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That the game is run in Earthdawn is probably the most interesting thing there. There are almost countless ways to organize a group of people for scheduling purposes (see also: raid management from classic MMORPGs that had more than 20 people per raid) and those are more or less another interpretation of wild crawls. I think that with the above kept in mind I have a couple of beefs with a system as presented like what they have on the FASA forums. The main thing is the amount of procedural and admin stuff that must be done in order to operate that game at scale requires a lot of meta instruction and book keeping, which I would personally prefer to have as integrated into the mechanics of the game itself. No game engine on the market currently actually supports this format of game explicitly, or was designed for such purpose, so you have to build the structural systems around whatever game engine you want, which means you could very likely swap out Earthdawn for some other fantasy role playing game system but retain all the other logistics and it would likely work fine. In my head what I would do is I would create a mechanical system that is used as a narrative device for players to think over. The power of game data artifacts holds a mysterious influence over many players, and the crux of West Marches games are “discoveries in the wild”. Essentially, I am proposing paperwork for the players to fill out. To take the example idea of “gathering stories to feed to your town’s dragon” as an example, I would give players their materials to work with in between sessions. This could be a Google form or a Trello board or something physical if the players frequented the same places in the real world. However, there must be something that the players create, present to the GM, who then will take that as their cue sheet and begin crafting a session for that group of players. This exerts a certain level of control over the actual execution of a given session. If a player has a quest, for example, there ought to be enough information inside of the quest in order to create some kind of encounter groups that makes sense. So, you would create as part of the paperwork something I’ll call a Journey Charter. Elements of a Journey Charter - Party Leader: A defined point of authority to consult with for how the team progresses, breaks ties, and so on - Party Members and Roles: Clear delegation of responsibility. Roles can also be operationalized to give certain special abilities. - Destination: A specific region or locale. This also allows GM to create rumors or research in advance if the players are inquistive. - Purpose of the Journey: Why is the party going? It need not be a quest. Perhaps they are following a lead that was an open thread from another quest or purely for exploration. - Travel Details: Logistics for the journey. How many supplies will you bring? Spare wagon axels? Are you planning to journey straight to the destination, or make stops in towns for provisions for boosts to morale so you can reach your adventure site as fresh as possible? - Requests and Considerations: If there is something that the party expects to happen to them or special preparations they are going to make such as to handle special monsters in the area, they should list all available skills and such here. — Part of what I think makes something like this interesting and important is that I am taking a deliberate stance for this theory game I’d be making where “the information and knowledge that the players learn is their responsibility to track and store in their Exploration Lexicon.” This is another such data artifact that other players can then use to understand more about the game world. As a GM running a game like this, I am a strong proponent of letting the mechanics do the talking and let the players come to their own conclusions. They only need be on board with doing these things in the first place so as to not make it something undesirable or cumbersome. Consider the frequency of games that a single GM can run, or even a team of GMs. GMs need a way to more concretely understand what happens inside of a sandbox game than session notes, especially if they need to share this information with other GMs. The intent of an adventure and its outcome documented in this way provides a key indicator for all people involved in a game. Players, as it turns out, like to do paperwork in a lot of game engines, but they need to be encouraged to do the right paperwork, and the design of a Journey Charter needs to take into consideration the aesthetics of the thing itself as well as the items that the players will fill out. Part of this is my desire to make traveling and the journey itself from start to finish something meaningful. I don’t want to take lightly a journey and hand wave it, because no journey in the wild should be trivial in a West Marches game. For other games that do not focus on this type of exploration, I think it totally fine to waive or abstract this, but I want to double down on this in a West Marches game. Consider a Journey Charter to be a big deal. I would even go so far as to put a bounty on the charter for players to sign up for it, or allow the player organizing it to “ante up” something of value. Inter-player negotiation is something rare and it’s assumed all players will just work merrily with one another, but when you have multiple cohorts where the player base changes, having a push/pull for these kinds of items means that players get a “delicious choice” of going on an adventure if they can make their schedules work; or, opting to post an adventure of their own with a similar ante up. I think also that a Journey Charter is something that need not be fulfilled immediately. As an example, perhaps someone may make a Journey Charter with a purpose of filling a career goal for a character which will take many other journeys to complete. However, this can remain in the shared “hub” that players will frequent. Time will go on and perhaps that physical artifact may gain some mystique to it. People may adorn it with accessories, raise it up on a cork board the older it gets, or it might even be plastered over by other more immediate matters. I’m diving back into the notes from the megadungeon thread but in creating something like a Journey Charter or Exploration Lexicon, there must be three primary things that such a system needs: - Rewards players with minor and major rewards - Provides positive reinforcement for players to engage with the system (in this case, generates a physical artifact for players to review and to leave for other players) - Must be elegant in design: can be nuanced and complex, but should be easy to understand at its core functionality I would also think that for something like this I would create a cluster of systems to help reinforce this as part of the core gameplay loop. I would also want to bring closure to it as all cohorts return to town from their adventures so that there is some kind of clear ritual that marks the passage of time. Here’s how I think this might work: - Players are run through session zero / funnels - Characters are formed up and provided with seed quests and maybe some carer goals as well - Introduce the Exploration Lexicon and the Journey Charter. Allow for players to discuss and ask questions about these things and walk through creating a sample one (perhaps from a helpful NPC in town) - Give the players an assignment to lead a Journey Charter and to turn in one by a certain near deadline - Allow players to freely organize after this point to discuss their quests, locales, and so on. If they wish to find out rumors, have them engage you with the Exploration Lexicon available so they can put notes into the thing they ask about. - First wave of Journey Charters are posted. GM team prepares the sessions for the appropriate groups. - Do the needful. - End of an adventuring season. After all groups return to town, mark the passing of time with a summary. Players contribute by completing their Journey Charters and collecting rewards. - GM hands out special rewards at the end of an adventuring season. Ask the players to submit their greatest moments good or ill and reward them for their trouble. Compile this and read it out in a flowery way to the players, perhaps record it as a video with some fanciful music for posterity. Note any changes in the state of the game world as a result of external forces or players doing things. - If a character enters or exits play, now is the time to do so. Celebrate the life and death of characters, perhaps even notable NPCs in town. Really sell it. - Give the players a bit of a break then get ready to do a new cycle of Journey Charters and the like. Introduce an Emergency Charter, if you’re feeling cheeky from the GM side. If you want to introduce a faction game, this is a good time after the first adventuring season. - Do the needful and go through the loop until everybody’s sick and tired of having fun.
