OSR community hexcrawl procedures are overcooked
I've been looking into the question of hex crawls recently. Yochai from Between two Cairns has repeatedly pointed out how inconsistent they are adventure to adventure, and I think he's right on that. Although I don't really get why he keeps asking why everyone wants hexcrawl maps. To me that's pretty obvious: people like the idea of a universal, modular system that lets them plug different adventure's hexes into whatever they're running. It's an attractive and relatively simple proposition. Thinking a bit further though, I think it's worth asking why hexcrawls are so all over the place in terms of dimensions and procedures. I won't claim to have the one true answer (unlike every single blog on hexcrawling), but here's my POV: 1) Almost nobody reads the source material 2) We call it hexcrawling, rather than wilderness exploration (which as far as I can tell is the term used in D&D rulebooks) 3) Every blogger and author wants to "sell...