The West Marches | Running the Game
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Channel: Matthew Colville
Views: 517,803
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Length: 30min 39sec (1839 seconds)
Published: Sun Feb 12 2017
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I've found my next game idea. I've been playing with ~3 separate groups the last two years or so and I've kept their contact info. I think having 10-14 players decide when they play on their own would be awesome, although it seems like the DM would have the majority of their work front loaded coming up with the terrain and surrounding areas.
TFW you don't click a link in the doobly-doo.
In all seriousness, an excellent video. I had never heard of the West Marches before, but now I'm determined to incorporate it.
I run one of these games at the moment on Fantasy Grounds. I have about 20 active players who range from 3 sessions per week to once per month.
My game area is loosely based on Katashaka in the Forgotten Realms world. It's bigger than the Sword Coast.
Things I have learned from the experience.
Creating the world was a massive task, but it was made a lot easier by having extremely good random encounter tables. Check these out https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw1kyeBlBRE9RHJxdnRDN201VzA/view . Mine are quite different now but I started with these about 2 years ago and just kept building. These tables create most of the adventures now. My tables now also create plots, quests, random dungeon maps and decorate the rooms according to the theme of the dungeon. And all I roll is 1d6. The information found in r/BehindTheTables is super useful for fleshing things out. I'll never stop adding to my tables.
Mixed group levels are great fun and promote creative play. When your wizard is level 5 and the fighter is level 2 you'll find that tank sitting at the back while the caster dodge-tanks. Lower level melee characters use alternate skills to perform in combat and find new ways to pay their characters.
Players who rely on researching things in town really struggle with the concept. It's very hard for them to get out of the mindset of going to a sage or library and looking for information.
Similarly when rolling checks for things like arcana and religion and dealing with totally foreign concepts that the players have absolutely no idea about some players struggle to understand that no matter how high you roll if something has never been in a book or taught in a school back home you won't know anything about that temple/deity/rune/symbol.
Brutality is excellent. My players expect death - and we had death early. This hasn't made them play like timid children, but they accept their fate more easily that in other games. It's the frontier, people get eaten by bears.
Locked doors are great. The players love to come back for revenge, to finish something off, or to recover a body. Having something stop them and not falling into the horrible trap of "if you keep picking the lock for long enough it'll open" really works for starting new sessions.
If your random tables are good you don't need to create hooks. See the first point. We're 2 months in and the players have a choice of about 40+ potential things to investigate.
Obsidian Portal is great for campaign tracking and event planning from the players. It has map sections, a calendar, and forums. My players have even created a wiki that they update and a morgue for all the dead. Discord is awesome for day to day stuff - it keeps everyone engaged.
Be very strict on people knowing how their character works. Because I play on Fantasy Grounds I insist that every effect/attack/spell/ability is set up. Our rule is "if it's not set up, it doesn't work". Playing with mixed levels and classes and people each week could cause things to get bogged down and make combat slow and tedious. Our group avoids this by using what I just mentioned and a 10 second announce action period at the start of their turn. Even 7 player sessions have fast action packed combat.
Don't let them solve everything. It's perfectly fine to leave things unexplained. You can come back to it another time and link plots to it and they'll think you're a genius with your multi-level storytelling. I love hearing "oh this relates to that - I get it now!", when I had no idea it would in the first place.
Flavour your areas by using monster types. You can use the same random encounter tables (mine now roll 20 different creatures for each result and i choose a result in the level range of the zone based on survival checks) for all the forests for example - but in Forest X weight goblin results more heavily than in Forest Y which has kobolds. The players work it out and it really adds an natural ecology to the regions. Our local swamp randomly produced dragons - and the players are very wary of any shadows passing overhead when they are even withing 2 hexes of the swamp.
For one shots of 3-5 hours with 6 players you can usually fit in 3-4 combat encounters and 3-4 RP/problem solving encounters. Focus on the adventures leaving town and don't play any random encounters when heading back to town.
Steal adventures from old systems, editions and drop them into your world. There are so many out there - you don't have to write it all yourself and some f the old school modules have ideas people don't use much anymore. My players just went through a horrific acid trap filled dungeon of death and loved it so much they went there three times.
I could make this an even bigger wall. If anyone wants advice on running one of these types of games feel free to ask.
I could only dream of having so many players.
There's a lot of good ideas here though all the same. Definitely letting my players trade in session write-ups for inspiration. This also goes back to something he mentions in his earlier videos about having the players give recaps instead of the DM, so the DM can see what information and experiences stuck with the players and what slid off.
I also think this is a brilliant way to run a sandbox style campaign. It lends itself well to the hook of running/being members in an adventurers guild, like Acq. Inc. picking up "new interns" every other PAX or so. It would also be a brilliant way to manage a high school or college tabletop club, which is where many people make their first forays into the hobby.
Im running into the issue of DM Burnout and the feeling that I am the only one who is corralling my players to the table. Im ending my current game after the next session and am looking for a new way to get my players invested in the game. I have 6 people in my normal campaign because people keep canceling (be it ahead of time or last minute) so sometimes i have 3 adventurers or a full 6. This system seems like a good medium
Where I am, I have a lot of people who want to dip their feet into DnD, but cant commit to a lot of games. This may satisfy my desire for different one shots and an overarching campaign!
Every single Matt Colville video makes me feel more enlightened and prepared as a DM. Bless this man.
/u/silent0siris runs one of these in RollPlay's The West Marches. It's phenomenal.
Now I want to try to run this, but at the same time, it sounds ambitious.
I could see this being a really fun online-reddit/discord based game
I have two comments:
1) I kind of want to try this to solve both a "too many players" problem and a "not enough players" problem. (The problem I have isn't really a pure "not enough players" problem, it's a "I'm in this large friend group of RPG nerds and yet I'm only ever in the same game as the handful that can actually get together at the same time as me every week" problem.)
2) Breaking from the point of the subreddit, this sounds like it would be amazing for a Shadowrun campaign.