brazdias.com

Estilo de Jogo Criado por Ben Robbins e popularizado pelo conhecido youtuber/DM Matt Colville


Textos retirados do blog de Ben Robbins, compatilhados em 2007/2008
Grand Experiments: West Marches
Sharing Info
Recycling
Death & Danger
Running Your Own

Novos insights de Ben Robbins de 2015 e 2018 respectivamente
Secrets & Answers (part 1)
Layers of History (Secrets & Answers part 2)

Compilado retirado do Reddit, com experiências compartilhadas de centenas de sessões no estilo West Marches
Lessons from West Marches

Texto EM PORTUGUÊS, publicado no Medium, explicando as premissas de West Marches (autor Nino Xavier Simas)
Desbravando Terras Selvagens: A Campanha West Marches

Vídeo de Matt Colville
The West Marches, Running the Game

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.

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.

Shared Experience: Game Summaries
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.

Shared World: the Table Map
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.

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.

Recycled Maps: Evolving Dungeons
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.

Recycled Danger: Wandering Monsters
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.

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” (one of Karen’s best lines, back in the first days in the kobold caves, and 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…

Danger Gradients: Paths of Exploration
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 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.

Danger Pockets: Barrow Mounds & Treasure Rooms
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.

Postscript
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?

Alarming fact: brave GMs all over the place are taking up the torch and starting their own West Marches games. Scary isn’t it?

I’ve already had some private email conversations about how one would actually build and run a West Marches of their very own. Maybe you’ve got the bug too. Early symptoms include a desire to build vast wilderness areas and enlist hordes of players to explore it. Sound familiar? Then read on for a few (hopefully) helpful tips:

Building It
make town safe and the wilds wild — Having the town be physically secure (walled or in some cases protected by natural features like rivers or mountains) is very useful for making a sharp “town = safe / wilderness = danger” distinction. Draconian law enforcement inside town, coupled with zero enforcement in the wilds outside town, also helps. Once you are outside the town you are on your own.

keep NPC adventurers rare — Or even better non-existent. It’s up to the players to explore the wilderness, not NPCs. As soon as you have NPCs going on adventures of their own you move the focus away from player-initiated action. NPC adventurers also makes it harder to explain why interesting things weren’t already discovered — players love being the first to find the Horned Tower or the Abbot’s Study. Keep this in mind when you devise the background for your region. Is it a newly opened frontier? Or is adventuring just something no one in their right mind does in this world (the West Marches premise)?

build dungeons with treasure rooms, locked rooms, pockets of danger — A solid party may be able to wipe out the primary critters in a dungeon, but there should always be spots that are a lot harder to clear. On those rare occasions when a group _does_ manage to clear a dungeon or crack a treasure room, they will stand on the tables in the tavern and cheer, not in some small part to brag to the other players who weren’t on that sortie.

Running It
appear passive — The world may be active, but you the GM should appear to be passive. You’re not killing the party, the dire wolf is. It’s not you, it’s the world. Encourage the players to take action, but leave the choices up to them. Rolling dice in the open helps a lot. The sandbox game really demands that you remain neutral about what the players do. It’s their decisions that will get them killed or grant them fame and victory, not yours. That’s the whole idea.

provide an easy lead to get new players started — Once players are out exploring, each new discovery motivates them to search more, but how do you get them started? Every time I introduced a batch of new players I gave them a very basic treasure map that vaguely pointed to somewhere in the West Marches and then let them go look for it. Whether it was the dwarven “treasure beyond bearing” or the gold buried beneath the Red Willow, a no-brainer “go look for treasure here” clue gets the players out of town and looking around. Of course once the players are in the wilds, they may find that getting to that treasure is much harder than it looks.

the adventure is in the wilderness, not the town — As per the discussion of NPCs above, be careful not to change the focus to urban adventure instead of exploration. You can have as many NPCs as you want in town, but remember it’s not about them. Once players start talking to town NPCs, they will have a perverse desire to stay in town and look for adventure there. “Town game” was a dirty word in West Marches. Town is not a source of info. You find things by exploring, not sitting in town — someone who explores should know more about what is out there than someone in town.

let the players take over — Don’t write game summaries, don’t clean up the shared map. You want the players to do all those things. If you do it, you’ll just train them not to.

competition is what it’s all about — Fair rewards, scarcity, bragging rights — these are the things that push the game higher. You could have a “solo” West Marches game with just one group doing all the exploring, and it would probably be a fun and pleasant affair, but it’s _nothing_ compared to the frenzy you’ll see when players know other players are out there finding secrets and taking treasure that _they_ could be getting, if only they got their butts out of the tavern. (Hmm, is this why I get a kick out of running Agon? It’s true, I’m a cruel GM.)

require scheduling on the mailing list — It doesn’t matter whether a bunch of players agreed to go on an adventure when they were out bowling, they have to announce it on the mailing list or web forum (whichever you’re using for your scheduling). This prevents the game from splintering into multiple separate games. If you notice cliques forming you can make a rule requiring parties to mix after two adventures. Conversely if you notice players being dropped from follow-up sorties too often just because some people can’t wait to play, you can require parties to stay together for two adventures. That forces a little more long time strategy in party selection, less greedy opportunism. Season to taste.

fear the social monster — This is the big, big grand-daddy or all warnings: even more so than many games, West Marches is a social beast. In normal games players have an established place in the group. They know they are supposed to show up every Tuesday to play — they don’t have to think about that or worry about whether they “belong” in the group. On the other hand West Marches is a swirling vortex of ambition and insecurity. How come no one replied when I tried to get a group together last week? Why didn’t anybody invite me to raid the ogre cave? And so on and so on ad infinitum. The thrilling success or catastrophic failure of your West Marches game will largely hinge on the confidence or insecurity of your player pool. Buckle up.

Running your own West Marches game? Post a link in the comments so everyone can take a look and grow green with envy. I’ve got some links I need to post but if you hurry you can beat me to it.

Writing about world-building in the expansion to Microscope got me thinking about West Marches again (more on that in part 2), so I’m taking a break from my kickstarter to answer some questions that have piled up.

Some of these ideas I’ve mentioned before but never elaborated on. Other bits are things I’ve never talked about at all. Because I know lots of people have played or wanted to run West Marches games of their own, I’ve tried to clarify which choices were critical to making the concept work and which were just personal preference. Because there is more than one way to march west…

The Player’s Handbook
Even though I wrote the blog posts in 2007, the actual campaign was years earlier. We started West Marches at the very beginning of 2001 and ended in 2003. 3rd Edition D&D had just come out and we used it for the entire campaign (3.5 wasn’t released until after the game ended).

West Marches character creation followed one very simple rule: you could only build characters using the original Players Handbook. No classes, races, feats, nothing from any other source. And because everything in the Players Handbook was allowed, I could just say, “If it’s in the Player’s Handbook, it’s good” without having to look over anyone’s shoulder or screen characters.

