The Seven Elements of West Marches Play

By JimmiWazEre

Opinionated tabletop gaming chap

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TL;DR:

West Marches campaigns hand more responsibility to the players: no scripted plot, no encounter balance, and strict timekeeping. The GM builds a world of rumours, dangers, and discoveries, while the players organise sessions, keep records, and decide where to explore.

Introduction

Ahoy there. Apologies if I’m a little late with this post, and if the writing’s a little more concise than normal. I’ve got the dreaded COVID lurgy and thinking straight is a bit of a mission right now :D

Today’s post is inspired by two things. Firstly, Critical Role season 4, and the perhaps clumsy(?) mention that it will be in West Marches style, and secondly, that maybe the West Marches style will suit my upcoming Pirate Borg campaign. We’ll see, but these are my thoughts so far.

Why Do A West March Style Game?

The West Marches is a style of TTRPG gameplay designed by Ben Robbins, and written up in 2007 on his Ars Ludi blog. The idea was that Robbins was burnt out as a GM, and bored of that mid campaign settlement where the players have lost some degree of enthusiasm for the ‘plot’ and are pretty much just going through the motions of turning up and rolling dice, then going home again. Rinsing and repeating each week.

Robbins wanted more, so based on his interpretation of the original 1970s playstyle, he coined/rediscovered/invented/reimagined a new/old style of play; the West Marches. The goals were threefold:

1. More player engagement, players who actually cared about the game world and wanted to discover it.

2. Less GM burnout from things like manufacturing and forcing complicated arching plots, or weaving in player backstories all while having to constantly juggle the pressure of not accidentally killing the players and cutting their stories short.

3. Fairer distribution of meta game responsibilities so that things like arranging dates and times of play, and sharing things like after session reports and maps was a responsibility for the players rather than the GM.

4. Robbins had more players than table space, and he wanted to find a way to allow them all to share the same instance of the game world.

The Key Principles of West Marches

1) No Predefined Macro Level Plot

West Marches games are unapologetically sandbox in style. That means that the GM has absolutely zero responsibility for attempting to craft a narrative story with character arcs.

Instead, the story of the game is told in retrospect and is crafted by the player’s choices, and the judgements of the dice.

None of this is to say that that the GM’s world shouldn’t have a history though - craft a world to your heart’s content - just don’t craft a series of future events designed to happen at designated points in the upcoming campaign. For example, you may have a big bad evil guy, but you must not have plans to bring him out on the final session. If and when he arrives in the game will be driven by the players actions.

2) Exploration and Discovery Focus

There is a huge emphasis upon the exploration pillar - that is; the means by which exploration is handled, and the player’s desire to discover the secrets of the world and plunder its loot. How you handle the mechanics of travel is up to you, but the key is moving the players into the wilderness.

In order to motivate players to the leave their home base, Robbins suggested making it a safe haven for rest and shopping, but not a place where adventure can be had or knowledge can be attained. In fact, the world is often built so that the further you travel from base, the greater the dangers and the greater the reward.

Taking a slightly different route, I’m going to experiment with having all of the home base elements of the game happen away from the game table to be managed entirely between games, so that the actual sessions start and end with leaving and arriving back at home base.

3) No Encounter Balance

The GM should pay no heed towards trying to keep the player characters alive in the face of their poor choices. It is this perceived deadliness which drives the players to advance in the game and find ways to meet their own goals. When a band of player characters return back to base in failure, they return with a greater understanding of the challenges that lie ahead so that they might try again, better prepared next time.

Besides, I find that as with most things in life, all the juice is in the journey rather than the destination. That is, the striving toward success, not the actual succeeding.

To be blunt - this means, yes, player characters will die. Probably frequently. When they do, roll up a new one. This means that in turn, that adventuring groups will contain characters of different levels, and that’s OK too. When games are engineered this way, the focus of game play becomes less about your stats and abilities on a character sheet, and more about your abilities as a player to effectively and creatively solve problems. That’s a feature, not a bug.

