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.
Hey, I know this is a bit of a ressucitation of the comments, but it looks like you guys were still responding a month or two ago so I thought I’d go ahead and ask my question.
I’m trying to work out how to run a West Marches game in 4th edition (that’s not really important, but I’d like to give a big shoutout to the other 4e west marches guy, Michael Pfaf, for his great blog helping me out). The biggest hole I’ve noticed in the gameplay for attracting players is specifically centered around the kind of play archetype that would appeal to somebody who would like to play, say, a Bard. They want there to be more “stuff” out there than just wilderness, and like, wars going on, or other citystates to visit to influence the politics or something like that.
What are some ways you can run a game that avoids being “urban” but still appeals to their sensibility of wanting to make a prolonged impact on the world? They want to build it, shape it, mold it… not just discover it. And there’s not a lot of opportunity to achieve that out there on the West Marches, at least I can’t find it. Any ideas? Am I sniffing up the wrong tree altogether?
@Ikeren That sounds like a great idea, I’d be all over a forum like that.
I have chatted to @chicagowiz a couple times asking him for advice and bouncing ideas off him. A big pool of folks running and playing in sandbox style games could be really cool.
Ah; I missed it; I only read through the comments of this thread. Thanks for the response.
Truth be told, I was thinking it might be fun to do a West Marches campaign development forums; where people DMing this style of campaign can pass around maps, regions, ideas and descriptions of how their games went.
@Ikenen: It came up in the comments of one of the original West Marches posts back in 2008.
Good call. Follow up question: Numerous people have asked for you to post encounter charts, maps, or even entire region guides. I have some 5-7 page region guides written up, including several small specific locations, a couple dungeons, and random encounter charts, and maps.
I don’t think I ever saw in the 235 comments I read you responding to that request; which I found a little odd, given how impressively you responded to other questions. Do you wish to refrain from putting your material out there in fear that it will stifle creativity, or because you hope to be published in the future, or you worry people will find it boring?
@Ikeren: Some regions had a lot of creatures, some were pretty quiet / barren. It all depended on the concept. Very few West Marches regions had a single creature type, but when it made sense to me, that’s what I did (Hydra Canyons, I’m looking at you).
Let logic and style guide you. Once I decided on the theme of a region (and the encounter level), I just put in what made sense to me. Don’t add in things that don’t make sense just to add variety. Your job isn’t to make each region exciting and challenging, it’s to make them feel real and distinct.
Think of how the critters in a region interact. Do stirges feed on the kobolds? Do kobolds hunt lizards for food or hide from them? I’m not saying you need a full-blown ecology, but it helps to take different encounters on your wandering monster table and imagine what would happen if they ran into each other (sans adventurers). Those critters would bump into each other all the time. They live there.
Remember, if the players get bored with kobolds, they’ll just go somewhere else. That’s their prerogative. They go look for what’s interesting, the regions don’t adapt to entertain them.
Hiya all. I’m working on a westmarches game that is going to run on a Play by Post website (DNDonlinegames). I’ve read through all the comments and am having tonnes of fun writing up the areas, entirely disconcerned with any sort of “balance.” The mix of writing historys, encounters, dungeons, cool terrain, and encounter tables seems to suit me surprisingly well.
The biggest challenge I’ve come up with is finding maps. I’m ending up cobbling a bunch of random maps together; which I can articulate represents that they’ll be getting fragments of maps from different cartographers, and that they could work on a personal map if they wished.
My remaining question is: How consistent were your areas? My first area, for example; has between 2 and 4 kobold caves (small dungeons featuring kobolds and traps), since the area is home to a lot of kobold tribes. I was wondering if your players found this boring and you subsequently had to vary encounters massively; or if players only did fractions of things? Like I guess it would make sense that the party would not stumble across all the
For example, your centaur woods; was it just a tribe of centaurs, a few traps? Did the players get bored of numerous centaur encounters? Or did you mix it up lots — centaurs + wolves + some other animals + some fey?
Anyways, thanks for the cool blog. I’ve been having fun reading it, and through the comments.
Excellent series, Ben. I’ve been percolating ideas for such a setting since I first read it about a year ago, but am just now starting to actually build the world and encounter tables. I’m curious mainly about distances and timescales; about how big was an average-sized region in the Western Marches, in terms of square miles or days’ march or whatever relevant unit? Likewise, about how large were the Marches as a whole?