Even religion worked that way. Need a god? Just pick one of the friendly faces in the book, read the tiny paragraph and you’re ready to go. Want to buy something? Check the price on the equipment list and spend away. The only caveat was that no one sold alchemical crap like tanglefoot bags and sunrods for the simple reason that I hated faux-technology stuff. Get a torch or get a wizard!

Using just the Player’s Handbook made life simpler because there were no debates about whether to allow X, Y or Z in the game. It wasn’t even an issue. But even more importantly it started players on the right foot by putting them in the driver’s seat. They didn’t need to ask me to approve anything. If they had the Player’s Handbook, they could make their own decisions. It put them in a West Marches mindset before they even started playing.

Every Square is 5 Feet
The idea that the Player’s Handbook was inviolate, that it was a bedrock you could trust and swear upon, started with character creation but it ran right into game play. Specifically, combat.

Unlike every previous version of D&D (and I mean every single previous version), 3rd Edition did not require judgment calls just to run a simple melee. You didn’t have to ask the GM whether you could get past the lizard man to attack the chief this round or who your fireball would hit. You could just look at the battle map, count the squares and make your move. You could open your PHB, read a page from the combat chapter, and know exactly what you could do and what to expect.

If you started with 3rd Edition or later, this may not seem like a big deal. Trust me, it was. Huge. It fundamentally transformed how D&D was played. As a GM, it meant I could set up the situation and then kick back and let the players decide how to tackle it. They didn’t have to ask me what they were allowed to do each round or hope I ruled in their favor.

Without this fundamental shift, West Marches would not have been possible. Or it would have been a much weaker shadow of itself. Players could never have felt that they were really in control of their own destiny if they had to play “mother may I” in every battle.

Rooting for the Players
Because the rules were well-documented and clear, there were lots of times when West Marches combats would become fascinating (albeit life-threatening) tactical puzzles for everyone at the table. We would all gaze down at the battle map (me included!) and ponder possible moves. Was there a way the barbarian could zig-zag through the kobold hordes and pounce on the shaman lurking in the back? (answer: yes, with clever manuevering he could avoid all but one attack-of-opportunity) Could a totally underpowered rogue anchor the line and prevent the bugbears from wrapping around and flanking the heavy fighters by just dodging like crazy instead of attacking? (answer: yes. By holding her ground in a fight that was out of her league she averted a total party kill at Zirak-zil) Could a staggered retreat get everyone out of the Hydra Cave in one piece? (answer: no. Really, really no)

I’m not talking about telling other players what to do (coaching sucks), I’m talking about analyzing the rules and the options after a player has declared a plan they want to try, but aren’t sure how it will play out mechanically. Someone would say “hmm, could I get to the shaman without getting clobbered by attacks-of-opportunity?” and invite the tactical huddle. These discussions levelled the playing field as far as rules knowledge went. Someone could be totally new to D&D but make reasonable decisions because if there were rules consequences they did not foresee everyone else could (politely) help them understand the odds. Again: informing, not coaching. Characters getting wiped out from making poor decisions was completely legit, but getting wiped out because you misunderstood the rules was not the danger I was trying to promote.

And when I say I would be chatting and trying to figure it out just like everyone else, I mean I really was. Once the combat was under way and the situation was pretty well understood, I often didn’t have any secrets. When a creature attacked, I would happily tell players exactly what its attack bonus was and roll the dice in the open. When a PC attacked, I told them the armor class they were trying to hit. I didn’t tell them actual hit points but I was pretty clear about how wounded something was. Most creatures in West Marches didn’t have weird or surprising abilities. You could generally look at the battle map and see what was up, so I could chat and analyze possible moves just like the other players did.

Being open about basic stats reinforced the idea that the dangers came from the monsters on the table, not from me. Player decisions and the forces in the world mattered, not my whims. When attacks were made, the players looked at the dice, not me. I could root for the players and even help them understand how the rules worked in their favor and it didn’t hurt the tension of the game even slightly. The combat rules of 3rd Edition D&D made that possible.

“Run the simulation in your head: who moved here, what did they build, what happened to them, and then what came next?”

Logic is the cornerstone of a sandbox. If things make sense — if there’s an internal consistency to what’s there and where things are — then players can make good decisions. Paying attention leads to good choices and good choices lead to success. Smart characters survive and flourish.

Without it, the environment is just a guessing game of what the GM decided to put around each corner. There is no way to make intelligent decisions. No fun and not fair.

So how do you make a world that makes sense? You build the history, because the past is what determines the present. Yep, this is where Microscope and West Marches intersect.

Long before I designed Microscope, when I made D&D worlds I would imagine layers of history one top of each other, jumping back and forth in my head to figure out what happened and how all of that led to what was here now. Or vice versa: something you create in the present makes you think “hmm, where did that come from”, so you dig back in history to establish its origin.

So when I sat down to make a simple little wilderness I named “West Marches” for some old school adventure, did I just draw some dungeons and pick critters from ye olde Monster Manual? No, first I figured out what was here before. Nothing super-detailed, just a starting concept for the world and a skeleton of history.

Layers of History
A skeleton of history is your friend. Even the simplest outline tells you what belongs in the world and what doesn’t, and that’s a welcome advantage when you’re trying to seed your wilderness with some danger and points of interest. That’s two benefits, if you’re keeping track: it doesn’t just make play better, it also makes it easier to populate your world.

Start with three or four independent layers of history. Just a simple concept, not too much detail. This is the local history of the region, but it might reflect larger world events. Or not. For West Marches, my layers looked like:

Duke drives back the goblins, settlements push into the wilderness and then fail
Dwarven exiles migrate here and build colonies far from home
Dark ages of the “Barrow Men”, scattered feudal lairds, clans, and primitive warrior-kings
Remnants of the god-wars, end of the sacred age, forgotten gods
That’s descending chronological order, with the most recent (and therefore most visible and known) events at the top, because that makes more sense to me. Farther down the list are things buried in the past, dwindling into myth and legend. The ruins from those elder days are the most worn down and picked over, while the remnants from the top are the most recent and fresh.

Each layer is completely independent and pretty far apart. The Barrow Men kings were mouldering bones in their mounds by the time the outcast dwarves of Black River came looking for hills to hew into new homes. Most importantly (for my plans for the West Marches), each of those layers of history left its imprint, but was also largely wiped away, letting the region revert almost entirely to wilderness by the time another period started.

More stuff happens in between those layers, but these are the big bookmarks, the key phases of the past that shaped this region.

Armed with just those very simple ideas, I can draw inspiration for what to put on the map and I know why things are the way they are. Now when I’m fleshing out the Rotting Oaks and I feel like an empty area needs some kind of interesting landmark, I can say to myself: “hmm, the settlers would not have gotten this far from Minol Valley, but the dwarves would have come through here when they built their second hall in the Lonely Hills, so a Dwarven marker stone or an isolated tomb of someone who died along the way would make sense.” Boom, problem solved.

