The 10-Minute Exploration Turn

What a messy topic. I could deep-dive into this, but once you dig deeper, you realize that time and movement have always been D&D's fatal flaw. Early versions of the game had you moving 120 feet every 10 minutes while mapping and exploring, and when you figure out the actual rate of speed, you have people literally moving in slow-motion through a dungeon.

At 0.136 miles per hour, the three-toed sloth is faster than you at 0.17 miles per hour. But this is careful exploration and mapping, so you will explore at a sloth's pace. Of course, the 10-minute exploration turn was always an artificial game construct, and we never questioned it - it just worked.

This was "game time" and "game movement," and it aggregated a lot of activities into one clean turn of time, and a 10-minute window. This isn't GURPS with its one-second turns. Simulation games were a natural reaction to this aggregation back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the original Top Secret game in 1980 also had one-second combat turns.

And I know, if you are exploring that slowly and that carefully, how does anyone fall into a pit trap?  Every 12 feet you move, you take a minute checking the walls, ceiling, floor, and poking everything with a 10' pole. You poke the single foot of distance ahead of you for five seconds, then the next foot takes another five seconds, and so on, all the way down to 120 feet of hallway.

Then again, in real life, some things you would not expect to take an hour end up taking longer. When your life is on the line in a dungeon, I can see why many things all of a sudden take a lot longer to do.

AD&D had special multipliers for different types of movement. The game still used the 120' per 10 minutes for mapping and exploration, multiplied that speed by five for movement through known areas or using a map, and by ten if you were fleeing. Often, they kept the same movement on the map; they just reduced the time it took to move it, using fractions of a turn.

AD&D 2E tried reducing exploration rounds to a minute as cracks in the wall started to appear, and simulation games like GURPS and Champions started using real-world movement rates. The 10-minute turn was retained, but only for things like spell and torch durations.

D&D 3.0 and Wizards of the Coast removed the 10-minute exploration turn entirely. They used a system of "local movement" for 1 minute and "overland movement" per hour. "Tactical movement" was the combat per 6-second round.

D&D 5E is more of a freeform time tracking, whereas D&D 5.5E feels a little more structured and formalized. Dungeon movement is 200' per minute for slow, 300' for normal, and 400' for fast. All times are "as needed," so if searching a room takes 10 minutes, then it does. Movement is typically tracked per minute. Pulling in ToV and A5E: ToV tends to be like 2014 D&D, while A5E uses a journey system, but the movement rates are the same as in 5E.

Of all the 5E versions, D&D 5.5E has the cleanest exploration rules, with a dedicated section on the topic and suggestions for 1-minute and 10-minute blocks, depending on what is needed. D&D 2014 and ToV feel the softest on exploration structure, while A5E takes it on a more macro-scale and defines a journey for longer treks, while still keeping that softness at the lower scale.

All this to get to the point. What if you wanted to roll random wandering monster encounters every 2 BX-style dungeon exploration turns? In D&D 2024, this feels the easiest. Stick to one and ten-minute time blocks for movement and searching, keep an organized time record, and every 20 minutes roll for wandering monsters. The fact that D&D 5.5E has a dedicated section for exploration in the DMG helps a lot, and it allows me to easily slot this procedure in, along with a time tracker.

This can be easily extended to D&D 2014, ToV, and A5E. What makes D&D 2024 the winner among all other versions of 5E is that the game recognizes that structure is needed for running exploration and explicitly lays out a section to cover it. The earlier editions feel too soft on dungeon exploration (outside of A5E's structured journeys and the excellent rules for those), and that low-level, turn-by-turn, time-tracking, and torch-burning game just feels absent.

D&D 5.5E also adds more detail and structure to equipment, formalizing the in-game use of each item. This is likely the designers' experience with Pathfinder 2E coming up, with items needing discrete game uses and rules inside of them, rather than being more "loosey gooesy who cares" things you write on your character sheet to be used if the DM asks if you have something. D&D 5.5E also wins in terms of equipment rules, with a stronger set of rules to back them up.

Shadowdark, providing an excellent, tension-filled turn-based experience, likely influenced D&D 5.5E in tightening up the dungeon exploration rules and laying out the methods for those out in a section of the DMG. Competition here improved the game; the other 5E-based games were happy to stick with the very loose exploration system that felt more like narrative gaming.

What a messy, complicated subject!

So, in short, keep a tight time tracker for dungeon exploration, and track time in blocks rounded to the minute. If you rule, it takes 5 minutes to spike a door; mark 5 off the time tracker. One minute is the shortest measure of time tracked in the books outside of combat. Longer actions are best measured in 10-minute blocks.

Every 20 minutes, roll an old-school wandering monster check.

Every hour, another torch burns out.

Lanterns burn for 6 hours on one flask of oil.