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Jan 13, 2021 06:39
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I've updated the ludography and jargon parts of the OP so if anybody is looking for more definitions or jumping into the thread as a spectator or participant, there's some stuff that may be of interest for you there.
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Jan 13, 2021 10:11
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Separate from the above, one of the players from my megadungeon game, Hylas, had some notes regarding experiences running a West Marches style game. Via https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?action=showpost&postid=511593740:quote:As far as West Marches go, I did attempt to run a West Marches game a few years ago and I did learn a lot of lessons and your game has given me a lot of good ideas. I originally invited a bunch of people and then said I could run Here's what I've learned:
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Jan 13, 2021 10:13
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Speaking of systems, have you seen the Forged in the Dark hack Forged in the Marches by Steven Lumpkin? Still work in progress but it's got some neat stuff going on, and I really like the way it lays out themes and content warnings.
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Jan 13, 2021 11:18
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Antilles posted:Speaking of systems, have you seen the Forged in the Dark hack Forged in the Marches by Steven Lumpkin? Still work in progress but it's got some neat stuff going on, and I really like the way it lays out themes and content warnings. What about this hack excites you, or is otherwise 'neat'? I am not super familiar with Forged in the Dark other than there is a simplified task nonbinary resolution system that generally favors "success with compromise", and has a discrete game phase for involving factions. The thing's 92 pages so I haven't yet dove deep in.
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Jan 13, 2021 22:15
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aldantefax posted:Separate from the above, one of the players from my megadungeon game, Hylas, had some notes regarding experiences running a West Marches style game. Via https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?action=showpost&postid=511593740: I'm playing in a westmarches style cyberpunk game right now, and most of those match up really well with our experiences. It gets especially spicy when you have people scattered across timezones. We have ~8 GMs and 36 players right now, mostly clustered in two timezone bands with about an 8 hour gap, so scheduling gets to be a nightmare. In order to not make it an absurd amount of work we've got it capped at 5 missions a 'season' which generally takes about a month real time to get scheduled and run, and let players guest GM if they want to run a single session in the setting that is not necessarily canon for the characters and gives no advancement. One thing we've found works well in keeping everyone up to speed is setting up a Discord livestream to let everyone not in the Roll20 for a given session watch. Another is getting one or more of the players in a given session to write an in-character debriefing for the mission that's posted in an announcements channel so people can get at least the overarching story bits so they can keep up on plotlines. They also run an in-character soft RP room where people can bullshit in character and GMs can drop info if it seems like an important plot point didn't get remembered. It's a ton of work and I respect the hell out of the GMs for the amount of effort they put in keeping personality clashes down. They're taking a month off right now from mid December to mid January so everyone can catch their breaths before we start up another year.
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Jan 14, 2021 05:06
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aldantefax posted:What about this hack excites you, or is otherwise 'neat'? I am not super familiar with Forged in the Dark other than there is a simplified task nonbinary resolution system that generally favors "success with compromise", and has a discrete game phase for involving factions. The thing's 92 pages so I haven't yet dove deep in. Well, since I haven't got any practical experience with West Marches I can't really speak to the setting and fluff and such, though I'd say it does the job in setting up a decent scenario for exploring weird stuff. Aside from the previously mentioned themes and content that they list in the beginning and is bloody awesome (seriously something other games can take inspiration from), the things that I like are primarily mechanical and how it changes the mechanics from baseline FitD to better fit West Marches sensibilities. Like in base Blades in the Dark and many other hacks the players pick a crew type to provide direction and framing, something that's tricky to do with multiple shifting groups so this hack uses just one, 'The Town', but there's still room to specialize by the parties contributing towards a 'great work' that when completed sets the overall tone for how the town will try to survive the ongoing trouble (magical weirdness, force of arms or rediscovering lost locations/items/lore). The way you 'build' quests is interesting, where simply gaining stable access to/through a location is a worthwhile goal, and even just spending time in a location often changes it in usually drastic ways. The Extraction roll is a fun addition, sort of mirroring the Engagement roll, and a decent solution to the 'the session ends in the middle of the dungeon' problem. The playbooks themselves are a bit ehh, I really like how they have multiple exclusive starting abilities, so even two PCs with the same playbook somewhat unique, at least compared to baseline Blades. I'm guessing it's hard to gauge this hack if you don't have much experience with Forged in the Dark systems? I'm not sure how to best explain it to someone with practically no experience with the systems.
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Jan 14, 2021 13:15
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Discord sounds like it's almost made for this kind of thing if you were going PBP or even chat- you could have role limited channels - GM's Room Tavern (for general chat) Group 1 chat Group 2 chat It's one of those things that would really be cool to run - I do love the idea of a DCC funnel as new players arrive and are whittled down to true heros. Mutant Crawl Classic could do a good post-apoc. Legacy might also work, but it would change the scale somewhat. With more than 1 GM, there would need to be some way to pool resources and info - having no Big Bad would make things simpler, as it would be a simple explore, get rich, retire or die situation.
