Grand Experiments: West Marches
West Marches was a game I ran for a little over two years. It was designed to be pretty much the diametric opposite of the normal weekly game:
1) There was no regular time: every session was scheduled by the players on the fly.
2) There was no regular party: each game had different players drawn from a pool of around 10-14 people.
3) There was no regular plot: The players decided where to go and what to do. It was a sandbox game in the sense that’s now used to describe video games like Grand Theft Auto, minus the missions. There was no mysterious old man sending them on quests. No overarching plot, just an overarching environment.
My motivation in setting things up this way was to overcome player apathy and mindless “plot following” by putting the players in charge of both scheduling and what they did in-game.
A secondary goal was to make the schedule adapt to the complex lives of adults. Ad hoc scheduling and a flexible roster meant (ideally) people got to play when they could but didn’t hold up the game for everyone else if they couldn’t. If you can play once a week, that’s fine. If you can only play once a month, that’s fine too.
Letting the players decide where to go was also intended to nip DM procrastination (aka my procrastination) in the bud. Normally a DM just puts off running a game until he’s 100% ready (which is sometimes never), but with this arrangement if some players wanted to raid the Sunken Fort this weekend I had to hurry up and finish it. It was gaming on-demand, so the players created deadlines for me.
The game was set in a frontier region on the edge of civilization (the eponymous West Marches). There’s a convenient fortified town that marked the farthest outpost of civilization and law, but beyond that is sketchy wilderness. All the PCs are would-be adventurers based in this town. Adventuring is not a common or safe profession, so the player characters are the only ones interested in risking their lives in the wilderness in hopes of making a fortune (NPCs adventurers are few and far between). Between sorties into the wilds PCs rest up, trade info and plan their next foray in the cheery taproom of the Axe & Thistle.
The whole territory is (by necessity) very detailed. The landscape is broken up into a variety of regions (Frog Marshes, Cradle Wood, Pike Hollow, etc.) each with its own particular tone, ecology and hazards. There are dungeons, ruins, and caves all over the place, some big and many small. Some are known landmarks (everbody knows where the Sunken Fort is), some are rumored but their exact location is unknown (the Hall of Kings is said to be somewhere in Cradle Wood) and others are completely unknown and only discovered by exploring (search the spider-infested woods and you find the Spider Mound nest).
PCs get to explore anywhere they want, the only rule being that going back east is off-limits — there are no adventures in the civilized lands, just peaceful retirement.
The environment is dangerous. Very dangerous. That’s intentional, because as the great MUD Nexus teaches us, danger unites. PCs have to work together or they are going to get creamed. They also have to think and pick their battles — since they can go anywhere, there is nothing stopping them from strolling into areas that will wipe them out. If they just strap on their swords and charge everything they see they are going to be rolling up new characters. Players learn to observe their environment and adapt — when they find owlbear tracks in the woods they give the area a wide berth (at least until they gain a few levels). When they stumble into the lair of a terrifying hydra they retreat and round up a huge posse to hunt it down.
The PCs are weak but central: they are small fish in a dangerous world that they have to explore with caution, but because they are the only adventurers they never play second fiddle. Overshadowed by looming peaks and foreboding forests yes. Overshadowed by other characters, no.
The West Marches charter is that games only happen when the players decide to do something — the players initiate all adventures and it’s their job to schedule games and organize an adventuring party once they decide where to go.
Players send emails to the list saying when they want to play and what they want to do. A normal scheduling email would be something like “I’d like to play Tuesday. I want to go back and look for that ruined monastery we heard out about past the Golden Hills. I know Mike wants to play, but we could use one or two more. Who’s interested?” Interested players chime in and negotiation ensues. Players may suggest alternate dates, different places to explore (”I’ve been to the monastery and it’s too dangerous. Let’s track down the witch in Pike Hollow instead!”), whatever — it’s a chaotic process, and the details sort themselves out accordingly. In theory this mirrors what’s going on in the tavern in the game world: adventurers are talking about their plans, finding comrades to join them, sharing info, etc.
The only hard scheduling rules are:
1) The GM has to be available that day (obviously) so this system only works if the GM is pretty flexible.
2) The players have to tell the GM where they plan on going well in advance, so he (meaning me) has at least a chance to prepare anything that’s missing. As the campaign goes on this becomes less and less of a problem, because so many areas are so fleshed out the PCs can go just about anywhere on the map and hit adventure. The GM can also veto a plan that sounds completely boring and not worth a game session.
All other decisions are up to the players — they fight it out among themselves, sometimes literally.
