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Thread Summary - Let's talk the design philosophy and maintenance around West Marches style games and what is cool about them, what isn't cool about them, what game engines are good to run them in, and which engines suck. - Let's discuss, challenge, dismantle, and reassemble each of the core assumptions about what makes a West Marches game the way it is. - Let's study some examples of games and media and talk about their specific successes and failures. - Finally, let's celebrate moments in our own experiences and where there were particularly moving moments in our own games of these kinds. Introduction West Marches and its name was originally defined by Ben Robbins, the author of Microscope and other games wherein multiple groups of players (more than one normal group's worth) all participated in the same shared world and shared information with one another. Scheduling was done by the players and the GM remained highly available to run sessions, which involved journeying to places, exploring a wild and ancient land, and returning back to town to level up, dispose of loot, and do it all over again. There would be "world secrets" where someone in another group may have a missing puzzle piece to unlock a vault in an area that had already been explored. Here's RPG Stack Exchange + Sly Flourish's summary of it: quote:A West Marches campaign is a particular style of RPG campaign, easily transported to D&D, that has some of the following criteria: We will use this as our baseline and popular interpretations of West Marches are. West Marches is a specific example of a type of game format that many people are familiar with, the "Hex Crawl", whereby there is a large overworld map and players would journey from civilization into the wild. Because not all groups necessarily use hexes but there is a clear delineation between the safety of town and dangers of the wild, I have instead created a more apt term of "Wild Crawl", because such a game need not be based in a pastiche of European countryside, but it almost certainly is in a place that isn't safe and covers a vast region. Introductory Resources for Discussion Since much of the discussion will be to qualify what West Marches is and is not, here is a brief but highly recommended list of things to look at about West Marches games: http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/ https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/120770/what-defines-a-west-marches-campaign https://slyflourish.com/west_marches_in_grendleroot.html https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comments/adn178/lessons_from_west_marches_a_guide_to_improving/ Specialized Jargon In the service of accessibility and also to ensure that people are generally aligned, we can also add more terms specific to this conceptual space that we can document in greater detail. This can remain here for now but may end up being forked to another curated source such as the SA TradGames Wiki, Google Docs, etc. - West Marches: What this thread is about, conceptually - "something" -crawl: Referring to a game involving methodical and procedural play through some kind of environment or conceptual space (urban, hex, space, etc) - "Wild Crawl": coined term for more clearly separating the safe from the dangerous, otherwise same as any other crawl or West Marches - The West Marches Grand Experiment: Specifically the game run by Ben Robbins (after the original post series on ars ludi) - Game engine: what most people would call a game system or game rules. Encompasses multiple individual components to make the game go. Ex: Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition is a game engine. - Game system: specific phrase for groups of components that are part of a game engine and part of its design. Ex: The D&D 5e combat system involving Hit Points, Armor Class, and Attacks are part of the D&D 5e game engine. - Data artifact: A discrete piece of information that has been created in service of or during the course of the game to leave behind for other people. - Exploration Lexicon: A proper noun to denote a data artifact entered into the player knowledge base. - Journey Charter: A proper noun and in-narrative mechanism for players to fill out to form up a party for a quest. - Sandbox game: Parent category for what West Marches ostensibly is. - OSE: Old School Essentials, a D&D fan fork from the Basic / Expert series of D&D. Official site: https://necroticgnome.com/collections/old-school-essentials - "Funnel" - term taken from Dungeon Crawl Classics where each player runs a group of villagers through a tough adventure designed to incapacitate most of the characters permanently. Surviving characters go on to become level 1 heroes. Conceptually, providing a large amount of randomly generated characters and reducing them down through great challenge as part of character creation. - Adventuring season: Coined term inspired by RuneQuest where regardless of how long it takes for adventures to conclude, they all happen within the context of a single season to reconcile any administrative details. Ludography If there are any pieces of media, games, or whatnot that we ought to be linking as it comes up in discussion, it may surface here (but there is no guarantee that it will do so). - The Alexandrian on Hexcrawls: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17308/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl - The Alexandrian on Urbancrawls: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/36473/roleplaying-games/thinking-about-urbancrawls - The Alexandrian on "Escaping the Dungeon": https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2149/roleplaying-games/escaping-the-dungeon - Return of the Lazy Dungeonmaster by Mike Shea: A book aimed at streamlining running games along with an accompanying workbook. Has worksheets to fill out for GMs to ensure consistency. https://slyflourish.com/returnofthelazydm/ - Welsh Piper on Hex-based Campaign Design: A multipart web series about how to organically populate an area with hexes ripe for exploration. https://welshpiper.com/hex-based-campaign-design-part-1/ - FASA Games Earthdawn West Marches: A forum and live hybrid game that is a working example (second in its series) of a well managed West Marches style campaign. http://fasagames.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=55 A Picture of a Dog For everybody else not particularly interested in this thread, here is a picture of a dog. 
aldantefax fucked around with this message at 10:10 on Jan 13, 2021 |
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Jan 9, 2021 19:13
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Reserved in the event I go insane and there is Too Much Information.