I could even have multiple layers of history built one upon the other in a single location. I know there are goblins in Cradle Wood because they are the remnants that were pushed back by the Duke’s armies decades ago. The kings of the Barrow Men were here before, so the goblin lair could be an old ruined keep they found and infested. But in the caverns beneath it are the ancient holy caves that the warrior-kings feared and held sacred, remnants of the gods whose names men have forgotten. Now I’ve got a dungeon with three distinct strata of source material to work with. Yeah, that’s a very literal “layers” example, but you get the idea.

The action in each layer of history doesn’t have to be spread evenly across the map. Some events might sweep across the whole region, but others might only affect some areas while the rest remains untouched. The dwarves colonized a few key areas and delved deep there, but most of the West Marches have no dwarven ruins, though I could still put in dwarven treasure and relics that could be found nearby (you read Treasure Tells A Story, right?)

And just like Microscope, your history is not going to emerge all at once. You may start with a mere skeleton (and like I said, you should really try to start with something simple), but as you keep playing you’ll figure out more detail and nuance, which will inform what should be in the world and why. You might even think of new layers you want to add, or maybe you just explore what you’ve established more and more.

Game Master: Keeper of Secrets
Part of my old D&D philosophy was that, by definition, the GM knows more than the players. You create a bunch of stuff, but instead of telling the players, you hide it. You don’t lecture them about the world: they explore and figure things out. Or they don’t.

In most of my campaigns, I kept major secrets for *years and years*. When the players figured it out, their minds were understandably blown.

Even if the background I made never came out, knowing it changed my attitude as a GM. Things in the “present” felt more real, less like things I had just made up, because they were outgrowths of the hidden history. That changed my mannerisms in play. I knew what the players were seeing were just pieces of a larger puzzle, so I treated the setting with gravitas and respect.

I don’t think that’s the only way to GM, but for West Marches, where you want players to think and deduce, it’s a perfect fit. If secrets are hard to uncover, then when the players figure things out it’s a victory. They can be proud of their success just like winning a fight (q.v. finally discovering the Abbot’s hidden study after a half dozen different sorties missed it).

So all these layers of history you’ve made: *don’t tell the players about them*. Don’t even want them to find out. Which is a very appropriate attitude for all West Marches GMing, where as the GM you really should not really *want* anything. Let them explore and experience and figure it out, if they’re interested. If they’re not, that’s fine too, because that’s not what they’re there for. The world will still be a better, more consistent place for them to tempt fate and dare the unknown because of the hidden history

Lessons from West Marches - A guide to improving West Marches play, with 600+ games experience

# ---Introduction---

West Marches is a sandbox style of D&D campaign, created by Ben Robbins and popularized by Matt Colville, designed to facilitate player agency and reduce ‘mindless plot following’ by putting a large group of players (10+) in charge of where they go, what they do, and when they play. I've spent two years playing and/or moderating three different online West Marches campaigns, which matches the amount of time Robbins himself played his original campaign. Our community, /r/West_Marches/, actually got called out by Colville in [Running the Game #50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BZAjzUBYmU). We’ve fluctuated in size between 4 DMs / 25 Players and 10 DMs / 70 players over the years. (We aren't accepting new players right now.)

We’ve learned a tremendous amount about West Marches design since the early days, and I'm here to share it. This started as a reply to /u/Zentharius recent request for [West Marches advice]( https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comm ... _campaign/) but grew wildly out of control so quickly that I thought it deserved its own dedicated post.

Before you read any further, please go read [all seven of Ben Robbins’ West Marches articles]( http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/7 ... t-marches/) and watch [Colville’s description of the game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGAC-gBoX9k&) if you haven’t already. I won’t comment on every piece of West Marches design, so please assume that any topic I omitted went swimmingly (ex, Robins’ “Sharing Info” article perfectly mapped to my experiences, and was a great part of West Marches play).

I’m going to be referring to the three games I’ve been involved in as “1.0”, “2.0”, and “Project Red (PR)”. 1.0 is the first year-long campaign we ran, 2.0 was the second year-long campaign (that’s just now winding down) specifically designed to solve the issues of 1.0, and Project Red is a recently started (<20 games) splinter campaign composed of many players from the same community who’d become disillusioned with 2.0.

# ---NARRATIVE DESIGN---

Remember that the story of any game of D&D is going to be about your players and not your setting. Your world is a means to an end – a kickass Saturday night – and every bit of design and worldbuilding that doesn’t facilitate the hilarity, tension, and drama of D&D is a waste of everyone’s time. There is no rule, no piece of advice, more important than knowing your audience and catering to them. If you’re sitting at the table and nobody’s having fun – improvise, narratively or mechanically.

## Plot Complexity, Avoiding One Shots

Our community’s biggest complaint with 1.0 was that it felt like a series of one-shots. The game was deeply collaborative, with dozens of DMs leaving their own mark, but also deeply disjointed. It didn’t feel like anything we were doing was particularly important, most characters didn’t really have any sort of narrative arc, the zones felt like their own isolated worlds instead of parts of one cohesive world (think the difference between levels in Super Mario 64 and the levels in Bloodborne).

Ironically, 2.0 ended up swinging too far in the other direction, with so much world lore that one player really couldn’t remember or communicate it all, which impeded player collaboration and led groups to focus on particular zones instead of branching out and exploring.

Takeaway being – have lore, create a world with secrets and overarching player goals, but keep it light. Drop hints, puzzle pieces all over the map, but not lore dumps. Allow the players to slowly assemble the pieces of the story themselves through play – environmental storytelling is more important here than ever.

## Starting Missions

Whether or not you give opening ‘quests’ is a matter of taste. 1.0 had a ‘rumor’ system whereby new characters got very short cryptic descriptions that consistently lead to quests whenever you created a new character, and 2.0 had ‘bounty boards’ which were slightly more open ended – the company behind our expedition would offer GP rewards for discovering ‘points of interest’, securing resource stockpiles, killing specific monsters, ferrying supplies to other villages, etc.

Most preferred 2.0’s system because it allowed rewards to be tied to more freeform activities, and as you increase in level the gold - and therefore the quests themselves - faded into irrelevancy. It did leave new characters with less initial direction compared to 1.0, and gave established characters less reason to interact with newbies. (In 1.0, your quest wasn’t guaranteed to be level-appropriate – newbies would wander into town with incredibly important information without realizing it).

PR, instead, opened by having each DM run ‘scene setting’ games that were more conventionally scripted. Each was designed to introduce you to the various settings (islands, in this case) efficiently and dramatically, without relying on players randomly stumbling into whatever features you wanted them to care about – like pilot episodes for zones. In 2.0, we’d sometimes find keys long, long before finding their locks – so much so that players would forget they had the keys, and DMs would have to improvise instead of letting their prepped content lie barren for months.

