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
[...] however, I was hit by a bit of inspiration while I was brainstorming for my “Northern Reaches” campaign and realized that the area I was trying to find a place for was actually from my completely [...]
[...] but merely a consistent GM and setting. I suspect Gygax’s own campaign ran more like the West Marches than what we’re used to these days. Quotes like the following from the DMG seem to support [...]
[...] “civilizados”, con sus ciudades, sus condados y ducados y tal, pero no lo veo para un West Marches donde la gracia está precisamente en descubrir lo que el nuevo territorio inexplorado esconde. Veo [...]
[...] udforsker områder og ruiner tegner jeg dem ind på kortet. (En af de ting jeg har hugget fra http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/ i et forsøg på at fremhæve at udforskning af verdenen er tænkt som en del af [...]
Thanks for this. I am currently running a successful sandbox, the ideas for which I owe you some credit. Great site.
[...] Ludi’s West Marches campaign. A different take on the classic sandbox, where you have a large troupe of players who combine into [...]
@ Richard,
What I can remember (as one of the players in the WM games) is that while we did start out with a “map” – it was pretty vague. As a result we had to do a lot of exploring before we found the dungeon the map referred to. All of that exploring meant that we bumped into other interesting stuff which led to other things.
Also there were some in town NPC’s who had info about things out in the wilderness and/or desires regarding stuff out there – e.g. the head priest talking about the monastery that had been abandoned decades ago, who then asks the cleric PC to go get some books.
Since each trip out often meant getting a bit lost and running into interesting & unexpected stuff there was never really any shortage of reasons to go out. Someone would mention seeing a cave or orcs off in the distance, that sort of thing. And since we had about a dozen PCs going out adventuring in various ‘groups’ (rarely the same set for more than a couple games, we mixed it up a lot) the person mentioning this was often a PC and not an NPC (see the WM:Sharing Info post). One thing that we (the players) did was to send out a game summary that covered what happened – coming back to the inn and bragging about your deeds & carving you’re newfound info into the table map. Which by the way was another impetus for going out and exploring – simply exploring the territory! We wanted to fill in the blank spots in the map, so sometimes a game was simply “we’ll be heading west around the swamp for a week or so” – there was usually something interesting and (often enough) worthwhile.
I would strongly suggest reading the “treasure tells a story” article – that’s something he used frequently to.
And ultimately, once the players get into it, they should be coming up with their own reasons. A key factor to how WM worked was that we, the _players_, had control of the scheduling and what the game session was going to be about. In order for a game to happen at all, one of the players had to set up the game, and more than just scheduling the game by saying “let’s play on Saturday” they had to say “I want to go find that old Monastery I’ve heard about! Who’s with me?”
As long as you (the GM) have enough interesting things for them so that if/when they say “we’re going to hike west for about a week and see what’s there” then the game you run with them doing that is exciting, then they’ll want to play and it should work out great.
[...] I was re-reading about the famous D&D West Marches sandbox campaign. If you've never heard of it before do yourself a favor and check it out. Its a [...]
Ben, I have a question for you. I did read that you mentioned each starting group got a “treasure map” to some starting area to get into the thick of things, but how did you seed hooks? Since NPCs are mostly townfolk who don’t go out into the big bad wilderness and monsters for killin’ (aside from the occasional hermit or bandit etc) that seems like maps or riddles would work out best. Anyway, I am trying to sell my players on this style of game and I’m developing lots of cool ideas for areas and regions and dungeons and ruins and all sorts of everything, except how to actually get the players info on new places to go after they clear out the bunny burrow just outside of the town walls.
[...] habe HIER eine ziemlich geniale Hilfestellung gefunden für jeden, der eine klassische “Hexcrawl [...]
[...] a few months ago I stumbled across Ben Robbins West Marches stuff (yeah I know, Im a little late to the party). It reminded me of how much I missed that style [...]
[...] so that is all well and good but what about a wilderness adventure? As you know I am running my sandbox style campaign in the Mwangi Expanse of Paizo’s default world of Golarion. This is not a very urban area and [...]
[...] (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 artículos, [...]
[...] 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 [...]
[...] ahora sólo queda reunir las ganas para arbitrar una partida de “cajón de arena” por foro… vieja [...]
[...] was reading Open Game Table The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs and I ran across ars ludi » Grand Experiments: West Marches. I’m tempted to try something similar for my next campaign. It wouldn’t be quite the [...]
[...] if you’re interested, you can read waaaay more about West Marches here. Really cool [...]
[...] other words, it’s a super hero team designed around a West Marches or Red Box style of attendance, where the strangest collection of characters, from the Hulk to [...]
