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. Así que me he vuelto a asomar por allí 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.