4) Players Are Incentivised to Write Up Session Reports

Players should be encouraged to keep up all the between-game book keeping as much as possible, and make it publicly available on some kind of digital sharing and communication platform. Discord seems like a solid choice. This is meant to simulate the natural flow of stories and rumours that would happen when an adventuring party got back and hit the local tavern, and it’s a crucial shared resource for everyone. It plays a huge part in helping the players decide what they want to do next, especially when some players miss a couple of sessions and might not otherwise know what’s going on.

Be warned though, the GM should never be tempted to correct the player’s imperfect interpretation of the world, be that maps they have created and updated, or reflections upon a session’s activity. Nor should you correct your world to match their version - let the players discover for themselves where mistakes were made and correct them as the course of the adventure unfolds.

All that said, I think it’s very likely that players will need to be highly incentivised to do this, as most are used to being passive consumers of content - and now we’re effectively saying that we expect them to complete homework. I’ll experiment with using meta currency, or even XP as incentives until I find something that works.

5) Activity Driven by Rumours and Clues

As GM, you’re predesigning the world with care. Each location in the game’s world should be keyed and intentionally formed, and each should contain clues pointing to another location that ensures the players are never without tantalising options for future adventures.

Equally, I’ll also be using the between-session time to post rumours to the campaign discord which reflect what the players might have heard in the local tavern. There’s no pressure on the players to pursue these rumours and not all of them will even be true, but they will serve to stop the players from ever being short of options.

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6) Player Responsibility To Arrange Sessions

This is a big one. Based off all the information players have received both in game, from rumours and from write ups, the players arrange between themselves where they want to go to next. If you’re operating with more than ones table’s worth of players then some will miss out on a particular adventure, and if they’re eager, they’ll set up a rival party to maybe head out to the same location to try to get the loot first.

Either way, when a group of players have come together to agree what they want to do next, and when and where they want to do it (they need to make sure the GM is also available and has enough notice to prepare) then they simply book the time in on the Discord server, or wherever you’re tracking your campaign, and provide details of the in-game date that the expedition is going to set off.

7) Strict Timekeeping Must be Kept

Firstly, before I get into it, your GM life will be made so much easier if you enforce an in-game rule that all adventuring parties must end their session at home base. If this involves having to come up with suitably punishing rules about ‘rolling to return home’ then so be it - it’s worth it for the headaches it saves. Let me explain why:

This is probably the biggest complication with running West Marches style games. As GM, you have to manage the passage of in-game time really carefully and accurately. If you do have multiple groups then the main headache will be in keeping track of branching timelines when a group departs, and then folding those timelines back into the main branch when the adventurers return back to base. All this has to be done in way that avoids creating any in-game ‘crossing of the streams‘.

For example; lets say you have two groups. If group A departs on the 1st day of your in-game calendar for location Z, and then they return on day 4, that represents a branch. The implication of this; is that later on in real time, group B cannot arrange a session where they depart on day 2 for location Z also. Why not? Because it would create a conflict - group A did not meet group B at location Z during the period of days 1-4, therefore group B cannot have gone there.

It would however be fine for group B to set off to location Y on day 2 and return on day 5. This doesn’t cause a conflict. They could also set off for location Z on day 5, but they’d be arriving at a place that’s already been visited.

At some point, your play groups should intermingle and form new groups. In these cases it is important to resolve any calendar differences between the different characters. Following our examples, for some PCs it is day 5, and for others it’s day 4. In these situations, we use downtime for the players on day 4 to fast travel them forwards to day 5. Alternatively, we fast travel everyone to whatever agreed day the next expedition happens on.

For me, this ‘downtime’ is the opportunity for players to shop, train, heal, carouse, careen their ships - whatever seems reasonable.

You’re gonna need a digital calendar to track this so that everyone knows what’s going on.

