ars ludi

As far as grand experiments go this one was pretty short: one game session in the middle of an ongoing campaign. Even though the experimental part was over pretty quickly it became a sounding board for the characters for years to come. Like swinging a hammer at a vase, it all happens pretty fast but the vase remembers it for a long time.

The concept was simple: the players showed up for the regular game, but instead of their normal characters I handed them each a short paragraph with a name of a new character and some details about their day-to-day life (occupation, friends, romances, etc). Players only looked at their own blurbs (not each others). No further explanation of who/what/why. And then… go!

This was a long-term game with well established characters in the middle of a major plot arc (massive quest to do the necessary thing by finding the mystical hidden city, the eponymous Lorngard). The last game had ended with the heroes fighting past the immortal guardian of the gates and entering the city… only to be engulfed in a blinding white light — end scene.

The reasonable reaction is of course “what the huh?”, but these players, bless their hearts, took on their new characters and just went with it, playing out scenes in their ordinary peaceful lives, taking lunch with lovers and working on their latest sculptures, etc. They were, as they say, game fish.

In fairly short order clues start to emerge that point to the truth, at least for the players if not their characters: these “new” characters have certain similarities to their normal characters in the game. Physical similarities, interests, etc. And the city where they are living this peaceful life and have lived since birth, is (surprise, surprise) mythical Lorngard, the same city the PCs were about to finally enter in the last game.

Naturally pieces fall together. We play out the discovery that when the heroes fought their way into the peaceful, utopic city, the denizens who eschewed all war had no means of self-defense except to embrace and integrate the intruders. Using their considerable mental powers (”the mind is the arsenal of utopia”) they implanted false memories of being born and raised in the city. To make the picture complete some citizens volunteered to also have their memories altered to become friends and families of the new-comers so they would believe their part in charade (a key point as it turns out).

All very Philip K Dick. An interesting reality twist until the mask is pulled off and everything goes back to normal, right?

But here’s the thing: either because I knew the characters well enough after years of play, or because the players molded their play as they sensed what was going on, or just because the gaming gods loved us, these new fictional lives of the heroes struck a deep, deep chord.

Each was carefully crafted to match the inner desires of the character: The once morally dubious wizard who was in some places distrusted and in others reviled was instead a respected scholar, wiling away his days in pleasant academic pursuits. The conflicted warrior-servant of demanding gods was now a simple sculptor, spending hours in his studio with no larger concerns than his hammer and chisel and the marble before him. And so on.

The players embraced the idea that here, in these fictional lives, their characters were happy. Because their lives in the regular campaign were fraught with perils, duty, and enemies on all sides (even among their so-called allies), the idea of a peaceful, tranquil existence was very, very attractive to the characters. A laying down of burdens, a rest from all their troubles.

When their real memories were returned to them, I let the each player decide to what degree they believed their real memories vs their implanted ones. After all, if you are going along with your life, and then someone comes along and says “it’s a trick! this isn’t your real life!” and dumps a whole second life on you… well why should you believe them? If they wanted they could have perfect memory of both lives side-by-side, or just expunge one entirely — whatever they wanted.

Naturally the players knew which was real, but faced with a life of endless danger and heroic sacrifice or a chance to have a peaceful fulfilling life as a scholar of rare languages and finally getting to write that book you always wanted, most of the players embraced the idea that their characters preferred the fiction to the reality.

They couldn’t turn their backs on the duties of their “real” lives, but they cherished the lives they could have lived. They chose to have the false memories still feel real to them. They had awkward partings with the people who had also had their memories altered to be friends and lovers since those people also had that double-memory. Because those people had volunteered because their own real lives weren’t so hot, they preferred the fiction as well, leading to complex feelings and “we’ll always have Lorngard” moments. How do you say goodbye to your wife who you simultaneously know you’ve only been with for a few days and also remember spending a decade with?

For years afterwards, the characters in the game clung to a kind of double-identity, their normal self but then also this ideal “peace time” self, an unattainable gentler life that they knew fate had denied them. Their “Lorngard names” became a secret private thing among them, and the (false) memories of their years in the city long before the few actual days they spent there were precious to them.

It unearthed a whole new human dimension in the campaign, an undercurrent of yearning that had been hinted at before (”wouldn’t it be nice to retire to Bayvinn Village?”) but never had such a clear voice.

So to dissect the experience, what made it such a smash hit? As always these factors aren’t absolutes, just variables that increase or decrease the odds of success.

Good players — I’ll start off with this obvious one because it’s the foundation for everything else. The players jumped in and went with the experience.

Know the players and the characters — The players embraced their fictional lives because I knew the players and the characters very, very well and could craft new lives that clicked for each of them. I gave them what they subconsciously wanted. I didn’t do as good of a job for some of the characters (through lack of inspiration or insight) and not surprisingly those players didn’t adopt it as deeply.

Voluntary acceptance — Each of the players got to choose whether to embrace or reject the memories. I didn’t force them to change their characters. You could also call this “respecting the players’ control of their characters.” The game world (like the real world) is full of things that can change you beyond your control, but in gaming there’s a gentleman’s agreement that while you might destroy someone else’s character (bang, you’re dead), changing them against their will is a no-no (bang, you’re a gnome).*

Change is only meaningful against a baseline — Because the players had had been running these characters for years, adopting this kind of personality change was a huge decision. It had a lot of meaning to the players. If this had been a pick-up game with new characters, it would have been interesting but not a big deal.