## Addendum: DM-made missions

Don’t be afraid to create your own game topics and pick the players yourself in dramatic, emergency situations. Ex, “Jeremy accidentally unleased an elder evil, and it’s barreling toward town.” Though these obviously need to be rare, remember that DMs are in this for the fun too. If you’ve got some kickass linear mission idea that you’re itching to run but doesn’t really gel with the West Marches format, go for it. But remember to be self-aware – if the itch to run these conventional types of games are coming frequently, you might not enjoy West Marches DMing in the first place.

## Backstories

You’ve got to work harder than usual to incorporate your PCs into the world. Because each West Marches setting exists on an unexplored frontier, the vast majority of game time is going to be spent in places your characters have no prior attachment to. While it’s fine to ask your players to take the initiative and buy into your content, in my experience it’s easy for PCs to feel like strangers in their own game. We allowed backstories to be as lavish as any player wished, but by virtue of the setting (and the sheer number of players in our game) character history almost never came up in gameplay. As a player, that was consistently disappointing.

PR has made a conscious effort to make worldbuilding more player collaborative, and so far it’s worked out well. Connect initial rumors to backstory, set ground rules for tone, and keep that backstory more relevant as the game progresses. Ask your players what their character goals are, and set up opportunities to meet them. If the character you worked to tie in dies, that only expands the tragic impact of death. Care about their stories, and it’ll be all the easier for them to care about yours.

# ---Gameplay---

## Lethality

West Marches is commonly associated with emulating old school play, and that brings with it an association to gritty games with a high death count. One of the first questions I frequently get asked when talking about my West Marches experience is “how lethal is your game?”. That question has come to annoy me, because it misunderstands the shift from DM to Player agency West Marches is trying to achieve.

In a properly designed West Marches game, the DM should not know the likelihood of player death at the beginning of each session. If the result of the proposed session is a foregone conclusion at its outset, whether in or against their favor, then the content you’ve prepped isn’t diverse enough, or your threat signaling is poor.

Your PCs should always have the option to go somewhere relatively safe, very unsafe, and everywhere in between. That’s the point – they choose where to go, and what to risk. If all their choices are about equally likely to kill them, they didn’t really have a choice.

Further, it should be relatively easy for PCs to predict how dangerous their actions are, to facilitate these choices. D20 combat is already uncertain enough to provide tension in fights, you don’t need to add MORE tension on top of that by hiding your threats. This is why the world gets more dangerous the further you get from town, even though there’s no reason in-character that the world should have a strict difficulty curve – it makes risk predictable.
And yes, that means PCs should have relatively safe adventuring options out of town. There’s already a mechanical cost to that choice – your characters rewards (xp, gold, items) will be worse. The dangerous nature of the West Marches frontier does not mean all of your PC heroes are constantly in mortal danger, it means the same thing it means in most heroic media – incredibly dangerous to the average person, and dangerous enough to make success uncertain for the heroes.

## The Costs of Forcibly Lethal Games

If you remove the option for PCs to pursue less lethal adventures, your game will suffer for it, mechanically, socially, and thematically. I’m speaking from experience; in the first few months of 1.0, about 40% of all characters that left town died. And while that stat was later toned down, we still had deaths or TPKs on a fairly regular basis (every month or so?) through the middle half of 2.0. The difficulty that I thought would be a core engagement (I was looking forward to it!) turned out to be a surprisingly artificial tag-on to the experience.

Among the many, many problems we ran into playing this way:

* Making the majority of encounters high-lethality pigeonholes characters into incredibly narrow mechanical and thematic archetypes. No character can be silly, because being silly gets yourself AND other people killed. No character can be a sub-optimal build, because that reduces the group survival rate overall, and makes it less likely you’ll be picked for games. Everyone, no matter how bright and colorful, trended toward bitter and gritty over time because so many of your character’s friends ended up dead. A couple people quit because RPing in a world as dark as early West Marches was emotionally exhausting.

* Using encounters to telegraph zone difficulty in a universally lethal game often comes at the expense of the original explorers, which can disincentivize exploration. Exploring the unknown had a high risk of encountering something you couldn’t beat, or escape. 5e’s mechanics often make retreat the tactically worse option – once you realize the Iron Golem deals 4d6+5 with his punch, it frequently too late to run without leaving at least one person behind to die. In a normal game, this is to incentivize heroic behavior, but in West Marches it literally creates traps.

* A logically consistent world has no reason to forecast danger. A goblin, played optimally, will hide and ambush parties. They’ll cover their tracks, and do everything in their power to KEEP players from making informed choices. Anything resembling a high Int, high Cha antagonist becomes out of the question, because the moment the DMs run smart, powerful enemies “realistically” people start dying in ways they functionally couldn’t prevent – literal ‘rocks fall, everyone dies’ moments. So, in order to keep the game fun in a lethal-only environment, DMs are limited to only running unintelligent enemies, which further restricts the kind of challenges and engagements that fit into the setting. Robbins literally states that he never ran intelligent opposition in his campaign. No intelligent opposition means, for the most part, no urban adventures – which severely gimps charisma and made Rogues almost strictly worse than Wizards.

* Corner case rules arguments will become increasingly prevalent and important, because your PC’s life frequently rides on the result. Adjudicating surprise in particular was grueling for DMs. Worried about having fiat-control over the life and death of characters, our DMs felt pressured to only use RAW rulings and hesitate to make on the spot adjudications (ex, “sure, roll sleight of hand to try and steal the necromancer’s amulet” while in combat) to keep things ‘fair’. But when improvisation is discouraged for the sake of consistent challenge, you end up with less of the kind of creative player adaptations Robbins was trying to incentivize in the first place. Everything just trends down to the rules that currently exist – RAW combat.

* 5e just doesn’t have the depth to support combat as THAT much of the engagement structure – there isn’t a diverse enough set of optimal strategies. Adaptation was uncommon, because that requires good encounter design, not just a higher likelihood of failure. In two years of play, I’ve been surprised maybe twice by the effectiveness of a RAW build or combat strategy (How good Wall of Force is, and how strong Extended Spell Divine Soul Sorcerers are). Everything else was just the builds everyone reading this is probably already aware of – Great Weapon Master Barbarians, Hexblades, Polearm Masters, Sharpshooter Battlemaster Crossbow Experts, Fireball, etc (Note that the DMs banned multiclassing in our games). What players did to survive were, for the most part, what they were already doing - rolling tons of perception checks, buffing passives and setting watches, camping under Tiny Huts, and obliterating monsters with Pass-without-Trace fueled surprise rounds – because those strategies were already the best thing to do. The “intelligent decisions that determined our fate” were always the same decisions, which West Marches didn’t change, and it got boring fast. Maybe 3.5 (the rule set Robbins’ campaign was run under) had enough combat depth for alternative strategies, but in my case, the pressure of lethality didn’t make players creative. It made them rigid with paranoia because most of the time there wasn’t a better alternative to consider. We didn’t feel like clever adventurers, we felt like tedious cowards.

## West Marches Encounter Design Tips

A full writeup on encounter design is beyond the scope of this already enormous post, but I will add a few quick words of advice that’s specific to West Marches.