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Jan 9, 2021 19:14
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My Disagreements with West Marches Definition To the overarching definition of what West Marches and Wild Crawls are, I think I disagree with as being too specific. West Marches has a special type of player agency that they are normally not afforded on a regular basis (dictating the schedule to the GM) but all other things are just playing a tabletop RPG in a sandbox way. However, it holds a certain mystique not from its dry definitions, but in some distinctions that make "West Marches, the Grand Experiment by Ben Robbins" something special to that cohort of players and what others idolize. West Marches was a special game because it was a revival of the Wild Crawl and kept very stringent rules about information fidelity, player agency, and danger: - Player agency: Players are free to organize and share information in between sessions - Risk management: Safety is not an entitlements or right that players had when out in the wild - Information fidelity: players came to their own conclusions but were not corrected by the GM on reliability of intel Combining these three things roll up to "direct player engagement", but they don't ensure the success of a game (it does help to have players along on the ride though). I think the above three points are the key to a successful Wild Crawl, so it'll be something to explore in greater detail later. For now, and for all time, there is tea and coffee.
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Jan 9, 2021 19:45
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The Alexandrian’s hexcrawl series is relevant: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17308/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl Then there is the “Urbancrawl” series where he explores what mashing up the principles of a hexcrawl game structure with an urban environment might be like: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/36473/roleplaying-games/thinking-about-urbancrawls
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Jan 9, 2021 21:16
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I ran a couple sandbox open table exploration games. I learned that player continuity/turnover has a huge impact on how the game turns out. In the first campaign I had a solid core of about five players who attended most games, plus the same number who dropped in and out. That meant that there was good transmission of knowledge - understanding of the map, the factions, which areas were dangerous, which monsters to watch out for, and what items were essential in the dungeon. It also meant that the end result wasn't much different from just running a conventional campaign with a fixed group of players. In the second series there was much less continuity. About two thirds of the way through the game, I had 100 percent turnover from the first session. That meant there were sessions entirely filled with brand new players, who had no idea what was going on in a game world that had become very militarized and dangerous as a result of events from previous games. The players who maintained the shared maps didn't attend every session, so new players ended up completely lost in areas that previous groups had already explored. Which was all certainly realistic within the fictional game world, but also "punished" the new players for things they had nothing to do with. So it's important to have a method of onboarding people in the case of a completely new group. The other thing to watch out for is how your advancement system affects what the players choose to do. If they get XP for treasure, they will not explore random uncharted areas if they have rumors about where the money is, and will not explore rumors if they have offers of paying jobs. They won't get involved in faction politics or do favors for NPCs, unless they're getting paid or they personally like the characters in question. Which isn't going to happen if you've got lots of players who are meeting all the characters for the first time. And the more dangerous the make your world, the greater the reluctance gets to doing anything that isn't profitable - leveling up is how you survive, sticking your neck out is how you get killed. When it comes to NPCs and factions, the other question is whether they treat the player group as a faction in itself, or a collection of individuals they have relationships with. IE if a player character pisses someone off, is that NPC also pissed off at a completely new crop of players in a subsequent group? Or are they only upset with the individual player character who did them wrong? What about if they discover the association between the offender and the other players in-character? If your game doesn't feature factions heavily (such as exploring a depopulated wilderness) you don't have to worry about this one as much.
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Jan 10, 2021 01:16
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mellonbread posted:I ran a couple sandbox open table exploration games. I learned that player continuity/turnover has a huge impact on how the game turns out. I think a classic game of this type does not feature politics prominently to start and the grasp of civilization only extends as far as the town itself - the wild is a wholly separate entity and zone conceptually. When it comes to onboarding, what I have seen other GMs do is to have brand new players enter in running a session zero or other similarly minor milk run that helps get their feet wet. An evolving worldscape likely will need some kind of cinematic primer just to get people acquainted with it which is a non-trivial task, but this helps establish a baseline. I also think it's okay to have people not engage with some of the systems like politics, NPCs and so on. From an aesthetics standpoint I see this style of game as characters who are more interested in the wild outside of town than anything else, and then giving them suitable motivation is key to success. Pathfinder Kingmaker did a pretty good job with this, I think, at least to start, but since it's focused on settling/colonizing a frontier, so it includes mechanics like factions and the like. I wonder, is it possible to run such a game and place the burden of keeping game world consistency something that players ought to do? I think something that can help with information retention is to commoditize nuggets of information that you give to players and have a way to track that somehow. This way, if someone obtains a piece of intel and then the player leaves, that knowledge can be released back into the pool to recirculate. I feel like I'm not making a whole lot of sense at the moment but I think there's more to this that I'll write more on once I've gathered my thoughts.
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Jan 10, 2021 03:14
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Bookmarking this thread, I am very interested in the prospect of running some West Marches games even if my current player group probably aren't the ones to run it for! What systems have people considered for the game? It feels like D&D is the 'default' but the only edition that doesn't have a big problem with caster supremacy is 4th, and that has the problem of combats being designed to be big focal set-pieces rather than something fast that you might do five or six times in a session.
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Jan 10, 2021 10:56
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Whybird posted:Bookmarking this thread, I am very interested in the prospect of running some West Marches games even if my current player group probably aren't the ones to run it for! I'm going to be using OSE for my eventual Land of One Thousand Towers wildcrawl. I like both how dirt-simple it is and how equipment choices are just as important as spell preparation.
