West Marches: Running Your Own
Alarming fact: brave GMs all over the place are taking up the torch and starting their own West Marches games. Scary isn’t it?
I’ve already had some private email conversations about how one would actually build and run a West Marches of their very own. Maybe you’ve got the bug too. Early symptoms include a desire to build vast wilderness areas and enlist hordes of players to explore it. Sound familiar? Then read on for a few (hopefully) helpful tips:
make town safe and the wilds wild — Having the town be physically secure (walled or in some cases protected by natural features like rivers or mountains) is very useful for making a sharp “town = safe / wilderness = danger” distinction. Draconian law enforcement inside town, coupled with zero enforcement in the wilds outside town, also helps. Once you are outside the town you are on your own.
keep NPC adventurers rare — Or even better non-existent. It’s up to the players to explore the wilderness, not NPCs. As soon as you have NPCs going on adventures of their own you move the focus away from player-initiated action. NPC adventurers also makes it harder to explain why interesting things weren’t already discovered — players love being the first to find the Horned Tower or the Abbot’s Study. Keep this in mind when you devise the background for your region. Is it a newly opened frontier? Or is adventuring just something no one in their right mind does in this world (the West Marches premise)?
build dungeons with treasure rooms, locked rooms, pockets of danger — A solid party may be able to wipe out the primary critters in a dungeon, but there should always be spots that are a lot harder to clear. On those rare occasions when a group _does_ manage to clear a dungeon or crack a treasure room, they will stand on the tables in the tavern and cheer, not in some small part to brag to the other players who weren’t on that sortie.
appear passive — The world may be active, but you the GM should appear to be passive. You’re not killing the party, the dire wolf is. It’s not you, it’s the world. Encourage the players to take action, but leave the choices up to them. Rolling dice in the open helps a lot. The sandbox game really demands that you remain neutral about what the players do. It’s their decisions that will get them killed or grant them fame and victory, not yours. That’s the whole idea.
provide an easy lead to get new players started — Once players are out exploring, each new discovery motivates them to search more, but how do you get them started? Every time I introduced a batch of new players I gave them a very basic treasure map that vaguely pointed to somewhere in the West Marches and then let them go look for it. Whether it was the dwarven “treasure beyond bearing” or the gold buried beneath the Red Willow, a no-brainer “go look for treasure here” clue gets the players out of town and looking around. Of course once the players are in the wilds, they may find that getting to that treasure is much harder than it looks.
the adventure is in the wilderness, not the town — As per the discussion of NPCs above, be careful not to change the focus to urban adventure instead of exploration. You can have as many NPCs as you want in town, but remember it’s not about them. Once players start talking to town NPCs, they will have a perverse desire to stay in town and look for adventure there. “Town game” was a dirty word in West Marches. Town is not a source of info. You find things by exploring, not sitting in town — someone who explores should know more about what is out there than someone in town.
let the players take over — Don’t write game summaries, don’t clean up the shared map. You want the players to do all those things. If you do it, you’ll just train them not to.
competition is what it’s all about — Fair rewards, scarcity, bragging rights — these are the things that push the game higher. You could have a “solo” West Marches game with just one group doing all the exploring, and it would probably be a fun and pleasant affair, but it’s _nothing_ compared to the frenzy you’ll see when players know other players are out there finding secrets and taking treasure that _they_ could be getting, if only they got their butts out of the tavern. (Hmm, is this why I get a kick out of running Agon? It’s true, I’m a cruel GM.)
require scheduling on the mailing list — It doesn’t matter whether a bunch of players agreed to go on an adventure when they were out bowling, they have to announce it on the mailing list or web forum (whichever you’re using for your scheduling). This prevents the game from splintering into multiple separate games. If you notice cliques forming you can make a rule requiring parties to mix after two adventures. Conversely if you notice players being dropped from follow-up sorties too often just because some people can’t wait to play, you can require parties to stay together for two adventures. That forces a little more long time strategy in party selection, less greedy opportunism. Season to taste.
fear the social monster — This is the big, big grand-daddy or all warnings: even more so than many games, West Marches is a social beast. In normal games players have an established place in the group. They know they are supposed to show up every Tuesday to play — they don’t have to think about that or worry about whether they “belong” in the group. On the other hand West Marches is a swirling vortex of ambition and insecurity. How come no one replied when I tried to get a group together last week? Why didn’t anybody invite me to raid the ogre cave? And so on and so on ad infinitum. The thrilling success or catastrophic failure of your West Marches game will largely hinge on the confidence or insecurity of your player pool. Buckle up.