Additional Considerations

Consider Giving the Players A Basic Map

Not essential, but you might want to consider giving the players a starting map. Not a hex map, mind - nothing gamefied. Just a basic outline of the land, something that they can fill in as they go.

Multiple Groups or One Group

You can do this with only one table’s worth of players, that certainly simplifies the timekeeping, but it does mean that you’d be missing out on a key component of West Marches play - inter-player competition, and a sense of urgency to be the first to discover somewhere and get the loot.

That’s a big deal and one of this methods key draws.

Emergent Gameplay Vs Prep One Session at a Time

This isn’t an either/or situation. You should prep what you can for a given session once you’ve been informed of the players intent, but as with any style of TTRPG GMing, you should also have all the tools you need to hand to help you improvise emergent play when things take a turn for the unexpected.

Tools of the Trade

Just a quick list of some essential tools… Well, I think think they’re gonna be essential:

• A private discord server, fully set up with different chat rooms for different purposes such as arranging sessions or sharing reports.

• Maybe something like Obsidian Portal so that players can share their understanding of the world in a structured way.

• Both an in-game calendar for planned expeditions, and a real world one for plotting game session on!

It’s all gone wrong!

There are a few pitfalls to watch out for I reckon, the key things to watch out for are:

• Players forming cliques and never mixing with other players. You should make rules to force players to mix it up every once in a while.

• Social barriers - such as players being bold enough to put themselves forward to actually arrange a session, rather than hoping someone else will do it, or players being too passive to bother with the after session write ups.

• As GM, if you do need to break the rule about returning to base in the same session, you need to be really careful about how you handle it and the implications that this has on the timeline for everyone else.

Conclusion

My next move is gonna be to put this article in front of my play group and see if they’re interested. Maybe you can use it in the same way? If you’re interested in running West Marches style games, feel free to direct your players over this way to test the waters.

Also, I’ve never done West Marches before - if you have any advice or comments, please chuck it down below the line, I’ll be grateful of anything you can share!

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials - it really helps me out and costs you nothing! If you’re super into it and want to make sure you catch more of my content, subscribe to my free monthly Mailer of Many Things newsletter - it really makes a huge difference, and helps me keep this thing running!

Catch you laters, alligators.

Deadly, Not Frustrating: Keeping OSR TTRPGs Fun & Fair

A common reason I hear for folks being turned off from OSR games is their perceived or real deadliness. Most folks getting into the TTRPG hobby these days are the children of Matt Mercer, and following Critical Role as their primary example, so it’s natural they're sold on the idea that TTRPGs are supposed to be a long interactive story with traditional structure, and deep and satisfying character arcs.

When they hear about OSR games and start to understand their deadliness, they get to thinking: “How can I get invested into the story of a character if they die so frequently? This sounds terrible”.

I'm not going to try to tell them that they're wrong, that would be ridiculous, their fun is as legitimate as anyone’s. But I do want to see if I can open a new door for them.

So that got me to thinking, can the OSR come meet this new generation of players in the middle, to make sure that the game is not frustrating and remains a fair and enjoyable experience for them?

Of course it can. I have thoughts on the matter.

How Players Can stay alive in the OSR

My first suggestion is to the players

From the perspective of an OSR player looking in, games like 5e prescribe your characters a set of abilities and optimised choices. The gameplay focuses on providing balanced encounters, and the rules come with a plethora of elements (open Death Save rolls) and abilities (Healing Word) to ensure that player death is highly improbable. The designers want you to buy their long, and event driven story campaigns, and those can easily fall apart narratively if characters start dying.

Contrasting this, the OSR swings the opposite way. Generally speaking any notion of balance or pre-game solutionising is thrown out the window, and cheap ranged spells that you can fire off to heal people and get them back on their feet whilst still performing your main action are typically non existent. These games tend to lean more towards sandbox style play, which means that character death doesn’t have to be woven awkwardly into some pre existing story, because there is no pre existing story.