Continued:
West Marches (part 2), Sharing Info
West Marches (part 3), Recycling
West Marches (part 4), Death & Danger
West Marches: Running Your Own
October 17th, 2007 at 10:39 am
This sounds like an awesome way to run a game. It might be perfect for a campaign I’m planning.
October 18th, 2007 at 12:12 am
This seems to be a beautiful solution to some of our internal problems in the gaming group I am currently GMing for. At times, some players aren’t available and we already have to have flexible gaming days since we’re all adults with other things that require our attention. This kind of game, with some of the same premises, would promise a higher level of events and put me as the GM in a very interesting position!
October 18th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Great idea! I love this. One question though, when you say that players can go charging off into dangerous areas and get their characters killed… does that happen when you have already fleshed out the ruined monastery and then a group of lowbies makes the mistake of going there? Or do you already have an idea that the ruined monastery is going to be for level 7-9, before anyone goes there, and you stick to it regardless of who goes?
October 22nd, 2007 at 5:07 am
“Or do you already have an idea that the ruined monastery is going to be for level 7-9, before anyone goes there, and you stick to it regardless of who goes?”
That’s correct — it’s a cardinal rule of the West Marches charter to never change the world to adapt to the players, otherwise you undermine the importance of their decisions. The players know they have to plan carefully, because they know I won’t nerf someplace just so they’ll survive. When they win, they know they won on their own merit.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
Cool! I hope you talk about how you went about plotting the danger zones, and how much you did in advance. Were there ever any sessions where PCs just got slaughtered and the night was a real downer?
October 31st, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Sounds great. Did the party returned to the outpost at the end of every session? If not how did you handled situations of one players not being present and their characters being entangled in the unfinished journey?
November 14th, 2007 at 3:23 am
“Sounds great. Did the party returned to the outpost at the end of every session? If not how did you handled situations of one players not being present and their characters being entangled in the unfinished journey?”
It was a stated policy that the party should try to get back to town before the end of each session, making each game a different sortie into the wilderness.
In practice this happened about 70% of the time. If a game did end with a group still out in the wilds it just meant we had to schedule another game with those same people, and that those characters couldn’t play with another group until they got back to town — really not any more trouble than scheduling a normal game.
I also tracked parties coming and going on a calendar in game time, so even if you had played your character making it back to town you couldn’t join another party that was leaving before the game date you got back. So yes you could camp for 5 weeks in the woods during one game session if you wanted to, but you were effectively unable to play until the rest of the players “caught up” in game time.
November 14th, 2007 at 3:23 am
“Cool! I hope you talk about how you went about plotting the danger zones, and how much you did in advance.”
More on that in Part 4…
“Were there ever any sessions where PCs just got slaughtered and the night was a real downer?”
Oh yes. Dice were rolled in the open which meant no fudging. It was literally let the dice fall where they may.
Surprisingly we only had one total party kill (who knew the treasure came with lizard men?) but there were lots of unexpected deaths along the way. Sometimes very cool characters got killed, which was depressing.
The flip-side was that the players knew that except for the luck of the dice, they were in control of their own fates. Smart or dumb decisions would decide whether they lived or died. They were sad when they got killed, but they could be honestly proud when they survived.
December 22nd, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Hey there, I was really impressed by your West Marches writeup. It’s very reminiscent of how I like to run games, and you did a great job of putting it to words. I was wondering, how did you structure your records of the various sites, recurring characters, etc? I’m taking on my first pen-and-paper game after being spoiled with online text games that did the grunt work for me. So far I was planning on having a big map for my players and a notebook I kept to myself that indexed the map’s contents against my source materials. Did your campaign give you any insights into this task? I’m looking forward to reading more of your site.
Thanks,
~Joe
January 6th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
[...] Ars Ludi readers, Skyla was the name of my first West Marches character, arrested and exiled, but still my [...]
January 27th, 2008 at 7:52 am
I’m interested in hearing what plans led to the DM veto rule for plans that didn’t sound interesting enough to play. Was it something like just putzing around towns buying stuff? Everything else sounds really cool, it’s just that struck me as a little odd. I’m guessing something unusual happened, no?
January 27th, 2008 at 9:48 am
“I’m interested in hearing what plans led to the DM veto rule for plans that didn’t sound interesting enough to play. Was it something like just putzing around towns buying stuff?”
Bing-bing-bing! Yes, “let’s just roleplay sitting around town” was generally considered an insufficient flight plan to schedule a game. Another good example would be something like “let’s go search the Weeping Walls for more stuff!” when I know and the players pretty much know that that particular dungeon is cleared out (for the moment anyway).
