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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > The West Marches and Other Wild-Crawls
 
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Hypnobeard
Sep 15, 2004

Obey the Beard

aldantefax posted:

mellonbread posted:

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.

I think the original West Marches campaign addresses this--there was a communal map, which the players could add to or not when back in Town. I don't think he ever mentioned any specific rules, but players did it without his vetting, so the information was not necessarily accurate, just whatever the players' impressions were. I think you could easily extend that--let the players decide what they share and don't share. You could have (friendly?) competing groups that pass each other information (e.g., "hey, you guys should check out the Weeping Crags--there's tons of undead, and that's right up your alley, isn't it?" to a group of mostly clerics/paladins).

On a practical level, you could have a Discord channel (called "#the-tavern" or whatever) that represents the Town area where information can be passed. Maybe there's a common map there, maybe it's a document accessible to everyone that can be edited, maybe it's just the text in the channel itself, or some combination. Anything in there is fair game. Players can spread rumors, share information, sell information if they're so inclined, etc. Groups, when they form and go out on adventures, are in a private channel, and the players/characters involved choose what to share back in Town, and to whom.

So there's a continuity that's being diegetic, kind of an IC representation of those rumor tables the OSR folks love shoving into everything, and there's minimal effort on the GM's part beyond some administrivia to maintain whatever documents and make sure they're not being defaced or something. Other players can pick up on this background or not, and the justification is it's what everyone in town knows, so it's trivial to discover.

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