[...] very interesting series is the Grand Experiment of the West Marches over at Ars Ludi (Ben Robbins) for an interesting account of a sandbox game he ran “for a [...]
[...] Ruins of Mwangi/sandbox playtest thoughts. Also, more behind the screen info on some of the technology I will be bringing [...]
[...] blog post by Gabe at Penny Arcade concerning his 4e campaign I noticed a reference to an article by Ben Robbins concerning something called sandbox campaigning. Let me just I was inspired. I read the article on [...]
Great reading, love this site
About sandbox adventure, check out the Stolen Land campaign from Paizo to Pathfinder – it seems to capture most of the esssence of sandboxing – looks like a great start for a campaign.
[...] [Link] [...]
HEY!
Thanks for all the good ideas hope you get another West Marches going in the future!
[...] me encontré con un grandísimo post sobre una campaña de rol de tipo “sandbox” llamada “West Marches” (lectura muy [...]
Great series of articles. I have been running a sandbox-ish PBP campaign for a while and I agree with a lot of what you say.
Only a couple of things I do different (partly because it is PBP so you MUST keep things moving otherwise things die – not like a physical gaming group where you will always be running into the players).
a. There IS a metaplot (or several). Not overriding, but important
b. There ARE some important NPCs.
However in both cases your philosophy of “the PCs are the adventurous ones” is critical. They must be able, if they work together, to influence a metaplot, or take on an influential NPC. And if they do something the GM doesn’t expect… then the consequences must flow for the game world.
(continued – accidentally pressed Submit Comment) The bad guy who’s destroying the world is here? Sounds bad, let’s hit him until he stops. A more sophisticated group might consider joining him, or setting other factions against him, or infiltrating his organization, or trying to convince him not to destroy the world, or contemplate the morality of killing someone even one who is going to destroy the world, or hell, even embrace their own destruction and give up.
But if you’re in a freeform game, the GM isn’t telling you what to do. The world-destroying bad guy may be out there, and he may functionally restrict your options (since everyone has to stop him or else the game is over; he becomes a plot bottleneck), but you have to find him, and the GM hasn’t told you what you should think about the guy yet. So you’re in town, without a dark stranger in the corner to give you a mission of questionable integrity or without a man in a suit approaching you curtly with a briefcase full of mission data. What do you do? Your CHARACTER has to determine that. If your character is a violent, rowdy type, she’ll look for a fight. If she’s a sociopath, she’ll start making a criminal empire from the ground up. If she’s a heroine of light and goodness, she’ll look for things she can do to help the town. If she’s a doctor or a healer, she might start looking for a plague or injuries and then sniff onto a plot thread that way. If she’s a spy from another society, she’ll start ingratiating herself into the local power structure; same thing if she’s a politically ambitious person. If she’s a Chaotic Good, freedom-loving type, she might look for injustices to right, freedom to spread, laws to resist and tyrants to overthrow.
Point is, the GM won’t hook you in with a line by force. You will have to choose which bait you take. And THAT encourages and in fact requires roleplaying, in a way that “You all meet in a tavern and hear about the haunted Barrows to the north” doesn’t.
One game I ran, for example, involves recruiting heroes from across space and time to form a team that will defeat an ancient foe. The ancient foe is actually more of a plot McGuffin: Players have to fight him eventually, but in the interim they are dealing with his minions, with other bad guys, with other things they are discovering, and have utter freedom to go anywhere and do anything they can imagine that is within their characters’ capacities. One player in this game actually LEFT the group, assuming that this was going to be a suicide mission upon which everyone was going to die! This was a radically different character choice, and the player told me it was due to OTHER players’ decisions. Everyone else seemed too excited, to him, to be charging into what appeared to be an impossible battle. The irony is that if other people had been more hesitant at jumping into the quest line, or were afraid, he’d probably have been the first one encouraging them. I had to write an entire quest arc for him since he had left the main party. It was interesting. Neither he, nor I, nor any of the other players had anticipated it. It flowed logically from the events of the story. THAT’S why this model is interesting and encourages good roleplaying.
@ Daniel Ream: I think the point that Ben was making is that ALL roleplaying games are orthogonal to the idea of roleplaying. You can and usually did make 1st edition D&D into a mindless dungeon crawl where the only roleplaying elements are “I’m a barbarian and I’m tough” or “I’m a cleric and I like to heal”. Rifts can have fantastic roleplaying with such a beautiful and rich world; it is also famous for producing mindless run-and-gunning. Shadowrun can have a fantastically intricate plot with memorable characters or just be sessions worth of stealing, shooting and breaking and entering. Even White Wolf’s Storyteller system can devolve into mindless action: They specifically encourage this in the Fomor supplement as a fun way of spending a night or two!
