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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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Whybird posted: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. To zoom out on the broader context there I'd want to make sure with the players that they're cool with being punished for going back to town like that. Some groups may balk but others may see it as a challenge in and of itself, but I don't know that it would be a Wild Crawl at that point since the Town could be portrayed as a hostile environment (not literally to the death, but economically hostile still means that the town itself is not truly 'safe'). I guess it is also a point to question where the gold and jewels come from and if that in and of itself is a theme ought to be discussed in greater detail, then it should. The main thing I'm feeling here is that since a Wild Crawl has no antagonist out the gate (though one might show up over time) adding a Viceroy in changes where the focus lies. I know that if I was a player in such a game after I learned of the intention of the Viceroy probably the first thing I would do is start looking for ways to take down the system, then the focus has shifted from venturing to the "Wild" space to deconstructing the "Town" space, which could be what you're going for, but if not, it is almost something that will certainly have an influence on the game state.
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Feb 6, 2021 09:54
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I don’t view it as a punishment strictly but you could argue convincingly (particularly if you are affected player) that if you “gain something” only to have it “taken from you” and the remainder is your actual income, then you have “lost” despite making a profit. Since the gain is outsized compared to the true profit and intake, that is the thing which can be viewed as “I gained a bag of money, but after going back to town, the Viceroy *took* 95% of my money and now I only have 5% left of that bag.” Semantically, that is still +5% profit, but because it *could have been* +100% profit instead...You see where that might end up leading. Anyway, this brings up some key insights. I think that a task-giver that may or may not also be an antagonist can be used in a Wild Crawl, but it need not be an antagonist. For the purposes of examining if that component would be useful to include, the narrative elements could also be defined in much the same way that random encounters would be in the wild Faction Generation Types: - Role - Starting Disposition - Wants - Needs - Purpose - Lair* Roles in Town: - Authority - Quest Giver - Amenities The Whybird Viceroy, then, could be defined as: - Role: Authority + Quest Giver - Starting Disposition: Indifferent to Hostile - Wants: More Economic Power, Order - Needs: Maintain Power, Order - Purpose: Serves to tie the Town together as an extension of a distant empire. Takes most economic benefit away from players and ships it out. - Lair: Viceroy Estate, a heavily guarded, opulent estate at the edge of Town If we define it thus we can adjust any of the dials to get some interesting things while still servicing what you want to provide contextually to players. In other words, if Viceroy wants to be a figure that is not that much of an rear end in a top hat, you can change Disposition, Purpose, and Lair, and probably Wants as well to get an altogether different feel. Another thing is if you more fully qualify “power players” like this in a Wild Crawl, this means they can be negotiated with or coerced as the default activity for them rather than the much more destructive murdering and looting them. Similarly, because this template can be extended to both “Town” and “Wild” contexts, you can establish any number of different combinations suitable for exploration. If the “Wild” is empty of people (or mostly empty) and it is just the environment, then you could still have the environment in place of people, but you have to get a bit creative with it and massage the Roles a bit to define the entity like a big ol’ Giving Tree or something that wants people to be happy and needs nourishment.
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Feb 6, 2021 17:40
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Generally speaking I have more ideas about Wild Crawls but I think part of what one could do to make their own crawl a unique type of thing has to do chiefly with what parts of the game you want to prioritize that modify the Wild Crawl format. From reading more about how other people are structuring a Wild Crawl, the main differentiator between it and a megadungeon (aside from the logistical aspect) is the “distance”. In other words, there must be some kind of meaningful distance to go by which itself is an important and key part of the game play. When it comes to a Wild Crawl or most any other ‘classic’ type of gameplay in this vein, then, you have a certain level of expectation to create procedural structures to have the mechanics inform the narrative experience. I think there are probably opportunities to argue to death when the boundary between gameplay begins, but many players in my other games are actively looking to take the game beyond the constraints of a specific block of time. For them, play happens when they are thinking about it, asking questions, interacting with each other, regardless of when people are at the table playing or not. This is an interesting concept to combine with “distance” then. Could you, perhaps, make distance more meaningful by implementing more in depth journey mechanics? Absolutely, and the expectation should be such, though the mechanics don’t need to be particularly complex - they do need to be interesting though. When I was putting out word vomit into the Megadungeon thread, I noted that when developing new mechanics or adapting mechanics for play, I prioritize three things: - Positive feedback loops - Clarity - Aesthetics This means then that in order to make journey mechanics worthwhile, it needs to have something that will reward interacting with the system such that it will provide small and large rewards, but also be clear to understand and fit with the overarching ideas of the game itself. Let’s extend the idea I had brought up in an earlier post then which envisions characters swapping out leveling up for revealing more about their