Grand Experiments: West Marches
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.
Setting: Go West Young Man
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.
Scheduling: Players Are In Control
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
New:
West Marches: Secrets & Answers
West Marches: Layers of History
West Marches: A Survivor’s Story
Leave a reply
[…] and shared it with the budding group before play, as well as took a look at the notes for the West Marches campaign, which, like I was hoping to do now, emulated that 1970s […]
[…] the whole table together but it’s also been a dream of mine ever since I read the original West Marches posts by Ben […]
[…] friend, the GM who first introduced me to TTRPGs, discovered sandbox-style campaigns in the form of West Marches, around the time that my main gaming group and I all went off to college. He saw it as a great way […]
[…] more and more prevalent in my Waterdeep campaign, which I’m running as a kind of ‘West Marches‘ series of one shots. The characters are only 3rd or 4th level, but the full spellcasters […]
[…] There are tons of resources for and musings about West Marches games, but the place to start, if you’re interesting, is Robbins’ own blogs on the subject. […]
[…] dei giochi di ruolo quando si fanno delle campagne ci si potrebbe ispirare all’esperienza di Ben Robbins nel 2017 , il quale ha creato una campagna West Marches. Questo è ciò che ho sperimentato […]
[…] it and sharing cool posts with interesting new ideas. Remember Calibrating your Expectations or the West Marches? Those were significant events that people kept talking about for months and linked to in […]
@Scott Anderson, check out:
https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/705/west-marches-secrets-answers-part-1/
What game system and edition did you use? Do you remember how you made characters? What house rules you used?
[…] luckily not long after another individual in the gaming group decided to spin up a West Marches style campaign inviting everyone they knew interested in Dungeons and Dragons. This worked […]
[…] characters, for five years from the age of 17 to 22. That was run at a summer camp, so it was West Marches-style. I’m still running a campaign and started when I was 21. I’m now 35, so now 14-year home game […]
[…] handelt es sich um ein Spielformat, welches 2007 von Ben Robbins zum ersten Mal vorgestellt wurde. Der Name leitet sich einfach von der Region ab, in der seine […]
[…] really the Exploration rules that always keep me coming back to this game. I remember when West Marches by Ben Robbins was first making its rounds and it always seemed like a really cool approach to set […]
[…] wurde die Idee einer West Marches Kampagne von Ben Robbins. Erstmals erwähnt wird sie in seinem Blogpost von 2007. Er hatte 14 Spieler in seiner Kampagne, welche die gefährlichen West Marches erkundeten. […]
[…] Ars Ludi’s article here […]
[…] https://twitter.com/PiJ_PodcastBlog: https://piwniceijaszczurki.tumblr.com/O West Marches: http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/ […]
[…] bin ich zu einer Gruppe gestoßen, die nach dem West Marches-Prinzip spielt. Das hat den Vorteil, dass die Sache mit der Terminfindung nicht ganz so schwierig ist. Da […]
[…] en mi mente (y en el google docs) es el de crear un pequeño «cajón de arena» al estilo de las West Marches de Ben Robbins o los Points of Light de Robert Conley y Dwayne Gillingham. Tengo los artículos, […]
[…] la idea de volver a dirigir una partida de rol por web, pero esta vez basándome en la idea de las West Marches de Ben Robbins. Así que me he vuelto a asomar por allí y he estado explorando de nuevo la Comunidad. Uno de los […]
[…] Robbins’s West Marches suggested this dream could be realized, could include players both new and veteran, and could be […]
[…] second possibility was the impetus behind Ben Robbins’ famous West Marches campaign[1]Ars Ludi. Grand Experiments: West Marches. Don’t fall into either trap of waiting to start playing. Whether you tend towards one extreme or […]
[…] campaigns with a “floating” roaster of gamers, as in a kind of open desk, West March type, by providing a community of modular […]
[…] I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition for two months now. Both in an online West Marches style campaign, and the Solasta: Crown of the Magister video game, which is a pretty good […]
[…] roughly the past year I’ve been playing with a group of cool peeps in a monthly Western-Marshes Hubris game, using my own DIY RPG Rules, and it’s been a blast… I’ve really been […]
[…] Setting would ideally support a west marches inspired campaign. (In case you’re not familiar with west marches.) […]
Absolutely man, as you wish. You were one of my favorite DMs of all time. I even referenced your sessions to my son when I started DMing adventures with him and his friends.
omg, Tommy! It’s been ages! Your recollections are spot on! You were definitely in the thick of it.
This is great stuff, and I’d like to make your comment its own post, if that’s okay with you, so more people see it.
I stumbled onto some discussions of “West Marches” DM style, and followed the rabbit hole down to these blog posts. Now I know why it sounded so familiar: I played in some of those early games! I only made it to like 4 sessions before moving back to the east coast in April of ’02, but I still have many vivid memories of those games.
A handful of those memories:
-The cool concept of that big wooden table where other adventurers had begun carving out the map. A few big Xs where previous heroes had fallen (and maybe left some of their treasure and items behind to collect.)
-A legitimately terrifying encounter with shadows, and a big black door that we couldn’t get past no matter what we tried.
-First character, a rogue who (unsuccessfully) tried to convince the L2 party that he was a bard, mostly pulling his weight through a dungeon, and then dying to a random crit from a wolf on the way back to town. RIP Lucky before he could even level up once.
-Reading the email tributes to Lucky after his failed attempt to make his mark on the Marches. Don’t worry about the broken lute, warrior bro; he had a spare “travel lute.”
-My next character, a druid named Briarweed: harrowing explorations through an undead-infested temple, turning the tide of a perilous battle with a timely cast of shillelagh.
-A near-TPK water trap. The rogue kept failing checks, and several players drowning before we barely managed to escape. I still recall our desperate attempts to make it through a rest in the forest while soaking wet in sub-zero temperatures, nursing the drowned warrior back to health, rationing goodberries, fighting off random encounters, and using every skill, ability, or spell I could find on my sheet to help keep the party alive in those cold wastes so we could make it back to town.
Good times. Despite my short time in the West Marches, and the dozens of campaigns I’ve played or DM’ed in before or since, I remember those sessions as some of my favorite gaming experiences.
