Players for a West Marches Game

One of the hallmarks of a West Marches campaign is a large pool of players, more than can fit at a table at one time. In an optimal world, the players get together as groups and schedule the games and ask the DM to be there. This works great in high school or college (particularly college), but after that it gets a bit more dicey.

What I am finding is that the game day is set based upon when the DM can be available and then players who can show up to play. A certain number of players can usually make every game with an equal number being more sporadic. The sporadic players will stick with the game until their character start falling behind in experience and then they drop out entirely.

This seems to lead towards a more standard gaming group, but I think it has greater flexibility in the way of bringing in new players. There is motivation to keep making games to avoid falling behind and with a more gygaxian naturalism, there is always the chance that high level PCs may die and restart, keeping overall levels relatively close (in theory anyways).

[Note: by "gygaxian naturalism" I mean the world is a somewhat naturalistic environment and what "should" be there actually is, regardless of level-appropriateness. So if your 5th level party wanders into a pride of dire lions, they better get out of there quick before they become kitty kibble. The opposite of this is a series of level appropriate encounters that gradually rise in difficulty to match the PCs increasing capabilities, as you see advocated in 3.x and 4E D&D.]

Now, one of the downsides to this is that sometimes you don't have a lot of players if real life conspires that way. In my Southern Reaches game, I have 10 players in my pool of players, but only regularly see six of them at the moment. In the Verden game, we started with six players and last session only had three. The question becomes, "Do I need to recruit more players or let it ride as-is?" The answer seems to be, "It depends."

For the Southern Reaches game, I don't think I need to recruit more players, partly because I still have six, but also because the reasons keeping the other players away are temporary and will be ending in the next month or so. For the Verden game, the DM is asking us if we know more players and I think he is right to do so. Three is a difficult number of characters to adventure with, especially if we do not have access to hirelings to supplement our numbers. The missing three players will likely be back, but it is much easier to run with a few more players and would improve our confidence that the game will regularly make (especially as I tend to be unavoidably late).

Discussions on Campaign Growth

There was no Southern Reaches game run this past weekend as I needed some time to work on some other stuff, flesh out some more of the map, and generally play a bit of catch up with myself. Running two monthly games, a weekly game, and playing in two others, plus a reading club and trying to spend more time with my wife (whose schedule has also blossomed) is stretching me a bit thin.

When fleshing out the large(r) scale map (1 hex = 15 miles), I realized I need more room. And a plan. A plan would help tremendously. So I have mapped out much more space to the south of the Table Map, I may still fiddle with it as I'm not entirely satisfied with it. I think I need to double it in size (at least) and redraw some of the locations, particularly the summer pastures for the aurochs, which don't feel far enough away for me. Plus, the encounter tables need some serious re-working, preferably including an night and day option.

I found an interesting way to speed up some of the traditional dungeon design. There is a site producing new geomorphs which are quite good. If I can find the link again I'll post it. It should do very well for what I want to do with The Cave and the Labyrinth of Qual deep underneath it.

We've also had a small spat of drama as to play styles, which I think I accidentally fuelled by posting my adventure logs here. Su Bel and Khallas keeping silent about the Terrace of Fallen Horses caused some friction amongst the players. This came from a disconnect in communication about game expectations, including my own. I think I've nudged things enough to get the group back on track, but we'll have to wait and see.

As a result of all this, I have rethought my position about competition in a West Marches-style game. If you are going to allow/foster this kind of competition, you need to separate the groups a bit and/or provide "private" areas for each faction to explore and one to share together. Or, keep everything separate and don't post about what the different groups are doing until they learn in game. This last part does me no good as DM and blogger. Part of the reason I'm posting the adventure logs is so I have a record of what happened in game. This helps greatly when the PCs avaoid an area for a while and then return and I have to remember how things were and why and then update form that for the intervening time.

Which leads to another topic: bandits. These are a staple of adventure games and are mentioned in most of the online literature dealing with West Marches-style games. However, I can't see a logical reason for bandits to exist in the Southern Reaches. Bandits need victims to prey on and there just aren't any in the wilderness. Plus, that place is dangerous, yo!

So I may have to manufacture something. Maybe they appear when the auroch herds return for the winter and disreputable individuals start raiding the herds from whichever humanoids are ranching them (probably gnolls as I like them as monsters, but I'm doing a lot with them in my Naze Valley Rangers game, so maybe not). There's been trouble in the mines with some collapses, so the Woodcutter's Camp will be populated the next time the PCs go by it as there is a need for new timber. There's also the Tower of Raan which the players have never systematically looked for (it's in the Edgewood, but they haven't been there yet). I don't know, maybe I'm over thinking it.

That's it for today, more on Wednesday. See you then!