It is easy to add detailed time-tracking to your game, along with old-school wandering monster encounters. What do you get for the effort? A ticking clock, forcing players to manage resources, spend time wisely, and it makes the environment come alive as wandering monsters creep about and hunt the characters in that maze of tight, twisting passages.

Structured Play Pitfalls

If you are the average D&D player, you have been trained by structured play in two truths:

• D&D is there to tell your story
• D&D must have structured and balanced encounters

These assumptions will get your character, and quite likely the entire party, killed in old-school play.

The wandering monster table does not care about throwing multiple very hard encounters at you, the longer you stay in that hole in the ground. You could roll badly for wandering monsters three times in a row, get overwhelmed, and the entire party is killed in a span of an hour.

The "environmental simulation system" of old-school play and BX does not care one bit about "your story" or "encounter balance." The world is rigged against you. You are always meant to die. The thrill is figuring out how not to.

Wizards of the Coast loves the facade of balanced encounters and story adventures, since these make for better new-player experiences. Players should feel thrilled that they went through a dungeon, completed the story of the adventure, advanced their personal stories, saved the day, and, in the end, "everybody wins." You look at the structure of any modern adventure, and it is 90% this.

Kobold Press and EN World work by this 5E assumption, too; you will find balanced encounters and a focus on narrative play in those systems as well. You cannot escape this, and you assume it is the norm.

Old-school play?

To heck with that, you are being dropped straight in the middle of a world simulator, and there are chances based on the time spent and the location you are in to encounter monsters. While the map may be keyed with monster listings, the world isn't, and you must get in, get out, manage scarce resources, find safe places, and survive long enough to head back to civilization and find a moment to rest.

All the while, wandering dungeon monsters and wilderness encounters are being rolled for. If the number on the table results in a TPK encounter, so be it. You decided to take this risk, go a little further out this time, explore one more room, and you paid the price.

This is not about a preset story, yours or the adventure's. If you are lucky enough to live that long, maybe you can tell another part of yours. A story is something that comes out of your efforts to explore the world and survive the chaos, and personal stories are something on top of that.

If you were ever into game modding, this is like taking Skyrim and adding all these "random world encounters" and "kingdom battle" mods into the game that introduces random groups on NPCs and monsters onto the map, and you can stumble into the middle of a fight where wolves are fighting with a caravan of traders, and you can choose to jump in, ignore them, or just watch and loot the bodies after the survivors move on. While you watch, a group of Nords or bandits could show up, and the fight could get huge and chaotic. Magic could be flying as you dodge random firebolts. The chaos could attract a dragon by the end of the fight.

Does this system care about CR and balance?

No. Not one bit. The world "is what it is."

BX and old-school play are the same way.

Thinking "this is the game about my story" and "the adventure should be balanced so we can complete its story" is something out of the artificial world of structured play. Encounters are not balanced here. You need to sneak past fights, play dirty, save resources, be clever, and learn when to turn tail and run. You need a retreat plan for when it falls apart, and an idea on who carries fallen friends who can't make it themselves. Your plan can't rely on one spell or person. You need to play smart and understand the world does not care about you or your story.

But the world can show kindness. You could roll a friendly reaction roll from a group of kobolds who take pity on you as you just ran out of a room after a bugbear killed your cleric and thief, and you are out of hit dice to rest and wondering what you are going to do. If you can speak their language and part with a little treasure, they may help you get your fallen comrades back, since they hate the bugbears, too, and they would be happy to fight a skirmishing retreat for you as long as you promise to kill the warren of bugbears when you return.

This is a dynamic encounter that the DM turns into a story on the spot; it's not "pre-written" into the adventure but happens organically through the dice, tables, world, and luck. These types of stories are better than pre-written character stories, the stories written into adventures, and anything an adventure writer could think up.

When you get back to town, the temple says they can't raise your friends, but they can summon a high-level vicar from the city who could, for a generous donation, and perhaps, a problem they may need help with...

After all that, and with your friends returned to the living (or not, with new characters created), you set out again, thinking about those bugbears. The survivors of that fight remember, and a plan is made to deal with this problem once and for all. And you can be sure those kobolds will be close by, watching or perhaps helping again.

None of this is your prewritten character story or the adventure's narrative. All of this happens organically through the world simulation engine. And you can have this in 5E, any version of it that you play, for free if you adopt an old-school method of play, and that "world simulation engine" mentality to DM-ing. Again, you do not need BX to do this. While BX will make the failure conditions harsher and more dire, 5E can play an old-school game just fine and be just as lethal and dangerous.

The belief that BX is some magical panacea to solve all your problems with D&D is not entirely accurate. You may try it and love it. You may try it, hop games again, and end up missing 5E. What BX can teach us is that matters, and that can be used in any of our games, is the lost art of how to play an old-school game. What we do is recreate the old-school playstyle and keep that independent from the rules.