[…] par le site Ars Ludi, complété par The Alexandrian et popularisé par une vidéo de Matt Colville, la campagne West […]
Stephan: Very cool! There are definitely a lot of different approaches you could take with the West Marches idea, so long as the core focus sticks to player initiated action.
“how did you manage to finish an adventure in one session? How did YOU cope with PCs still in one adventure but wanting to join another adventure?”
I think the key point to both those questions is that the players are responsible, not the GM. You lay out the consequences at the start (e.g. “if you’re in a game and don’t get back you can’t join another game”) which motivates the players to manage themselves. If they want to be free to join other groups, it’s their job to think about when to turn back during a play session.
If you’ve got more questions I’m happy to answer them here. I like to keep discussion part of the main thread, so other folks running their own games can benefit too.
Hi Ben!
My name is Stephan from Germany. About a year ago, I joined JohnnFour’s campaign community (link below) and have become not only an active writer and GM, but also deeply invested in our West Marches campaign.
Having been intrigued by your campaign style, we wanted to try this out ourselves. Basically because there were so many players and so little time to run games for all. So we began our own West-Marches style campaign. Some parts we changed though:
1. We included in-town adventures and politics, so that PCs could strife for powerful positions, and
2. We made the Borderland all around the little country, so we do not have a mighty citadel to fall back to, in order to later bring about armies from other areas trying to invade the home area.
Now, we are struggling with some aspects and would LOVE to get in contact with you to talk about it. E.g. how did you manage to finish an adventure in one session? How did YOU cope with PCs still in one adventure but wanting to join another adventure?
And in addition, in case you are interested (and I hope you are), please see our forum (and ideally join. It is a great community of GMs and we would love to have you):
https://campaign-community.com/index.php?threads/grenzland-borderland-an-open-table-west-marches-style-game.1268/
And if you are intrigued, please find here our ingame RPG chats concerning the West Marches campaign:
https://campaign-community.com/index.php?forums/in-game-in-character-talk.73/
Best Regards and hoping you are still checking these messages
Stephan
[…] technique was inspired by Ben Robbins’ West Marches Campaign, and it gives you the best of both worlds. Player freedom and GM freedom, plus delicious intense […]
[…] tool was inspired by the West Marches campaign of Ben Robbins. Ben has a multi-part blog series describing how he ran and organized the West Marches […]
[…] campaigns with a “floating” roaster of players, as in a more or less open table, West March style, by offering a network of modular […]
[…] Ben Robbins, who designed the West Marches approach to campaign structure explains that in a West Marches game, town must be safe ground, and everything that happens in the game space happens “out there,” in the wilds. There’s a whole psychology at play that confirms the necessity of that. Explaining it is well beyond the scope of this blog, however I encourage you to read Ben’s blog posts to get an understanding, but, without doing that, it’s recommended that Hubs not be used as encounter spaces. Meaning, no harm can come to the party when they’re in their Hub. No combat, no conflict. […]
[…] wasn’t until Necromancer Games brought the Wilderlands back into print and Ben Robbins’ West Marches campaign went viral that people started to rediscover the lost art of the hexcrawl. The format has returned […]
[…] always loved the idea of running a West Marches style game, and tried once to do one virtually, but I’ve never been able to make it work. I […]
[…] The Alexandrian Hexcrawl Series Ars Ludi: West Marches The Welsh Piper on […]
[…] West Marches […]
[…] such as Megadungeons, Freytag’s Pyramid, the Monomyth,Dan Harmon’s Story Circle, West Marches, and Dungeon World’s Fronts. There are great ideas in writing everywhere, so again, do what […]
[…] Now I didn’t make this concept, but I have run this kind of game before. The concept is that there is a central town and a direction to explore filled with discoveries and dangers. You start in the town, grab a party of adventurers in head in the direction you’re allowed to (usually west) and try to find as much treasure as possible. When I ran it, my notes simply listed what players would run into if they went north, south, east, or west from the town. It was moderately easy to prepare for. […]
[…] Lumpkin, started to GM the West Marches on itmejp’s Twitch Channel, a campaign inspired by this post And additionally I wanted to get more of my friends into […]
[…] brilliant mind that is Ben Robbins came up with a campaign style called The West Marches. You should really click that link, because it’ll explain everything better than I’m […]
[…] vanishing as they wake from the dream. That way, rather than using a single megadungeon, or a West Marches game where sessions start and end in a familiar locale, or some other conceit like Monte […]
[…] West Marches […]
[…] online group of almost 20 former players. This seemed to me like a great potential for forming a west marches style game. We could play entirely online using G+, which I’ve had success with in the […]
[…] pretende seguir el concepto de Grand Campaing, del que forma parte Avarnia Meridional, Alasia ,The Westt Marches, y otras por el estilo, donde los personajes se dedican a explorar una región, salvaje, saqueando […]
[…] DMing both online and IRL using the Fragged Aeternum system done in the style of the West Marches. (LINK) I’m hoping to create a large group of GM’s and players who explore this shared […]
[…] à la fin des années 90 et que, plus récemment, la mode en revienne parmi les rôlistes avec les "West Marches" de Ben Robbins ou le succès de la campagne "Kingmaker". Et si sa définition est encore débattue […]
[…] is an in character session report delivered by my barbarian, Baptiste. The game he is from is a West Marches style game and so this probably won’t be a frequent feature on this site, but I hope it is at […]
[…] récemment en utilisant Freebooters on the Frontier. Le plus important étant de lancer une campagne de type West Marches en septembre avec Dungeon World ou Freebooters on the Frontier et en s’appuyant sur En […]
[…] A West Marches hex crawl. […]
Its about time a added a big thank you. This article was one of my inspirations for the Kenmore Roleplaying Society and the Polemar Open Table game. I started with myself as a DM, my daughter and her friend Tara as players. After a year of playing we now have around 6 DMs and 30 players.
