ars ludi

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

Did you read part 1 and part 2 already? No? Go do that.

Running frequent on-demand games is a lot of work, but because the campaign was set in a fixed region there were ways I could maximize the reusability of some material I prepared.

Maps were a good example — I could pour tons of detail into wilderness maps because I knew characters would be returning to those areas frequently. Even after some players had mostly explored a region they still had to trek through it get to farther away areas. Plus since there were lots of players there was always someone going to an area for the first time. Lots of return on investment. Compare that to a normal game where the players might stroll through a region once and never look back.

Interior maps of dungeons, ruins, etc. were also a very good investment, because even if a party came through and wiped out all the creatures the floor plan did not change. Come back a season later and who knows what will have taken up residence. Wipe out the entrenched kobolds and next spring the molds and fungi that were a minor hazard before have spread into whole colonies of mushroom warriors. Drive the pirates out of the Sunken Fort and its lonely halls become the hunting ground for the fishy devils from the sea — or maybe the whole place is just empty. These “evolving dungeons” were a key feature of the West Marches.

Another massively useful tool was the venerable yet mockable wandering monster table. No, seriously. Think about it: by creating a unique wandering monster table for each wilderness area (one for the Frog Marshes, one for the Notch Fells, etc.) I could carefully sculpt the precise flavor for each region. It made me think very carefully about what each area was like, what critters lived there and what kind of terrain hazards made sense (anything from bogs to rock-slides to exposure to marsh fever). They were effectively the definition for each territory.

Most tables also had one or more results that told you to roll on the table for an adjacent region instead. If you’re in Minol Valley you might run afoul of a goblin hunting party that came over the pass from Cradle Wood. The odds were weighted based on how likely creatures were to wander between the regions.

For all encounters there was also a chance of getting two results instead of one: roll twice and come up with a situation combining the two. It might be a bear trapped in quicksand, or a bear that comes across you while you’re trapped in quicksand. Combining two wandering monsters results is surefire way to come up with an interesting encounter.

Just having these detailed wandering monster tables at my fingertips meant I was always ready when players decided to do a little “light exploring.” These tables got used over and over and over again.

Players never saw these wandering monster tables, but they got to know the land very, very well. They knew that camping on the Battle Moors was begging for trouble (particularly near the full moon), they knew that it was wise to live and let live in the Golden Hills, and they knew to keep an ear out for goblin horns in Cradle Wood. Becoming wise in the ways of the West Marches was part of their job as players and a badge of merit when they succeeded.

next up: West Marches, part 4

Players sharing information was a critical part of the West Marches design. Because there was a large pool of players, the average person was in about a third of the games — or to look it the other way, each player missed two-thirds of the games. Add in that each player was in a random combination of sessions (not even playing with a consistent subset of players) and pretty quickly each player is seeing a unique fraction of the game. No one is having the same game experience, which sounds philosophically interesting but is bad news if you want everyone to feel like they are in the same game. Sharing info was essential to keeping everyone on the same page and in the same game.

There were two main ways information got shared: game summaries and the shared map.

Players were strongly encouraged to chat about their adventures between games. Email (specifically a list devoted to the game) made between-game communication very easy, something that would have been next to impossible years earlier. This discussion theoretically mirrored chatter between characters who had made it safely back to the town. Did you stumble into the barrow mounds in Wil Wood and barely escape with your life? Warn other adventurers so they can steer clear. Did you slay wolves on the moors until the snow was red with blood? Brag about it so everyone else knows how tough you are.

What started off as humble anecdotes evolved into elaborate game summaries, detailed stories written by the players recounting each adventure (or misadventure). Instead of just sharing information and documenting discoveries (“we found ancient standing stones north of the Golden Hills”), game summaries turned into tributes to really great (and some really tragic) game sessions, and eventually became a creative outlet in their own right. Players enjoyed writing them and players enjoyed reading them, which kept players thinking about the game even when they weren’t playing.

The other major way information was shared was the table map. When the game first started the PCs heard a rumor that years ago when other adventurers had tried their luck exploring the West Marches, they had sat in the taproom of the Axe & Thistle to compare notes. While trying to describe an area of the wilds, a few thirsty patrons had scratched out a simple map on the top of the table (an X here, a line here). Over time others started adding bits, cleaning it up, and before long it had grown from some scratches to a detailed map carved into most of the surface of the table showing forests, creeks, caves, ominous warnings, etc. Where was that table now? Gone, but no one was sure where — maybe carried off as a souvenir, smashed in a brawl and used for kindling, or perhaps just thrown out after it was too scratched to rest a drink flatly.

