Grand Experiments: West Marches (part 4), Death & Danger
As I’ve said before (and any of the players will tell you) West Marches was dangerous by design. Danger encourages teamwork because you have to work together to survive. It also forces players to think: if they make bad decisions they get wiped out, or at least “chased into the swamp like little sissy girls” (a recurring game quote).
It’s an open secret that every GM fudges sometimes, or glosses over closely checking rolls and just hand waves things. It’s part of the art to do it well and gracefully. No such thing in West Marches: I rolled all dice in the open, not behind the screen. If the dice said you sucked a critical, a critical you did suck.
Did this lead to looming specter of sudden death? Yes, but having strong and fairly unyielding consequences combined with a consistent, logical environment meant the players really could make intelligent decisions that determined their fate — they really did hold their own lives in their hands.
Of course for that to work the sandbox had to be built with internal logic and consistency that the players could decipher…
West Marches was intended to be a campaign environment, where characters would start at low level (1st actually) and then push farther and farther out into the wilds as they advanced. When I was creating the game map I marked each region with a specific encounter level (EL) to gauge the kind of threats that were normal there. The logical pattern was a rising gradient of danger: the farther you get from the safety of town, the more dangerous and the land became.
In most cases there were no steep changes in encounter level as you moved from region to region: if you were in an EL 3 area, an adjacent region would probably be EL 4 or 5 at most. This makes good game play, but also matches game world logic: the goblins in the mountains don’t magically stay on their side of the fence, some wander into Cradle Wood (the adjacent region) and some even go as far as the Battle Moors (the region beyond that). Distance was generally walking distance not “as the stirge flies”, so the far side of a mountain range might be quite a bit more dangerous since it was effectively “farther” from town.
Mountains, rivers, valleys and similar terrain features divided up the West Marches, creating separate paths of exploration. Players were free to jump around and explore where ever they liked, but there was a tendency to return to previously explored areas just to see what the next region out looked like. So if a party started exploring west into Wil Wood, they would probably push into the Frog Marshes, then the Dwarven Caves, then the Notch Fells, each region harder than the last. But if they explored north into the Moors, they would push into Cradle Wood, Ghost Wood, then the Goblin’s Teeth and so on. Each region also held tidbits that revealed details about the farther regions. By the time you reach the ruins in Harbor Wood you’ve hit lots of clues pointing at their druidic origins.
Multiple exploration paths also meant that a player could level up exploring one direction, die horribly somewhere high level (sorry Mike, two hydras was cruel), and then start a new 1st level character and explore completely different areas. You didn’t have to go back to the same low level areas because there were multiple low level areas (and multiple medium level areas, and multiple high level areas, and so on).
The players never knew I had these potential exploration paths planned out, they just pushed farther and farther into the wilds in whatever direction they started going.
Not everything in a region obeyed the overall encounter level — how exciting would that be? Some regions had sharp pockets of danger, like the barrow mounds in the middle of the otherwise pleasant Wil Wood.
By logic those pocket encounter areas had to be either sealed away or isolated somehow, otherwise they would change the EL of the region around them. If the wights stay in their mounds, the rest of the wood is still relatively safe. If the wights go roaming through the forest, Wil Wood should just have a higher EL.
Usually these pockets were either easy to find and well known or hard to find and completely unknown. This kept players from just bumping into extreme danger with no warning — they either knew about the danger spot and could avoid it if they wanted, or didn’t know about it and would only find it with searching, in which case they knew they were unearthing something unusual. If they were smart that would be enough to get them to proceed with caution.
Dungeon design was also a little different than normal. In a traditional game the adventurers sweep through a dungeon and never look back, but as I covered in part 3 the ongoing environment meant every dungeon was a permanent feature. Dungeons generally had the same or near EL as the region they were in (for all the obvious reasons), but to make things interesting I designed many of the dungeons with “treasure rooms” that were harder than the standard EL, well hidden, or just plain impossible to crack. So even when a party could slog through and slaughter everything they met, there was a spot or two they couldn’t clear, whether it was the fearsome Black Door, the ghoul-infested crypts of the ruined monastery, or the perilous Hall of Swords. They usually had to give up and make a strong mental note to come back later when they were higher level.
Lots of times they _never_ came back. They really wanted to, they talked about it all the time, but they never got around to it because they were busy exploring new territory. Rather than being frustrating each new “incomplete” seemed to make players even more interested in the game world.
Was there actually good treasure in the treasure rooms? Yes, really good treasure. Every time the players cracked one it just made them more certain that all those other sealed or well-guarded rooms they couldn’t beat were chock full of goodness.
In Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist (GNS) terms, West Marches was gamist (make bad decisions and you die, roll bad and you die) and heavily simulationist (if you’re in the woods in winter and you have no food you’re in trouble).
An interesting side effect was that West Marches put me (the GM) in a more neutral position. I wasn’t playing any scheming NPCs or clever plots, so I wasn’t portraying intelligent opposition and didn’t have any ulterior motives. The environment was already set, so instead of making up challenges that matched the party I just dutifully reported what they found wherever they went. When I rolled I would freely tell the players what bonuses or target numbers they were up against, so the players looked at the dice to see the result, not me.
In many of the West Marches games it really felt like the PCs versus the world with me as an impartial observer. The players didn’t “see” my hand just the game world, which is about the most any GM can hope for.