Running your own West Marches game? Post a link in the comments so everyone can take a look and grow green with envy. I’ve got some links I need to post but if you hurry you can beat me to it.
Frost said:
Really though I think all of that boils down to this: We never expected things in the game to be “fair” (i.e. “level appropriate”) – we expected them to make sense and fit into the game world. It was our job as players to make sure the encounters were level appropriate.
Yep, that’s it.
I feel like I should chime in here, being the PC who died in the “second Hydra” incident that Ben mentioned. In that case I felt that it was pretty obvious, even while it was happening, that we (me especially) had rushed in foolishly (“hooray, we killed the hydra!! Let’s rush into its lair and search for treasure!”), were getting caught with our pants down, and needed to run like mad (which we immediately tried to do). It was probably the least telegraphed big danger I can remember, but nobody felt that it was ‘unfair’.
Thinking about what made me not get upset with Ben when I died and accuse him of unfairness or somesuch:
1) It made sense and was reasonable in the circumstances; even if there was crucial info that we didn’t know when we rushed into the cave.
That is, it didn’t really seem likely that there was a second Hydra hiding in the cave nearby during the fight with the first one, but as we entered the cave it was pretty obvious there was something more going on, even before the other Hydra appeared. When the hydra did appear that made it very clear what was going on and _it made sense_ even if there was no way I would have guessed that that would be what was going on before that. And anyway I should have been much more paranoid about going into any cave like that.
2) Lots of little things reinforcing the feeling that Ben was an impartial/passive arbiter, e.g. the GM rolling all the dice out in the open. All of the “West Marches” style of play helps reinforce this (players deciding where to go on their own and so forth), but there’s also things the GM can do during the game to emphasize their impartiality.
3) Lots of precedence for things being potentially very dangerous, often surprising, and not tuned for your current level .
For example a very early bit in a game involved a 1st level character crawling into a barrow mound that the group had come across on their way to somewhere else, to do a little grave robbing. Sure enough there were a couple of Barrow Wights – definitely not a 1st level encounter. It was pretty obvious what was happening and the PCs fled immediately. That sort of thing (with the players & PCs retelling it to others) made sure that we all knew very well that there were scary things in that dark hole or on the other side of the door (heck folks were even scared of the doors themselves). I remember most of us veterans making sure to explain to new players that this was a very different play style so that they would get that from the beginning. I think with everyone feeling that the world was generally a very dangerous place that was not tuned for their level at all, we were all generally very aware of the risks we were taking. Of course despite that we would still frequently do “a little light exploring” just before camping for the night or heading home; because that’s where the fun was.
I’m not even sure that clues or signs that dangerous things are up ahead is important for this. If things make sense and are consistent then that should usually provide the clues the players need, and as the GM you should make sure to think about those things (“given that there’s a hydra in this area what would that mean…”). But they should also know that sometimes there are surprises.
Really though I think all of that boils down to this: We never expected things in the game to be “fair” (i.e. “level appropriate”) – we expected them to make sense and fit into the game world. It was our job as players to make sure the encounters were level appropriate.
In West Marches there was an running joke about “a little light exploring.” That was a code word for “well we’re low on hit points and spells, but rather than rest like we should let’s push on and explore a little more territory because what could go wrong?” It was the players joking to themselves that they were about to do something potentially stupid and get themselves killed. They key was that they knew they were being unwise so could hardly be grumpy when they got in over their weary heads.
The short answer is no. Not that I can remember anyway. The hydra is probably the closest (by which I mean the second hydra) but in hindsight the players were smacking themselves in the heads and wishing they’d put up defensive spells before walking into the scary cave lair.
A very valuable skill (possibly the most valuable skill) is knowing when it’s time to run away. Very, very fast. Including creatures that pursue is actually a far more dangerous design decision than simply making dangerous creatures that players could flee. In West Marches the goblins of Cradle Wood were generally recognized as being far more dangerous than their stats indicated because they did mob-up and chase intruders, often for days on end. The other epic example would be the Brood of the Standing Stones. They led to one of the most nailbiting sessions in the entire campaign because killing one put a blood curse on the slayer that drew vengeful Brood from miles around. Nightmare.