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Jan 10, 2021 15:36
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Lumbermouth posted:I'm going to be using OSE for my eventual Land of One Thousand Towers wildcrawl. I like both how dirt-simple it is and how equipment choices are just as important as spell preparation. I've been trying to run a West Marches campaign using OSE, with a few tweaks here and there (mundane healing, 'subclasses' and new classes) and I think the straight-forward rules seem to split people into two groups - those that attempt to try things that aren't explicitly stated in the rules, and those that feel that their only options in combat are move and attack. I am struggling to handle combat in an exciting way that isn't just purely fatal - I get that it isn't supposed to be 'combat as a sport', but maybe I just lack creativity because combat keeps coming up! I have found that the hardest part of prepping and keeping motivated is creating dungeons (as you'd imagine) - I was foolish enough to decide to run the campaign in a non-standard setting (Dark Sun inspired lacking most intelligent humanoids) and it meant I couldn't use the usual shortcut of repurposing dungeons to fit the campaign (plus this is my first real big campaign). But I've found using free dungeon maps and populating them myself is quite effective. My main struggle right now is creating treasure of the appropriate quantity and variety to not just be "you find another 1000 gold pieces). Does anyone know any good resources for randomly generating valuable alternatives to just heaps of cash? In terms of other systems to support a West Marches game, I'd have to put forward Traveler - I don't think it is often played that way (outside of being a huge sandbox setting), but I think it has everything you need to run one.
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Jan 10, 2021 19:13
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How would you adapt a West Marches-type game using a "Point Crawl" approach, rather than a Hex or Wild Crawl approach? Would there be any significant differences between the games, you think?
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Jan 10, 2021 20:43
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In the megadungeon thread I mentioned that a West Marches game has "lethality" in order to represent the dangers of the wild, but I think you can totally do a West Marches game that isn't lethal in terms of physical trauma. For example, taking a West Marches game but as you accrue damage instead you lose traits off your character sheet as your existence becomes erased to the point where you lose your sense of being. Having some kind of "character loss" is an important thing that is further capitalized on in West Marches games because there is an implied dramatic pole of "safety" versus "danger" - the town represents the safety, but safety is boring. You will grow old, have a happy life, and die surrounded by families, but you wouldn't be a character in a West Marches type of game. I think part of it is encouraging players from a mechanical perspective to actively seek danger. This seems to me the core conceit of most tabletop RPGs (one might argue that D&D 5e isn't dangerous enough mechanically) but it is surely amplified in this type of game. I also think then that if you were running a game and you needed to encourage certain kinds of lethal encounters or risky maneuvers, if Old School Essentials takes off of an older make and model of D&D like B/X or something then you could award XP for risky things and also give people explicit mechanical direction in stuff to do. GURPS has 'combat cards' to help remind people what they can do, and Move/Attack is one of them (actually a different thing than just Attacking, because it limits your effective skill). If you wanted to make combat more interesting, you may also want to examine your gameplay loops and game tone. If combat happens frequently, should it be exciting? The answer is probably yes, but maybe combat is a consequence of other things and it's more of a finality or a punishment (see: Shadowrun games where combat is messy, brutal, and if it happens on a stealth mission, something went very badly). I think if I was going to do a proper West Marches campaign, it would need the following components: - Clear motivation to go away from "safety" - Clear risk categories to manage: travel logistics, battle logistics, and intelligence - Mechanics to commoditize the sharing information between players and between GMs and the players - Systems for the GM to procedurally generate either from outside-in or inside-out without overloading information Boardgames like Gloomhaven have this on lock but they don't have a GM. Same with Mage Knight, which I think you could absolutely use as the seed for a West Marches game. Part of the thing I think people miss in the widely circulated description of a West Marches game is that "the players need to set the schedule dynamically". I think this is a distinct thing for "The West Marches Grand Experiment", but not conceptually. I think it may be cargo cult oriented game thinking that points to players scheduling sessions instead of the GM, when really, everybody needs to be available or else there's no game...?
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Jan 10, 2021 21:37
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Pasha posted:How would you adapt a West Marches-type game using a "Point Crawl" approach, rather than a Hex or Wild Crawl approach? Would there be any significant differences between the games, you think? I think you don't need a classical map that has a hex grid in it if you wanted a Point Crawl. You just need "enough points" to make it work and the aforementioned "travel logistics". There have been talks about doing this that I can't find right now, but it essentially separated each region into threat levels. I'd use something to develop a mind map or use a logistical planning tool like Trello, Notion, or similar to have stuff set up for this. Part of what makes West Marches appealing is that the world is laid out for people in a very clear way, in that there is just enough of a map to spark the imagination. It need not be filled out or even created behind the screen on the GM side, but it feels like there is a world out there waiting to be explored. I would have a point crawl game let the players dictate the map however they like. From the GM side, I would only describe point to point journeys in terms of major landmarks only. Behind the screen, I would have a reference for each journey as part of my prep, and once the journey was "complete", I would have the group turn in their notes to me. If they kept no notes, then they will need to complete a new journey or the same journey over again. If they kept insufficient notes, then they will have only specific parts of the journey documented and enjoy a bonus and I can reuse my notes as needed.
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Jan 10, 2021 21:44
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aldantefax posted:I think a classic game of this type does not feature politics prominently to start and the grasp of civilization only extends as far as the town itself - the wild is a wholly separate entity and zone conceptually. aldantefax posted:I wonder, is it possible to run such a game and place the burden of keeping game world consistency something that players ought to do? Anisotropic Shader posted:I am struggling to handle combat in an exciting way that isn't just purely fatal - I get that it isn't supposed to be 'combat as a sport', but maybe I just lack creativity because combat keeps coming up!