Link away, Andy!
Sorry to necro this post, but I read it and created my own sandbox and I couldn’t be happier.
I would love to link or repost this on my site for my readers to enjoy also.
I just started up a 4e West Marches style game tonight. I only had two players for the first session, but it was still fun. I think for 4e, parties are for more capable of surviving on their own for extended periods of time, so I did several things to make town more appealing and 4e more compatible with this style of play:
*PCs only get 1 healing surge per extended rest in the wilderness but all of them back while at town.
*The area where the party is exploring has two active volcanoes, filling the area with ash clouds(handily reducing visibility to no more than a couple miles). Each day I’d roll to see which was erupting and if both were, the PCs had to make a save or get Fuming Lung, a disease that rapidly saps their combat abilities and to which they get an Endurance/Heal bonus to recover from while at town.
*Used inherent bonuses so I could ignore magical items and make them special and unique again.
They started in a small military outpost that also had a ramshackle tavern-tent, run by an entrepreneurial dwarf who had a thing for maps and stories and who was willing to trade room and board for additions to his (nearly empty) map of the region or interesting stories and discovered that the Legion would also pay small bounties for useful information about the region (but only if they didn’t give it to the tavern-keeper too!)
They headed out, got caught in a rockslide while camping, rolled a terrible nature check that made them think they’d gone 15 miles when they’d only gone 10 (wreaking havoc on their map), then ran into a level 5 monster while in a level 1 zone since they were close to the border of a level 5 area. They killed it, then wisely avoided the area, backtracking through the “Windy Forest” as they named it and discovering a burnt wooden henge with a crazy kobold carrying a snake staff guarding it.
He seemed to get agitated when they came close to the henge, so they left him some food and made a note to come back with an interpreter (or more food to bribe it). Then they reached the forest of huge 10-15 foot tall ferns leaking mind-altering spores and fled, making their way back to town.
Unfortunately, they ran out of food and money, so one of them did free labor for the Imperial Legion that was building the outpost they are operating out of (increasing his Faction with them, though I don’t know if he knows that) while the other treated Fuming Lung patients (and fighting to survive his own case of Fuming Lung) for a pittance of gold so they could afford more food (prices are marked up 5x – at least until the outpost gets bigger or the tavern/shopkeeper likes them enough to reduce his prices).
Then a caravan arrived full of slave-kobolds to labor on the outpost and a new shopkeeper – a gnomish alchemist selling a wide variety of potions. They bought some supplies, collected some fern spores for the alchemist in exchange for a potion to help the cleric with his still-worsening Fuming Lung disease, and prepared to head out. And there we ended.
The only complaint I might have about the game is my random encounter system randomly produced only 2 encounters out of 70 rolls(10 rolls a day with 10% chance of each creating an encounter). I’m also thinking of making some “locations of note” fixed and others to be placed as encounters to make sure the PCs find the cool stuff I’ve created.
Thanks for all the ideas, I’m looking forward to running next week’s session(this time with more players hopefully!)
so did you not bother with random encounters of the harmless variety in settled areas?
mine is based around a city which is safe-ish within 10 miles of the city, patrolled by guards to protect the farmers kinda deal.
however in this area it is possible for the odd goblin, small group of bandits or an errant wild animal to be encountered. Obviously i want there to be other encounters in the area too and it was those encounters i wanted inspiration for.
also how many rumours did you make up and were they all related to different quests or were some related to the same quest even if they did not seem to be?
i was just wondering about random encounter tables, how much of these were taken up with non-combat stuff like rock-slides and similar? also in the more settled area say around 5 miles from town what sort of encounters did you have there?
Different terrain types had different ratios of environmental hazards (for example, swamps have a lot more potential terrain hazards than grasslands). Settled / safe areas should have few or no random encounters, or only harmless things — that’s the definition of settled and safe, right?
i am currently writing up a game like this, based in the world of allansia of fighting fantasy fame.
have got a lot of stuff pencilled in, but slightly different to yours in that i will be having some adventuring within the town.
just got to set out some of this stuff now!
i was just wondering about random encounter tables, how much of these were taken up with non-combat stuff like rock-slides and similar? also in the more settled area say around 5 miles from town what sort of encounters did you have there?
i will only have one gaming group sadly, but think the game should still be fun. this is in fact how i used to do all my RP sessions, just dropped that style for some reason.
i’ve read all the comments on all pages referring to this subject so don’t think you’ve provided ideas for this yet?