A GM can produce the most interesting plot in the world, but if his players roleplay boring characters, then the only roleplaying being done is by the GM. A GM can require character interaction, diplomacy and smart roleplaying to advance, but if his players can’t or won’t do so, the party simply wipes.
You’ve simply identified a “problem” or an element inherent to the hobby itself: Roleplaying games are about two elements, the roleplaying and the game. Both give exactly out what is put in. You can make D&D into a combat simulator for dungeon crawls, or you can have a fleshed-out world where the players are choosing their missions, discovering intrigue and saving the world. Players themselves must have both the skill and the inclination to roleplay their character: Separate in-character knowledge from out-of-character knowledge, have their character do things they themselves wouldn’t, say interesting or funny things, get invested into the plot, etc.
What I have found, though, is that freeform games are MUCH better at encouraging roleplaying than the opposite, for a reason that Ben didn’t mention. If you’re in a campaign on rails, you can just stick on the rails. T
This has been the way my group of friends has had to run every game they’ve ever done since the 1990s. Obviously, this is a case of parallel development. When you have lots of people that you want to be able to play, the party has to be designed such that people not attending won’t be a problem. In practice, this means that the party that shows up just goes ahead and does the things and we don’t worry about what the other guys were doing. And when you have
I think it’s important to stress that these stories aren’t quite rail-less. Rather, the players have dozens of smaller tracks to pick from, and they can go from track to track at their will, and solve the problems they encounter on the track in the fashion they prefer. By this I mean that, if the players find someone who wants them to clear out the local mob den and they decide to say yes, then the mob den will presumably have a pre-set number of enemies, a pre-set location, etc. Now, unlike many games, they can say no to the guy offering the mission and move on, or ignore all the missions out there and start building their own criminal organization or mercenary group or whatever floats their boat, but eventually the GM has to start saying to them what happens.
Let’s say that a group creates a mercenary company. A truly “railless” game would have the players say, “And now we have the mercenary company”, or make up their own obstacles. This can be fun, but these games don’t have GMs. The GM’s role is not to write some story that the players just trudge through, but rather to create story potentials that he and the players collaboratively create. Okay, so what are obvious twists to the plot that they could encounter in their process of creating a mercenary group? Other mercenary groups or criminal organizations might not like the competition and attack them. The local governments may want them to do something to prove that they’re not psychopaths who will kill innocent people for money. Obviously, people have to HIRE them to do their missions.
The classic model is the standard Shadowrun game. The GM has a Johnson offer the players something to do. The players could very well turn them down, but usually the Johnson offers something interesting that plays well and advances their interests. There’s an obstacle, say a briefcase to be stolen. The players could do any number of things to steal the obstacle: Recon to see what the security is like (not trusting the Johnson’s intel) or just charge in blindly; attack with overwhelming force, lay a trap or ambush, attempt infiltration… The GM then figures out how their plan works with the resources that his NPCs have at their control and presumably a healthy dose of chance provided by the dice. These three elements (dice, players, GM) come together to produce a plot that should be something none of them anticipated before coming in, but isn’t without rails because the players and the GM each have plans and ideas of what probably should go down and those plans intertwine to make the story.
[...] posted about shifting his game to a sandbox-style, particularly influenced by Ben Robbins’ West Marches game. Possibly with just coincidental timing, Zak from Playing D&D with Porn Stars pointed out [...]
[...] ars ludi » Grand Experiments: West Marches This guy ran a kind of open world D&D campaign with no plot, just dungeons and monsters. In a way sort of like really, really old school D&D or a Roguelike. He ended up with emergent narrative by having several groups of players in the same sandbox that talked to each other about game elements they encountered. Pretty neat. I think my old high school D&D group could have used something like this. (tags: nifty game.design games.rpg) [...]
[...] hatte ich gehofft, die anderen Spieler von einer West-Marshes Kampagne überzeugen zu können, aber es wird eine „richtige“ Story-Kampagne gefordert. Damit [...]
[...] Sandbox campaign has recently been playing out the implications of a shift away from a fundamental West Marshes tenet: the adventure is in the wilderness, not the town. The town of Belltower, sadly no longer a [...]
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[...] cheap dice and figures, and a mega-mat of some kind. Preferably dry-erase. Develop a single-group West Marches sandbox setting. Gather [...]
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[...] a consistent West Marches style game with as many people as I can in [...]
So how do you keep play levels appropriate for the groups they want? You reference that guys who play weekly and monthly can intermingle but how do you cope with the weekly guy being level 7 and the monthly guy at 3? Do you assume that players keep a number of characters at various levels for the cliques they form?
[...] of characters could just be the adventuring inhabitants of an area. This is a great backdrop for a West Marches style [...]