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Jan 10, 2021 23:17
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mellonbread posted:This might be true in principle, but in practice, unless every monster is unintelligent and noncommunicative, "how do the NPCs feel about the players" will become important at some point. Unless you're completely restocking all your locations from scratch every time the players visit, or unless they kill absolutely everything they encounter, they're going to have repeat interactions with the wilderness inhabitants. Which means "do the monsters have affect toward specific player characters, or toward the party as a whole" is still a relevant question. Semi-correct, but I have a more thorough examination of this I'm thinking on about how "NPC interaction and faction movement" interact with the core West March-ey bits, but I want to diagram it out in a more comprehensive way before diving deeper. The short of it is, I think you can represent things like this at the party level unless there's an exceptional note for an individual, which might be invalidated if people leave. quote:I don't see how this could work at all. If you're running an open table with players dropping in and out, that means the details of the world are constantly changing. Unless you mean that players should be taking notes about what happened on previous sessions, for future players to use. Which is something that should be encouraged and rewarded, since it's time consuming and not always fun to constantly write down what happens in-game. I'm having a galaxy brain moment here but I am thinking of making specific pieces of knowledge as commodities to be traded to and from the players for the purposes of information management. Like writers for a movie or video game, you could present a mostly empty world bible that is a gazetteer to be filled out with a card template. Like a deckbuilding card game, players will put something onto a card, and use a bigger card, maybe, to emphasize importance, then enter it into a binder that is turned back in to the GM. If you can commoditize this into discrete objects which allow for freeform expression that you then share to other players as a living document and represent this in the game world's context...Well, I think you might have some interesting results, but now I want to go think about how this might look.
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Jan 11, 2021 00:09
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aldantefax posted:
I think the original West Marches campaign addresses this--there was a communal map, which the players could add to or not when back in Town. I don't think he ever mentioned any specific rules, but players did it without his vetting, so the information was not necessarily accurate, just whatever the players' impressions were. I think you could easily extend that--let the players decide what they share and don't share. You could have (friendly?) competing groups that pass each other information (e.g., "hey, you guys should check out the Weeping Crags--there's tons of undead, and that's right up your alley, isn't it?" to a group of mostly clerics/paladins). On a practical level, you could have a Discord channel (called "#the-tavern" or whatever) that represents the Town area where information can be passed. Maybe there's a common map there, maybe it's a document accessible to everyone that can be edited, maybe it's just the text in the channel itself, or some combination. Anything in there is fair game. Players can spread rumors, share information, sell information if they're so inclined, etc. Groups, when they form and go out on adventures, are in a private channel, and the players/characters involved choose what to share back in Town, and to whom. So there's a continuity that's being diegetic, kind of an IC representation of those rumor tables the OSR folks love shoving into everything, and there's minimal effort on the GM's part beyond some administrivia to maintain whatever documents and make sure they're not being defaced or something. Other players can pick up on this background or not, and the justification is it's what everyone in town knows, so it's trivial to discover.
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Jan 11, 2021 03:43
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I've been wanting to try my hand at a West Marches style game. I've been looking at using DCC. But I'm open to any OSR games. How many locations do you usually have prepared at once?
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Jan 11, 2021 06:57
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leekster posted:I've been wanting to try my hand at a West Marches style game. I've been looking at using DCC. But I'm open to any OSR games. How many locations do you usually have prepared at once? I think you can do as follows: 0th leg: generate broad strokes of the world. nobody knows what's going on, but you have key words to describe each area that might pop up 1st leg: guide rails. show the players what's up unless they are well seasoned 2nd leg: flesh out regions = player count. "prepared" is relative to what you think you need for a single session, so i'd prepare 1 encounter per 30 to 45 minutes of expected play time. add more over time as the world becomes curated around the players 3rd leg: add regions as regions become explored, flesh out existing regions
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Jan 11, 2021 07:39
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Thank you! BTW, your megadungeon thread has been a huge inspiration for me. It's given me a creative drive I haven't felt in a long while!
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Jan 11, 2021 09:06
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Yay! I will write up and sketch out in greater detail the idea I mentioned from earlier posts for this thread and try to get something up this week. The idea itself is easy but I need to talk myself through it first.
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Jan 11, 2021 18:49
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aldantefax posted:In the megadungeon thread I mentioned that a West Marches game has "lethality" in order to represent the dangers of the wild, but I think you can totally do a West Marches game that isn't lethal in terms of physical trauma. For example, taking a West Marches game but as you accrue damage instead you lose traits off your character sheet as your existence becomes erased to the point where you lose your sense of being. I think some of my fears about fatality might also be due to inexperience with running games where character death is an expectation. I need to find ways to make it so the loss of a character is obviously a drawback - but it doesn't kill a player's interest in the endeavor - something to do with starting EXP most likely, so they don't feel that they're doomed to grind through level 1 all over again if they die. I mentioned in the Retroclone thread that I've been having trouble with pacing awarding exp and I think that could be a compounding effect - it takes 5 sessions to get half way to level 1 and then you die. That's an enthusiasm killer. With regards to 'players set the schedule' - I've found it really hard to get players to do this: we have effectively just settled into two parties that have different time slots. I am planning to try and break this up somewhat by forcing them both to wait in 'town' until the other party returns so they can finally talk and cross-pollinate. Without a big pool of players (and enough DMs to support them?), I think the West Marches ideal of self-organizing parties doesn't work. mellonbread posted:Reaction rolls. They're easy to dismiss as cruft that can be cleared away and ignored, but they perform the vital function of preventing every single encounter from going straight to combat. If the players want to turn everything into a brawl, they can still do that. But it's important that the system not automatically enforce it. I haven't read OSE in detail (I use the monster manual occasionally from the SRD) but I assume since it's a clone of Basic, it has some form of this system. This is a good point - I keep getting caught up in "this room contains a monster so it has to attack!" and don't stop to try and characterize the enemy. Even stuff like the giant cockroaches and slugs that are being encountered currently can be made more interesting by using the reaction table as inspiration.