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Jan 14, 2021 15:39
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Grey Hunter posted:With more than 1 GM, there would need to be some way to pool resources and info - having no Big Bad would make things simpler, as it would be a simple explore, get rich, retire or die situation. What I've settled on for my own work is smaller, 'regional' threats that slowly grow and make specific areas into 'danger zones' with increased odds of an encounter and more difficult encounters, but never big enough to f.ex. threaten the town. Adds a bit of color to the map, and since SotDL only has 10 levels which could take a relatively short time to reach taking one out permanently is the endgame for max-level characters, granting a big old bonus if they retire after taking out one of these regional bosses.
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Jan 14, 2021 15:54
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For the scattered players problem, I wonder about a semi-DM'd approach using solo wargame rules like Five Leagues from the Borderlands or Two Hour Wargames' Talomir or Dungeon Crawl rules. The DM sets up the overall map and whatever basic storyline they want, but actual sessions are sent to the player as a package with a scenario map that they then run using solo play rules and sends the DM back what happens. Depending on how much control you want as a DM you could either let the players roll for loot, etc or you could send it to them. That approach would limit the actual play experience into something more like a CYOA and limit how much you could do with roleplaying and storyline development during an actual play session, but would allow for a distributed play-at-your-own-pace approach for the players and you could always pair it with a discord for more live engagement between players or between players-NPCs when the timing worked out.
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Jan 14, 2021 17:25
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I think one of the assumptions to challenge about a game of this type is a highly available GM. Having things resolve for players and they report their results back could be interesting as long as the player is willing to engage with it and the reward justifies the difficulty of engagement.
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Jan 14, 2021 17:32
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Discord bots and Roll20 make this even easier, because you have an unimpeachable roll judge that doesn't need a GM to witness.
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Jan 14, 2021 19:22
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Roll20 does have a limitation of player count. I think you can only have up to 15 players in a given game and no multiple GM thing.
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Jan 14, 2021 19:42
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Only ~15 in a session at a time, and you can give control over tokens to any player, so they can go just fine. We just have 4-5 players, 1 GM, and either one of the players or someone else sits in to stream.
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Jan 15, 2021 01:44
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I did use Roll20 pretty extensively for some things but I just don't like the way it forces a lot of things to do it the Roll20 way, even after multiple years and as a paid subscriber, using the official modules for some D&D stuff, the whole drat thing I just keep going back to Tabletop Simulator, which has its own problems but it lets me run games the way I want. Sadly, Tabletop Simulator can only support so many players at a time too and it's prohibitively unoptimized, so it makes it really difficult. I think something like Fantasy Grounds might be okay because it has a more robust system for tracking notes and the like but honestly it's kind of abysmal as a player and I imagine it is more abysmal as a GM for the same reasons I don't like Roll20. Foundry might be okay for this as well but ultimately it will run into the same problems as the others because it's a 2d projection that wants you to do things its way. I think if I was going to run the game it would be through the same thing that we're doing for the Megastrata project, which is a dedicated series of Discord channels and then whenever a session is live anything that needs to be used during that session, be it roll20, Tabletop Simulator, a toaster, whatever. As long as there was a way to save and share information you could theoretically run the game anywhere you had players and dice, and that in and of itself could possibly be anywhere online, because you could have access to dice anywhere online. I don't know of any online service that is built explicitly in service of West Marches. However, I think this is something worth exploring, a Discord or IRC bot that explicitly handles the humdrum of calendar management, submitting/retrieving information, and so on could be extremely powerful and lower the barrier to entry for a lot of people. There are certain things that could be done and I'm sure there is a project out there (or maybe it's waiting to happen) for something regarding this. Part of what the most common sentiment I see with Wild Crawls at the moment is that they are too hard to manage. I think that if the systems that support the GM are not well defined and the players have a very nebulous rules of engagement and expectation management, you will end up with something that is like my buddy Hylas' cautionary tale. So, one must consider all tools available to manage players, scheduling, information, and so on.
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Jan 15, 2021 04:14
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We solely use Roll20 for moving tokens on a map and making dice rolls. Nothing else is on there, not even built out character sheets because it's such a bitch to reliably format them.
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Jan 15, 2021 05:02
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So when you work with Trello or Notion, how many other people can you share it with? Do they need to have accounts in order to edit content? What sort of content would you put on a character's board?
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Jan 15, 2021 06:50
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Trello Teams require each person to have an account but they can be used with free accounts. You can make boards (as an admin) with multiple teams up to a finite limit of teams. https://help.trello.com/article/927-what-are-teams has more. Notion I don't have any experience with, unfortunately. I feel like that if I wanted to do a West Marches game online the information management thing will just be a huge Google Drawing or oekaki type board that people will need to contribute to during and after a journey has been completed. I dunno what system I would use, PDQ seems good because it's so lightweight that you can bolt basically anything onto it, but maybe something else might be better. I haven't quite sold myself that I'm going to necessarily do one live just yet.
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Jan 15, 2021 07:26
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Hmm, I could see the use in setting up a google sheets as a combination calendar/diary and a discord bot that lets you upload a bit of text to specific cells/'dates' in the sheet, so GM's/players could go f.ex. "/update 15.01 standard pace northwest, weather change to calm, found landmark triangle rock, encounter large animal tracks (unidentified)" or something like that, real easy record- and timekeeping. Maybe separate sheets for GM's and players?