The Importance of History in a Fantasy Sandbox
Absolutely true. West Marches had about four discrete periods of history (five if you get out as far as the Sacred Lakes), going farther and farther back in time. When I put anything on the map, knowing where it came from in history helped immensely. Of course I didn’t tell the players any of this, but they started to figure out it, because that was their job…
I would say that the thing that I varied from your original implementation, which has been a key to keeping it going two years, is allowing an open door to new players. That’s not to say you weren’t open to it, but I got the impression when I read your posts a couple of years ago that this was a tight-knit group of friends.
Actually quite the opposite: most of the players met through West Marches, then became close friends (or bitter enemies). It only started with three players, and kept growing as it went along.
And no, West Marches wasn’t designed to end, just at some point that became the best idea
Unfortunately, Blogger ate my homework (and my post) so I reposted it today. (1/12/2011) My apologies.
I would say that the thing that I varied from your original implementation, which has been a key to keeping it going two years, is allowing an open door to new players. That’s not to say you weren’t open to it, but I got the impression when I read your posts a couple of years ago that this was a tight-knit group of friends. For me, keeping a steady influx of new players has been key. I have about 5 people I consider “original players” (joined within the first 3 to 6 months) and 3 of them are core players in where they show up more games than not. The other 5 core players started playing during year 2. I’ve had 3 people that I’ve not invited back due to social/group/campaign issues. 6 players just stopped playing due to life changes (2 have come back from time to time) and I’ve had probably another 5 to 7 people who’ve played once or twice. I’ve got 4 new players coming tomorrow and the possibility of 2 to 3 new players in the next 4 weeks.
I guess I’ve moved from using West Marches as a strict inspiration to combining your vision with looking at Dave Arneson’s, Gary Gygax’s, Rob Conley’s, MAR Barker’s campaigns for inspiration as well… they never intended those to “end” as much as continually grow and adjust the world to how the players moved things. To that end, keeping the players focused on exploration and “what’s out there” keeps them discovering the things that I’ve had there since day 1, without me having to drive a plot to get them there. I want this to run long term and open-ended.
Congratulations Michael! And yes, ebbs & flows is pretty much exactly how it is. You have to ride the wave, and sometimes the wave rides you for a bit.
[edited your comment to include the link you wanted]
Ben,
I’m coming up on two years on my West Marches implementation and I wrote a blog post summarizing it. If you don’t mind, I’ll point you to the 1/11/2011 post on my blog (WP thinks I’m a spambot if I include the link) for a more detailed discussion.
TL;DR summary – it’s possible to keep a campaign of West Marches style going for this long, but there are natural ebbs/flows. The campaign world has to be compelling to bring/keep people into, along with a DM dedicated to keeping it going.
Kindest regards,
Chicagowiz/Michael
I’ve been running a small sandbox game, started out using Fantasy Craft rules, but those have proved a bit too crunchy for my group and have recently switched to Castles and Crusades which I dig the hell out of.
The problem I have been running into (aside from players not liking that characters die…) is that the overland travel/exploration feels… not very explore-ey and very book keeping heavy.
Essentially what Ihave been doing is whenever the party decides to start traveling they tell me a direction and a time period, then whoever their designeted guide is makes a skill check and depending on the DC they either head the intended direction , or are off by a set ammount and head in that direction for the alotted time, then they can check again. If they think they are lost, they can stop and re-roll for direction at any point, or stop and search their surrounding area etc…
It just feels very clunky. I guess what I’m asking is, Ben, how did you resolve the overland travel specifically?
Cheers folks!
@ DemoThesaurus
Finally, it’s hard to not flesh out NPCs and fill their portrayals with quirks and story angles. I guess I just love coming up with NPC personalities too much.
Flesh out NPCs as much as you want! They’re a valid part of the world. Just don’t make them the plot, or the primary source of the plot. It’s a slippery slope.