I was also inspired by Justin Alexander’s Open Table Manifesto. ( http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/38643/roleplaying-games/open-table-manifesto )
Info about KRPS at https://strangeflight.blog/kenmore-role-playing-society/
[…] going to be a consistent group of players as most of the games are open gaming. I am going to use The West Marches as a model for […]
[…] The West Marches – Blog post by the creator of the original West Marches campaign. Great overview of what a West March campaign is, and why he made it. […]
[…] we’re inspired by a West Marches style campaign, we’re primarily more story-focused and more open to different play styles and character […]
[…] mit dem Konzept der Hexfelderkundung war, zum anderen die Blogartikel von Ben Robbins über seine West Marches-Kampagne. geht ruhig mal die Artikel lesen, die sind selbst dann interessant wenn man keine solche […]
[…] premise of the game is drawn from the famous West Marches campaign; your PCs live in a town or village on the edge of civilisation; behind them is a peaceful, […]
[…] goals. Not all sandbox campaigns have an episodic structure, but many do. A popular example is a West Marches game (named for a campaign that documented this style in a way that garnered lots of attention), […]
[…] West Marches […]
[…] West Marches idea […]
[…] Konzept irgendwo zwischen klassischer unterirdischer Konstruktion, mystischer Unterwelt und „West Marches […]
[…] campaigns offered counterpoints. Michael S has run such a campaign for 9 years, outlasting the West Marches campaign that inspired him by 7 […]
[…] had to explain the entire West Marches concept to players who may be unfamiliar with […]
[…] toda a estrutura para este estilo de campanha. E isso continuou até que Ben Robbins, em seu blog ars ludi, publicou sua experiência narrativa em hexcrawl, que ele batizou de West Marches. Seu poderoso […]
[…] games for a whole week I would probably set up shop at a nice big table and run the very same West Marches style D&D game all day for every day. This whole situation assumes a lot, so let’s just […]
[…] des systèmes stellaires ou des vallées boisées, se gérer par des tables aléatoires comme les West Marches de Ben Robbins ou être aussi narratif que The Fall of Magic, la base c'est que les PJ ne […]
[…] is a style of game play called West Marches. It’s episodic campaign driven by the players. That sounds very interesting. On Reddit, […]
[…] the quality slipping and started to consider how to improve it. At the same time, I discovered the West Marches campaign approach – something that was conceived a decade ago, in my D&D hibernation […]
[…] Grand Experiments: West Marches […]
[…] ars ludi: Grand Experiments: West Marches […]
[…] ????? ?????? ???????? ????, ?????? ?? ????? ?? […]
[…] something more flexible I think would be more up my alley. And, like many gamers, I’ve read the classic blog posts about the West Marches style of play a few times before. While I’ve always kind of liked the idea behind it, my current gaming […]
[…] Kurtzhau did a lot better job of refereeing than I did at his age. I know this because suddenly the whole neighbourhood 40K circle are queuing up to play Traveller and he and I are having to use Google Docs to administer our shared sandbox campaign — because, yes, we’re doing this West Marches style. […]
[…] I really need for my map is a variation of a Western Marches campaign. We talked about doing a Western Marches style game (a setting idea by game designer Ben Robbins, creator of Microscope, Kingdom, and the […]
[…] (Astute players will recognize this as the setup for a West Marches campaign.) […]
[…] For those who may not know what I’m talking about, here’s Ben Robbin’s original post that started it all: http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/ […]
[…] The kind of GMing it required was challenging and perhaps not for novices. There was no internet to tell me how to run a sandbox campaign, or to introduce me to the wonderful West Marches concept (*). […]
[…] want any of my current games to end, I have vague dreams of someday running WH in the style of a West Marches game. I’d just want to hard-cap the game at 4 players; I’ve seen WH slow down to a […]
[…] run and then detailed by designer Ben Robbins. His detailed (and very good) writeup can be found here, but the summary of it is that the West Marches was a campaign designed to be extremely resilient […]
[…] story of how this session came to be has everything in the world to do with the pseudo-West-Marches format of Aurikesh. That means that there are a lot of players, many of whom have two or more characters: […]
[…] (y en el google docs) es el de crear un pequeño “cajón de arena” al estilo de las West Marches de Ben Robbins o los Points of Light de Robert Conley y Dwayne Gillingham. Tengo los artículos, […]
[…] Beyond the Wall game is a Westmarches-style hexcrawl, for the most part. The players are from a small village situated on the edge of a deadly […]
[…] “civilizados”, con sus ciudades, sus condados y ducados y tal, pero no lo veo para un West Marches donde la gracia está precisamente en descubrir lo que el nuevo territorio inexplorado esconde. Veo […]
[…] sketch of the setting’s cosmology. In development and play, my hope is to emulate the West Marches style and organizing principles. In terms of “story” and “feel”, […]
[…] In game terms, The Keep is a permanent safe place where nothing will ever happen. This is a key element of this game, as explained when talking about the original new school open table, West Marches. […]
[…] full post can be found at http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/ , however I would ask you not to read the other posts regarding this campaign style; it’ll […]
[…] ????? ??????, ???? ????? ?? ?????? ?? ???. ?????? Western Marches? ???? ?? ??????? ????? ???????, ???? ?????, ???? ?????. […]
[…] world adventure and finishes with a useful set of cheat-sheets. Also referenced is Ars Ludi’s Grand Experiments: West Marches, which prompting the idea for the […]
[…] – so instead of trying to get everyone together regularly I’m attempting a more open, West Marches style game where players come and go. As it happens, about half of my players are actual real-life […]
[…] di recente in voga grazie all’OSR. Qualcosa di simile, molto di moda qualche anno fa, sono le West Marches (diretta ispirazione per una campagna omonima nell’ambito dello show online RollPlay). Un […]
[…] is campaign & game models that allow for flexibility. There are campaign styles like the West Marches and hex crawls that allow for a modular/flexible approach, where every session can stand alone but […]
@Wise Goblin: Thanks! It was one of the most exciting and challenging campaigns I ever ran. I hope you and your players have an equally great (and dangerous) time.
This article series has been so inspiring that I created my own west marches style campaign. Than you Ben for sharing this with us.