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Jan 15, 2021 11:24
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I tried that level of granularity some time ago and it was still too much of the wrong kind of information. I think a game like The One Ring has the right idea of codifying the journey being just as important if not more than the destination; Ryuutama also has a similar, if much more whimsical and anime oriented approach. Looking into how people traveled about in the middle ages there is a very good video by Lindybeige that covers the topics of travel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdguh1D-fOk In this video he describes in great detail the concept of the itinerary which really was just a measure of different legs of a journey. They were flexible because each leg of the journey could have rapidly changing travel conditions, like a flood causing a known road to be washed out so you would get some local directions on how to get around that. This would be the type of Journey Charter I think the party would expect to use prior to and during play. Having a sheet which clearly and elegantly documents this as well as their general exploits and key notes might be something to consider. I think I could get away with having the party contribute to a Google Drawing as a shared thing and then export a copy to the Exploration Lexicon. Then, whenever anybody wanted to modify that page, they would do so by making another copy. I don't know if it would be something that after some point the information falls off or becomes permanent but I think part of it is that information and the world is always changing, so all elements of a given Exploration Lexicon and Journey Charter should remain as modifiable.
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Jan 15, 2021 11:31
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aldantefax posted:I think I could get away with having the party contribute to a Google Drawing as a shared thing and then export a copy to the Exploration Lexicon. Then, whenever anybody wanted to modify that page, they would do so by making another copy. I don't know if it would be something that after some point the information falls off or becomes permanent but I think part of it is that information and the world is always changing, so all elements of a given Exploration Lexicon and Journey Charter should remain as modifiable. Yeah, and the GM should explicitly be changing things behind the scenes, and should keep some paths open and close some off- but it should be something that changes almost at random for them. so they get used from going to town to the caves - then someone blows the dire beaver dam (ridding that threat) and suddenly the road is in the middle or a marsh. This is not something the players should know, so they go in expecting a quick journey to This leads to a question of how much impact do the players make - do you want them to feel like there is a chance that the lands will be tamed, or do you want it to feel like they are holding back the darkness that is always trying to creep into the realm. Though the former gives something for the players to work towards and an end for the campaign, the latter could be a great basis for the campaign - that the edge of the world is a constant terror that needs to be pruned back lest it encroach on the world. A good feel would be something like this. "Well done guys, you have cleared the goblins from the caves, miners arrive and set up a colony, now about that manticore....." Players scratch "goblin cave" off map and replace it with "Dwarven mine" .....time passes.... "Bad news guys, the miners dug to deep and now a Balrog lives there!" Players sign, and Change mine to Balrog.
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Jan 15, 2021 12:01
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I think that's in general a pretty good idea. It does mean that there should be something mechanically to support it and have certain ramifications of how something is. I think this could be modeled by ascribing an easy to understand "GM rating" to an area similar to how some games use stats for regions (Birthright, for example, had development levels for the various counties and such that were under a lordling's control in AD&D 2e). I also think that the stats should be kept in a "GM codebook" so that it can be easily manipulated and read. I think that you could operationalize this in some interesting ways, I'm thinking something silly like generating a bunch of random numbers in advance on a page and then circling a certain amount of numbers in a specific pattern. You can use this to track progression as well or as the seed for influencing future events. Example: Take a grid of randomly generated numbers, which can be any series of numbers, then draw a circle around some kind of recognizable pattern. Let's say you have a grid that is full of numbers 00 to 99 in random distribution with reoccurences. Each number represents the starting intensity level for a given locale or adventure site. As players interact with the locale, then it will upgrade or downgrade the intensity. Any major change in events such as the passing of time, random chance, or maybe something that puts an external change in the area can bump the intensity to another number in the sequence. This is already predetermined relative to the seed number but isn't fleshed out yet, but if you need to generate something you can follow the procedures to further dive in. I can tell already that while I am writing this out this makes more sense in my head so I'll try to have a visual accompaniment example.
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Jan 15, 2021 18:23
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So to re-summarize the primary components of a Wild Crawl, we have four main things to consider: - The Wild, a conceptual where all the action and adventure happens - The Town, a conceptual space that represents a ring of boring safety and recovery - Information Management, the connector component that feeds details from the Wild back to the Town - Structures and Organizations, either out of character or in character, by which agents move information around. Since I think the first three are generally well qualified, I'd like to write about "Structures and Organizations" specifically and why they're core to the Wild Crawl concept. Before that, though, I should talk about how a Wild Crawl has some mimicry of what was documented in architecture as the concept of the "Third Place", which notes a place that is neither home (the Town) nor work (the Wild). This is the place where socialization and congregation happens. You can read the more in depth explanation here, but the summary suffices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place About Structures and Organizations Structures are distinct conceptual or physical places that everybody has access to and is generally considered to be "common ground" for all players to meet freely and discuss things. This can be reflected as a physical place that everybody goes to like a coffee shop, or a digital place like a message board like the TG forums on Something Awful. It need not be permanently accessible either; perhaps it can be during a game convention or other special event and it only exists as long as the event itself exists, such as GenCon Indy or a Renaissance Festival, or some kind of online meetup. The main takeaway here is that the conceptual Structure for a Wild Crawl is a place that permits the rest of the crawl to happen. Each main Structure in a Wild Crawl serves a specific purpose: - Plaza, the common social meeting ground. This is the default space people end up in back in Town, but it need not be a literal plaza. It can be a Tavern, a Coffee Shop, a Cafeteria, or any other kind of place where many people congregate chiefly to socialize. - Library, the information repository that has its deepest ties to Information Management. This is the place to go that will likely overlap the Plaza, because maybe the information is kept in the same physical location like in West Marches the Grand Experiment where a map was put up in the tavern the adventurers went to. - Bazaar, the place to buy/sell goods conceptually. These are not necessarily physical goods but represents material exchange of resources to level up (via experience points), craft/enchant items, and so on. This usually does not overlap the Plaza or Library but there's no reason it couldn't. "Well, no duh," one might say because these places are well known and recognizable for any kind of tabletop RPG. However, Wild Crawls place a special emphasis on the first two places: Plaza and Library. Since we know the types of Structures that a Wild Crawl prioritizes, we can then understand better how these things can potentially be connected.  