I think it’s also very useful to mentally review your own GMing. When you look back on things from the players’ point of view clues that seemed obvious to you might have other interpretations. When you get into the zone of thinking “oh clearly they should have seen the signs!” you are in danger of potentially punishing what you perceive as bad tactical decisions. I’ve caught myself doing that.
If a particular player is repeatedly grousing about the injustice of the world a West Marches game might not be for them.
But yeah, sometimes you step into more than you bargained for. Sometimes there’s no way you could have known to avoid it. That’s life. Run.
I do have one more quick question; can’t quite fit it on twitter so I figured I’d ask here.
During my time running West Marches (~70 games over the course of ~10 months sometime last year or so) I caught flak a few times from players who believed I had created something unfair – commonly that it was too powerful. Of course these were baseless claims – the things I had made were basically by-the-book level appropriate and the fact that the PCs had died was their own fault for ignoring obvious foreshadowing of the dangers ahead (like being basically out of HP and literally announcing aloud that they were going to press on to find the big bad ghost in charge of all the less-bad little ghosts… yeah… not a smart move, that).
This got me wondering, though, if appearing passive didn’t really help me in avoiding the blame for players being stupid and getting themselves killed, how did it go on your end? Was there ever a time where somebody called shenanigans on something you had created that they had unwittingly stumbled into? Did you ever take the blame instead of the world because, ultimately, you were the creator of the world? Why do you think this kind of thing might happen?
@TheHydraDM: Ability scores were rolled straight but with swapping one pair. It became clear that lucky rollers had an unfair advantage so after a while I instituted an XP bonus based on how low your scores were. Weaker ability score characters got more XP.
Encumbrance etc were straight by the book (D&D 3e). There was a ton of overland travel and forced marching so it mattered a lot. People were constantly taking subdual damage. It was great to have other attrition meters instead of just HP (same with ability score damage).
Hey Ben, with the work I’ve recently been doing on West Marches I have a question (which I posed on twitter but you rightly suggested would be better recorded here):
Did you generate characters with point buy or with dice rolls? Or both? I could see it working either way with the theme of the campaign (point buy is more gamist, dice rolls are more simulationist, and WM mostly supports both per the articles), but I was curious about the way you did it.
Bonus question: how did you manage encumbrance and equipment? Was it very by the book D&D or was there any sort of unique approach to reduce time spent managing your inventory?
WM sounds like a lot of fun. I’m currently setting up something like it myself, this long tale’s been quite informative in doing so. I’m using Pathfinder. There’s a couple of things I wonder about how to handle;
1) navigation; the DCs for the survival checks aren’t really all that high. How do you handle that? What sort of actions do people roll them for?
2) PCs that start at levels above 1; do they get some sort of Wealth By Level?
3) Magic items: was creating magic items with feats ever an option?
Finally, FINALLY, after about a year in the back of my mind, a West March of my (our) very own is about to go down. Wooo! I’ve read and re-read all this at least two times (although the last time was a few weeks back) and come up with some things of my own as well. I do, however, have a few things I’d love to get your thoughts on…
First of all is the issue of more than one GM. There are three of us that are going to be GMing, which was the idea even before we locked onto the WM-concept as the next step for the group. I thought a bit about having all three of us GM the same world, but I don’t think that’d be very fun for the three of us, as we’d 1) have to do everything together, and 2) we’d know everything, all the time, which might be very boring. I’ve also thought about having three separate world, one each, all adhering to the same rules (ie. treasure tables, survival checks, etc.), and this is what we’re leaning towards at the moment. We thought about having one West March, a South March and a North March, so to speak. A little more problematic part would be the lore of the world… Do you have any other ideas or modifications on those two I’ve mentioned that could make multiple GMs work in a WM campaign?
Another question has to do with booking a session and the logistics. What we’re thinking about now is doing it all over a Facebook Group. Anybody would first check with a GM on a date they want to play, and then post that date to the group once they got the OK from the GM. But how do you decide who gets to go in those cases where more than 4 (which we think would be the ideal group number) show interest? First-come first-served seems a bit weak, seeing as it’d just be who logs in to Facebook the most. How did you guys do it, did you even have this problem?