[…] Taking a leaf from Ars Ludi’s book, the snug at the Brass Dragon has a table where the various parties scratch rough maps of the […]
[…] The West Marches: this is the campaign that launched a thousand Hex maps. The model provided in these session reports is, I believe, in large part responsible for the revival of the hexcrawl with the OSR community. Fantastic stuff! […]
[…] ???????? ??????? ?????? ?????? ??? ?? ????? ???, ??? ??????? ????????, ??? ??????? ??????? ????? ??? ?????? ???? ???.?? […]
[…] aber man kann mit diesen sehr leichten Regeln auch ohne Probleme eine Kampagne à la West Marches (das Paradebeispiel der Old School Open Table Sandbox, die übrigens auch ohne Hexfelder auskam!) […]
@Michael Prescott: Originally yes, but after a while we switched to letting people start at half the level of the dead character. There was usually a pretty good spread of levels so people starting at lower levels would team up with other low levels and explore areas they hadn’t gone to before.
Ben, first of all, amazing. A question: what did you do for replacement characters’ levels? Did they start at level 1 again and trundle along with their betters, or did you bring in replacement characters at a higher level?
[…] It wasn’t until Necromancer Games brought the Wilderlands back into print and Ben Robbins’ West Marches campaign went viral that people started to rediscover the lost art of the […]
[…] osui Ars Ludi -blogia isännöivän Ben Robbinsin hieno kirjotus avoimesta West Marches -erämaakampanjasta. Kampanjassa oli yhteensä n. 10-15 pelaaja ja suurehko erämaa-alue […]
[…] de la OSR. Pues bien, en esta ocasión Jorgemán y él han puesto en cristiano la serie de West Marches, cuatro artículos que Ben Robbins (el creador de Microscope) escribió allá por el 2007, […]
The Spanish translation of all the West Marches is up at La Frikoteca (three parts):
Traduciendo la OSR: Las Marcas Occidentales
Traduciendo la OSR: Las Marcas Occidentales II
Traduciendo la OSR: Las Marcas Occidentales III (última parte)
Thanks Carlos and Jorgeman!
@Carlos de la Cruz: I sent you an email
Hello, Mr. Robins.
I’m working in the translation to Spanish of some good articles related to the OSR movement, dungeons and sandbox playing. The translation are going to be published just as a entries in my blog (frikoteca.blogspot.com) and I’ll include an URL to each original articles.
I’ve already translated “The Dungeon as a Mythic underworld”, from Phylotomy ODD’s Musings, and I’m working in other articles.
Could I have your permission to translate your five entries about the West Marches campaign?
[…] same thing), Daniel Davis talks about a similar ‘path crawl‘, and Ben Robbins’ West Marches campaign used a vector-based navigation system. It seems quite suitable for anything where items can be […]
[…] Der West March-Ansatz: Das ist ein Ansatz den ich vor ein paar Jahren in einem Blogartikel entdeckt habe, und den ich bei meiner nächsten Fantasy-Kampagne probieren möchte: Eine Kampagne […]
[…] used already to describe some of my favorite games, such as the Star Control series, FTL, and the West Marches concept. The realization has dawned on me that Triumph & Despair has unwittingly become a great […]
[…] online group of almost 20 former players. This seemed to me like a great potential for forming a west marches style game. We could play entirely online using G+, which I’ve had success with in the […]
[…] Marches-style Sandbox Campaign. Ben Robbins had a campaign he called the West Marches that exhibited some characteristics that would very much suit my opportunities to actual play. I […]
[…] meets West Marches — No, seriously. The Bad Wrong Fun campaign is going to follow a West Marches model of play, but create the game world with Microscope and Dawn of Worlds. There’s also a […]
[…] whole West Marches-style campaign idea gains more ground. N. Wright is starting one using the Microlite74 rules, and I still want to […]
[…] Grand Experiments: West Marches […]
[…] this week I read about Ben Robbins’ West Marches sandbox campaign, and I won’t lie, the concept and structure excited […]
It was D&D 3.0, characters from core PHB only.
what game ruleset are you running this on?
[…] a pretty well-discussed problem, with excellent suggestions from the classic sources including the West Marches and Rob Conley’s Bat in the […]
[…] however, I was hit by a bit of inspiration while I was brainstorming for my “Northern Reaches” campaign and realized that the area I was trying to find a place for was actually from my completely […]
[…] but merely a consistent GM and setting. I suspect Gygax’s own campaign ran more like the West Marches than what we’re used to these days. Quotes like the following from the DMG seem to support […]
[…] “civilizados”, con sus ciudades, sus condados y ducados y tal, pero no lo veo para un West Marches donde la gracia está precisamente en descubrir lo que el nuevo territorio inexplorado esconde. Veo […]
[…] udforsker områder og ruiner tegner jeg dem ind på kortet. (En af de ting jeg har hugget fra http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/ i et forsøg på at fremhæve at udforskning af verdenen er tænkt som en del af […]
Thanks for this. I am currently running a successful sandbox, the ideas for which I owe you some credit. Great site.
[…] Ludi’s West Marches campaign. A different take on the classic sandbox, where you have a large troupe of players who combine into […]
@ Richard,
What I can remember (as one of the players in the WM games) is that while we did start out with a “map” – it was pretty vague. As a result we had to do a lot of exploring before we found the dungeon the map referred to. All of that exploring meant that we bumped into other interesting stuff which led to other things.
Also there were some in town NPC’s who had info about things out in the wilderness and/or desires regarding stuff out there – e.g. the head priest talking about the monastery that had been abandoned decades ago, who then asks the cleric PC to go get some books.
Since each trip out often meant getting a bit lost and running into interesting & unexpected stuff there was never really any shortage of reasons to go out. Someone would mention seeing a cave or orcs off in the distance, that sort of thing. And since we had about a dozen PCs going out adventuring in various ‘groups’ (rarely the same set for more than a couple games, we mixed it up a lot) the person mentioning this was often a PC and not an NPC (see the WM:Sharing Info post). One thing that we (the players) did was to send out a game summary that covered what happened – coming back to the inn and bragging about your deeds & carving you’re newfound info into the table map. Which by the way was another impetus for going out and exploring – simply exploring the territory! We wanted to fill in the blank spots in the map, so sometimes a game was simply “we’ll be heading west around the swamp for a week or so” – there was usually something interesting and (often enough) worthwhile.
I would strongly suggest reading the “treasure tells a story” article – that’s something he used frequently to.