Big kudos to Mike, Gavin, Karen, Chris, Dan, Ping, Seth, Jem, Jen, Rob, Russell, Paul, Trey, Zach, Roy, Tommy, Mike M, Charissa, John, and Paul G. I kept trying to kill them and they kept coming back. What more can you ask for in players?
postscript: Running your own West Marches
December 9th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Wow, ask and ye shall receive (see my comment on West Marches 3).
I’m completely in love with the West Marches idea. I really, really have to find a way to incorporate this into my future campaigns, or something like it. It seems to solve problems of attendance, scheduling, and other such issues. This is just astoundingly awesome, and I hope you keep writing stuff like this for a long time.
December 10th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Ben, great stuff, and thanks for answering all my questions (I just noticed).
I’d love to do something like this, but I have such little time to prep games these days. Maybe 4e will save the day! Until then, I keep pointing my friends to this site and hoping they’ll take the bait.
December 11th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
For some player perspective, I played in West Marches (joining in the middle, see: flexible roster), and I have to say that it took a long while for me to adjust to the “no clever plots” aspect of the game. There was definitely some major denial in the beginning as I sniffed around like a bloodhound for plots that weren’t there and was sort of miffed and confused when I didn’t find them. But I played some of the most intense games ever in the West Marches, and I have to say it wasn’t because we were saving the princess but rather because the environment was totally believable, realistic, consistent and deadly. I guess that’s why Ben calls it a Grand Experiment.
December 12th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Thanks for that Ping. What was a typical adventure like?
Also, I stumbled across the Wanted Posters.
Were those side-quests or PCs who ended up on the wrong side of the law?
December 23rd, 2007 at 9:06 pm
@ cr0m
“Also, I stumbled across the Wanted Posters. Were those side-quests or PCs who ended up on the wrong side of the law?”
The wanted posters were part of the rumor mill. They were posted by the Duke’s soldiers (aka the law) because the criminals were thought to be hiding in the region, but some were total red herrings and weren’t even in the area. If PCs decided to go bounty hunting they might turn up more info about where to find the culprits (”Soder Black-eye’s ship was seen down by the Sunken Fort”) or they might get nothing. Sometimes PCs would stumble across or run afoul of bandits they had heard about without really looking for them.
There were other kinds of bounties that cropped up in town: the local priesthood is paying gold for water collected from the Opal Caves to treat a spreading fever, or an apothecary who pays for certain herbs growing in the Frog Marches. These weren’t plots, just simple excuses to go out and maybe earn some guaranteed money if you found what you were looking for and made it back.
There was one PC who wound up on a wanted poster after he very rashly and publicly cut down a guardsman in town. It was part of the premise that the town was safe and law-abiding, and the Duke’s men did not tolerate any public troublemaking — the adventure was outside the town, not inside it. Conveniently the character got killed by an ogre that same game, so we never had to sort out the whole issue of how could he stay based in town when he wanted by the law, etc.
January 28th, 2008 at 2:27 am
Ben, it just occurred to me that I have repeatedly praised and linked to this series of posts on other forums without ever letting you know directly how much I enjoyed them. So there:
Thanks for your West Marches writeup; excellent work, very insightful. Any chance for more on this project, i.e. some example campaign notes, or session writeups?
February 4th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Great articles! I love this kind of premise for a campaign, although I’ve always been too lazy to actually do it myself. Any chance to see your maps for this?
February 12th, 2008 at 2:16 am
Amazing concept and great articles, Ben! Some vaguely similar ideas have been roaming in my mind for a few years… I’m joining the popular request: Is there any chance to see your maps or campaign notes?
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:41 pm
“Thanks for your West Marches writeup; excellent work, very insightful. Any chance for more on this project, i.e. some example campaign notes, or session writeups?”
All that stuff would actually look rather mundane — the interesting part about the game was how it was run, how the players participated, not the notes that made it. The maps would just look like typical maps, and the dungeons would just look like fairly ordinary dungeons.
That’s also part of the beauty — building your own West Marches is actually quite easy. You just have to _refrain_ from adding in tricksy plot stuff and mysterious NPCs, and then dump game control on the players. The players may have a hard time adjusting at first (seriously) but once they get comfortable it runs itself.
May 1st, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Ben, one more question about death. If I was say, 15th level and got (irretrievably) killed, is my next character automatically 1st level, or can I make say, a 10th level character?
May 1st, 2008 at 8:32 pm
At first we had people restart at 1st level, but about half way through the game we started letting people make new characters at half their old level (rounding down). When the game was very low level it was less of an issue, but eventually it meant that when you died you couldn’t really go back and explore the area you had been interested in or adventure with the same characters as before, at least not until you gained some levels. Restarting at half didn’t absolutely change that, but it made it easier to catch up. On the other hand that forced mix was part of the charm.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Pure genius!
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:20 am
A question from a stripling DM: what state was your west marches in for beginning play? Complete, or fleshed out just to the points where the PC’s couldn’t conceivably pass? Or, alternatively, what would you suggest doing?
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:24 pm
“what state was your west marches in for beginning play? Complete, or fleshed out just to the points where the PC’s couldn’t conceivably pass? Or, alternatively, what would you suggest doing?”
Unless you hermit-up and prep for 3 years before playing (not recommended) it’s unavoidable that you’ll start out incomplete. That’s part of the reason why planners are required to specify a flight plan when scheduling a game — you know where they are going and whether you need to flesh out details for that area (which in turn saddles you with deadlines, also part of the design).
The trick is to not change details based on who is going. Build as though you had no idea who was playing. If you planned on the barrow mounds being EL 5, make them EL 5 regardless of whether the first group to go there is 1st or 10th level.
Building “blindly” requires a little mental discipline but gets easier with practice.