That "sandbox engine" we used to have before AD&D 2nd Edition was replaced by narrative railroading and the video-game-like progression of D&D 3.0. Narrative games are easier to DM and sell adventures for; they will have a bigger audience, so there is a financial incentive to ship them. It is easy to sell a game with a predictable, reproducible, pregenerated experience that plays like a theme-park ride every time, for every group. It is insanely hard to ship a game that delivers compelling, easy-to-manage, sandbox play.

But once you learn, a new style of play and types of interactive worlds are open to you. Your creativity goes from slightly tweaking published adventures to building living worlds.

You can play an old-school game in your game of choice.

You do not need to change the game.

You just need to change the way you think about it.

Wandering Monsters

While the turn structure says wandering monsters are checked for at the beginning of the turn, this page (B53) says they are checked for at the end of the turn. In any case, this feels like they are checked between turns, and they apply to the following turn if encountered.

Besides the monsters which live in rooms, characters may encounter monsters which wander about the dungeon. These monsters are known as "Wandering Monsters". At the end of every 2 turns, the DM should check for Wandering Monsters. To do so, roll Id6: a result of 1 indicates that the party will encounter a Wandering Monster in the next turn. The Wandering Monster will be 20-120 feet away from the party when encountered (roll 2d6, multiply the result by 10) in a direction of the DM's choosing, and will be headed toward the player characters.

Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules, Moldvay edition, 1980, page B53

So, every two turns, we roll 1d6 to check for wandering monsters. We can do this in 5E, but a part of the problem is that not all adventures, especially the story-based ones, have wandering monster tables. This is going to be a problem in D&D 2024, where Wizards moved away from wandering monster tables and instead list monsters by CR in the Monster Manual.

I just realized that some of these games, most notably D&D 2024, lack a 10-minute exploration turn. I will get to this in a later article, since this will be a problem.

You will need a 2014 DMG or the 2014 Xanathar book; ToV and A5E also have these tables, with A5E having the best implementation. If you are in 2024 and don't have a table, use the Monsters by CR lists in the 2024 DMG, and pick one that makes sense, or use those lists to make your own table, if you have time.

This is the first real stumble for D&D 2024 when it comes to old-school play, but it isn't a huge one if the adventure has the tables, or you have access to another book. Most adventures have them, and those may work for you as well, or you can use an online tool.

The dungeon may have certain areas where Wandering Monsters are encountered more often (such as on a roll of 1 or 2). The dungeon may have areas where the DM checks for Wandering Monsters every turn, or where a monster will appear when a corridor is entered. Wandering Monsters should appear more often if the party is making a lot of noise or light, but should not be frequent if the party spends a long time in one out-of-the-way place (if they stop in a room for the night, for example).

Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules, Moldvay edition, 1980, page B53

Okay, hold up! This is something that I do not see on the YouTube channels that push BX. The original rules mention that wandering monsters can be rolled for:

• Every turn
• At a higher chance (1 to 2 on a d6)
• Automatically, when entering a certain area
• At higher chances or frequency, depending on party activity

So, that bard playing music, the fireball exploding, or the dwarf running in full plate mail? Yep, you are going to up your chance of wandering monsters. There may be a "central hallway" where the chance is 1-3 on a d6 every two turns, or every turn. There may be a giant ant burrow where ants will always appear when characters come close (unless you toss a fireball in there). There may be a kobold warren where it is checked every turn.

There may be places where it is checked less frequently, such as once every three turns, once an hour, or longer. This is what a DM did in an old-school game. We called things as we saw them, and tweaked our sandbox to surprise the players and the DM.

And yes, resting in the dungeon was even mentioned back in 1980, which is more appropriate for a remote cave where nothing creeps by than it is a closet in an occupied Orc fortress. Still, if you attempt this, you'd better have a plan for who is on lookout and when, and make sure it is laid out with the DM before you even try. I may still check every two hours, just to see if something comes up for you.

And remember to choose a reaction or roll it randomly! Maybe that giant spider in the cave crawls in silently and snuggles up next to you while you are sleeping for body warmth. I will require a saving throw when you wake up, so as not to scream at Fluffy.

Note: Lots of wandering monsters will affect adventure balance! This is old-school sandbox play, and it is the ticking clock that punishes those who waste time in the dungeon. Every two turns, you roll. If a monster shows up, you choose or roll a reaction. This will, by default, make things harder. You may not survive, so you'd better have a plan to get in and get out, especially when you are slowed down carrying treasure back to the dungeon entrance.

And all of this can be done in 5E, whichever version you love. This is not exclusive to BX, and since Dungeons & Dragons started with these rules, we can use them as-is in our 5E games to add some old-school flavor.

We don't have to change our games to have epic wandering monster encounters and make them feel more old-school and cool. We can keep playing 5E, adopt these rules, and have an old-school game with the rules we love.