And ultimately, once the players get into it, they should be coming up with their own reasons. A key factor to how WM worked was that we, the _players_, had control of the scheduling and what the game session was going to be about. In order for a game to happen at all, one of the players had to set up the game, and more than just scheduling the game by saying “let’s play on Saturday” they had to say “I want to go find that old Monastery I’ve heard about! Who’s with me?”
As long as you (the GM) have enough interesting things for them so that if/when they say “we’re going to hike west for about a week and see what’s there” then the game you run with them doing that is exciting, then they’ll want to play and it should work out great.
[…] I was re-reading about the famous D&D West Marches sandbox campaign. If you've never heard of it before do yourself a favor and check it out. Its a […]
Ben, I have a question for you. I did read that you mentioned each starting group got a “treasure map” to some starting area to get into the thick of things, but how did you seed hooks? Since NPCs are mostly townfolk who don’t go out into the big bad wilderness and monsters for killin’ (aside from the occasional hermit or bandit etc) that seems like maps or riddles would work out best. Anyway, I am trying to sell my players on this style of game and I’m developing lots of cool ideas for areas and regions and dungeons and ruins and all sorts of everything, except how to actually get the players info on new places to go after they clear out the bunny burrow just outside of the town walls.
[…] habe HIER eine ziemlich geniale Hilfestellung gefunden für jeden, der eine klassische “Hexcrawl […]
[…] a few months ago I stumbled across Ben Robbins West Marches stuff (yeah I know, Im a little late to the party). It reminded me of how much I missed that style […]
[…] so that is all well and good but what about a wilderness adventure? As you know I am running my sandbox style campaign in the Mwangi Expanse of Paizo’s default world of Golarion. This is not a very urban area and […]
[…] (y en el google docs) es el de crear un pequeño “cajón de arena” al estilo de las West Marches de Ben Robbins o los Points of Light de Robert Conley y Dwayne Gillingham. Tengo los artículos, […]
[…] la idea de volver a dirigir una partida de rol por web, pero esta vez basándome en la idea de las West Marches de Ben Robbins. Así que me he vuelto a asomar por allí y he estado explorando de nuevo la Comunidad. Uno de los […]
[…] ahora sólo queda reunir las ganas para arbitrar una partida de “cajón de arena” por foro… vieja […]
[…] was reading Open Game Table The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs and I ran across ars ludi » Grand Experiments: West Marches. I’m tempted to try something similar for my next campaign. It wouldn’t be quite the […]
[…] if you’re interested, you can read waaaay more about West Marches here. Really cool […]
[…] other words, it’s a super hero team designed around a West Marches or Red Box style of attendance, where the strangest collection of characters, from the Hulk to […]
[…] very interesting series is the Grand Experiment of the West Marches over at Ars Ludi (Ben Robbins) for an interesting account of a sandbox game he ran “for a […]
[…] Ruins of Mwangi/sandbox playtest thoughts. Also, more behind the screen info on some of the technology I will be bringing […]
[…] blog post by Gabe at Penny Arcade concerning his 4e campaign I noticed a reference to an article by Ben Robbins concerning something called sandbox campaigning. Let me just I was inspired. I read the article on […]
Great reading, love this site :)
About sandbox adventure, check out the Stolen Land campaign from Paizo to Pathfinder – it seems to capture most of the esssence of sandboxing – looks like a great start for a campaign.
[…] [Link] […]
HEY!
Thanks for all the good ideas hope you get another West Marches going in the future!
[…] me encontré con un grandísimo post sobre una campaña de rol de tipo “sandbox” llamada “West Marches” (lectura muy […]
Great series of articles. I have been running a sandbox-ish PBP campaign for a while and I agree with a lot of what you say.
Only a couple of things I do different (partly because it is PBP so you MUST keep things moving otherwise things die – not like a physical gaming group where you will always be running into the players).
a. There IS a metaplot (or several). Not overriding, but important
b. There ARE some important NPCs.
However in both cases your philosophy of “the PCs are the adventurous ones” is critical. They must be able, if they work together, to influence a metaplot, or take on an influential NPC. And if they do something the GM doesn’t expect… then the consequences must flow for the game world.
(continued – accidentally pressed Submit Comment) The bad guy who’s destroying the world is here? Sounds bad, let’s hit him until he stops. A more sophisticated group might consider joining him, or setting other factions against him, or infiltrating his organization, or trying to convince him not to destroy the world, or contemplate the morality of killing someone even one who is going to destroy the world, or hell, even embrace their own destruction and give up.
But if you’re in a freeform game, the GM isn’t telling you what to do. The world-destroying bad guy may be out there, and he may functionally restrict your options (since everyone has to stop him or else the game is over; he becomes a plot bottleneck), but you have to find him, and the GM hasn’t told you what you should think about the guy yet. So you’re in town, without a dark stranger in the corner to give you a mission of questionable integrity or without a man in a suit approaching you curtly with a briefcase full of mission data. What do you do? Your CHARACTER has to determine that. If your character is a violent, rowdy type, she’ll look for a fight. If she’s a sociopath, she’ll start making a criminal empire from the ground up. If she’s a heroine of light and goodness, she’ll look for things she can do to help the town. If she’s a doctor or a healer, she might start looking for a plague or injuries and then sniff onto a plot thread that way. If she’s a spy from another society, she’ll start ingratiating herself into the local power structure; same thing if she’s a politically ambitious person. If she’s a Chaotic Good, freedom-loving type, she might look for injustices to right, freedom to spread, laws to resist and tyrants to overthrow.
Point is, the GM won’t hook you in with a line by force. You will have to choose which bait you take. And THAT encourages and in fact requires roleplaying, in a way that “You all meet in a tavern and hear about the haunted Barrows to the north” doesn’t.
One game I ran, for example, involves recruiting heroes from across space and time to form a team that will defeat an ancient foe. The ancient foe is actually more of a plot McGuffin: Players have to fight him eventually, but in the interim they are dealing with his minions, with other bad guys, with other things they are discovering, and have utter freedom to go anywhere and do anything they can imagine that is within their characters’ capacities. One player in this game actually LEFT the group, assuming that this was going to be a suicide mission upon which everyone was going to die! This was a radically different character choice, and the player told me it was due to OTHER players’ decisions. Everyone else seemed too excited, to him, to be charging into what appeared to be an impossible battle. The irony is that if other people had been more hesitant at jumping into the quest line, or were afraid, he’d probably have been the first one encouraging them. I had to write an entire quest arc for him since he had left the main party. It was interesting. Neither he, nor I, nor any of the other players had anticipated it. It flowed logically from the events of the story. THAT’S why this model is interesting and encourages good roleplaying.
