Scenes within Exploration

It can help you to think of exploration as a series of scenes, where encounters break up exploration and function as subsections within it. Many of these are based on geography; for example, exploring a starship's corridors is one scene, and entering the starship's bridge begins another. Other times, you'll break out of a scene at a point of interest. If the PCs decide to stop their travels and investigate a computer terminal, that's a new scene. When you transition between scenes, describe what was happening to reinforce where the group was, then describe what they now face to show the change. For example, “You've been making your way through the dark corridors of the abandoned starship, but after a moment of debate, you stop, your footsteps and voices still echoing down the corridor. The computer terminal before you is five feet wide and built into the wall. It has a touchscreen interface, but the screen is cracked, and the text it displays is garbled and difficult to discern. What do you do?” When playing out a scene, your initial description should set the expectation of what level of detail the scene might go into, with you and the players adjusting as needed during play. Since players aren't bound in a strict initiative order in exploration mode, it can be useful to proactively call on PCs to avoid everybody talking at once. If possible, start with someone who instigated the scene change, or perhaps with the PC using the most relevant exploration activity, like a PC Hacking, Investigating, or Repairing the terminal, Deciphering the text, or Searching for secrets in the example above.