This piece has really resonated with me and several of my friends. We've been kicking around the idea of getting a game like this up and running. I'm curious to know if anyone else has had experience with this style of play. What worked well and what didn't? Did you step in any pitfalls that we could avoid with your wisdom?
I've played in a couple campaigns that tried this. You're usually going to have several people that are consistent enough that they want to play in every session, and you'll have some people that can only make it sometimes. This sometimes leads to level disparities between groups, depending on how you manage XP. Also, I've noticed that over time the attendance actually settles down to make it almost indistinguishable from a regularly scheduled campaign, where the same group of people are always available and can schedule games consistently.
One other thing I've noticed about this style of play is that you have to be very careful with how you plan out each session. Since the idea is that you return to town between every session, it's gets pretty tedious if you've created a huge dungeon for the party to explore, and each session the group only has time to explore three or four rooms, before having to retreat to town and return next time. It's probably more thematic, and more fun, to build encounters so that its feasible that a group can achieve an objective during a single session. For instance, let's say the plot hook is to find a missing person. It won't be much fun if it'll take multiple sessions of investigating to find that person, because the group that decided to go out looking might be very different from the group that actually solves the mystery. It's a bummer for the original group because they may never find out what happened, or at least they missed out on the pivotal discovery, and a little bit of a bummer for the group that solves it, since they weren't necessarily invested in the quest in the first place.
I'm currently playing in a West Marches campaign with quite a few friends and it's a lot of fun. There are two main DMs who occasionally run double DM games, but mostly run them separately. It honestly reminds me a lot of survival mode in Fallout, because we have to keep track of how much equipment we can carry (only 5 times our strength score), how many days of rations we have, and the most interesting part is mapping the land. Every player is given a hex grid and its up to us to write down what the DM(s) describe as a means of mapping the new territory. Everyone's map is different since most people explore different places, and whenever different people from different groups play the first thing we do is copy down info from each other's maps. Our characters interact so well (we're all theatre students so acting in character is always expected) and we all feel invested in the people we adventure with.
One thing that I don't really enjoy about it is that there is not much of a story to it. It's just a huge bunch of adventurers running around trying to find loot and stuff and not much of an overarching conflict. Recently a group I was with encountered death knight killing an elf druid we knew from a nearby village of wood elves over something about a key and these blue gems keep popping up all over the place, so maybe there's inklings of a story being suggested, but it's mostly grab friends, explore for a while, maybe find some interesting stuff, kill some bad guys, get some loot, and go back to the quest hub. The two DMs also have very different opinions on certain rules and enforce them differently (which one of them said he would talk to the other about), so that can be bothersome.
All in all, I think West Marches is a great way to play D&D if you have a lot of people who want to play, because you cannot run a game for all of them at once. It is extremely open-ended and allows you as a DM to come up with lots of different locations of interest and constantly play with new people, while as a player you get a chance to take new risks by not being bound to a story arc and feel some semblance of control when you decide to check out that unexplored hex. These things are also its weaknesses. A good D&D group has got to have good chemistry to work well together (in my opinion), and since West Marches implies you're usually playing with different people all the time, not really giving you a chance to really bond as comrades. You can always ask to adventure with them, of course, but my DMs imposed a rule where you cannot go on an adventure with the same person twice (which actually hasn't been very much enforced, now that I think about it).
I really enjoy it, but I also prefer standard D&D with a set party and story arc.
Thanks to you both for sharing your thoughts and experiences. Our group has been working on codifying solutions to some of the challenges you both shared. We are planning on setting the limit on sessions at two before a forced return to town. We can't think of an elegant way to do the return, but we decided the perfect shouldn't get in the way of the good (contrivances and all). We are also saying that two players can't adventure together more than twice in a row. We sense that the game made evolves from a large player driven group to a much smaller DM driven group and are trying to come up with rules to avoid that.
Most of the folks involved are OK with a story–lite game, because this is being viewed as more social and informal, kind of like pick up basketball at the gym. For folks who want to dig more into a deep narrative driven game they know that a more traditional campaign would be the way to go.
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Back in February, Matt Colville did a segment on a West Marches style campaign.