@ Daniel Ream: I think the point that Ben was making is that ALL roleplaying games are orthogonal to the idea of roleplaying. You can and usually did make 1st edition D&D into a mindless dungeon crawl where the only roleplaying elements are “I’m a barbarian and I’m tough” or “I’m a cleric and I like to heal”. Rifts can have fantastic roleplaying with such a beautiful and rich world; it is also famous for producing mindless run-and-gunning. Shadowrun can have a fantastically intricate plot with memorable characters or just be sessions worth of stealing, shooting and breaking and entering. Even White Wolf’s Storyteller system can devolve into mindless action: They specifically encourage this in the Fomor supplement as a fun way of spending a night or two!
A GM can produce the most interesting plot in the world, but if his players roleplay boring characters, then the only roleplaying being done is by the GM. A GM can require character interaction, diplomacy and smart roleplaying to advance, but if his players can’t or won’t do so, the party simply wipes.
You’ve simply identified a “problem” or an element inherent to the hobby itself: Roleplaying games are about two elements, the roleplaying and the game. Both give exactly out what is put in. You can make D&D into a combat simulator for dungeon crawls, or you can have a fleshed-out world where the players are choosing their missions, discovering intrigue and saving the world. Players themselves must have both the skill and the inclination to roleplay their character: Separate in-character knowledge from out-of-character knowledge, have their character do things they themselves wouldn’t, say interesting or funny things, get invested into the plot, etc.
What I have found, though, is that freeform games are MUCH better at encouraging roleplaying than the opposite, for a reason that Ben didn’t mention. If you’re in a campaign on rails, you can just stick on the rails. T
This has been the way my group of friends has had to run every game they’ve ever done since the 1990s. Obviously, this is a case of parallel development. When you have lots of people that you want to be able to play, the party has to be designed such that people not attending won’t be a problem. In practice, this means that the party that shows up just goes ahead and does the things and we don’t worry about what the other guys were doing. And when you have
I think it’s important to stress that these stories aren’t quite rail-less. Rather, the players have dozens of smaller tracks to pick from, and they can go from track to track at their will, and solve the problems they encounter on the track in the fashion they prefer. By this I mean that, if the players find someone who wants them to clear out the local mob den and they decide to say yes, then the mob den will presumably have a pre-set number of enemies, a pre-set location, etc. Now, unlike many games, they can say no to the guy offering the mission and move on, or ignore all the missions out there and start building their own criminal organization or mercenary group or whatever floats their boat, but eventually the GM has to start saying to them what happens.
Let’s say that a group creates a mercenary company. A truly “railless” game would have the players say, “And now we have the mercenary company”, or make up their own obstacles. This can be fun, but these games don’t have GMs. The GM’s role is not to write some story that the players just trudge through, but rather to create story potentials that he and the players collaboratively create. Okay, so what are obvious twists to the plot that they could encounter in their process of creating a mercenary group? Other mercenary groups or criminal organizations might not like the competition and attack them. The local governments may want them to do something to prove that they’re not psychopaths who will kill innocent people for money. Obviously, people have to HIRE them to do their missions.
The classic model is the standard Shadowrun game. The GM has a Johnson offer the players something to do. The players could very well turn them down, but usually the Johnson offers something interesting that plays well and advances their interests. There’s an obstacle, say a briefcase to be stolen. The players could do any number of things to steal the obstacle: Recon to see what the security is like (not trusting the Johnson’s intel) or just charge in blindly; attack with overwhelming force, lay a trap or ambush, attempt infiltration… The GM then figures out how their plan works with the resources that his NPCs have at their control and presumably a healthy dose of chance provided by the dice. These three elements (dice, players, GM) come together to produce a plot that should be something none of them anticipated before coming in, but isn’t without rails because the players and the GM each have plans and ideas of what probably should go down and those plans intertwine to make the story.
[…] posted about shifting his game to a sandbox-style, particularly influenced by Ben Robbins’ West Marches game. Possibly with just coincidental timing, Zak from Playing D&D with Porn Stars pointed out […]
[…] ars ludi » Grand Experiments: West Marches This guy ran a kind of open world D&D campaign with no plot, just dungeons and monsters. In a way sort of like really, really old school D&D or a Roguelike. He ended up with emergent narrative by having several groups of players in the same sandbox that talked to each other about game elements they encountered. Pretty neat. I think my old high school D&D group could have used something like this. (tags: nifty game.design games.rpg) […]
[…] hatte ich gehofft, die anderen Spieler von einer West-Marshes Kampagne überzeugen zu können, aber es wird eine „richtige“ Story-Kampagne gefordert. Damit […]
[…] Sandbox campaign has recently been playing out the implications of a shift away from a fundamental West Marshes tenet: the adventure is in the wilderness, not the town. The town of Belltower, sadly no longer a […]
[…] won’t be standard Burning Wheel. West Marches of Ben Robbins are an inspiration, as is Burning Thac0 and various old school luminaries around the […]
[…] cheap dice and figures, and a mega-mat of some kind. Preferably dry-erase. Develop a single-group West Marches sandbox setting. Gather […]
[…] all of these points are pretty standard “sandbox” ideas and have been influenced by the West Marches write-ups by Ben Robbins. As I progress, I’ll have more write-ups on the […]
[…] is a style of gaming I think is interesting called Sand Box gaming, and the whole point is to be open more to exploration for it’s own sake, rather than […]
[…] a consistent West Marches style game with as many people as I can in […]
So how do you keep play levels appropriate for the groups they want? You reference that guys who play weekly and monthly can intermingle but how do you cope with the weekly guy being level 7 and the monthly guy at 3? Do you assume that players keep a number of characters at various levels for the cliques they form?