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Jan 11, 2021 19:40
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Run a megafunnel for your west Marches game. This is a concept from Dungeon Crawl Classics which has a bunch of regular people with random stats and very cursory equipment get started and there are no superheroics. Zero HP and you are done. Then, put them in circumstances that are intentionally unfair but not mean, and whoever comes out the other side is now a level 1 character. Really sets the tone that danger is everywhere. Fast character onboarding is something that newer editions lack of D&D and part of its ongoing design is to make characters more powerful at level 1 that are way harder to kill individually. I'd say to also consider running a primer game with characters that players know they will not play after that session to tee up the idea that players should be flexible.
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Jan 11, 2021 19:57
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I've been messing around with both wild-crawl and megadungeon space. I've found in the past that risk adverse play is so often based around individual character loss that I've started moving consequences away from character death (and in some cases, explicitly taking that off the table) in favor of other ongoing concerns and threats. Negatively advancing world states are one of the things that can work really well to provide tension, especially if players know that their favorite <neighborhood, town, merchant company, wizard tower> is potentially in for serious hurt if they come up short in providing for it/trigger consequences they can't put down. I'm was curious if folks had any tools for reactive or progressing worldstates that work well for tabletop. Kevin Crawford's faction turns can definitely be useful, but I've also developed a habit of using clocks from Blades in the Dark to track ongoing trouble which seem to be good for ratcheting up tension.
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Jan 11, 2021 19:59
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I really like this concept but as I was fleshing it out in my head I realized that basically it's an early MUD/MOO but with more DM engagement. I bet there are some lessons that can be taken from oldschool MUDs about what works or doesn't.
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Jan 11, 2021 20:16
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aldantefax posted:Run a megafunnel for your west Marches game. This is a concept from Dungeon Crawl Classics which has a bunch of regular people with random stats and very cursory equipment get started and there are no superheroics. Zero HP and you are done. Then, put them in circumstances that are intentionally unfair but not mean, and whoever comes out the other side is now a level 1 character. Really sets the tone that danger is everywhere. Imo the 0th level adventure in the back of the DCC book would make a great West Marches starting funnel (although I've only read it and haven't run it); it provides hooks at the end that can *very* easily be translated into cool nearby locations and encounters (there's a dryad wood nearby!), and the whole "you went through a star portal" thing can even provide a reason as to why a bunch of idiot farmers have become murder hobo interns intent on exploring the dangerous wilds.
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Jan 11, 2021 21:52
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ok also also, I think a good west marches campaign should incorporate some board gamey elements (half sandbox, half boardgame?); I've been thinking of doing stuff like allowing my players to "invest in the town" in order to increase the starting level of future adventurers should their current crop die. oh and does anyone have any favorite programs for creating pretty hex maps?
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Jan 11, 2021 21:57
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Anisotropic Shader posted:I think some of my fears about fatality might also be due to inexperience with running games where character death is an expectation. I need to find ways to make it so the loss of a character is obviously a drawback - but it doesn't kill a player's interest in the endeavor - something to do with starting EXP most likely, so they don't feel that they're doomed to grind through level 1 all over again if they die. I mentioned in the Retroclone thread that I've been having trouble with pacing awarding exp and I think that could be a compounding effect - it takes 5 sessions to get half way to level 1 and then you die. That's an enthusiasm killer. Anisotropic Shader posted:With regards to 'players set the schedule' - I've found it really hard to get players to do this: we have effectively just settled into two parties that have different time slots. I am planning to try and break this up somewhat by forcing them both to wait in 'town' until the other party returns so they can finally talk and cross-pollinate. Without a big pool of players (and enough DMs to support them?), I think the West Marches ideal of self-organizing parties doesn't work. Anisotropic Shader posted:This is a good point - I keep getting caught up in "this room contains a monster so it has to attack!" and don't stop to try and characterize the enemy. Even stuff like the giant cockroaches and slugs that are being encountered currently can be made more interesting by using the reaction table as inspiration. I'm trying not to nitpick every sentence of your post, but all the issues you're describing are ones I've encountered myself, so I'm listing solutions that worked for me. fashionly snort posted:ok also also, I think a good west marches campaign should incorporate some board gamey elements (half sandbox, half boardgame?); I've been thinking of doing stuff like allowing my players to "invest in the town" in order to increase the starting level of future adventurers should their current crop die. fashionly snort posted:oh and does anyone have any favorite programs for creating pretty hex maps?
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Jan 11, 2021 23:14
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I've toyed with West Marches-esque games in the past, but a big stumbling block I encountered was "What happens when the session ends in the dungeon?" I recall seeing something using a table or roll to see what happens if the players don't make it home safe, but I can't seem to find that at the moment.