PCs in West Marches had complicated relationships with a bunch of different NPCs in town. There were people they liked and people they hated — and another PC probably felt the opposite way about those exact same NPCs (Father Billorkin, I’m looking at you). Most of the time it had no impact on their adventures (until you were trying to get healed). It was just part of roleplaying.
Ever since finding this blog a few months back and reading about the West Marches style game, I’ve been toying with the notion of running my own and I finally started the machine this past Saturday. I drew a fairly extensive map and printed out a number of the One Page Dungeon Contest entries. I wrote up encounter tables for the nearest regions and dubbed my land Arcitropia, a.k.a. the New World to the colonists who’ve settled there. I had four players show up out of an anticipated six (seven total interested persons). It went pretty well, but there were a few hiccups.
It was hard for me to know when to stop building the map and settle down on making things interconnected, at least in the pre-planning stage. Traditionally, I’m someone who does a lot more improvising as a GM. This setup made me not want to cheat the players by making up treasure found on the spot and the like. And yet I had to do that when the Old Drunk’s Cabin turned from a limited information gathering spot (my conception) and into an assassination / murder / looting scene by the players. Cue me quickly coming up with coinage, personal items, and links to other sites on the map that I had not foreseen having to create beforehand.
And yet this came about partially due to my own contribution since the party’s rogue asked a town NPC whether there were any jobs of the nefarious kind available (he’s an aspiring assassin). I went ahead and threw him a bone figuring it would be akin to the wanted posters angle and because, and this is the craziest part, we had just finished roleplaying out a half hour / 45 minute long day laborers scene (gardening, painting a house, etc.) that the players willingly entered into in order to earn some money! I threw this out as a gag to satirize the played-out “mysterious cloaked man offers PCs a gig in the tavern” scene, figuring the guys would chuckle and then head out into the wild yonder. Nope. Not that it wasn’t fun, I just forgot how atypical my players can be.
Finally, it’s hard to not flesh out NPCs and fill their portrayals with quirks and story angles. I guess I just love coming up with NPC personalities too much. In general though, I’m liking this approach and we’ll see how far we deviate from the template.
cr0m,
The hex based campaign on The Welsh Piper site has some really solid world generation tables that you could re-purpose/modify into a random feature table.
http://www.welshpiper.com/hex-based-campaign-design-part-2/
Personally, I just generated my own based off of a few things, it’s been a pain in the arse, but I think I’m about 2 weeks from kicking off a Fantasy Craft sandbox game. Just waiting on players to finish generating characters.
@213: one thing I’m on the lookout for is random terrain/features tables. I’ve heard they exist, and with a little human judgement (no towers popping up a few yards from the PCs) they can generate decent maps on the fly. For me this would way more interesting than my own ideas–I love surprises. You could even have them organized by difficulty. A 00 in an easy area is quicksand, but in Mordor it’s a lava floe.
If any one knows of a published terrain generator please let me know!
I must say this sounds like a great idea, like many of the things on your blog. I would just like to express my appreciation for your blog, and the fact that you are still answering questions on a 2.5 year old post.
Thanks for pointing me to those – I must have read them at some point, but the discussion is quite long by now. I’ve grabbed a book about cartography, and I’ll try to do something in Inkscape, which should be able to handle that varying level of detail (perhaps with layers, even). Anyway, it’s inspiring to read about your project. Hope mine will take off as well (… as soon as there is a map, there’s adventure to be had!)
@ mandra, re scale:
http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/94/west-marches-running-your-own/comment-page-3/#comment-12681
http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/79/grand-experiments-west-marches-part-2-sharing-info/comment-page-1/#comment-12327
Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend having stationary, permanent landmarks on the wandering monster table. Theoretically those things should be where they are for a reason.
I understand that you don’t want to publish your maps, but cartography is actually the most difficult part for me to translate into my own campaign. It seems to me that a very detailed knowledge of the terrain is necessary for a campaign focussed on exploration, but on the other hand, to much detail will lead to an insurmountable amount of preparation.
Do you have any advice on the scale of a map? Were you using different maps (a world map, various regional maps) with different scales?
I am considering adding terrain elements to my random tables (“You stumble upon a cave”, “There’s a small watchtower here”), but I can see that it would lead to problems if, for example, a group follows the path of another group and there wasn’t any watchtower then. Then again, that would be a question of scale (whether the group is merely roughly within the same square kilometer or could actually follow the same track).