[…] of characters could just be the adventuring inhabitants of an area. This is a great backdrop for a West Marches style […]
Wow great post! Much like the setting that I have started. This is the style that my first DM used to use. Nothing for free. Claw your way to the top. Many characters died by the dice but when you mad it your really had accomplished something.
[…] schoolers, one in particular, started jesting that I was going to the dark side and jumping on the Sandbox bandwagon. The thing is, I’m not interested in doing a classic exploration-based Sandbox […]
[…] your game has no overarching story, like some sandbox of game (MegaDungeons or West Marches types of game) you need to pepper your various sites with bits and pieces of story that Storyteller […]
Given the inherently dangerous nature of a WM-style game, how did you handle the introduction of new characters? If the majority of the characters were, say, level 10ish and one of them died, did you require the players to create a new 1st level character, or did you let them make a new, level-appropriate character?
Daniel, I’d be curious to hear your definition of roleplaying, and why you think we should consider the non-gaming sense of the word at all, being gamers. This sandbox stuff is classic, the very definition of what an RPG (D&D) was intended as. I think the “roleplaying” you are so concerned about must be some kind of odd offshoot of this that really doesn’t apply.
See, everything you’ve mentioned here applies (in spades) just as much to MMOGs as the West Marches. There are certainly people in MMOGs who insist on playing in character all the time, on and off-line, but it’s also pretty obvious that the MMOG game engine itself doesn’t require, encourage, or arguably even support it.
Let me be more explicit: I don’t consider MMOGS or dungeon crawling to be roleplaying in the common, non-gamer sense of the word (and while you are correct that picking the cleric class means you are playing a “role”, I think that’s splitting semantic hairs; it’s the same as me saying that when I use my Guild Wars Monk/Elementalist in multiplayer PvE I’m “roleplaying” because that character fills the niche of the party’s healer/buffer). The campaign style you’ve set up here appears to be orthogonal to the idea of a roleplaying game: it doesn’t prevent it, but I see no way that it encourages or supports it, either.
You obviously had some excellent players who got into the setting and roleplayed on their own, but from the way you’ve described the role of the GM (largely passive and reactive) it doesn’t seem that there was any part of the setting or the mechanics that brought that out.
So, let me refine the question – was there any part of the West Marches Grand Experiment that either required roleplaying on the part of the players (by making it impossible to play/succeed if they did not) or encouraged it (by rewarding them in a well-defined way for doing so)?
@ Daniel Ream — It’s been true of all versions of D&D, since it first emerged from the primordial ooze of Braunstein, that you could play the game without overtly roleplaying. I say overtly, because you’re always taking on a “role” even if that’s just being the party cleric, even if you don’t create any personality for that character.
So the real question I think you’re getting at is whether the West Marches model encourages roleplaying more than the average D&D dungeon crawl. There definitely was a lot of roleplaying in the original West Marches game. Did the model encourage that? I can think of a couple of ways it might have:
– Info had to be shared in-character, so even away from the table roleplaying was encouraged. There was constant roleplaying on the email lists comparing notes or writing whole huge in-character game summaries. When characters who had never met did finally play together, they already knew each other’s character personalities.
– Mortality meant players started new characters more often in the same game, so they went to great trouble to make their new characters distinct personality-wise.
– Danger meant bonding. Characters were literally loathe to leave their comrades behind in dire straits, and it was dire straits all the time. There was a lot of character bonding, which was particularly noticeable because it was contrasted against new characters — Vesta is my comrade I’ve adventured with for months, I won’t leave her, but I have no idea who this new guy Hargen is even though it’s a player I’ve played with for months also.
– Mortality & info sharing combined meant that players were constantly thinking about “what does my character know” versus what they knew, sharpening the mental distinction between player and character
So off the top of my head, I’d say yes.
“This is basically the way D&D was run in the past.”
It’s the way every MMOG is run now. Reading the post, what kept going through my mind was “LFG Droknar’s Forge run”. It does work, on a logistical level, but just like 4th ed I have to wonder whether this really counts as roleplaying any more as opposed to just dungeon crawling.
[…] (y en el google docs) es el de crear un pequeño “cajón de arena” al estilo de las West Marches de Ben Robbins o los Points of Light de Robert Conley y Dwayne Gillingham. Tengo los artículos, […]
[…] you want a real life example of such a campaign, go check out the notes for West Marches Campaign. It’s a set of articles written about a sadbox game that was actually implemented and played […]
[…] of game releases have really got me jonesin to play. Would there be any interest in a sandbox or West Marches free form type game utilizing the od&d "retroclone" Swords and Wizardry Whitebox […]
[…] Sandboxing! Weil ich gerade dar?ber gestolpert bin: […]
[…] post this over at Humpy Boggart in light of its RPG-related nature, but I have really been enjoying this series of articles at Ars Ludi on a particularly successful sandbox-style D&D campaign. Pretty […]
[…] Wilde Süden geht live. Dieser Kampagne liegt die Idee der West Marshes zugrunde: Die Spielwelt ist eine Sandbox in der die Spieler sich austoben dürfen – und sollen. […]
[…] likely of the same class. The original assumed AD&D campaign structure was much more like the West Marches, where there was a fluid player-base not of 5 or 6 guys but of maybe 15 or 20, and the makeup of […]
[…] anyone here read about the West Marches? The idea you propose seems pretty much like a dungeon version of the west marches. I would […]
[…] A well-crafted table sets the tone of an area of play. The table for a bustling merchant city and a howling wilderness are going to be very different. Sandbox D&D games rely on encounter tables to theme different areas. […]
[…] of my inspiration and ideas from the Grand Experiments: West Marches articles over on Ars Ludi (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and running your own) and have been fleshing out a wilderness area of […]
[…] de testa-la, é transformar o narrador em um agente passivo, mais ou menos como na idéia do jogo West Marches, proposta pelo Ars Ludi. Nesse jogo, temos um grupo bem grande de participantes, podendo chegar a […]
[…] stealing the West Marches concept of the build-as-you-play Table […]
Hey Batronoban, I’ve sent you an email.
Dear Ben,
I have recently gone trough your article regarding the game mastering system you use for the West Marches.
As I am working as a volunteer for a French speaking rpg magazine, I would be interested to introduce your system to the French speaking role-playing community.