* Keep in mind what skill your encounter is supposed to be testing, and mix up tested skills. It’s really, really easy to make every encounter about life-or-death survival, and that gets boring. Skill checks are just as engaging as attack rolls.

* Recognize that ‘difficulty’ is actually a function of two variables: how difficult the task is to accomplish, and how much you’re punished for failing to accomplish it. Generally, D&D keeps the difficulty of tasks easy, but keeps things tense by making the punishment for failure enormous (character death). A game like Super Meat Boy, in contrast, has an enormously difficult task but virtually no punishment for failure. Play with these variables, whether talking about DCs and damage die or character life and death itself.

* Be more liberal in giving out monster stat blocks than you’re used to, and try to keep them consistent. Some of the most fun our players had was in creating these complicated, heist-like plans that hinged on information other parties had acquired. You need to provide players monster info to facilitate this.

## PC Information Access

In all games of D&D, deciding what information to provide your players up front and how much to hide away – to allow them the thrill of discovering it – is going to be a tradeoff. Players need information to make meaningful decisions; ‘Left corridor or identical right corridor?’ is not a choice, it’s a dice roll. West Marches is about letting your players make choices. However, marching into the unknown on the back of educated guesses is where most of the fun in exploration comes from. So how do you hit the sweet spot between giving players enough info to feel responsible for the outcomes of their choices while at the same time hiding enough to surprise them and make them feel like finding that info was an accomplishment?

Answer: you stuff the world full of clues. I mean every goddamn nook and cranny. In fact, to save on prep, it’ll likely be easier for you to just keep a list of the information you want the party to find and distribute it in response to player action, instead of deciding in advance where you want the clues to be. Never call for checks yourself (get in the habit of using Passive Perception!) so that any information the players find was a result of their choice to make a check. Spoon feed them nothing, but give them a spoonful each time they ask nicely. That way, every success will at least be a result from their choice to ask the right question.

If anyone reading this is grumbling, worried this removes too much challenge from play, I highly advise you go read the [original three-clue-rule article](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/11 ... -clue-rule), which spends much longer justifying the kind of liberal information access I’m advocating for.

Ultimately, testing players on their ability to acquire information is rarely interesting. There’s no cost to search and knowledge checks other than in and out of character time, so punishing players (who will naturally be risk averse) for failing to do ‘due diligence’ in scouting is just asking for a tedious, boring night stuffed with the phrase “I search for traps.” It’s also an increasingly untenable source of challenge as PC scrying magic increases in power beyond 7th level (Commune, Divination, and Augury are all castable as rituals).

## Miscommunication

If the PCs are ever doing something that seems flat-out idiotic to you, ask them why they’re doing what they’re doing. Ninety percent of the time, there’s just a DM/Player miscommunication. In D&D, since so much of the relevant information has to be conveyed verbally, it’s incredibly hard to distinguish circumstances where your speech was unclear from times your players weren’t paying attention. Compare this to board games like Chess, where all relevant information is unambiguous and constantly visible. When you run into these miscommunications and players request ‘take-backs’, acquiesce. West Marches is supposed to reward decision making, not listening comprehension; having PCs die because of an OoG mistake doesn’t make for interesting stories and fun nights.

Sidenote: This is why you should almost always use minis and battle maps in West Marches combat. In life or death situations, you want as much relevant information as possible to be constantly visible to the players.

## Threat Signaling

Effective threat signaling can be difficult in a game designed around heroically defeating monsters. If your players stumble into a dead scouting party, eviscerated by some feral monster, that tells them surprisingly little about the threat posed by the monsters unless they know the strength of the dead scouts. A big gash across the chest doesn’t tell you whether the victim took 1d6 or 5d6 slashing damage.

Furthermore, hunting dangerous creatures is often the exact reason your PCs are adventuring in the first place – if not to make the wilds safer, then to harvest XP and pelts. Out of character, most of your players are probably looking forward to combat by default. Your warning might be their invitation.

If you’re trying to keep the distinction between foreshadowing and threat signaling clear, so your players can make informed decisions about risk and benefit, you should allow your players access to a description of events in game terms. Ex, “It looks like this soldier took 20 lightning damage in a single blow”. While it does lessen immersion somewhat, it accents the strengths of the West Marches play by giving your PCs more precise information to work with. In particular, I find descriptions like this make excellent rewards for high knowledge checks; DC20 Medicine, Investigation, Survival, Arcana, Nature, etc. It gives a lot of these lesser used checks combat relevance by facilitating precise player planning.

Alternatively, you might want to consider de-coupling XP from defeating monsters entirely. Instead, you can have XP given out exclusively for the behaviors you want to promote: whether that’s AD&D’s system of rewarding XP equal to the amount of gold you looted, a more milestone-like system where players have specific narrative goals that reward XP (‘raise our banner atop the undead castle = 5k XP’), or anything else you can think of. The key lesson is that players will do what you reward them to do, intentionally or otherwise. If you want monsters to exclusively be hazards your players skillfully circumvent, don’t inherently tie rewards to their defeat.

## Exploration

A deep, crunchy exploration pillar is crucial to this style of play, since it gives players a sense of agency over the information they acquire. Don’t just tell players the prophecy of the crystal chalice, or the location of the black spire, let players decipher it from some scribblings on these cool rocks they keep finding. Exploration lets players feel responsible for what they know ~even though that’s somewhat of a fiction since the DM decides when, how, and what players are capable of learning~.

However, remember that ‘deep exploration’ is not synonymous with ‘overland hexcrawl’. We ran a hexcrawl in 1.0, but didn’t use hexes at all in 2.0 – opting instead for a less incremental movement system where we measured distance with the Roll20 pointer tool on precisely scaled maps. As discussions of the inevitable “3.0” begin, we’re considering ditching an overworld altogether in favor of a Metroidvania-inspired superdungeon.

Our two primary sources already diverge on how they fundamentally prep that overworld. Robbins pre-prepped every major location, while Colville saw the ability to prep nothing in advance of player requests as a major selling point of West Marches. Point being, there’s a lot of room for flexibility, and even after two years and hundreds of games, we’ve yet to pin down the ‘best’ travel system, so empower yourself to experiment and find what works for you.

Side Note: The 6th level spell ‘Wind Walk’ breaks hexcrawls in half. If you want your game to reach 11th level, you’re going to have to ban or house rule it.

## Random Encounters

Please, do not plan to use random encounters in every play session. Our DMs went above and beyond creating the most rich, complex, and interesting random encounter tables I’ve ever seen, and they STILL got tedious and boring. Outside of personal novelty, a pre-planned encounter will always accomplish your design goals better than a randomized outcome. Use random encounter tables for improvisation, not base structure. If your players veer off a direction you didn’t expect, that’s the time to pull out the tables.