This is one example which is likely the default assumption of all Wild Crawls (and just all campaigns in general, perhaps). This is not always the case, though, because there can be multiples of these kinds of things in other games - in a Wild Crawl, there is only one focused place for each Structure, which is "the Town". This also means we can play around with the assumptions a bit. As long as the priority is kept high, then the Structures could be anywhere. What if the Library was kept deliberately away from Town, for example, which means to record the knowledge the players must put it in a highly ritualised place like a secluded tower or cave of wonder or some such? You could play around with "distance" quite a bit. Anyway. When considering a Wild Crawl, I think the Structures can also be people instead of conceptual places, hence "Structures *and* Organizations". Organizations would be then a special category of structure that can be optionally introduced in order to provide further context. They can also be mobile, but this is 100% optional. To speak to one of the earlier comments, the "Faction Game" would be featured most prominently here and can be tracked discretely using some kind of special "Faction Sheet". This could also be commoditized in the Library. Types of Organizations: - Guild, a group of people seeking material goals (money, power, etc). They will provide "Quests", which you know what their deal is already. Material quests provide material rewards. - Royal, a mostly hereditary group or groups that do not provide quests, but "Mandates" that must be fulfilled. Use sparingly for greatest effect, because the majority of players do not like being ordered around! Mandates are likely a special type of quest that have consequences if they are not fulfilled but typically carry a major milestone for a reward that alters the game scope, such as gaining land and an estate, a bigger boat, or a retinue. - Atelier, a group of people who are seeking non-material goals (the various arts and creative pursuits, experiences, etc). These can offer abstract rewards. - Cabals, a group of people who provide access to "Forbidden Things". Whatever that might be for a setting is up for debate. Maybe candy is banned in a Wild Crawl for whatever reason, but you could do requests for a Cabal to obtain that illegal resource. They may also deal in "Forbidden Information" as well. This is likely an organization which provides "good and bad things" as part of their reward structure. - Folks, which represent everybody else just trying to get by in your game setting. They have no specific requests but if they did it is likely they would express them through a Guild. Note that in the above basic organizations you could absolutely sub-divide and re-categorize or combine as needed. There are many books on how organizations in tabletop games are formed up, and Kingdom by Ben Robbins explicitly details looking at these kinds of social power structures. It is almost certainly good reading to consider! Anyway, since we have the general categorization of Wild Crawls generally addressed, I think we could go back to the proposed model of what a Wild Crawl looks like and work on fiddling with the dials until we get something interesting. Consider using the Organizations to drive the agency of players into the Structures that are in Town and represent the various bits of information that the players accrue in the game world in a more concrete way. Ideas: - A new Wizard Cabal which sends its students, the players, out into the Wild to identify and research monsters and bring back valuable research data. - The Royalty has charged the players with settling a new frontier as the first people to establish a vassal state and reclaim the de jure lands which have been left to grow wild for generations. - An Atelier seeks new stories for their poems and songs and charges the players with gathering those stories in the Wild. Their poems and songs turn player interactions with the world into something they refer to as a Tapestry, which is recounted at the end of every season with new stories obtained by the players. - The Folk of Town have disappeared in a magical cataclysm, and the players must travel into the Wild to find their spirit fragments and bring back them back to Town, where they may exist peacefully as phantoms until reincarnation. By making semi-generic but still descriptive categorizations of the variety of things that go into a Wild Crawl you can then move forward with adding whatever context you like in order to establish the core concept to sell the sizzle to your prospective players.
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Jan 21, 2021 21:54
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I've attempted to play a few west marches games, and they've all fizzled out. We were using Burning Wheel for one, and then Zweihander. They both kind of fell apart, which happens. Burning Wheel has too many social skills, and I just don't think it was a good fit, when you can be so easily out for months if your character gets hurt. I'd be interested in giving another one a shot. Also, I want to see YOUR dog, not just A dog.
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Jan 30, 2021 05:41
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PicklePants posted:I've attempted to play a few west marches games, and they've all fizzled out. ? that is my dog. I think that if you allow for players to have multiple characters, if one is taken out of action and you do seasonal game play instead of having an adventuring week, then you can get characters back into the action at the same general timeframe.
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Jan 30, 2021 08:28
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Oh poo poo. Did you get a new one? I was thinking of the Shiba. My bad.
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Jan 30, 2021 20:52
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I got 2 dogs since forever and a half ago! Anyway, I think with respect what to examine in greater detail, I believe that the main thing is to find a good themeing. I think upcoming for this I'll be examining the popular assumptions and summarize in greater detail the agreements and disagreements with them again. I am currently thumbing through a Kickstarted "West Marches" type book which has a more in depth treatment of it, but generally speaking it feels kind of phoned in a bit (reserving full judgement after I've had a full read through on the subjects). I will also attempt to design a world for West Marches using simple available tools that are generally free and then go from there as discussed previously and go from start to finish for a game that is ready to launch - I am not going to actually launch it but it's worth doing the exercise, in any case.
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Jan 30, 2021 23:10
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aldantefax posted:I think upcoming for this I'll be examining the popular assumptions and summarize in greater detail the agreements and disagreements with them again. I am currently thumbing through a Kickstarted "West Marches" type book which has a more in depth treatment of it, but generally speaking it feels kind of phoned in a bit (reserving full judgement after I've had a full read through on the subjects). Was it the Izirion's Enchidirion or something along those lines?