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Jan 11, 2021 23:36
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Dr. Sneer Gory posted:I've toyed with West Marches-esque games in the past, but a big stumbling block I encountered was "What happens when the session ends in the dungeon?" I recall seeing something using a table or roll to see what happens if the players don't make it home safe, but I can't seem to find that at the moment. Could it be The Alexandrian's Escaping the Dungeon?
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Jan 11, 2021 23:42
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I've used this one. Or, I "used" it but I never had to actually roll on it. Once I told the players that they needed to exit the dungeon before the end of each session, they did a good job self policing. They budgeted the time necessary to leave the dungeon into their exploration calculations, including possible delays if something unexpected and time-intensive came up, like a random encounter near the exit. A good rule of thumb was that if they had one hour left, and they weren't already on their way out of the underworld, it was time to turn around. And if that meant they got out of the dungeon with lots of time to spare, they could use that to talk with NPCs, visit the tavern, do faction or character stuff, etc. On my end, I also made sure to add "stoppage time" to the session clock if I did things that delayed the group through no fault of their own. Like taking an emergency phone call, or calling a break to make another drink.
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Jan 11, 2021 23:57
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Yeah, that's the one. It never came up either, when I "used" it. Partially because the dungeon I was using with it was fairly linear, so leaving the dungeon was pretty straight forward for the players. That, and no significant travel time between the dungeon and town.
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Jan 12, 2021 03:12
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Okay, my brain is kind of jumbly right now, but: How I'd do a Wild Crawl I. Preparation 1. Inception, just really come up with a fully formed statement about what it is I want to do and create a wild crawl. quote:WILD FRONTIER 2. Generate a random map with normal parameters on Dwarf Fortress, export the detailed image to BMP, and then convert that into PNG for space purposes. Example:  3. Generate a list of places using donjon.bin.sh world generator and copy all of the names from there and a reference of that map. 4. Open up Tabletop Simulator, and import the Dwarf Fortress PNG map to a new table as a custom game board. Map and merge the random names and place them in spots that make sense on the Dwarf Fortress map. Using default settings means there will be a wide variety of biomes and special markers for settlements, so map accordingly. Anything that's a specific point of interest should have a token laid out for it. 5. Using the symbol library, establish your starting town, or if you want to, multiple starting towns to give players a choice that may or may not matter (in my games, they would make abstract differences to narrative and mechanical things, like picking a town that is in the middle of a desert will likely be an oasis town with camels and things that make sense for a town like that vs. a town in the countryside in plains) 6. Checkpoint. Save the positions of everything, maybe create a screenshot to use and think on. Tabletop Simulator can be posed for a 2D top down view of your map with the symbols as discrete objects. Example without the camera posing:  7. Come up with a cool teaser for the game. Keep it as short as a 1 page document like a campaign kicker document. Recently I experimented with recording audio and had positive results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbzWjFUUX24 for example 8. Determine how much lead time adventure generation needs. Figure out how an adventure is going to be generated, but maybe leverage concepts from the Megadungeon thread and Gazeteer, possibly back to Donjon. Example:  9. Pick the "Funnel" or group of "Funnels" that will session zero thru 1 the players whenever they start playing. It might be good for if you need to onboard players asynchronously to maybe even create a very simple choose your own adventure sheet to fill out and then you give them back results to say "Clem died, Cletus lived, your mom is now Satan, etc." They can use this to go and then create a character or you can give them a premade character. 10. Assemble your cohorts. For me, I know that I can run games nightly if I needed to, so advertise and set up the logistics. 11. Give the deets to the cohorts asynchronously. This might be part of the sizzle reel but maybe it is something people want to get behind. Running multiple cohorts with session zeroes can sometimes be challenging, a consequence of Life and Such. II. Presentation of the World in Data Create the seeds for adventure by talking of places far and away. 1. Create a World Bible and present it to the characters in their first session with real characters (maybe after the Funnel). For definition purposes following the original prompt, I am calling this the Exploration Lexicon. 1a. For my purposes I would want to use something with a limited physical dimension format like a playing card or index card size that can be arranged somehow like a scrapbook, binder, or some digital equivalent of this. 2. Populate the Exploration Lexicon with the sheet generated from part I, 3. To keep things from being overwhelming, create an info card for only the hometown, the player group, and the surrounding areas that they have heard of, plus a randomly determined amount of places that are "Far Away". Don't put any details in to these cards, but you could use evocative imagery as part of the prompts. If you are making something for exclusively your table, use all resources available unless you have copyright issues (because you're streaming or similar). 2a. Players are responsible for checking in and checking out the Exploration Lexicon during every session. This means it will get busy very fast and this will be expanded on elsewhere on how to expand it. Give a guide to players on how to engage with this thing. Include your outcomes from session zero. III. Onboarding Players Properly Give your players something to worry about, then do. 1. Run the Funnel, whatever it was determined to be. It need not be the same content, but should address the subject matter appropriately by introducing the dangers of the wild, the safety of home and how that is in jeopardy, and the resolve to go out and do something right that instant. Give each player a card for each of the characters they run through the funnel, and ensure they write their fates. 