I was going to say that “no malice” was part of the equation, since the NPCs doing this weren’t really trying to screw the PCs, but I could see other scenarios where evil arch-nemesis did something tragically character changing but the players were into it and embraced it anyway. So scratch that one.

There’s another lesson in this experiment. When I set up the scenario I _never_ foresaw the impact it would have. I thought the players would gain an insiders perspective on Lorngard (kind of a proto-NormalVision, but with the same characters thinking they were other characters) but then snap out of it and be pretty much back to normal. I only came up with the idea that the characters could retain their fictional lives in parallel when I saw how much the players were embracing the whole thing.

Which makes the lesson: be warned, your experiments may be bigger than you think. Because you are wired into the tropes and themes of the game you may be subconsciously creating something that strikes a greater chord than you realize. You may be playing with fire. If you’re lucky your experiments will smash your test tubes and stomp on your preconceptions. You want your players to go with the flow and think on their feet? You should too.

* miscellaneous gaming corollary: Players should always be allowed to choose character death rather than imposed change.

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.

A wizard discovers a strange tome with tales of adventures in far off lands. When he sleeps that night, he finds himself transported to those lands and confronted with those adventures. But he need not face them alone, for faithful companions from far and wide are summoned in their dreams to stand by his side…

This was an actual D&D mini-series I ran. There was one central PC (the aforesaid wizard) and each time he was drawn into a dream adventure he could pick from among all his allies who would would join him no matter where they were in the waking world. Naturally that turned out to be characters who belonged to players who could make it to that game session — what magic! The title came from the chapters of the book (poetically called cantos), each of which was a different adventure.

By day the heroes were all back in their respective cities, dealing with their own affairs, including some unrelated solo adventures on their own turf. At night they go to sleep and magically come together to continue the dream adventure.

Clever little premise for a game, huh?

The thing is, there is no meat on dem bones. The “any PC anywhere can join you” was convenient, but as far as the dream quests went, much like a city floating in the clouds, it sounds fantastic but doesn’t actually change anything. The PCs still just go through the adventure like normal. It’s fancy window dressing with no real heart, a Not So Grand Experiment.

There are lots of “fantastic” elements you can include in a game that may seem amazing, astounding, trippy-freaky-cool, but wouldn’t really make any difference in how the players behaved or thought about the game. There may be a moment of “cool, galleons navigating the spacey void!” (possibly with talking hippo guys) or “cool, it’s like a normal city, but in a bubble beneath the sea!” but then the players go about their business and forget about the fantastic bit entirely. They have sword fights on the galleons (in space or not), they look for pawn shops in the city (underwater or not).

It’s not that you shouldn’t have wild, fantastic elements in your game that would make Lord Dunsany weep for joy — by all means, have at it. It’s that you shouldn’t expect a few wild, fantastic details to create a wild, fantastic game. You could even argue that the more fantastic the setting becomes, the easier it is to ignore it.

So just ask yourself: is this fantastic detail you’re adding the heart and soul of your game, or is it just a nice bit of flavor? If you can remember which it is and not expect it to do the heavy lifting for you, you’ll do fine. Because you can have a boring sword fight on top of a giant flying turtle as easily as you can on the ground.

Heaps of games have one big thing in common: the player characters wind up being a team because it’s easiest to run a game if they stick together and are on the same side. Genre or not, it’s the result of the pure logistics of having people at the table.

But what if instead of introducing external antagonists you mix it up a bit and have existing player characters take turns being the antagonist? Not the player running a different character, the normal player character taking sides against the so-called party.

Each game or game arc something is introduced that at least temporarily puts one character in an adversarial roll against the other player characters. Once the arc is finished, the character goes back to being part of the team. Next time a situation arises that puts a different character in the hot seat. Each conflict could erupt into full bore combat (well, non-lethal anyway) or it could just be argument and attitude, whatever fits the genre.

One game session the player character team is supposed to survey an ancient burial ground, but one of the characters starts to feel her roots and tries to stop the other characters from violating the sacred land. She might just argue or actually run off into the woods and sabotage the team’s equipment. Either way, she’s the enemy for the moment.

The trick would be to make sure that the conflict was set up in such a way that the other players didn’t just side with the opposition player. It might just be part of the gentlemen’s agreement of the game: when the opposition player takes a side, you angle for opposing them, not sympathizing with them. Or you could include a practical plot reason that made opposing the rogue character urgent and vital:

The team is surveying the terrain because there are risks of landslides that could endanger a nearby town. They need to get their job done or real live people will be in danger — no more jibba jabba about ancient spirits!

You would also need to leave the door open for resolution and renewed solidarity. Does the opposition PC recognize the error of their ways? Does the situation just change so the issue is moot? If the opposition PC took a stance that the other players could respect even if they didn’t agree (some kind of moral or ethical stance) than a reconciliation isn’t too hard once the immediate pressures are removed. If not, the opposition PC would have to completely about face and basically apologize for the error of her ways — either works.

There are also secondary effects, like putting each character in the spotlight when they are the opposition, and pushing more roleplaying since the players are spending more time talking (that is, arguing) among themselves instead of yelling at NPC adversaries.

I know what you’re thinking: was this idea really inspired by Gareth Marenghi’s Darkplace? All I can say is, “Let’s do this!” Sure it works in a surreal sci-fi/horror comedy, but it could work just as well in a realistic setting if you were careful to pick good conflict plots.

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