The West Marches and Other Wild-Crawls

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > The West Marches and Other Wild-Crawls

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

Dr. Sneer Gory posted:

I've toyed with West Marches-esque games in the past, but a big stumbling block I encountered was "What happens when the session ends in the dungeon?" I recall seeing something using a table or roll to see what happens if the players don't make it home safe, but I can't seem to find that at the moment.

Could it be The Alexandrian's Escaping the Dungeon?

# ¿ Jan 11, 2021 23:42

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Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

ninjoatse.cx posted:

Are there any West Marches / crawl style games going on in the forums right now? Given the player pool / low commitment thing, I thought they would be more popular in the forums.

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.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2021 04:11

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

Whybird posted:

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.

That sounds a lot like Tony Bath's Hyborian Campaign. People made mostly strategy-level decisions, and whenever something tactical needed to be done (in that case, mostly battles), Bath and sometimes another person (a co-ref) would set up a wargame to adjudicate it and play that. If people were able to actually come and do it in person, that could happen, too, but the default was this way.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2021 15:46

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

OtspIII posted:

I missed this thread when it first happened, but it's in line with a lot of stuff I'm working on and thinking about right now. I've been leaning in more of a "extremely dense, relatively small, open-ended" direction (inspired in part by Hot Spring Island), but this resonates pretty well with that.

One way I've found to (partially) fight against the colonialism angle is to change what the PCs are hunting for out there in the wilds. I really like how GP=XP turns XP into a common but restricted physical object scattered throughout the setting, and getting it being usually but not perfectly aligned with the actions the PCs are expected to be doing anyway leads to some really fun and interesting situations, but making the players into genuine treasure hunters delving into the lands of other sentient civilizations leads to some real ugly imperialism real easy.

I'm experimenting with making XP come primarily from research and diplomacy, instead. Whenever the PCs encounter something new and unknown to 'civilization' (be it a monster, archeological site, relic, society, etc) they get XP if they spend some time studying it--an action which inherently involves them intertwining themselves with it a bit and potentially getting into trouble; the monster attacks, the site has a set of stairs leading ominously down, the relic is trapped, the society members want to ask a favor, etc. Diplomacy means establishing contact and setting up friendly relations with new societies--you get XP as your relationship with the faction increases, probably as you do quests/etc for them. Lots of the societies are at odds with each other, so it'll be hard to forge strong relations with all of them at once, but it's rewarding if you can.

Adventurer-naturalists don't have a spotless track record on not being racist in real-world history, but it's way better than the conquistadors that fantasy heroes are traditionally modeled off of.

All of this works much better if there's some line of interconnected secrets tying the setting together from behind the scenes, since it really puts an emphasis on understanding the setting and its dynamics.

One issue that seems tough for a West Marches game in which you aren't hopelessly at odds with all the other intelligent creatures you encounter is forcing the players to go home at the end of the session. If a huge part of the game is trying to forge deeper and deeper into the wilds it feels like the desire to recuperate from a forward position with some friendly lizardpeople would be really appealing, but it also breaks the core premise of the game pretty badly. Treasure has a nice natural 'it's heavy, and the only place you can dump it is the home base' quality to it, but in a game where that's less emphasized I don't have a great answer on why the PCs need to go all the way to home base each session.

Well, they need to report things, right? If you end a session with a bunch of friends you've made along the way, there's no reason not to have their next adventure start after they've safely gotten home and reported things. Hell, if it's appropriate enough to consider the trail between home base and new pals blazed, then you can just let them have a bigger meta-home to start expeditions from next session.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2021 04:24

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

An option that is more literary is to try something like the Coventry games, which if I recall correctly from Jon Peterson's book, involved each person essentially writing a story starring their character, sending it over to the editor, who would accept everyone else's stories, iron out any inconsistencies, and respond with a coherent narrative incorporating all of the strands sent as fairly as possible.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2021 04:39

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