2. Introduce the Exploration Lexicon gameplay loop. Give each player some kind of quest. Ideally, one that goes somewhere real far away, with a real big reward, and a smattering of simple small quests in the local area to introduce the locales. Each player should have one Major quest and one Minor quest. Complete quests or free exploration in order to level up your town. 3. If you are doing a dynamic schedule like the original West Marches game, use a booking service so that people know how to book time on your calendar. https://youcanbook.me/ is free and you only need one setup, which you can route to a custom email address linked to your calendar or to your personal one. Have the players organize and give them a deadline for organizing (3 or 4 days in advance might be nice). Otherwise, establish policies for booking as needed. 4. Make creating data for each player a positive reinforcement exercise. If this means giving them material rewards in game or out of game for doing it, make sure you have a clear outline of expectations to make the players own the game and its data. IV. Running the Game Most of this is not Wild Crawl specific but is re-contextualized, particularly the visual examples for other games 1. Determine what is coming up next. Prepare as much content for scenes as is needed for that session only. Keep it as comfortable for you as possible, and if you have a habit of not preparing information or even thinking about a session until game time, give yourself a worksheet to operate from that is always within reach of you physically. The worksheets from the book "Return of the Lazy Dungeonmaster" are fantastic for this, but you can make your own. Try to keep it to something simple like one page or one half page. 1a. Before play begins, determine if a "Secret" will be available during the game. This should be available with some regularity but not explained, though it may be mentioned overtly or discretely, such as when describing the world around the players during a session. 2. If you need to do preparation for in-game things, rig up the table and ensure you have the parts required to establish your game. If this means getting battle maps and other image assets in advance, do so. I like to have Tabletop Simulator with a stock token of custom icons I had commissioned plus battle maps from 2 Minute Tabletop so I can load an encounter zone plus put monsters on the board without finding the correct token all the time.  3. Use terrain blocks and give players the right to build and modify terrain as they see fit before a combat starts. You can mess around with this but during play this means you have time to set up your side of the board as a GM while the players struggle over how to place terrain, which in my experience never causes ill will and is in fact super fun for them. Example:  4. For any encounters that are not tactical combat in nature, use evocative imagery to guide players through encounter zones. Describe things and give players the opportunity to write them down, or give them a card which represents the thing. Using Index Card RPG as a format for point to point locations is a fantastic way to do this, just curate them for encounters that flow. 5. Provide appropriate rewards. Depends on the rules system and I dunno what I'd run this in right now but whatever is considered a good reward. I would strongly consider awarding special abilities, feats etc. on a major victory and only experience on a minor victory. All sessions should have experience awarded based on participation, fulfilling of whatever the core values of the game are, awesome moments, and any other miscellaneous things that seem cool. Experience = celebration of things they did. 6. Reserve time for the players to update the Exploration Lexicon while at the table. This is a key point to ensure that it is ready to be provided to the next group. It need not be particularly in depth, but loresheets and the like should go back in. aldantefax fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Jan 12, 2021 |
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Jan 12, 2021 05:24
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I guess if I was going to used a published map setting because it's tied into the mechanics and fiction of the game like RuneQuest or something then I'd almost certainly make it a point to include that as much as possible. This is more for rolling a custom place that has no definitions yet, since you could totally run Wilderlands of High Fantasy or RuneQuest, Harnmaster, DCC Chained Coffin, DCC HUBRIS, or any number of other settings with established maps. The problem is, information is bidirectional there, so the GM has to read and interpret and internalize everything there is about the settings and a lot of the setting's decisions have been expressly made by the players. If I was going to use a semi-published setting I would likely use something like Yoon-Suin as part of the foundation of this game. I mentioned some key words and titles which may help me in defining what I want out of the game in very broad conceptual strokes (anime??? is not a title, of course, but you get the idea). The aesthetic of a West Marches game to me has very explicitly to do with purely the information and exploration aspects, and as a GM, I like knowing stuff, but also like discovering things as well, hence systems to generate things and iterate on them only a few steps ahead of players.
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Jan 12, 2021 08:59
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mellonbread posted:. No worries! That's why I posted - I'm glad to get so much feedback. Adjusting the ratio of gold:exp is such a straightforward solution that it is sort of silly that I hadn't considered it. I'm curious about this post though: Dr. Sneer Gory posted:I've toyed with West Marches-esque games in the past, but a big stumbling block I encountered was "What happens when the session ends in the dungeon?" I recall seeing something using a table or roll to see what happens if the players don't make it home safe, but I can't seem to find that at the moment. Is it expected that each (3 hour, for me) session should involve leaving, questing and then returning to the home base? I hadn't considered this - currently I am running each 'expedition party' as like a mini campaign - they head out, spend several (roughly six) sessions on the road and then make it back to the home base (with 300 exp each, ughhh). I can see how having everyone back at base between sessions might be a requirement for having a pool of PCs to intermingle and self-organize. Probably doesn't help that because of how I'm handling travel it can take hours to get anywhere... This post is great - the use of Dwarf Fortress to generate a continent is fantastic - I'd also recommend this article for anyone wanting to fill in a sheet of hex paper the old fashioned way. Its a good algorithm for creating a random environment that you can adjust to your liking. aldantefax posted:II. Presentation of the World in Data Could you provide a visual example of this? The idea reminds me of compendiums from RPGs where you get info on creatures when you kill them, or keep a collection of texts you've encounters. Is this analogous - but using a set of index cards and letting the players maintain it? I think this is a great idea - something like https://kanka.io/en set to allow the players to edit (but not create) pages could work to store all that info.