Depending on how often your players go a direction you don’t expect and trigger random encounters, you might want to consider a “generative” table instead of a “distributive” table. Distributive tables are what you see most often – a big list of premade encounters you roll to select between. Generative tables, however, contain a list of foes, traits, and locations that you roll on separately and combine to create a unique encounter each time. For example, you could a list of creatures (goblins, wolves, bandits), motivations (sleep peacefully, rob you, run away from [roll another creature]), and locations (an abandoned fort, an open field, an overturned merchant caravan) and roll “Goblins running away from wolves in an open field” or “bandits sleeping on an overturned merchant caravan”. Generally speaking, if you find you’re having a hard time filling your random encounter tables with bespoke content, make a generative table for your zone instead. [Here’s a wonderful generative table example]( http://www.welshpiper.com/encounter-populations/) to get you started.

The DMG “Gritty Realism” rest rules improved our travel encounters immensely. Because, by default, PC recover all resources each night, unless you want to run multiple combats every in-game day (which is tedious and prevents players from accomplishing mission goals by wasting OoC time), the only way for a travel encounter to be tense is if it’s difficult enough to credibly threaten a PC’s life. In 1.0, we recognized this problem and did exactly that – made every random encounter lethal. But, frankly, the players hated it. You can’t keep high tension up forever, and it was a massive buff to the Long Rest classes (paladins, wizards) that had bigger power spikes. PR shifted to 8hr Short Rest and 7 day Long Rest while outside of dungeons, and it’s fantastic. You actually have to manage resources during travel now, which keeps travel encounters engaging and fun.

Ignore random encounters on the return trip; they made every session end on a wet fart instead of whatever awesome curated encounter or narrative revelation the players had discovered. (We dropped return trip encounters halfway though 1.0)

Lastly, never let the players know that they’re experiencing a random encounter – it’ll make the world feel more real, and if your encounter is well designed they won't be able to tell the difference.

## The Impartial Mindset

To Ben Robbins, one of the hallmarks of West Marches was the impartial mindset he saw as part-and-parcel to sandbox play, and... he was right. But it’s very easy to misinterpret that quote. What you need to be impartial to is the success or failure of players within the structure of the game you’ve built, and that is DIFFERENT from being impartial to how your world influences the success and failure of players. Whether they win needs to be their choice, but whether they have fun still comes down to your choices – you are a game designer, and that’s harder than just being a worldbuilder.

It’s impossible to create a world and abdicate responsibility for its results. You choose literally every detail of the world your friends are exploring; your influence over how fun your games are is, obviously, enormous. Their options are constrained by what you’ve placed in front of them. Moreover, the things you chose to populate your world with are not chosen randomly. You could have filled your world with an infinite amount of unfun things - you could have the players besieged by twenty dragons, or have the hexcrawl be empty in every direction – but you didn’t, and the reason you didn’t is either because you have opinions about what makes for a fun night of D&D, or you’re copying someone else’s ideas about what makes for a fun night of D&D. Either way, facilitating fun is the reason these tropes exist, and pretending you’re indifferent to facilitating fun is the quickest way possible to making a shitty game.

You are not an impartial computer, you are a game designer with goals. Aspiring to be like a computer accents D&D’s weakness instead of its strengths. You are worse than a computer at consistently tracking the state of an enormous sprawling world, you are worse at resolving complex randomized tables, and you are worse at impartially adjudicating the results of player decisions. 5e was designed to be [an improv toolset first and a tactics game second](https://youtu.be/EG6KZLcEp4M?t=513) – the ruleset [intentionally isn’t tight enough to facilitate perfect rules consistency](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... image0.png). That wiggle room exists to promote DM agency; to more flexibly let the DM steer and reward play they didn’t foresee when designing the encounter.

If you and your friends want that experience, where the DM is trying to be an impartial computer playing the world instead of an improvisational storyteller, I’d highly recommend looking into [text-based MUDs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD) instead of 5e. They were a major inspiration point for Robbins’ West Marches design.

## Level Cap and Zone Levels

We ran into the issue of high-level parties stomping low level content in 1.0 (even with reduced XP and GP rewards), so we tried to gate content with level ranges in 2.0, but that had several bad consequences as well:

* It reduced player agency over the level of risk they wanted their characters subject to. By marking a zone as, say, 'level 5-9', the DMs were making a subjective decision about what constitutes an engaging level of risk without player input. And while that's a very normal thing for a DM to do (they build the encounters after all), it runs counter to the West Marches goal of putting the players' lives in their own hands.

* It locked players out of storylines they were invested in. These zones need to last longer than a single player's journey from 3rd to 6th level, so people who cared deeply about, say, the Pinetop Goblin tribe could no longer visit them once they hit 7th level. We had players voluntarily asking not to level up; it was a mess.

We're pretty sure we've solved this problem for good in PR by instituting a *rising level range. At the outset of the game, we put a hard level cap at 5th level. Then, after a certain narrative event, *both the level cap and the minimum starting level of all characters will raise. Ex, we’ll shift from 1st - 5th level to 3rd - 7th level, and bump any players who haven’t reached level 3 yet up to that level.

The specific numbers can be tweaked to your liking, but the key is to keep the level range small enough that any player can join a game with any other player (~5 levels). A DM can’t prep a session that’s engaging to all party members if one player is 10 levels higher than another (which actually happened in 2.0!). This pressures DMs into only running games when the party is close in level, which functionally spreads the player base thin and reduces the number of games available to both low AND high level groups. With a rising level cap, players get stronger without growing further apart in level, which allows more PCs to play with one another - a unique selling point of West Marches. It also allows you to phase out low level content as the campaign progresses, and give the world a tighter narrative arc - you don’t have to worry about always having something for a 1st level character to do.

(Side note: the ‘evolving, recycled dungeons’ Robbins used to keep fresh low-level content never happened in any of our games, despite DMs prepping for it. Players just didn’t want to retread old ground in a game about expanding the frontier, even if that old ground has a fresh coat of paint.)

What events raise the level cap can be likewise tweaked. It could be as simple as “defeat the Dark Lord Tyrannus”, or it could be incorporated into the construction systems. PR has a “Hall of Heroes” that costs an enormous amount of GP and XP (any XP you earn once you hit the current level cap can be spent on construction), that raises max level, starting level, and the maximum XP you can earn in a game (we capped per-game XP to remove the incentive to make games go on longer).

# ---SOCIAL ISSUES---

## More Inter-player conflict

More players means a wider variety of both in-character and out-of-character perspectives, which sets the stage for more and longer arguments. Those awkward table moments where you capture a goblin and one guy wants to kill it while another wants to set it free will often get discussed between twelve people instead of five.

However you choose to resolve group conflicts like these, as the DM you must ensure that everyone is on the same page. Allowing players enough leeway to oppose each other’s missions gets into nebulous PvP territory very quickly – a Warlock might want to sacrifice the captive goblin to his god, while the Redemption Paladin might die to protect even an evil prisoner. Or, to give another example that actually happened in 2.0, players might reasonably disagree about whether or not denying sanctuary to a desperate, dying PC is an evil act. Morally grey situations can easily become the catalyst for player civil war. All the standard discourse about giving your PCs a reason to work together counts for double when your player count doubles.