So the first thing you have to do as a new OSR player is adjust your playstyle. The answer to whatever encounter is in front of you is not on your character sheet. Instead the onus is now on you to use your personal ingenuity to try to shift the dynamics of whatever threat is in front of you, to push the odds in your favour before you engage.

What do I mean? I mean pay close attention to the descriptions given out by the GM, ask questions, fully engage your imagination and start dreaming up wild solutions, ask questions, make a point of being an active participant in the games narrative - ask more questions! Seriously, ask your GM about the situation to gain better understanding, suggest possible additional elements in the world that you can use to form part of your solution.

A good GM should be gratefully receptive to this - they should be rooting for you after all, and when you ask questions it gives the GM opportunity to fill in the gaps of your knowledge!

Of course, it should go without saying - if all else fails, be prepared to run away and fight another day.

Best GM practices To Ensure a Fair Game

Telegraph danger

Be liberal with information, even meta information about the dangers ahead. This will avoid those foul tasting “gotcha moments”. Remember, you are the player character’s eyes and ears in this world, it is unfair to expect the players themselves to be able to act in their best interest if they are unaware of of things that their characters would be very aware of.

For example, everyone in town knows about the dangers of the swamp at night, so the townsfolk stay clear. When you are explaining this to the players, why not show them the swamp random encounter table so they understand exactly what can happen? It would be common knowledge that the swamp was full of giant crocodiles and that there are ghostly lights in the water that try to lure you into peril. Also, lets not forget about the rumours of a nasty old lady who sets traps and kidnaps lost folks too.

Kill your darlings

You know that encounter that you think is going to be epic and you've been really looking forward to bringing it to the table? You need to be able to take joy in allowing the players to come up with ways to circumvent it entirely. Encourage this line of thinking, and when you sense that they’re trying to do this, make sure you equip your players with everything they would know in order to complete their strategy.

The best way to stay alive in the OSR is to play smart. Smart players don’t pick fights when the odds are against them, instead they find another way. Let them, that’s your side of the deal.

Also, keep that encounter on the back burner. The players may have circumvented it this time, but there’s probably going to be another opportunity to recycle it later on. Of course, you should let them avoid it again if they can!

Mothership: Telegraph monster attacks

I wrote a piece a couple of months back. Ostensibly it was about Mothership combat, but there’s this nifty GM style that the game promotes which really helps. Applied more generally to the OSR, it would look like this:

When a combat encounter is potentially devastating, at the start of every round of that combat, tell the players quite openly what the monster is going to attempt to do.

Firstly, this removes any gotcha’s, which is a good thing. Secondly, this creates an exciting feeling of existential dread and panic in the players, knowing what fate lays just ahead of them. Thirdly, it gives the players opportunity to play smart and change the future. Circumvent it, dodge it, whatever verb you like :)

Honestly, this lands a hell of a lot better than the anti climax of just smashing your players into dust out of nowhere.

GOZR: Death or Debasement

Did you catch my piece on GOZR perchance? It’s another OSR game, but it has a rather clever rule. JV West calls it “Death or Debasement”, and when your character would die, you as a player get to make a choice:

1. Death. You can accept that the character has died and get a bonus to the stats of your next character.

2. Debasement. You can say that your character survived on 1HP, however his stats have been permanently degraded in some way that does not break verisimilitude.

It’s cool, because as a player, only you know if you’re ready to draw a line under a characters career or not, and this empowers you to do so. However, it’s not a free pass, taking a hit to stats is a narratively satisfying major setback. Possibly even more so than death would be.

If I was to port this to something like Shadowdark, I might say that the consequence for Debasement is that you drop a level. That feels good to me, but you could go with all sorts, so figure it out with your players.

Conclusion

Alrighty, that’ll do pig. Let me know if I’ve managed to convince you. Also, lemme know if you think of anything else I’ve missed. If it’s good, I’ll add it to this article.

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.