Lastly (for now!), about naming stuff and previous cultures. Did every zone/place have a name that the GM came up with, or was it purely from the players that the names came? How would that work with possible library-searching or asking the local priest in town about those ruins that looked like a church down in zone X? I can sort of see that places having a name makes sense on the original map the players but (just the closest zones, maybe?) but what about subsequent zones and places inside them?
Thanks in advance!
@ Surgo: That disparity was entirely part of the design. If you look through the early comments you’ll see it’s discussed. Play a bunch you get ahead, don’t play and you fall behind.
How do you give out XP rewards and/or deal with level disparity between players? If people start to diverge, I could imagine that could cause some issues.
That mass sense. Thanks!
@ hangarflying: GM decides on a case-by-case basis, usually as part of the email discussion planning the session. If there’s no overlap, like in the case you described, group B would be playing in the same time group A already played, so long as they plan on going somewhere different (so there’s no chance that the events in either game would interact).
I also required characters to take some downtime between sorties, just because that’s human nature: if you are out risking your life for a week, spending a couple of days resting in town is reasonable (players forget their characters need rest). That also staggered sorties.
Sometimes I would advance the clock just because we needed to move on. If you hadn’t played, you lost the chance to adventure during that time. “Time waits for no lazy PC.”
The one thing I don’t understand is the advancement of the in-game calendar.
For example, during the first session, you meet with four players and the adventure for an in-game period of two weeks before returning to town.
During the next gaming session, you meet with four different players; has the in-game calendar advanced for them as well, or do you set the calendar date of the second group to be the same day (or perhaps a few days later) as the first group?
Thanks!
I am wondering if the players only had an optional upkeep, and magical treasure was relatively rare, I also assume they could not whatever magical items they liked in town. What could they spend their money on besides these taxes? Doesn’t this system devalue gold and give casters an even greater advantage over fighters than before?
[...] West Marches: Running Your Own – [...]
I generally put the dice in the player’s hands. Make a Wilderness Lore check, 15 means you keep even, 20 or more means you’ve given them the slip, etc. But yeah, deciding those DCs is arbitrary but informed by the situation. Some chases were short, some were drawn out over days of cat-and-mouse with a variety of checks (you elude them but you’re still in their territory so they’re prowling the area for intruders, roll Hide, roll to cover tracks, roll to detect if they’re near).
I suppose my question was more did you sort of adjudicate it by ear (“I think this thing would chase them with reasonable success up until they get to here and then it would give up” or “I think this thing will catch them over the next two hundred feet because it’s faster than them and not wounded”) or were there discrete mechanics you utilized (“Well it’s faster, so that gives it a +2, and it’s willing to chase them forever, so that’s another +2…”)? I ask because I sort of can’t help feeling that adjudicating it by feel is too arbitrary, but at the same time if I try to set up something that uses dice it inevitably gets very complicated by virtue of the plethora of factors you talk about.
Did you pick one way or the other, or did you find a happy medium? If it was mechanical what sorts of mechanics were involved? I know you haven’t been too big on handing out “here’s exactly how I did it complete with an example” for a lot of elements, but I’ve been after a good way to handle the heroes running away from monsters (and determining the success or lack thereof) for really as long as I’ve been playing traditional GM’d RPGs, be it full of mechanical elements or else simply a reassurance that using my best judgment is the way to do it.
There are so many different variables. Speed is one, but more important are motivation and territory. Is the creature the kind of thing that has a reason to chase? Does it clearly have an advantage? Is it unwounded? Is it chasing within its turf or crossing into unfamiliar terrain?
Creatures that would leave their own territory were potentially terrifying. In West Marches, goblins and wolves would chase you all day long in Cradle Wood, and probably into the Moors, but if you crossed the pass or went into different terrain they were drastically less likely to follow. But the game where PCs tangled with the Brood at the Standind Stones and then got stalked all the way back to the very gates of town was nerve-wracking. It remains one of the legendary retreats.
Hey, HydraDM from twitter here. I had a question: you mention running away was a key aspect of this campaign, as was maintaining a simulation-type feel. Try as I might, though, I cannot for the life of me find or figure out a way to simulate running that isn’t ridiculously overwrought and bulky.
I did have some thoughts so far (such as how speed should be a factor, but not the only factor – Spirit of the Century has chase rules making mention of how most chases aren’t decided by speed and I pretty much agree with that), but I was wondering how you handled it? No need to reinvent the wheel if I don’t have to, you know?