Loot distribution also becomes more awkward. In a home game, you’re with each other player every session, so giving magic items to the player who can use it best is a no-brainer – giving a magic longword to the paladin ups the survival rate the wizard more than the wizard keeping the sword for himself. But in West Marches, that’s no longer true. If another party member gets an item, you two might never play together again. There are also half a dozen other players, who weren’t even a part of the game where the longsword was found, whose builds might make better use of that sword than anyone present. Are you all in this together, or do the spoils go exclusively to those who earn it? What does ‘earn it’ even mean in a persistent cooperative world, where one party can clear five levels of a dungeon and leave with nothing, only to have another party return, clear the sixth, and collect the entire treasure hoard?

Robbins’ answer is clear, “competition is what it’s all about”, but that quote could not be further from my experience. Good lord, did danger NOT unite. The rat race to maximize gold, loot, and xp was absolute poison to our ~50 person game, to such an extent that our players intentionally avoid such competition now. It’s too easy for players to collect rewards for reasons totally unrelated to player skill – even something as simple as setting up a game with the DM first can assure you a treasure trove. We’d have DMs getting dozens of messages literal seconds after posting their game availability to our community calendar. Spellcasters would hoard powerful martial weapons they weren’t proficient in, in the hopes that they could trade them for spellcaster items later. Magic loot was distributed randomly between players at the end of sessions, because literally everyone wanted every magic item to use as trade fodder. Players would pressure DMs to make games longer and longer so they could accomplish more, and therefore get more chances at XP and loot. Until we toned down lethality, removed the pressure on players to absolutely maximize your chances of survival, players were being as cutthroat with each other as they were with the world, which made everyone have a worse experience overall.

## The Player/DM Ratio

If you only want to DM for a maximum of five players at a time, you need to either cap your player count to five times the number of DMs, or make sure your players understand they aren’t going to play as frequently as they would in a home game. The West Marches scheduling style kind of assumes you’re a busy adult who’s unable to make a weekly commitment anyway.

Side Note: Dividing up which DMs run which parts of the world and letting DMs play in the parts they don’t run is fine, don’t let people dissuade you. We did it for years with minimal issues.

## Repeat game rules

We scrapped the “anti-clique” rules (that bar you from playing with the same people repeatedly) about midway through 1.0. They were overcomplicated to track and didn’t stop cliques from forming anyway. The parties that formed had more to do with when players were free during the average week than any kind of social bias. If only five of your twelve players are free Wednesday or Thursday night, the rule just keeps people from playing at all instead of promoting diverse parties.

We never had ‘de-facto home games’ pop up, in the way that Robbins and Colville were scared of. Even the tightest knit player pairs on the server, best friends, only played with each other about 50% of the time. I’m unconvinced this a game design issue; Robbins may have just had some personal issues with his group. We toyed with implementing a system that gives bonus xp for ‘party diversity’, but ran into enough wording problems, abuse cases, and tracking issues that we scrapped the idea.

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# ---Executive Summary---

* Build your world with a subtle story in mind, and let your players piece it together on their own. Make sure there’s enough mystery to keep players engaged and inquisitive after the dungeon crawls repeat. Remember that all prep, narrative and mechanical, is subject to change in pursuit of the experience you’re trying to craft.

* Don’t reduce ‘testing players’ to ‘testing player skill at the 5e combat system’. Allow players to improvise by rewarding creativity enough to make it the optimal strategy. When a player asks if they can shoot an arrow to bring down that chandelier, don’t groan – smile. They’re thinking about the world instead of their character sheet. Challenges don’t have to use the combat engine; skill checks are fun too.

* Prep both easy and hard content - do NOT make all content lethally hard. Use a carrot instead of a stick - players will challenge themselves in pursuit of rewards, and have only themselves to blame when they fail.

* Give your players LOTS of mechanical information - it's what they use to make choices, and feel responsible for their wins.

* Exploration doesn’t have to be a hexcrawl with random encounters. Gritty realism rest rules go a long way to making overland travel fun.

* Institute a rising level range around five levels wide, and slowly raise it as the campaign progresses.

* Be prepared for more inter-player conflict.

I hope you can use this as your handbook to a better West Marches experience, and if you read all of this, thank you for your time.

Uma campanha de RPG onde mais de dez jogadores decidem seus próprios objetivos, marcam as sessões, exploram o mundo e fazem relatos de seus feitos? Parece interessante ou um caos completo? Conheça aqui o modelo de campanha West Marches!


Era o começo dos anos 2000, e D&D 3ª edição havia sido lançado há pouco tempo. Ben Robbins, autor dos excelentes jogos Microscope e Kingdom, resolve criar um tipo de campanha diferente para lidar com os problemas do seu grupo de jogo. Em sua nova campanha, ele decide que os personagens serão aventureiros explorando os West Marches (Fronteiras Ocidentais ou do Oeste no bom e velho português) — a última fronteira selvagem de um reino civilizado e pacato.
A minha motivação […] era superar a apatia dos jogadores, que seguiam o plot de maneira automática.¹
Não é incomum que os jogadores fiquem apáticos à história, simplesmente “seguindo o plot” sem se importar demais com os acontecimentos. Então na campanha West Marches os jogadores marcariam as sessões e decidiriam o objetivo (ou missão) de cada sessão com antecedência (para que Ben tivesse tempo de se preparar).
Adaptar a agenda de jogo às vidas complexas dos adultos era um outro objetivo.¹
As muitas responsabilidades da vida adulta tornam quase impossível juntar as mesmas 5 ou 6 pessoas em um dia específico toda semana. Essa campanha teria entre 10 e 14 jogadores, mas em cada sessão só compareciam 4, 5 ou 6. Se um jogador específico não puder jogar essa semana, tudo bem. Se uma jogadora puder uma vez por semana e outra apenas uma vez no mês, não tem problema.
Fazer os jogadores decidirem para onde ir cortava a procrastinação do mestre (ou seja, a minha) pela raiz.¹
É difícil para o mestre encontrar motivação, concentração e foco para preparar todos os detalhes de um jogo. Também se gasta muito tempo preparando diversas possibilidades diferentes de viagem e exploração. Nesse tipo de campanha, os jogadores decidem explorar o Monastério Arruinado na quinta-feira dia 17 — dando ao mestre um objetivo claro e um prazo definido.
Esses problemas parecem familiares? Então pegue um par de boas botas de viagem e vamos explorar as Fronteiras Ocidentais!
Como funciona?
Afinal, o que diferencia uma campanha West Marches de qualquer outra campanha de RPG?
Premissas Básicas
· Não existe um dia específico para as sessões: cada uma é marcada pelos jogadores em acordo com o mestre (afinal, sem o mestre não tem jogo).
· O grupo de jogo conta com um grande número de jogadores (10, 15 ou mais), mas apenas alguns poucos estão presentes em cada sessão (entre 3 a 6, por exemplo).
· Não existe um plot que oriente a narrativa: os jogadores decidem para onde ir e o que desejam fazer. Essa campanha é uma verdadeira sandbox, sem missões dadas por NPCs. Não existe um metaplot — em seu lugar há um cenário coeso e com elementos interligados. Uma exploração levanta outras pistas que podem ser exploradas depois.
· Os jogadores compartilham informações de suas expedições e descobertas entre si em algum meio de comunicação (e-mails, grupos em redes sociais, fórum etc.). Idealmente eles criam e atualizam um mapa coletivo com as suas viagens e descobertas — o mestre não deve corrigir o mapa nem os seus relatos, mas deixar que os próprios jogadores se contestem ou contradigam.
Junto com os pertences do sacerdote-fungo na Caverna dos Cogumelos os jogadores encontram uma carta. Nela descobrem que existe um grupo de cultistas no Forte Arruinado no centro da Floresta Sussurrante. Depois da sessão, André envia uma mensagem no grupo da campanha convocando seus colegas a caçar os cultistas do Forte Arruinado na quinta-feira dia 17 de 7 horas. A mestra diz que tem um casamento nesse dia, mas pode na quarta-feira às 6. Outros 3 jogadores podem jogar nesse horário. Então na quarta-feira às 6 os aventureiros embarcam na jornada para explorar a desconhecida (e perigosa) Floresta Sussurrante em busca dos cultistas e seu Forte Arruinado. André também avisa no grupo que encontraram rastros de um urso-coruja nas colinas em frente à Caverna — seu grupo sabe que a besta é perigosa e evitou os seus rastros. Outro grupo, de nível mais alto, pode decidir caçar esse urso-coruja. Afinal, se ele ronda as colinas há tanto tempo deve ter acumulado um bom tesouro, não é?