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Jan 12, 2021 18:39
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Anisotropic Shader posted:Could you provide a visual example of this? Get a binder full of Magic the Gathering cards in sleeves. That represents your information pool now to give to players. Only, instead of there being Magic the Gathering game effects on the cards, there are rumors, doodles, facts, whatever they can fit on the cards. When people are done with the session, they shove all the cards back into the binder with whatever's available. Example:  Alternately, get a box full of blank index cards, maybe with different colors to make it spicy. Put all the data on those cards and pass it around to players like a church donation plate. Let them pluck cards that sound interesting to them and write down things they might know about such a place like the Spines-Broken-by-the-Sea Mountains. Example of what this might look like as an applied journey recycled from the megadungeon thread;  Cannibalize an old boardgame that has cool cards with pictures on them like an incomplete copy of Dixit or maybe an old Everway box or something. Put some amount of cards in a sheet protector with a blank piece of paper titled with the name of a region. That's now the map for that locale. Good luck to the players to fill it out! Hopefully with the above examples you may have a clearer picture. aldantefax fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Jan 12, 2021 |
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Jan 12, 2021 19:54
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Anisotropic Shader posted:Is it expected that each (3 hour, for me) session should involve leaving, questing and then returning to the home base? I hadn't considered this - currently I am running each 'expedition party' as like a mini campaign - they head out, spend several (roughly six) sessions on the road and then make it back to the home base (with 300 exp each, ughhh). I can see how having everyone back at base between sessions might be a requirement for having a pool of PCs to intermingle and self-organize. Probably doesn't help that because of how I'm handling travel it can take hours to get anywhere...
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Jan 12, 2021 20:27
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Time in the game world I think can be mutable. RuneQuest, for example, has each adventure take place and it make be over the course of days, weeks, or months, but when the players come back to their home base, a season passes. This would mean that there is a shared unit of time for players to use to intermingle and that can be a potentially special event both in the game world and out of it. I abstracted such a thing for my megadungeon game as the abstract unit of a "Dungeon Period", which maybe was one week, could be more, could be less, but it only advanced after all cohorts returned to town. Once all parties had tripped that "flag" then the game progressed accordingly. That can be mildly untenable as you go up in cohorts but, maybe not? Inside baseball idea: run two West Marches campaigns and handsomely reward players for creating maps and content for the other game, using the same map and locations but different aspects. Just mirror or 90 degree flip every map so the players don't get wise to your schemes!
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Jan 12, 2021 20:55
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I've always wanted to play in a West Marches campaign, but since it's a minor miracle to get just one group over here there's no chance of that. So instead I've been noodling on my own West Marches game basically for shits and giggles, but it's a fun little project for when I get the game design bug. I've been using the Shadow of the Demon Lord system and setting, since I know and like both. It's pretty different from your average OSR game which has led to some interesting challenges, but that's just part of the fun. The hardest part has been map creation, even with an existing world map for inspiration I'm having a hard time getting anything decent from Hexographer.
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Jan 12, 2021 23:07
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mellonbread posted:If you're running three hour sessions and travel to/from the dungeon consumes most or all of a session, then no, there's no reasonable expectation that the players will get back to town by the ending. Unless you set up a system whereby players can move quickly through locations they've already explored, possibly with a reduced chance of encounters, to reach new areas. So moving through a few hexes and returning to town might take an entire session at first, but in future sessions you can traverse those hexes with a single die roll and expenditure of the appropriate exploration resources, leaving the rest of the session for exploring new areas or dungeon crawling or whatever was at the end of the original journey. since most of the games that I am (and presumably a lot of you are) a part of are virtual, I think it's a lot more feasible to move some of the travel stuff to the pre-game. E.g if you have a map available for the players then they can decide where they want to go ahead of time; you can abstract some of the travel encounters and just present them with results/choices at the start of the session ("you run into some magical quicksand; if you don't have a rope to toss to The Fighter then they take stress/hp damage/lose equipment as they struggle to get out"). This can go a long way to keeping your session focused on the destination (if that's what you want)
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Jan 12, 2021 23:13
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I think you can run a wild crawl in pretty much any game engine. It likely is the most favorable to OSR types of things but in games like PDQ or SotDL which are very task resolution light I would want to use something like the aforementioned selective erasure thing as part of the immediacy to go into danger knowing that you may not make it back out. To that end, I think I would even go so far as for a West Marches game, give everybody a character that is fully kitted out and at the high end of the power band, but they have lost their meaning, memory, or may be reincarnated, something like that. The character sheet is obscured but they must go into the wild to reveal parts of the character sheet over the course of play. In this way, they travel to the wild to explore on behalf of external forces, but also of internal forces to answer questions about their own identity. They might choose to completely forgo something on their character sheet or write completely over it as a result, but that also would mean each thing that they get for their character is something that they earn back from whatever consumed their existences previously. I dunno how I would model this on an online format, but I would likely just use some corrective tape that would then be easy to remove. Part of what the old DCC Funnel attempts to impart is 'discovery through play' rather than 'defining before play', and for a game like a West Marches game, in absence of intelligent monsters and factions, perhaps this meta-game of identity would be interesting and dynamic until someone decides you're a terrible human.
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Jan 12, 2021 23:18
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 15:41 |
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For those of you who want to see what a West Marches campaign looks like in action, the FASA Games forums have a pretty healthy community running their second WM campaign. Forums host the characters and rulesets, games happen throughout the week on Roll20, and there's constant chatter on Discord.
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Jan 13, 2021 03:22
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