Thinking about Things Western Marches

Portions of this are cut-and-pasted from my other blog, Imperial Dispatches. I'm duplicating it here and then adding, as this is where I'm talking about things OSR-related.

If you read the April 9 post, I talk about possibly making it a Western Marches style game. I had a chance to try that out last Saturday with my Champions group using the Pathfinder RPG and have some more data points to consider.

1. My 4E world, dangerous frontier though it is, is actually too settled to make this work the way it is supposed to. There is supposed to be ONE safe point (the town/city) and everything else is supposed to be wilderness with no really safe places to end a session but the town/city.
2. The only adventurers are supposed to be the PCs - no NPC adventurers at all. Goldland Crossing is mostly populated with adventurers (active or failed), which is the direct opposite.

Now I can see an easy way to work around Point 1 - just adjust the scale, drop a few fiefs from the map, and go from their. But I like the world the way it is, really and Point 2 is the really killer. There is just no way for the PCs to be the only adventurers with the campaign background. Plus, I'm planning on setting up a competing adventuring group as frienemies. (Shh! Don't tell them.) So what I'm really saying is: my Goldland Crossing Campaign will not become a pure Western Reaches-style campaign, but I may borrow elements from it.

By the way, the player of the eponymous bugbear has dropped out of the group for personal (drama) reasons, so I've changed the name of the campaign Goldland Crossing Campaign from Here Be Bugbears. Le sigh.

Southern Reaches
So Saturday (April 10), I ran a Western Marches style game in the Pathfinder RPG, which I call my Southern Reaches campaign. I also included the Resolve Points system discussed by Penny Arcade (scroll down to Gabe's post). The resolve tokens do a good job of illustrating how far the PCs can travel in a day without invoking any cumbersome math to slow things down: move a hex=spend a token, run away=spend another token. I plan on querying the PA guys for details on what else they envisioned. If they answer, I'll share it here.

Putting a token on the map showing where the PCs are (or think they are) and making them move it does a good job of focusing their attention on where they're going and making decisions rather than passively waiting for the DM to tell them when they arrive at an encounter. Did I mention I drew out the table-map on a 2 ftx3 ft vinyl battlemap? I did. Made several things easier:

1. All the players could clearly see the map.
2. I could write cryptic descriptors in several places, big enough to be read.
3. The players could annotate the map as well (which they did).
4. Easy to keep track of while still being portable.

I also did something I haven't done in ages - rolled for random encounters. I created location-specific encounter tables to provide a feel for each area. Right now I have one for the Edgewood (BTW, Thank you to Gabe of PA for putting that on his map - I stole it.) and a different one for the plains. I still need to make one for the (unnamed) hills south of Edgewood, the area around 3 Peaks, and the Spiderwood (in case the players go there - it will have many giant spiders and spider-based monsters). There are two small clusters of hills on the map and I haven't decided if I want specific encounter tables for them, but I'm fairly certain I will create them - I know whats there.

(Ah! I just remembered to add cross-region entries to the encounter tables. Need to do that today while I'm thinking about it. In fact...done!)

My next step is to create a forum of some sort for players to log onto and plan future expeditions. I need to add some cryptic remarks in the spellbook they found (hinting at other adventure locales) and post a copy of the map they can clearly see online to whet their appetite. Part of the point is to get the players to decide where they want their characters to explore ahead of time so I know what to have ready and to keep them thinking about the game, increasing their buy-in and excitement. Plus, I can recruit new players and point them there to join in the discussions. I'm thinking of either getting an Ascended membership on Obsidian Portal, which allows me to set up forums for each campaign, or setting up something through Google Wave, which I have an account with but haven't had a reason to use. While Google Wave is free, Obsidian Portal has a built in wiki, which is very handy for preserving information about a campaign.

Then there is the issue of time. Right now I run the following:

1. A monthly Hero System game on the 2nd Saturday of each month (either Champions, Fantasy Hero [no OP site yet due to hiatus], or Pulp Hero)
2. A monthly Pathfinder game on the 4th Saturday of each month (Naze Valley Rangers)
   
3. A weekly D&D 4E game on Fridays (theoretically - see other posts on this blog)
   

I also play in D&D Encounters on Wednesdays from 6:00-8:00 PM.

The question is "Do I have to drop one (or more) of these to fit in my Southern Reaches game and still stay married?"

No Game Today

Due to no positive RSVPs, my 4E game will not run this evening. We'll try again next week.

In the meantime, I've run across the Western Marches as a campaign style and I am very intrigued by it. It is very similar to what I was envisioning, but even more so. I going to give some thought to making that the implicit definition of the game, with the exception of game scheduling. My schedule as DM is limited, but I can set a specified time and run for whoever shows up. While I can do it, I can see 4E combat being time critical to making this work.

This bears some serious thinking about.