character sheet. Memories and internal examination are important, but they also need to go meet their basic needs, find more bits of their memory out in the Wild, and then maybe have a run at ‘going home’. To stay in the safety of town would mean they lose what little attachments and memories they have, and they fade into the background, becoming a “Null” and exiting play. Based on the above paragraph, we have a generally clear theme and drive for players to go into the Wild, but what do they do when they are out there? How do they get from A to B? The goal I would have with the journey mechanics then is something like as follows: - Planning is good. Allow and reward players that plan for their journey carefully through preparing resources - Reserve. For players not interested in planning carefully (or not having that opportunity) to still deploy to the field with their character’s basic resources - You can’t bring everything. Introduce a resource economy that reinforces teamwork and discovery. I think this is good to put into a balancing act that you can have on a sheet to associate dice with. Let’s say you use the humble six-sided die. Each pip on each die represents ‘quality of resource’, which will be initialized to 2. If resources reach 0 quality, the die is removed and cannot be restored until the group returns to town or finds a resource point in the Wild through luck, knowledge, or skill. Let’s set our resources on a sliding scale for pairs of resources so you have a fairly simple balancing act. Thus: - Sustenance versus Mobility. The more supplies you bring with you, the slower and less flexible your crew becomes. - Gear versus Subterfuge. You can bring platemail out into the field and a catapult, but it’s likely you will be spotted from miles away. By what? Do you want to find out? Gear does not have to be immediately defined but serve as requisition points to ‘manifest the right thing at the right time’. - Bravery versus Knowledge. They say that being brave is a fool’s task, but fortune favors the bold. Adventurers must leverage Bravery to overcome obstacles against all odds. However, having Knowledge allows you to identify things out in the Wild, so if you take the time to analyze and research things in the field, you can identify and make permanent the things you discover. Okay, so that’s six resource types to do a tug of war with. They sound pretty interesting already to me, but the most interesting is probably “Bravery versus Knowledge”. How can I make “Sustenance versus Mobility” more interesting? You receive a certain amount of dice at a certain quality at the start of your requisition. Add 2 quality to distribute to your resource dice for every other player that is going out into the field with the Expedition Leader. The additional quality granted by extra players ensures that there is a certain amount of points to plan on these sliding scales that best describes how a journey is supposed to go, and can be represented on the Journey Charter. This would put the majority of the “planning is fun” mechanics to the people most interested in planning, which is whoever is organizing the actual group. Each player may have one or more bonuses to contribute because they have traits that do so, like maybe someone remembers how to pack things efficiently, so they can increase Sustenance or Gear quality by some amount. This assuredly makes sure that players can feel useful and contribute to the group’s survival. I think if I was going to do this in greater detail each character would have a certain element with them which influences their Reserve. These are special dice that each character gets and is part of their distinguishing traits which can be used to overcome challenges in the Wild. For example: A party of four has agreed to investigate a rumor about an abandoned mine about a day’s travel away from Town. They’ll want to bring enough Gear and Sustenance to get through the wilderness and into the mine. They have the elements of Air, Wood, Fire, Metal. Nobody with Water element reserve dice was available, so if they encounter a Water challenge they may need to spend more resources or try to bypass the that challenge by going around it somehow. I’m thinking of a system like how AGON represents its challenges as mythologically dramatic displays of someone naming themselves and how they will meet a challenge, which also determines the amount of dice they commit to it. Something like this is interesting to recontextualize, because if a character has discovered something about themselves and invokes their qualities, it can have a greater narrative impact and be fun at the table. Continuing the above example, the party arrives at the mine without too much incident but their supplies can only support a short delve into the mine. Gear is leveraged to manifest exploration equipment like torches, pickaxes, and the like. The party begins to descend deeper, and must face spooky monsters and use their Bravery or Knowledge to hold their ground and identify the monsters and world around them. The party may also find after navigating the dangers they have an environmental challenge in front of them, which is a large raging river with a cluster of Memory Fragments on the other side. They now have to figure out using their abilities, memories, and resources how best to tackle this. If someone with Water resources was available, perhaps they could part the water by expending their Water elemental reserve. This is mostly rambling at this point and maybe it would be good to prototype this out on Tabletop Simulator but perhaps this is going to tickle some inspiration from someone and they might chime in to say “this sounds like this system from this other game and maybe that could be useful for further desigin”.
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Feb 9, 2021 08:59
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As part of helping to define a Journey Charter I have decided to form up and roll out a prototype for the megadungeon game I'm running. This can almost certainly be optimized and simplified with a much better page layout, but it's getting close to 2 AM and I'm calling the first draft good enough: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WFL0ZSUYzym-CWAH6QDxft0z97YqiLEzqmT7FxjEh3s/edit?usp=sharing
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Feb 12, 2021 08:55
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