On hearing this story the PCs immediately decided to revive the tradition (just as I hoped they would) and started to carve their own crude map on a large table in the taproom of the Axe & Thistle. As the campaign went on all the PCs would gather around it, quaff an ale, and plan adventures. In the real world it was a single sheet of graph paper with the town and the neighboring areas drawn in pretty well, and then about four or five more pieces of graph paper taped on haphazardly whenever someone wandered off the edge or explored just a little bit farther. Because the map was in a public place and any PC could get to it, I brought it to every game session for the PCs to add to or edit and kept a reasonably up-to-date scanned copy on the web for reference between games. In the end maybe half a dozen different players had put their hand to it.

Was the table map accurate? Not really, but having a common reference point, a shared sense of what they thought the region looked like kept everyone feeling like they were playing in the same world.

…

An intentional side effect of both game summaries and the shared map was that they whetted people’s appetite to play. When people heard about other players finding the Abbots’ study in a hidden room of the ruined monastery, or saw on the map that someone else had explored beyond Centaur Grove, it made them want to get out there and play too. Soon they were scheduling their own game sessions. Like other aspects of West Marches it was a careful allowance of competitiveness and even jealously to encourage more gaming.

It was also important to me as a GM that players share knowledge because otherwise I knew that no one would put the pieces together. Remember how I said there was no plot? There wasn’t. But there was history and interconnected details. Tidbits found in one place could shed light elsewhere. Instead of just being interesting detail, these clues lead to concrete discoveries if you paid attention. If you deciphered the runes in the depths of the dwarven mines, you could learn that the exiles established another hidden fortress in the valleys to the north. Now go look for it. Or maybe you’ll learn how to get past the Black Door or figure out what a “treasure beyond bearing” actually is. Put together the small clues hidden all across the map and you can uncover the big scores, the secret bonus levels.

Next up: West Marches (part 3) Recycling

West Marches was a game I ran for a little over two years. It was designed to be pretty much the diametric opposite of the normal weekly game:

1) There was no regular time: every session was scheduled by the players on the fly.

2) There was no regular party: each game had different players drawn from a pool of around 10-14 people.

3) There was no regular plot: The players decided where to go and what to do. It was a sandbox game in the sense that’s now used to describe video games like Grand Theft Auto, minus the missions. There was no mysterious old man sending them on quests. No overarching plot, just an overarching environment.

My motivation in setting things up this way was to overcome player apathy and mindless “plot following” by putting the players in charge of both scheduling and what they did in-game.

A secondary goal was to make the schedule adapt to the complex lives of adults. Ad hoc scheduling and a flexible roster meant (ideally) people got to play when they could but didn’t hold up the game for everyone else if they couldn’t. If you can play once a week, that’s fine. If you can only play once a month, that’s fine too.

Letting the players decide where to go was also intended to nip DM procrastination (aka my procrastination) in the bud. Normally a DM just puts off running a game until he’s 100% ready (which is sometimes never), but with this arrangement if some players wanted to raid the Sunken Fort this weekend I had to hurry up and finish it. It was gaming on-demand, so the players created deadlines for me.

The game was set in a frontier region on the edge of civilization (the eponymous West Marches). There’s a convenient fortified town that marked the farthest outpost of civilization and law, but beyond that is sketchy wilderness. All the PCs are would-be adventurers based in this town. Adventuring is not a common or safe profession, so the player characters are the only ones interested in risking their lives in the wilderness in hopes of making a fortune (NPCs adventurers are few and far between). Between sorties into the wilds PCs rest up, trade info and plan their next foray in the cheery taproom of the Axe & Thistle.

The whole territory is (by necessity) very detailed. The landscape is broken up into a variety of regions (Frog Marshes, Cradle Wood, Pike Hollow, etc.) each with its own particular tone, ecology and hazards. There are dungeons, ruins, and caves all over the place, some big and many small. Some are known landmarks (everbody knows where the Sunken Fort is), some are rumored but their exact location is unknown (the Hall of Kings is said to be somewhere in Cradle Wood) and others are completely unknown and only discovered by exploring (search the spider-infested woods and you find the Spider Mound nest).

PCs get to explore anywhere they want, the only rule being that going back east is off-limits — there are no adventures in the civilized lands, just peaceful retirement.

The environment is dangerous. Very dangerous. That’s intentional, because as the great MUD Nexus teaches us, danger unites. PCs have to work together or they are going to get creamed. They also have to think and pick their battles — since they can go anywhere, there is nothing stopping them from strolling into areas that will wipe them out. If they just strap on their swords and charge everything they see they are going to be rolling up new characters. Players learn to observe their environment and adapt — when they find owlbear tracks in the woods they give the area a wide berth (at least until they gain a few levels). When they stumble into the lair of a terrifying hydra they retreat and round up a huge posse to hunt it down.

