Pendulums swing. That's what they do. And fashions, like pendulums, swing back and forth (and round and round and up and down...probably more of an ascending or descending spiral than a proper pendulum, but y'know, whatever.)
Hexcrawls are in. Hexcrawls have been in for a few years now, concurrent with the rise of the OSR, but I think they've hit maturity. There's no longer a host of posts explaining hexcrawls, or justifying them...it's just "here's my hexcrawl".
And that's fine. I like hexcrawls, and megadungeons. They bring a certain flavor to the game. What I don't like is the assumption that they bring all the flavors because, surprise, they don't. Random rolling differentiates between hexes, but on a macro scale, it weights everything evenly and nothing stands out. If we are all special snowflakes....
Are there ways around this? Probably. Not doing random rolls would be the other extreme. You can bias or weight the rolls (mountains here, swamp here, lots of civilized stuff here). You could (and this is more of a conceptual idea that would affect in-game experience) play with hex sizes, from small hexes near civilization to large hexes away from it (I touched on this in an earlier post). If encounters and travel is measured per hex, then you have more encounters near civilization than you do away from it, rather than a static 3 chances per day or some such. This, IMO, reflects reality - there are many more chances for interaction walking a mile in downtown Boston than there are walking a mile on a logging road in Maine.
Anyways, all things in moderation. I like hexcrawls, but it's nice to read about kingdoms once in awhile too.
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