Is there such a thing as too *many* players? It looks like that may happen with my upcoming game.
Congratulations and beware..!!!
Yes, definitely. It’s supply and demand: if there are too many players you’ll have a harder time running enough games to let everyone play as much as they want. It totally depends on how often your average player wants to play versus how much you can GM. And if you let too many people play in one session, no one has fun (or everybody has less fun). We had a few eight or nine player games and they were pretty chaotic, so I capped party size unless there was some really good reason.
Think of how often you’re willing to run games. Say it’s once a week. If you’re willing to have an average of five players per game, you can accomodate 5 players in your pool if they all want to play every week, 10 if on average they’re happy to play every other week, and so on.
In other words, the GM has to be willing to play (player pool / 5) times more often than the average player does. Of course a teeny bit of over-demand is not so bad. Keeps the competitive spirit. But too much can lead to serious bad blood.
I had a waiting list to join for a lot of the campaign. There’s always the urge to bring in more people and share the fun, but sharing too much waters down the fun.
Is there such a thing as too *many* players? It looks like that may happen with my upcoming game.
If I had many players, I would definitely run a campaign like this. Unfortunately, I don’t even have enough players for regular gaming.
Ben,
Great system. My dad raised me on 1st edition D&D as an ‘interactive storytelling’ from the age of 3. As I grew older I was able to participate in his real sessions which can only be described as open sandbox with a lethal reality. To this day I still prefer this style to all others.
I’m contemplating a ‘West Marches’ style and was wondering if you could pass along your large map as well as the contract you had all of the players agree to. I love the idea of a fractal map and have recently begun to use the ‘Fractal Mapper’ software to build my map for the setting.
I’ve had the pleasure of looking over a copy of the Microscope game. Have you thought of using that system to develop the campaign setting background for a setting they would later roleplay in? Great free-form system.
A fellow roller of the die,
-Jay
@ OJW: cookie accepted!
@ Mike: I made the maps in Illustrator, but during games I had paper printouts and just drew a line to plot the course the party was taking each hour of the day. So I always knew exactly where they were even if they didn’t. Make a little dot when they camp, put a date beside it if you want, then draw another line as they start marching the next day.
Ben,
Thanks again for writing this all up! I am hoping to kick off a west marches style game this weekend.
You said you used “just an open terrain map where I drew vectors to keep track of where the party was” and “I didn’t use hex maps, just free movement and distances”. It seems like you also mentioned zooming in and out.
Did you use vector mapping software, or was this just plotting vectors on a gridless paper map? If you used software, what did you use?
First of all, a homemade, chocolate chip cookie to Ben for not only writing this up but also for continuing to answer comment questions years after the fact. A big pat on the back to everyone that contributed to ideas and posted links to their similar campaigns. That helps me out alot mainly because….
I have only run 2 campaigns so far so I am a fledgling GM. Vampire the Masquerade and now Pathfinder…Both were prepublished modules (NY by Night and _I still can’t believe they talked me into this_ The World’s Largest Dungeon). That 2nd one is the price I pay for being the most knowledgeable player of the group after our previous GM’s left for one reason or another. If you want to play, someone has to run it
I think I may try to steer my group towards this Western Marches/sandbox style as it is the style of play I am most used to. I first got into RPGs many years ago and had more fun playing in these style games than following plotlines and over-arcing stories.
I have read through the pages plus all of the comments on each of the pages and put together a good listed of tips and things to look out for. Especially since I only have a 3 player pool right now. But if they pass along the word to others, maybe (hopefully) it will grow. My planning begins tomorrow…
I just came across this and it resembles (in some ways) a game I played until for a while. We did that one in 1ed with the vast majority of XP coming from treasure and not from monsters, which changes the dynamic a lot. I wonder how much of the dynamic in your campaign came from XP coming mostly from killing monsters and how much it would change if monsters give a pittance of XP and getting gold is where XP comes from.
I’m so glad I found this, the game I’m running is a mixture of this and a normal campaign, and the tips here will help. One large campaign world with a West Marches feel to it, where it could either go story-driven or sandbox depending on what the players choose. I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to end up, but I’m excited to give it a try and see where the players decide to go with it, so I might just be back asking for tips.
Oops, *Michael Pfaff, sorry typo!