The PCs are weak but central: they are small fish in a dangerous world that they have to explore with caution, but because they are the only adventurers they never play second fiddle. Overshadowed by looming peaks and foreboding forests yes. Overshadowed by other characters, no.

The West Marches charter is that games only happen when the players decide to do something — the players initiate all adventures and it’s their job to schedule games and organize an adventuring party once they decide where to go.

Players send emails to the list saying when they want to play and what they want to do. A normal scheduling email would be something like “I’d like to play Tuesday. I want to go back and look for that ruined monastery we heard out about past the Golden Hills. I know Mike wants to play, but we could use one or two more. Who’s interested?” Interested players chime in and negotiation ensues. Players may suggest alternate dates, different places to explore (“I’ve been to the monastery and it’s too dangerous. Let’s track down the witch in Pike Hollow instead!”), whatever — it’s a chaotic process, and the details sort themselves out accordingly. In theory this mirrors what’s going on in the tavern in the game world: adventurers are talking about their plans, finding comrades to join them, sharing info, etc.

The only hard scheduling rules are:

1) The GM has to be available that day (obviously) so this system only works if the GM is pretty flexible.

2) The players have to tell the GM where they plan on going well in advance, so he (meaning me) has at least a chance to prepare anything that’s missing. As the campaign goes on this becomes less and less of a problem, because so many areas are so fleshed out the PCs can go just about anywhere on the map and hit adventure. The GM can also veto a plan that sounds completely boring and not worth a game session.

All other decisions are up to the players — they fight it out among themselves, sometimes literally.

Continued:
West Marches (part 2), Sharing Info
West Marches (part 3), Recycling
West Marches (part 4), Death & Danger
West Marches: Running Your Own

With the Lawman/Outlaw/Cowboy tripod of deceit, characters may or may not have secret allegiances, and more importantly the players anticipate that the other player characters have secret allegiances. The groundwork for mistrust and treachery is nicely laid out.

The details behind these choices are fleshed out in the character backgrounds the players create — the surface Lawman is a Texas Ranger, but she is really an Outlaw because she used to run with a gang, and so on. But each secret is effectively a separate plot, and in a one shot game having each person's secrets come out is going to be tricky. Plus when treachery is the name of the game, the players are more motivated to hide their secrets than dramatically reveal them. To get those secrets surfaced, or even make them a factor in play, there has to be some weak point that threatens to expose them.

Players sent me their backgrounds before the game. Most were pretty straight forward: “he accidentally killed a lawman, so now he's on the run”, or “a gang killed his lawman brother, so now he's pretending to be an outlaw to find them and bring them down.”

All good stuff, and fine by themselves, but to up the treachery ante, I took each one and cross-linked it by just assuming that a character in each background was actually the same person referred to in another background. So the lawman player A accidentally killed just happens to be the lawman brother of player B, and the gang that player B thought killed his brother is the same gang that the female Lawman (mentioned above) used to ride with. All the backgrounds interrelate.

In some cases it meant that what the player thought happened was incorrect. One player thought his brother was killed by an outlaw gang, but the secret truth was that he was killed by a drunken doctor while pursuing that gang. Another player thought he killed a US Marshal, only to find out later that the Marshal was an impostor.

The players had no idea I was doing this, and it didn't start to come out until part way through play. Had they known, they might have metagamed and looked for possible connections, so the “tangled threads” trick might have been far less interesting.

The last ingredient to make sure things got spicy were things that were guaranteed to expose some secrets. A player who is carrying around the badge of the lawman he accidentally killed will have some explaining to do after his saddlebags are searched, and how is the Texas Ranger going to explain it when the outlaw gang rides up and gives her a big hug?

If only one person knows a secret, and they have no reason to ever give it away, you don't have material for an interesting game. If there are clues that point towards the truth or just don't fit the story they've been using, they have to start coming up with explanations. And if someone else knows their secret, they are under pressure to get that person to not spill the beans.

This is particularly important for the characters whose only goal is to hide their past. A character that wants something (“avenge my brother”) will get right into the action, but unfortunately the best tactic for the “hide my past” character is to shut up and lay low, none of which makes a good game. Weak points that might give away their secret are critical to getting them involved.

…

So our Western game now has two layers of action inducing treachery: we have the Lawman/Outlaw/Cowboy deception to make players distrust each from the start, and we have the deeper tangled threads so that when the players do start to find out each other's secrets even more conflict emerges.

Now we just slap on a fairly simple surface plot to get the characters involved, like the outlaw gang gearing up for a train robbery, and let the pot boil…