how to do it.

Because you are a pleb who gets rustled by things outside their expectations (muh dunjuns).

Because you and your DM are plebs who think forests have to be one huge homogenous block of trees where the only encounters are wolves, bears and more trees.


Seriously, think of all the things that could be in a fantasy forest. Forest towns, lost tombs, fey settlements, scary wild areas full of treants, druidic sacred groves, clans of forest beastfolk, mountains, ravines, rivers, waterfalls, forts, fey creatures, dire creatures, forest dragons, benign nature spirits, malign nature spirits, huntsman demigods, bandit camps surrounded by traps and guards, etc.

Two things come to mind. The first is dungeons have separate rooms that give the impression that you could "clear" and area, move on, then eventually complete the dungeon and leave. "Clearing" a forest mostly just means destroying it, and I have a hard time imagining a sense of progress wandering through the woods at least in the same way

The other (and probably more important) thing is that dungeon is pretty synonymous with shit tons of treasure, while forests are usually not
I've done similar things for a game that was essentially just an endless dungeon, but I don't have any tables or whatever to show you

Because at some point dungeon stopped meaning "jail in the castle basement" and started meaning "enormous adventure labyrinth full of danger, monsters and treasure". Forests are still forests, mostly.

A dungeon, at its core, is a flow chart. Because of the box-by-box nature of separate encounters that can lead in complex directions, a DM can really use the artificial layout to their best advantage. You can have a battle followed by a trap-filled corridor followed by another battle, all within the span of a few dozen feet, with multiple choices of where to go and to try and find alternate routes.

A forest adventure is still a flow chart, but it's more difficult to work with. Noise travels through the forest more easily, there's more space that needs to be covered, and gameplay ends up being more linear. Going from point A to point B in a forest rarely includes a multitude of choices, and the challenges tend to follow the cliches of log trap, owl bear, dire wolves, and angry druids.

There's no reason forest exploration can't be great, but the dungeon is really the ideal environment for exciting exploration, because that's what it's chiefly designed for.

Unless they're jungles.

Jungles are to forests like dungeons are to jails.

That's an interesting point.

Suppose one were to expand forests then into more of a mystic other-world with all the supernatural wonders suggested by ?

As I follow this thread, I've been scratching out some ideas in my notebook.
I'm drawing some influence from MOBA level design where the mystic forest is structured into a number of 'bases' connected by three or more 'lanes' with patches of 'jungle' between them. It is basically a flow-chart.

I'm sketching out some procedures where a GM builds a mystic forest by rolling for a number of major and minor landmarks, placing them randomly on a map, and then connecting those landmarks by trails with their own random features. The spaces between landmarks and trails would consist of dense foliage that blocks line of sight and counts as difficult terrain.
Landmarks would include things such as:
Ancient ruins
Stone circles
Clearings
Springs
Forest Shrines
Trees with faces in their trunks
Trees with human arms for branches
Trees with hanged men
Trees with impaled men
etc.

Because shitty GMs can't come up with anything worth shit and just copy-paste ideas from DnD? If you can't make interesting encounters in an ecosystem that's older and more diverse than civilization, your imagination is seriously atrophied.

Your inspiration for a pnp forest comes from a MOBA? Really?

>Going from point A to point B in a forest rarely includes a multitude of choices

People who design forests this way have literally never set foot in one, and that's just sad.

They are popular for a reason.
Anyway, the concepts used are well established.
1) Starting position for players
2) Objective at the other end of the map
3) Multiple paths between 1 and 2.
4) Different paths have different obstacles, so the choice matters.

They are popular thanks to 1) gameplay based on quick/automatic progression, 2) a generic sci-fi/fantasy setting that carters to everyone and 3) a f2p business model, but that's besides the point.

You are seriously gimping yourself by thinking about pnp roleplaying in terms of a moba. There is nothing gameplay-wise or lore-wise that hasn't been done better in other games, digital or pnp.

Excellent point.
It's a shame you can't come up with any examples though.

The issue is scale. The distances necessary to separate the forest into workable "zones" makes it hard to set up "walls" and "gates." Not impossible, but more difficult than the finesse allowed in a dungeon.

A forest adventure fits in that awkward place between traveling and a dungeon, and making travel exciting is often a challenge for new GMs.

Posting these to celebrate Iceland's win today?

Maybe.

because forests are mostly empty and huge, and dungeons are mostly packed with traps, treasure, and monsters in a small area.

Because no matter which direction you go, it's just more boring trees until something jumps out to try and eat your tasty ass.

In a dungeon, there are walls, forcing you to choose from limited paths, making you claustrophobic, going along those narrow corridors... until something jumps out to try and eat your tasty ass.

Trees, like walls, are also solid objects, user.
If the foliage is dense enough and the ground uneven enough, it may as well be a wall.

Plus, sometimes you can hunt animals and eat them.

Maybe bring along a few essential cooking supplies for when you prepare the meat.

I mean this is kinda my end goal right now with a game of twilight2000

A wilderness adventure can just be a dungeon with landmarks instead of rooms. The hallways in a dungeon are usually just filler anyway.

except said wilderness can be used to actively fuck with the players. Things like winding game paths that lead to nowhere, the very real risk of being ambushed by enemies, pitfalls and even just the fact eventually it'll be night and the party needs to make camp and find shelter. The wilderness can be an enemy in and of itself

Yeah, it's actually easier to find ways for the spaces between major encounters in the wilderness to be interesting than those in a dungeon.

That's my main issue, honestly, how do I, as ironic as it may sound, make a forest adventure feel natural? Something runs their coach off into the forest, plunges down a steep hill, into the wild wilderness. How do I make their encounters natural instead of like situation-to-situation encounters.
>you're in the forest
>you see this, interact with it
>you solved the situation
>you're in the forest, moving
>you bump into this thing in the forest, what do you do?

A wall you can climb or fly around or chop through, but even if that wasn't the case, the simplest action is just to walk around, and the scale at which forests typically work even a large, impassable grove of trees tends to be less of an issue than a chair in a dungeon.

There needs to be some game mechanical aspect to the actual forest wandering.

People (player characters) should be able to get lost and hungry and frustrated.

Encounters should break up things a but, primarily it should be about navigating between A and B without getting lost or out of resources.

Best bet is probably to go by roads and trading routes, which turns it into a node crawl.

You can then try to lure players out from the road with obstacles or tempting with "shortcuts"

this or make the exploration of the forest the goal in itself. Have it so players need to worry about things like food and water, if they're hurt they might be able to find things like medicinal plants and need to find shelter if a storm rolls in. Are there predators that they cant handle that might be claiming territory? Trappers and huntsmen that live in the woods and have gone mad? If the forest a living thing actively thwarting the players? Stuff like that.

Yeah absolutely. Navigation and survival should be high concerns.

>influenced by MOBA level design

Please kill yourself or me. I don't care which as long as my suffering ends.