Would you mind if I translate/resume some part of your articles on your Ars Ludi site for our magazine ?
Best Regards,
Batronoban
This is basically the way D&D was run in the past. The only reason you think it’s “new” or a “novel solution” or whatever is because the game has strayed from it’s origins and the books lead you astray as to how you should be running it. There’s a reason the method works so well, and people have been running successful campaigns this way for over 30 years.
[…] la idea de volver a dirigir una partida de rol por web, pero esta vez basándome en la idea de las West Marches de Ben Robbins. Así que me he vuelto a asomar por allí y he estado explorando de nuevo la Comunidad. Uno de los […]
[…] I’m shorty going to be running a 4e game, loosely based on Ben Robbins’ West Marches. […]
[…] ahora sólo queda reunir las ganas para arbitrar una partida de “cajón de arena” por […]
[…] I think interest is waining. I’ve already started thinking about another game to run. Over at Ars Ludi, Ben Robbins wrote about a free-form game he ran for about two years. I loved the concept of the […]
“I was wondering, how did you structure your records of the various sites, recurring characters, etc?”
Completely regional. So there was a section in my binder for the Tower Road region, and inside it there’s a subsection for the Wil Wood, and inside that a subsection for Spider Mound (or on the computer, a straight hierarchy of nested folders).
A normal game is chronological as well as regional — you have notes for different parts of the world, but you pretty much know each game session what’s going to happen, so you may wind up putting lots of important info in chronological order. In West Marches there was no such thing. Each game session had at most a single notes sheet where I could jot down what happened, where people went, etc, but all the rest of the went right back into the regional structure.
The only real recurring characters were the secondary figures in town (who were in the Keep-town section of the binder) and the odd bandit or two, who stayed in the section of the region they were hiding out in.
“I’m interested in hearing what plans led to the DM veto rule for plans that didn’t sound interesting enough to play. Was it something like just putzing around towns buying stuff?”
Bing-bing-bing! Yes, “let’s just roleplay sitting around town” was generally considered an insufficient flight plan to schedule a game. Another good example would be something like “let’s go search the Weeping Walls for more stuff!” when I know and the players pretty much know that that particular dungeon is cleared out (for the moment anyway).
Searching tapped out areas was a common urge: hey, we had such good times there last game, let’s go back! No young gamers, we just did that. Go explore new places! Not a surprising mistake since lots of other games were all about going back and taking another whack at some place.
There were a few memorable incidents where I messed up and inadvertantly scheduled a zero-action game because of miscommunication. I was nearly lynched.
I’m interested in hearing what plans led to the DM veto rule for plans that didn’t sound interesting enough to play. Was it something like just putzing around towns buying stuff? Everything else sounds really cool, it’s just that struck me as a little odd. I’m guessing something unusual happened, no?
[…] Ars Ludi readers, Skyla was the name of my first West Marches character, arrested and exiled, but still my […]
Hey there, I was really impressed by your West Marches writeup. It’s very reminiscent of how I like to run games, and you did a great job of putting it to words. I was wondering, how did you structure your records of the various sites, recurring characters, etc? I’m taking on my first pen-and-paper game after being spoiled with online text games that did the grunt work for me. So far I was planning on having a big map for my players and a notebook I kept to myself that indexed the map’s contents against my source materials. Did your campaign give you any insights into this task? I’m looking forward to reading more of your site.
Thanks,
~Joe
“Cool! I hope you talk about how you went about plotting the danger zones, and how much you did in advance.”
More on that in Part 4…
“Were there ever any sessions where PCs just got slaughtered and the night was a real downer?”
Oh yes. Dice were rolled in the open which meant no fudging. It was literally let the dice fall where they may.
Surprisingly we only had one total party kill (who knew the treasure came with lizard men?) but there were lots of unexpected deaths along the way. Sometimes very cool characters got killed, which was depressing.
The flip-side was that the players knew that except for the luck of the dice, they were in control of their own fates. Smart or dumb decisions would decide whether they lived or died. They were sad when they got killed, but they could be honestly proud when they survived.
“Sounds great. Did the party returned to the outpost at the end of every session? If not how did you handled situations of one players not being present and their characters being entangled in the unfinished journey?”
It was a stated policy that the party should try to get back to town before the end of each session, making each game a different sortie into the wilderness.
In practice this happened about 70% of the time. If a game did end with a group still out in the wilds it just meant we had to schedule another game with those same people, and that those characters couldn’t play with another group until they got back to town — really not any more trouble than scheduling a normal game.
I also tracked parties coming and going on a calendar in game time, so even if you had played your character making it back to town you couldn’t join another party that was leaving before the game date you got back. So yes you could camp for 5 weeks in the woods during one game session if you wanted to, but you were effectively unable to play until the rest of the players “caught up” in game time.
Sounds great. Did the party returned to the outpost at the end of every session? If not how did you handled situations of one players not being present and their characters being entangled in the unfinished journey?
Cool! I hope you talk about how you went about plotting the danger zones, and how much you did in advance. Were there ever any sessions where PCs just got slaughtered and the night was a real downer?
“Or do you already have an idea that the ruined monastery is going to be for level 7-9, before anyone goes there, and you stick to it regardless of who goes?”
That’s correct — it’s a cardinal rule of the West Marches charter to never change the world to adapt to the players, otherwise you undermine the importance of their decisions. The players know they have to plan carefully, because they know I won’t nerf someplace just so they’ll survive. When they win, they know they won on their own merit.
Great idea! I love this. One question though, when you say that players can go charging off into dangerous areas and get their characters killed… does that happen when you have already fleshed out the ruined monastery and then a group of lowbies makes the mistake of going there? Or do you already have an idea that the ruined monastery is going to be for level 7-9, before anyone goes there, and you stick to it regardless of who goes?
This seems to be a beautiful solution to some of our internal problems in the gaming group I am currently GMing for. At times, some players aren’t available and we already have to have flexible gaming days since we’re all adults with other things that require our attention. This kind of game, with some of the same premises, would promise a higher level of events and put me as the GM in a very interesting position!
This sounds like an awesome way to run a game. It might be perfect for a campaign I’m planning.