@ Kael: Definitely. I’ve always wanted to do a “crashed colony ship / exploring alien world” sandbox.
Heya, just read teh whole article, and had a fun little idea. Sure, you could always run it with D&D, but i was thinking… Why not make a “West Marches” campaign with D20 Future? Stranded spaceship or newly colonized world ^^
Definately gives you some fun ways to make “Magic weapons” to be found in treasure rooms
I’m with #208, I’m trying to make my own version of this, and I’m trying to understand how best to ‘zone’ out my world into different CR. I know that you have previously said that your map looks like a typical fantasy map, but I would be very much interested in seeing anything (else) that you’re willing to share.
[...] Posted on August 6, 2010 by cr0m Ever since I read Ben Robbins’ now famous West Marches blog posts, I dreamed of running a sandbox of my own, but when I tried to imitate Ben’s experience, [...]
I must say, I love this idea…I am considering beginning a similar campaign for some of my friends. However, I’ve got a question–no one in my group seems too enthusiastic about playing D&D, so what other systems might you recommend for a West Marches game?
Have you ever considered releasing some of the maps and tables? If not, would you?
I’d love to see them and theoretically cannibalize parts of them as well.
How to do it with superheros? Short answer: go Post-Apoc.
Long answer: “traditional superheroes” are defenders of post-war peacetime eras, so yes, they’re reactionary. But if “superheroes” are part of a local reconstruction effort making a demilitarized zone safe for humanity again, that could also work. Think “Fallout.” They might also be selfish, enriching themselves only. Either way works if your players are otherwise ordinary folk augmented by powerful, yet modest, superpowers.
That’s a good point, I didn’t even think about it like that. Oh well, if I figure out a way to do it, I’ll post something here
It may not be a good fit for traditional superheroes at all, since that genre is primarily reactive (villain does something, we stop it) rather than proactive and exploratory. But if someone figures it out, I’m all ears.
Great idea and I loved reading all of the comments. I was slightly disappointed though because it seems everyone is into starting up fantasy based games and I didn’t see even one mention of a modern Super Hero type game. I grew up playing Heroes Unlimited and I have recently started playing Champions and the Hero System. I was wondering if anyone else has any insight on what would work for either of these two systems in my own West Marches type game.
I’m avoiding the D&D Edition Wars, but one part of 3E that I used heavily in West Marches (and don’t think I ever mentioned) was ability score damage. It was an extremely useful tool for subtle gradations of wear and tear vs progress, something that’s really critical in a trek/exploration game.
Forced march to get out of owlbear territory? Lose Con. Fever in the Frog Marches? Lose Wisdom. Dripping wet in the Hidden Stair in the dead of winter? Lose Strength.
You could also score short-term benefits. Gaze in the Moon Pool? Gain Wisdom, if you do it right. Drink the hearty Druidic mead the Keeper of Bees gave you? Gain Con. Drink the strange brew in the mushroom caves? Lose Charisma (because you’re a little nutty and freaking everyone out) but gain Wisdom, at least for a while.
Ability score damage was pretty much a constant presence — we rarely had a game without it. It was nice because you could lay on very small impairing effects (ooh, stagnant water, Fort save or -1 Dex), so environmental decisions, like having a good wilderness skill to find good water, made a difference, but it wasn’t a save vs poison or die kind of thing.
@199 Neil Carr: I can’t speak for Ben, but I can speak for the West Marches inspired Red Box D&D game I’ve been running for the last year+. Simply put: it’s a feature, not a bug.
PCs who survive are rewarded in lots of ways, and having the pick of the loot is one of them. The only way I can see this as a problem is a social one, where other players are annoyed that Bob’s Fighter has all the cool stuff, while their brand new characters have to struggle along with starter weapons and armor.
A lot hinges on the system you’re running. In my case, Red Box D&D is highly lethal at low levels, so no amount of treasure and gear is a panacea. But regardless of the system, if you’re following Ben’s advice about danger, it benefits the rich, successful PCs to kit out their poor cousins to increase the party killing power.
An adventuring company is another great way to put loot and certain items into a communal “battle chest”. In my current game there’s a Staff of Healing that the clerics pass around depending on which players have showed up to game. And a lot more players have started running clerics ever since it was discovered… funny that.