[ɐʞᴉuoW ʇsnſ]

Being IC about grinding would be easier if we didn't have to go out of our way to do it. The issue with BDP grinding is that you go into the BDP with the intent to grind, whether it be for EXP or items. There's no reason to enter them for any other purpose. Contrast this to many other RPGs where grinding is less something that you go out of your way to do, but rather something that happens passively during the course of a greater objective, like getting from point A to point B.

Let's look at this psychologically for a second. Traveling and sightseeing isn't something people generally view as "unfun", especially when done with friends. Grinding, on its own, is always seen as unfun. When you're doing something you don't find fun, with your mind on that specific task, you don't want to spend more time on it than you have to. RPing during the grind will make it take longer, and not many people are willing to deal with that. It's doable for the first few battles, but when you know you're going to have many more back to back most people can only keep it up for so long before it feels repetitive and meaningless.

If you were to deal with enemies during your travels on the other hand (look to just about any other RPG as an example of this, Elona in particular if you want an example that also uses a world map), not only is your grinding not necessarily the focus, but it's broken into digestible chunks and streamlined into your actual objective. Your mind is no longer on it, and that means it's no longer something you feel like you need to rush and get out of the way as quickly as possible. The way it is now, if you want to become viable you know you're going to have to go into a BDP at some point whether you want to or not. RP exp doesn't give you items, so you will be lagging behind everyone else no matter what you do if you neglect them. But people want that unfun activity out of the way ASAP, so they dash to 60. There's really all there is to it.

As for how to fix this, if you do see it as something worth changing, a few hoops would need to be jumped through to stay faithful to the lore (to my knowledge monsters can't leave the BDPs), but I don't see why that would stop us from adding some... non-monstrous encounters to the map itself. A bit of local life, if you would. If we were to derive inspiration from Elona, just as an example of what could be possible, we have an overworld with road tiles that could be used for weaker enemy encounters (up to 5 levels below the party leader), grass tiles for stronger enemies (party's level+1d5), and forest tiles that, while impassible, could function similarly to water in the jammer caverns in that they could give special encounters. There could even be ways to enable random, map specific boss encounters.

But those are just my thoughts, and I think this post has already gone on for too long. Thanks for your time and adieu for now.