O que será que se esconde no Forte Arruinado da Ilha Solitária?
Temas e Conceitos
Além das premissas básicas, uma campanha West Marches geralmente conta com os seguintes elementos:
· O foco da campanha é a exploração e interação com o ambiente selvagem.
· Cada sessão começa e termina em um lugar seguro (geralmente, “a cidade”).
· A cidade é um refúgio seguro onde os PJs descansam entre as aventuras — não um lugar onde acontecem aventuras. A ideia é que eles sejam impelidos a explorar o ambiente selvagem e correr riscos ao invés de se aventurar perto de casa.
· O mundo é alterado pelas ações dos personagens, e é sempre dinâmico. Dois grupos diferentes nunca terão a mesma experiência nem jogarão a mesma aventura. Se um grupo “limpa” uma masmorra, outro grupo até pode explorá-la novamente — mas provavelmente encontrarão novos inquilinos. Eliminaram todos os cultistas do Templo Arruinado? Talvez eles tenham se tornado fantasmas, ou um necromante tenha levantado os seus corpos, ou goblins da floresta tenham ocupado a área. Se um grupo derruba a igreja arruinada, ela continua desmoronada.

Os ambientes mudam e podem ser reaproveitados, facilitando o trabalho do mestre e mantendo a coerência ficcional
· O cenário é consistente e ameaçador, dividido entre partes diferentes, cada uma com suas próprias características e nível de ameaça. As Colinas Douradas são cheias de minérios valiosos, violentamente protegidos por goblins selvagens. A Floresta Sussurrante é tranquila durante o dia — mas quando a noite cai os fantasmas se levantam. As Montanhas Azuis guardam antigas fortalezas anãs protegidas por ameaças e demônios surgidos das profundezas.
· Todas as áreas incluem perigos ou obstáculos inesperados acima do seu nível de ameaça típico. Eles podem ser evitados ao encontrá-los, sendo enfrentados pelo mesmo grupo posteriormente ou por outras pessoas mais bem habilitadas. Durante a viagem nas Colinas, os personagens ouvem uivos — é noite de lua cheia. Eles se escondem e evitam os lobisomens, mas relatam a sua existência na cidade. Um outro grupo, de nível mais alto ou portando armas de prata, resolve caçar os lobisomens. Ben Robbins colocava “Salas de Tesouro” contendo ameaças de níveis mais altos em alguns lugares, trancadas ou protegidas por obstáculos complicados. Os seus perigos eram terríveis, mas suas recompensas também. Na caverna dos goblins existe uma sala estranha de pedra, guardada por um golem imune a magia que destruiria grupos de nível baixo. Uma charada ou enigma protege uma porta negra, e o primeiro grupo que a encontra não tem as informações necessárias para abri-la.
· Existe uma certa competitividade amigável, que encoraja os jogadores a permanecer no jogo. O seu grupo não conseguiu explorar toda a masmorra? Marque uma outra sessão para explorá-la (ou outra pessoa pode acabar fazendo isso). Um outro grupo fugiu de lobisomens? Monte uma expedição para acabar com essa ameaça e contar vantagem. Quando um grupo se junta para uma determinada sessão, os seus personagens integrantes terão níveis diferentes e tesouros variados.
· Os personagens evoluem de maneira independente e assíncrona — um personagem de nível alto pode acompanhar outros de nível mais baixo em uma missão simples, agindo como um mentor. Um grupo de nível alto pode escoltar um PJ de nível baixo e protegê-lo em uma missão importante.
· O fluxo de informação entre os jogadores é extremamente importante: encoraje (ou suborne) os jogadores a escrever relatos da exploração. Ofereça Inspiração, poções de cura ou algum outro recurso por cada relato escrito — quanto mais informação os jogadores compartilham, mais alcance terão os seus ganchos de aventura. Além disso, escrever (e ler) os relatos mantém os jogadores conectados ao jogo e os incita a participar da comunidade. Um grupo encontra o diário do abade, decorado com uma poesia. Outro grupo nota que essa poesia menciona uma pessoa idêntica à estátua na biblioteca do antigo monastério por onde passaram. Será que existe uma passagem secreta? Será que a estátua é um celestial petrificado? O que acontece quando a “luz do dia brilhar sobre a auréola pétrea”? Junte um grupo e vá lá descobrir!

Tesouros impressionantes se escondem atrás de passagens antes ocultas ou atrás de guardiões poderosos
E então?
Essas são as ideias gerais por trás de campanhas West Marches ­– um grande grupo rotativo de jogadores que definem seus próprios objetivos e marcam as sessões. Eles exploram regiões selvagens, montam um mapa coletivo e trocam informações entre si. Mas não existe uma única maneira correta de jogar West Marches — o seu jogo pode usar quantos elementos desse modelo você quiser e se sentir confortável. Escolha e use os elementos que quiser — talvez o seu grande grupo de 20 pessoas se aventure em uma única metrópole, sempre retornando a uma taverna. Talvez sejam exploradores marítimos, entrando em barcos para explorar ilhas e retornando ao porto.

The West Marches, Running the Game