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Jan 31, 2021 02:26
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Antilles posted:Was it the Izirion's Enchidirion or something along those lines? Yeah. I'm about 40-60 pages in and I'm very like "yeah whatever"
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Jan 31, 2021 04:15
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My brain is still churning this stuff over, but here is a work in progress. This is more than one page so it almost certainly needs to be trimmed down before being presented for player consumption. —- West Marches Design Document 1 Tell me, have you ever been to the End of the World? They say it is a place where you can go to have all your wishes fulfilled. There, a paradise. A place where one no longer has wants, nor needs, and can simply exist peacefully. Forever, perhaps. It is a place where as time goes on, all the pains and sorrows of the world will leave, so too happiness and love. Is it not wonderful, the End of the World? Perhaps you are one of the few who has found yourself there, at the End, viewing a verdant landscape of infinity. The neon-pink birds alight through the massive trees that have run rampant through the landscape. Civilizations of the past perhaps may be under the eaves, but none call it home anymore. A quiet, patient apocalypse has taken place, the twilight of all things. Perhaps you have a fragment of memory still left, at the End. A piece which drives you to move, to explore this verdurous, apocalyptic hellscape, to move out of the cocoon of perfect existence and nothingness. Tell me, have you ever been to the Beginning of the World? --- Key Concepts - The End of the World is a place that houses townsfolk living a quiet, idyllic life without purpose or meaning. Lacking even basic identities, they are simply referred to as “Nulls” - Players are “Fragments”, named after their memories of another time and place. They seek to return back to that time, and must travel from the End to the world beyond that has turned into a massive sprawling land of green. - It’s rumored by other Fragments that there is a place called the Beginning of the World, which holds the secret to the apocalypse and a wish-granting engine that can send someone home - Players venture into the wild and return to the End to rest and recover. As they explore and discover more of the world, they learn of its fate, restore the identities of the Nulls, and ultimately, find their way to the Beginning of the World Notes about the game structure - This is a West Marches type experiment that is further extended by changing around core assumptions of game engines - Players must draft a Journey Charter in order to propose a mission out from the End. This allows them to specify the time, number of people, and journey itinerary - Players will find Records in the game world, and are chiefly responsible for updating the Exploration Lexicon, a publicly available and collaborative player journal that can have any number of details that they choose to place into there. - All information that is provided to the players is the full responsibility of players to document. - Characters can die, but be recovered. Recovery causes them to lose something from their character sheet. However, there is only so much on their sheet which can be lost. - Characters will have sheets that have redacted information on them. If they have too much redacted from their sheet, they become a “Null” and exit play. - Characters can choose to consume Records to reveal more details from their character sheet, restore what they have lost, add new things to their character sheet, or remove them. Tone of the Game - Post-post apocalypse. A somewhat lonely, quiet surreal optimistic twilight punctuated with threats - The feeling of a ‘stranger in a strange land’. Another world that is similar but wildly different from the one we live in today. - A world of danger, but not of physically dying. Existential death is the key - A world where the inner unknown is just as important if not more important than the external unknkown - Some mixture of Somali and the Forest Spirit, Haibane Renmei, BLAME!, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Hakumei to Mikochi, DR STONE, Made in Abyss, all the trashy isekai you can think of, Heterogenia Linguistico, Angel’s Egg, Master Keaton, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Binchotan, and so on. Coppelion (even if it kinda sucked) still applies too, as any other GoHands show (soft edges, lots of bloom, a show more concerned with its aesthetics than narrative) - Music is inspired by the more contemplative works of Joe Hisaishi such as from the Princess Mononoke soundtrack, Howl’s Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and so on. Yasunori Mitsuda as well for work on Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. The music of the Andes and folk music. - Game inspirations take place from West Marches, Hex Crawls, Caves of Qud, Wildsea, the Pool, Ryuutama, Golden Sky Stories, and others, maybe Persona, Dark Cloud 2, Shadow of the Colossus, Odyssey: Journey to the West, and Yume Nikki, Legend of Mana, Bastion, Dwarf Fortress, Breath of Fire 2 (Township), Suikoden, and so on. Ar Tonelico might count even if I never played it or went in deep on the lore. - Media inspirations come from primitive technology based channels and other channels focused on outdoor survival and bushcraft
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Jan 31, 2021 10:28
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I'm thinking more on what system I would use to support gaining and losing resources in a suitably and satisfyingly crunchy way. West Marches has a certain psychology enforced in it where you don't know what dangers you're getting into and if your character eats it, then they're dead and there's nothing to be done about it. Thus, removing "player elimination" or delaying it but still allowing for "material loss" seems interesting. My argument would be that there is just enough sting from losing something off your character sheet that it puts a true sense of danger into the player mentality, but does not outright eliminate them. They lose "progress", similar to in Dark Souls when you're just starting out and learning the ropes, or when you lose a life in a platformer and you have to attempt a section over again rather than replay the entire game. In addition to this though, there has to be a sense of integrating with the Wild in some way. If you wanted to take a scummy approach of it, "taming the wild", which has some very gross connotations, and maybe some West Marches games and inspired campaigns such as Kingmaker take this point as a matter of fact. The Enchidiorion makes a point of spending about half a page to call this out and it's something to consider when scoping a game like this. In the design ideas that I started kicking around the idea of finding ephemeral things out in the wild where "a character finds pieces of themselves out there" is an interesting one. In Valkyrie Profile 2 as an example, you find items of dead heroes which has a portion of their soul in it. You can then add them to your party of similarly dead heroes and continue adventuring, but the interesting part is the inversion of life and death - a character only really starts existing in that game when you find them after they're dead. I don't know that the characters in this theoretical game