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Bookmarking this thread, I am very interested in the prospect of running some West Marches games even if my current player group probably aren't the ones to run it for! What systems have people considered for the game? It feels like D&D is the 'default' but the only edition that doesn't have a big problem with caster supremacy is 4th, and that has the problem of combats being designed to be big focal set-pieces rather than something fast that you might do five or six times in a session.
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Jan 10, 2021 10:56
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 06:29 |
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aldantefax posted:In addition to this though, there has to be a sense of integrating with the Wild in some way. If you wanted to take a scummy approach of it, "taming the wild", which has some very gross connotations, and maybe some West Marches games and inspired campaigns such as Kingmaker take this point as a matter of fact. The Enchidiorion makes a point of spending about half a page to call this out and it's something to consider when scoping a game like this. This is a thing I've been thinking about a lot: how to write a setting for a WM game which doesn't end up being apologia for imperialism. One of the premises I was considering was that the players aren't in control of their own destiny: the West Marches are a prison colony (I was going to base them on Britain from the point of view of Ancient Rome, a faraway wet, lovely island full of angry celts) where dissidents are dumped, sent to go on adventures, and paid a pittance by the colony's viceroy for any loot they bring back from their near-suicidal adventuring job. That doesn't take all the sting away but it turns the PCs into fellow victims of imperialism, rather than instigators of it.
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Feb 5, 2021 09:36
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Halloween Jack posted:I don't understand. Can't you just not populate your setting with suspiciously ethnic demihumans who exist only to slaughter and be slaughtered? I mean yeah that's also a good thing, but having intelligent opposition to your characters makes adventures a lot more interesting. Making that intelligent opposition not be coded as real-life victims of colonisation ameliorates the problem (which was why I'd planned to do it as Romans colonising Britain) as does not making them literally subhuman and making the relationship with them more nuanced than "slaughter or be slaughtered". If you don't have any intelligent life at all in the area you're exploring then that can risk leaning into the myth of the bloodless colonisation: as a general rule, anywhere worth colonising has people already living there with stuff to take, and the idea that you can just show up at a place and find a load of cool natural resources is - well, ok, it's less harmful than having colonisers heroically pry them from the bloodied hands of their former owners but it's still not great. To be clear, I'm not saying none of these things are ok and all West Marches games are cancelled now, I'm just thinking out loud on best practice.
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Feb 6, 2021 09:24
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aldantefax posted:Having a taskmaster in the game like a Viceroy may be interesting but it also could backfire since the players will invariably go shake them down for quests and loot if the viceroy is not already doing so in the opposite direction. My thinking was not that the Viceroy would be sending the players on specific quests -- more that they're there to keep order in Town, fireball any attempts on the prisoners' part to build a raft and sail home, and when the players come back from an adventure with a fat sack of gold and priceless jewellery the viceroy ships it back home, sells it for a huge profit, and gives the prisoners like a 5% cut which they can only spend at his company store selling slightly-less-poo poo equipment and cigarettes.
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Feb 6, 2021 09:33
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aldantefax posted: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 don't think of it as the players being punished for going back to town: there's literally nowhere else they can sell this treasure, so trading it for the Viceroy for better weapons and healing potions is still a step above just sitting on it. The town is still a safe space for them compared to the Marches themselves: it's somewhere they can rest up in relative comfort. And the players are still adventuring out of choice: if they don't wanna risk life and limb in the wilds, they can always go back to farming. But yeah, agreed that this frames the Viceroy as an antagonist to be taken down, and that does detract from the WM premise a little.
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Feb 6, 2021 10:08
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 06:29 |
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Absurd Alhazred posted:While committing to any particular excursion is low, once you have, the expectation is that the session itself will have serious engagement. I don't know that that's easy to work with in PbP, which is already stop-and-go for any individual decision point inside of a session. One option would be to have the expeditions into the wilderness entirely GM-adjudicated with nearly no player input, send the results of an expedition back in private to only the PCs who went on them, and have the game entirely focus on the players discussing what they found, negotiating about where to go for their next expedition, and deciding who to bring and how to split the loot. It'd be a very different game and you'd need to be sure to create enough stuff going on that decisions like "well I need a ranger to get us through the goblin warrens undetected and a priest for the undead at the gate, but the more people we bring along the less treasure for each of us" get interesting.
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Aug 26, 2021 12:40
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