Why I love the OSR, Exploration is king

I think one of the biggest epiphanies I've had playing TTRPG's is that above all else I enjoy the process and rewards of exploration the best, from starting with 5e d&d where exploration is a stated "Pillar of Play" yet seemingly poorly used or understood, with missing dungeon crawl procedures, overreliance on the exhaustion mechanic for overland travel and everything being a DC check to the point where running a hex crawl rules as written must be rolling a dozen d20s every hex (which bogs down the game and is basically just fishing for success/failure after awhile)

It was really when I discovered the OSR that I had this realisation, a lot of the OSR books I have read emphasis exploration, from systems that heavily focus on these aspects of the game like Stars Without Number and Worlds Without Number, to adventure and setting books based around exploration and sandbox-style gameplay such as Hot Springs Island and Carcosa.

So what is exploration? Exploration in the simplest terms is the process of freely interact with a location; The GM creates the elements of the location and then you are free to manipulate the environment through the actions of your character. In game terms there are certain mechanics that form a structure for exploration. These are usually things that have values or measurements to them (Time, weight, size, distance etc) and abstractions for more loose or unpredictable elements (random encounters, weather, reaction rolls etc). This structure helps to ground the actions taken in a sort of virtual reality, but are not meant to precisely model the physics of the virtual reality. For example: the mechanics of the game may lay out how to open a chest with a crowbar or lockpick but the chest itself has certain properties. You could for instance infer that a wooden chest doused in oil may be burnt through (at risk of any flammable content) the rules are in place for abstracting common actions.

A lot of this is me organising my thoughts so it might not be the easiest to read but I hope it makes some sense, I would love to hear your feedback or opinion on the subject and would love to go back to this subject in the future. 

M.C.