I'm constructing would be dead and then reincarnated in a fantasy land (though that's a very common trope for the isekai genre) but I think the memory loss portion is interesting from a mechanical standpoint. Rather than curating from an a la carte menu like in D&D or GURPS or any other system where "the player creates the character", this idea comes forth as "the player discovers and curates the character", which is altogether a very different experience compared to the modern concepts of character creation before and during play. I also don't know of a game that properly uses resources as pools for everything. I imagine that I could use a combination of a rules light narrative forward game such as FATE, the Pool, PDQ, or Forged in the Dark, and of those the one I'm most comfortable with is PDQ. Memory/trait loss reflecting taking damage or dying can be emulated by giving a player a character sheet that has the traits in PDQ filled out with the appropriate bonuses, but each sentence is exposed/redcated based on the severity of damage. The question of whether or not a character has a mythical or realistic overtone is up to question, but I imagine a Fate Stay/Night type situation where the characters are mythologic or historical figures perhaps. I'm not super sold on that but I think it would be a particularly memorable moment when a character gets an important reveal that they can invoke in order to do a crazy move that beats the odds under a time of extreme duress. This also brings the question of "how dangerous is the wild intrinsincally", to which a resource usage system should be important. A party may be able to move out into the wild with less resources which increases the speed and stealth that they travel, but they expose themselves to hunger and starvation if they wish to do so. It would be good to provide a suitable reward for certain challenges to let players make a decision if they wanted to go "ultralight" versus "kitchen sink" in terms of preparation, but that implies that there is a reward for doing so, and that reward should be mechanical, and the mechanics should support the narrative! Okay, so how would I model something like that? - Each resource has a reserve pool and when in Town, you get a certain amount of reserve points to allocate to your individual pools - As part of the Journey Charter you get a "team" reserve pool that represents your ability to share the burden when traveling - Each personal pool represents something that a character has access to. In order to overcome challenges, you need to use a certain amount of resources from specific pools, which means the more variety your party has, the better equipped you are to handle a variety of situations in the wild - Resources that are in any pool can be "pushed" to have a chance at getting a better result, but this is risky - it may backfire, but can be used when times are desparate - Players and the party pool recover when on the road but at a very slow rate. - A character can choose to "burn" pool during an adventure which takes time to recover, and it may only recover back in town. This should be a big deal and have subsequent marked effect. The types of pools can have any number of things associated with them that thematically make sense. Perhaps they are mundane pools, or magical pools, or some other esoteric type of thing like elemental qi pools, magic circuits, whatever. How the pools are arranged should have something tied to the fiction and have a mechanical ramification. Thus, if we're looking at characters and their memories, then their pools are perhaps generated as a mental reserve, and everything services the mental condition of a given character. Dangers in the wild can perhaps do things like remove resources from these pools by causing psychic damage (sanity? resolve?), or even cause temporary memory loss (thinking like a level drain by a wight in old D&D). I dunno how this would truly look like right now but unless someone knows of a game that already models this type of resource management in RPG form (or boardgame form) then I might have to start bashing together various systems in order to get what I'm angling after.
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Feb 3, 2021 20:29
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aldantefax posted:In addition to this though, there has to be a sense of integrating with the Wild in some way. If you wanted to take a scummy approach of it, "taming the wild", which has some very gross connotations, and maybe some West Marches games and inspired campaigns such as Kingmaker take this point as a matter of fact. The Enchidiorion makes a point of spending about half a page to call this out and it's something to consider when scoping a game like this. This is a thing I've been thinking about a lot: how to write a setting for a WM game which doesn't end up being apologia for imperialism. One of the premises I was considering was that the players aren't in control of their own destiny: the West Marches are a prison colony (I was going to base them on Britain from the point of view of Ancient Rome, a faraway wet, lovely island full of angry celts) where dissidents are dumped, sent to go on adventures, and paid a pittance by the colony's viceroy for any loot they bring back from their near-suicidal adventuring job. That doesn't take all the sting away but it turns the PCs into fellow victims of imperialism, rather than instigators of it.
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Feb 5, 2021 09:36
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Hmm, I like the idea, but at the same time, I feel even in the backstory removing player agency puts a certain spin on the game itself which is predominantly focused on a high degree of player agency. To further extend this though, I think setting large setting goals are interesting that cannot be achieved right away. The goals then serve as the context for adventure, but still require the return back to town and if that is a prison colony or a memory palace full of ghosts or a giant flotilla then that is something to consider in greater detail. Having a taskmaster in the game like a Viceroy may be interesting but it also could backfire since the players will invariably go shake them down for quests and loot if the viceroy is not already doing so in the opposite direction. There have been cases where having some kind of entity like this causes over-fixation on it when the players could be expanding outwards. Perhaps the Viceroy is part of the original setup but then the prison colony detaches as the Viceroy goes out on some kind of insane expedition and dies in service of the plot, which then gives a few options for the players: - Take the reins of the prison colony and work towards liberation - Go investigate the Viceroy because maybe they left a macguffin or some other treasure and what killed them (maybe they just went rogue, or they got killed by monsters or other things) Using the idea of the ‘steady state world’ as the basis for town, the impetus to leave it is then ‘do you want to be stuck in this jail in a far away land forever’? Or maybe something like that, I need some more coffee because I’m now thinking of bumbling aristocrats in a wild land and they severely underestimate it and pay the price as an example of the setting, like the classic scene from Jurassic Park of the park ranger going “Clever girl...” before being mauled to death by velociraptors.