The YouTube video can be found Here
This piece has really resonated with me and several of my friends. We've been kicking around the idea of getting a game like this up and running. I'm curious to know if anyone else has had experience with this style of play. What worked well and what didn't? Did you step in any pitfalls that we could avoid with your wisdom?
I've played in a couple campaigns that tried this. You're usually going to have several people that are consistent enough that they want to play in every session, and you'll have some people that can only make it sometimes. This sometimes leads to level disparities between groups, depending on how you manage XP. Also, I've noticed that over time the attendance actually settles down to make it almost indistinguishable from a regularly scheduled campaign, where the same group of people are always available and can schedule games consistently.
One other thing I've noticed about this style of play is that you have to be very careful with how you plan out each session. Since the idea is that you return to town between every session, it's gets pretty tedious if you've created a huge dungeon for the party to explore, and each session the group only has time to explore three or four rooms, before having to retreat to town and return next time. It's probably more thematic, and more fun, to build encounters so that its feasible that a group can achieve an objective during a single session. For instance, let's say the plot hook is to find a missing person. It won't be much fun if it'll take multiple sessions of investigating to find that person, because the group that decided to go out looking might be very different from the group that actually solves the mystery. It's a bummer for the original group because they may never find out what happened, or at least they missed out on the pivotal discovery, and a little bit of a bummer for the group that solves it, since they weren't necessarily invested in the quest in the first place.
I'm currently playing in a West Marches campaign with quite a few friends and it's a lot of fun. There are two main DMs who occasionally run double DM games, but mostly run them separately. It honestly reminds me a lot of survival mode in Fallout, because we have to keep track of how much equipment we can carry (only 5 times our strength score), how many days of rations we have, and the most interesting part is mapping the land. Every player is given a hex grid and its up to us to write down what the DM(s) describe as a means of mapping the new territory. Everyone's map is different since most people explore different places, and whenever different people from different groups play the first thing we do is copy down info from each other's maps. Our characters interact so well (we're all theatre students so acting in character is always expected) and we all feel invested in the people we adventure with.
One thing that I don't really enjoy about it is that there is not much of a story to it. It's just a huge bunch of adventurers running around trying to find loot and stuff and not much of an overarching conflict. Recently a group I was with encountered death knight killing an elf druid we knew from a nearby village of wood elves over something about a key and these blue gems keep popping up all over the place, so maybe there's inklings of a story being suggested, but it's mostly grab friends, explore for a while, maybe find some interesting stuff, kill some bad guys, get some loot, and go back to the quest hub. The two DMs also have very different opinions on certain rules and enforce them differently (which one of them said he would talk to the other about), so that can be bothersome.
All in all, I think West Marches is a great way to play D&D if you have a lot of people who want to play, because you cannot run a game for all of them at once. It is extremely open-ended and allows you as a DM to come up with lots of different locations of interest and constantly play with new people, while as a player you get a chance to take new risks by not being bound to a story arc and feel some semblance of control when you decide to check out that unexplored hex. These things are also its weaknesses. A good D&D group has got to have good chemistry to work well together (in my opinion), and since West Marches implies you're usually playing with different people all the time, not really giving you a chance to really bond as comrades. You can always ask to adventure with them, of course, but my DMs imposed a rule where you cannot go on an adventure with the same person twice (which actually hasn't been very much enforced, now that I think about it).
I really enjoy it, but I also prefer standard D&D with a set party and story arc.
Thanks to you both for sharing your thoughts and experiences. Our group has been working on codifying solutions to some of the challenges you both shared. We are planning on setting the limit on sessions at two before a forced return to town. We can't think of an elegant way to do the return, but we decided the perfect shouldn't get in the way of the good (contrivances and all). We are also saying that two players can't adventure together more than twice in a row. We sense that the game made evolves from a large player driven group to a much smaller DM driven group and are trying to come up with rules to avoid that.
Most of the folks involved are OK with a story–lite game, because this is being viewed as more social and informal, kind of like pick up basketball at the gym. For folks who want to dig more into a deep narrative driven game they know that a more traditional campaign would be the way to go.