Searching tapped out areas was a common urge: hey, we had such good times there last game, let’s go back! No young gamers, we just did that. Go explore new places! Not a surprising mistake since lots of other games were all about going back and taking another whack at some place.
There were a few memorable incidents where I messed up and inadvertantly scheduled a zero-action game because of miscommunication. I was nearly lynched.
January 27th, 2008 at 10:14 am
“I was wondering, how did you structure your records of the various sites, recurring characters, etc?”
Completely regional. So there was a section in my binder for the Tower Road region, and inside it there’s a subsection for the Wil Wood, and inside that a subsection for Spider Mound (or on the computer, a straight hierarchy of nested folders).
A normal game is chronological as well as regional — you have notes for different parts of the world, but you pretty much know each game session what’s going to happen, so you may wind up putting lots of important info in chronological order. In West Marches there was no such thing. Each game session had at most a single notes sheet where I could jot down what happened, where people went, etc, but all the rest of the went right back into the regional structure.
The only real recurring characters were the secondary figures in town (who were in the Keep-town section of the binder) and the odd bandit or two, who stayed in the section of the region they were hiding out in.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
[...] I think interest is waining. I’ve already started thinking about another game to run. Over at Ars Ludi, Ben Robbins wrote about a free-form game he ran for about two years. I loved the concept of the [...]
June 13th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
[...] ahora sólo queda reunir las ganas para arbitrar una partida de “cajón de arena” por [...]
July 17th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
[...] I’m shorty going to be running a 4e game, loosely based on Ben Robbins’ West Marches. [...]
July 23rd, 2008 at 3:13 pm
[...] la idea de volver a dirigir una partida de rol por web, pero esta vez basándome en la idea de las West Marches de Ben Robbins. Asà que me he vuelto a asomar por allà y he estado explorando de nuevo la Comunidad. Uno de los [...]
August 2nd, 2008 at 10:55 pm
This is basically the way D&D was run in the past. The only reason you think it’s “new” or a “novel solution” or whatever is because the game has strayed from it’s origins and the books lead you astray as to how you should be running it. There’s a reason the method works so well, and people have been running successful campaigns this way for over 30 years.
August 11th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Dear Ben,
I have recently gone trough your article regarding the game mastering system you use for the West Marches.
As I am working as a volunteer for a French speaking rpg magazine, I would be interested to introduce your system to the French speaking role-playing community.
Would you mind if I translate/resume some part of your articles on your Ars Ludi site for our magazine ?
Best Regards,
Batronoban
August 11th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Hey Batronoban, I’ve sent you an email.
August 27th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
[...] stealing the West Marches concept of the build-as-you-play Table [...]
August 28th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
[...] de testa-la, é transformar o narrador em um agente passivo, mais ou menos como na idéia do jogo West Marches, proposta pelo Ars Ludi. Nesse jogo, temos um grupo bem grande de participantes, podendo chegar a [...]
September 16th, 2008 at 10:39 am
[...] of my inspiration and ideas from the Grand Experiments: West Marches articles over on Ars Ludi (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and running your own) and have been fleshing out a wilderness area of [...]
September 25th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
[...] A well-crafted table sets the tone of an area of play. The table for a bustling merchant city and a howling wilderness are going to be very different. Sandbox D&D games rely on encounter tables to theme different areas. [...]
October 30th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
[...] anyone here read about the West Marches? The idea you propose seems pretty much like a dungeon version of the west marches. I would [...]
November 1st, 2008 at 11:47 am
[...] likely of the same class. The original assumed AD&D campaign structure was much more like the West Marches, where there was a fluid player-base not of 5 or 6 guys but of maybe 15 or 20, and the makeup of [...]
November 12th, 2008 at 3:40 am
[...] Wilde Süden geht live. Dieser Kampagne liegt die Idee der West Marshes zugrunde: Die Spielwelt ist eine Sandbox in der die Spieler sich austoben dürfen - und sollen. [...]
November 17th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
[...] post this over at Humpy Boggart in light of its RPG-related nature, but I have really been enjoying this series of articles at Ars Ludi on a particularly successful sandbox-style D&D campaign. Pretty [...]
November 17th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
[...] Sandboxing! Weil ich gerade darüber gestolpert bin: [...]
January 22nd, 2009 at 8:18 pm
[...] of game releases have really got me jonesin to play. Would there be any interest in a sandbox or West Marches free form type game utilizing the od&d "retroclone" Swords and Wizardry Whitebox [...]