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Feb 5, 2021 17:56
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I don't understand. Can't you just not populate your setting with suspiciously ethnic demihumans who exist only to slaughter and be slaughtered?
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Feb 5, 2021 18:02
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I think you certainly can! The concept I have been mulling over is mostly absent of people so it's more a Castaway scenario than anything absent of a lot of people in the wild. I don't have the PDF handy of the moment but the Enchiridion's notes clarify much better than I can without coffee or breakfast.
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Feb 5, 2021 18:09
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I’m with you. For the specific ideas I have kicking around, I don’t have any intent to set up slaughter or being slaughtered as the only mode of engagement with non-player factions or anything out in the wild. I would be pretty alarmed if players imposed that viewpoint on this game type. I’d like to explore in greater detail the Journey Charter that I mentioned previously and try to make the actual Charter itself to see how turning a piece of planning into an in-game artifact for players to leverage or celebrate.
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Feb 5, 2021 18:23
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Here's the specific for what is written from Izirion's Enchiridion of the West Marches:
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Feb 5, 2021 18:36
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Halloween Jack posted:I don't understand. Can't you just not populate your setting with suspiciously ethnic demihumans who exist only to slaughter and be slaughtered? I mean yeah that's also a good thing, but having intelligent opposition to your characters makes adventures a lot more interesting. Making that intelligent opposition not be coded as real-life victims of colonisation ameliorates the problem (which was why I'd planned to do it as Romans colonising Britain) as does not making them literally subhuman and making the relationship with them more nuanced than "slaughter or be slaughtered". If you don't have any intelligent life at all in the area you're exploring then that can risk leaning into the myth of the bloodless colonisation: as a general rule, anywhere worth colonising has people already living there with stuff to take, and the idea that you can just show up at a place and find a load of cool natural resources is - well, ok, it's less harmful than having colonisers heroically pry them from the bloodied hands of their former owners but it's still not great. To be clear, I'm not saying none of these things are ok and all West Marches games are cancelled now, I'm just thinking out loud on best practice.
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Feb 6, 2021 09:24
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I was considering since I had made mention of Valkyrie Profile in an earlier post that it could serve as the basis for a West Marches game (dead heroes are brought into service and must wander the land to refine their character traits before being sent to prepare for the final battle and so on), but that made me think that there were two aspects to it where there were effectively two worlds that could be superimposed on one another: the "mundane" world where the affairs of mortals take place, but the "divine" world where gods and heroes dwell. This means that one could use the same locations in multiple contexts, which is highly useful for a Wild Crawl. The "Wild" itself could include the "Town" but in a different context. You see this in a lot of fiction, particularly in urban fantasy type games such as World of Darkness, Dresden Files RPG, and any other game set in contemporary eras where poking around areas to explore are also the same areas that normal people have coffee at. Unknown Armies as well does this, as do other somewhat surreal types of games. This presents an interesting narrative and aesthetic context. Since West Marches have to do conceptually with the "Wild" and "Town" having a clear delineation, perhaps this also could be done in a way that is decidedly grander in scale such as the world spanning of Valkyrie Profile, the many oceans of One Piece, or a very constrained type of setting such as a square mile of where you live in the real world, but reflected in different ways. Considering then that the "Wild" can be overlayed onto the "Town" the aesthetics for a West Marches campaign can shift to service any type of setting which allows a single place to serve both contexts, and also helps reinforce that you can run a West Marches game with a variety of systems if you step away from the original naming convention (hence, Wild-Crawl). If one place can serve one or more "Wild" contexts while also having a "Town" context, how does one "travel" between the many different places? Wild Crawls seem to invite a certain level of "player versus environment" in that the actual journey and discovering what is there is just as important if not more than the destination. So, the journey mechanics must be there somehow, and a "Journey Charter" of some kind ought be considered even if it takes a different form than paperwork. This is over-generalizing of course but I could see turning something as mundane as working in a cubicle farm in some large faceless corporation in the modern era something that could be turned into a Wild Crawl. Each floor or different department reflects a different and mysterious type of thing and maybe you're out of pens and pencils so you have to go forage for them out of the safety of your team's cubes or head down to the mail room. You would replace swords and spells with reports, questionable social interactions, and spilled coffee. "Town" could be your cube farm or the place you go home to at the end of the day in a very literal sense. That's being very silly about the interpretation, but it could be an interesting challenge to make an ongoing Wild Crawl in that context instead. It also was brought up that there were ways of handling procedural versus narrative conflict in a mechanical way, and if the "Faction game" as mentioned earlier is something to be considered, then leveraging mechanics from a game like DramaSystem would work quite well there. There are very simple but robust mechanics for social interactions which allow a higher degree of agency from multiple sides and also puts the matter of conceding rather than digging in a key option. Its procedural resolution mechanics are somewhat boring and there are no real journey mechanics to consider, but its primary system has to do chiefly with the interpersonal dramas rather than dealing with nature, existential crises, or whatnot.
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Feb 6, 2021 09:25
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aldantefax posted:Having a taskmaster in the game like a Viceroy may be interesting but it also could backfire since the players will invariably go shake them down for quests and loot if the viceroy is not already doing so in the opposite direction. My thinking was not that the Viceroy would be sending the players on specific quests -- more that they're there to keep order in Town, fireball any attempts on the prisoners' part to build a raft and sail home, and when the players come back from an adventure with a fat sack of gold and priceless jewellery the viceroy ships it back home, sells it for a huge profit, and gives the prisoners like a 5% cut which they can only spend at his company store selling slightly-less-poo poo equipment and cigarettes.
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Feb 6, 2021 09:33
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