January 27th, 2009 at 8:53 am
[...] you want a real life example of such a campaign, go check out the notes for West Marches Campaign. It’s a set of articles written about a sadbox game that was actually implemented and played [...]
March 31st, 2009 at 1:06 pm
[...] (y en el google docs) es el de crear un pequeño “cajón de arena” al estilo de las West Marches de Ben Robbins o los Points of Light de Robert Conley y Dwayne Gillingham. Tengo los artÃculos, [...]
May 4th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
“This is basically the way D&D was run in the past.”
It’s the way every MMOG is run now. Reading the post, what kept going through my mind was “LFG Droknar’s Forge run”. It does work, on a logistical level, but just like 4th ed I have to wonder whether this really counts as roleplaying any more as opposed to just dungeon crawling.
May 4th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
@ Daniel Ream — It’s been true of all versions of D&D, since it first emerged from the primordial ooze of Braunstein, that you could play the game without overtly roleplaying. I say overtly, because you’re always taking on a “role” even if that’s just being the party cleric, even if you don’t create any personality for that character.
So the real question I think you’re getting at is whether the West Marches model encourages roleplaying more than the average D&D dungeon crawl. There definitely was a lot of roleplaying in the original West Marches game. Did the model encourage that? I can think of a couple of ways it might have:
- Info had to be shared in-character, so even away from the table roleplaying was encouraged. There was constant roleplaying on the email lists comparing notes or writing whole huge in-character game summaries. When characters who had never met did finally play together, they already knew each other’s character personalities.
- Mortality meant players started new characters more often in the same game, so they went to great trouble to make their new characters distinct personality-wise.
- Danger meant bonding. Characters were literally loathe to leave their comrades behind in dire straits, and it was dire straits all the time. There was a lot of character bonding, which was particularly noticeable because it was contrasted against new characters — Vesta is my comrade I’ve adventured with for months, I won’t leave her, but I have no idea who this new guy Hargen is even though it’s a player I’ve played with for months also.
- Mortality & info sharing combined meant that players were constantly thinking about “what does my character know” versus what they knew, sharpening the mental distinction between player and character
So off the top of my head, I’d say yes.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
See, everything you’ve mentioned here applies (in spades) just as much to MMOGs as the West Marches. There are certainly people in MMOGs who insist on playing in character all the time, on and off-line, but it’s also pretty obvious that the MMOG game engine itself doesn’t require, encourage, or arguably even support it.
Let me be more explicit: I don’t consider MMOGS or dungeon crawling to be roleplaying in the common, non-gamer sense of the word (and while you are correct that picking the cleric class means you are playing a “role”, I think that’s splitting semantic hairs; it’s the same as me saying that when I use my Guild Wars Monk/Elementalist in multiplayer PvE I’m “roleplaying” because that character fills the niche of the party’s healer/buffer). The campaign style you’ve set up here appears to be orthogonal to the idea of a roleplaying game: it doesn’t prevent it, but I see no way that it encourages or supports it, either.
You obviously had some excellent players who got into the setting and roleplayed on their own, but from the way you’ve described the role of the GM (largely passive and reactive) it doesn’t seem that there was any part of the setting or the mechanics that brought that out.
So, let me refine the question - was there any part of the West Marches Grand Experiment that either required roleplaying on the part of the players (by making it impossible to play/succeed if they did not) or encouraged it (by rewarding them in a well-defined way for doing so)?
June 9th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Daniel, I’d be curious to hear your definition of roleplaying, and why you think we should consider the non-gaming sense of the word at all, being gamers. This sandbox stuff is classic, the very definition of what an RPG (D&D) was intended as. I think the “roleplaying” you are so concerned about must be some kind of odd offshoot of this that really doesn’t apply.
June 15th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Given the inherently dangerous nature of a WM-style game, how did you handle the introduction of new characters? If the majority of the characters were, say, level 10ish and one of them died, did you require the players to create a new 1st level character, or did you let them make a new, level-appropriate character?
June 18th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
[...] your game has no overarching story, like some sandbox of game (MegaDungeons or West Marches types of game) you need to pepper your various sites with bits and pieces of story that Storyteller [...]
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:02 am
[...] schoolers, one in particular, started jesting that I was going to the dark side and jumping on the Sandbox bandwagon. The thing is, I’m not interested in doing a classic exploration-based Sandbox [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Wow great post! Much like the setting that I have started. This is the style that my first DM used to use. Nothing for free. Claw your way to the top. Many characters died by the dice but when you mad it your really had accomplished something.