I should read some more Advanced Squad Leader rules or prep for the games next week, and not get distracted by snac, or podcasts, but here I am…
@Judd posted a message on Mastodon:
Cool discussion with Jay, Paul and Jason Lutes about West Marches campaign format. – The Diceology Podcast: Going West with Jason Lutes (edit), December 2, 2022
The Diceology Podcast: Going West with Jason Lutes (edit), December 2, 2022
Oh yeah! I love it. I was really into Perilous Wild back in 2015 after having read @funkaoshi’s short review blog post.
I have been looking forward to this book since it was first announced. I had pretty high hopes for what would be produced, and I’m quite happy with the results. If you are interested in hex crawls and the like this book is well worth grabbing. – Review: The Perilous Wilds
Anyway, so now I’m listening to that podcast episode and of course I keep comparing our setups with theirs. They distinguish a West Marches campaign from an Open Table by saying that an Open Table could also just be a series of one-shots. And that’s true. Our games keep the same setting, of course, and so we’d also call ourselves a “West Marches” campaign, I guess.
What’s different is that we have multiple referees. I play and run games in two multi-referee, open table, “West Marches” campaigns. Both in German.
The first one uses my own house rules, Halberds and Helmets, with me running Stonehell and the Giant Giants, @phf running Barrowmaze, @frotz running The Flying Dagger Coast, Olupo running his Cistern, and all these locations are reachable from the same starting village where most of our characters are. We also keep track of time using our real calendar, so if a character doesn’t get played for a few weeks, they just hang out in the starting village, no harm done. In the wilderness, it’s trickier. If you haven’t reached a safe outpost, you might decide to freeze time, but it starts getting awkward quickly so I try to avoid that.
The other one uses AD&D 1st ed, with the referees running different regions along the Wooly Coast in Greyhawk. I’m running Elredd. Since we’re all running different regions, the only time we care about the calendar is when characters cross the invisible border lines. We each keep time using a Discord bot, and when there’s a break, we “advance the clock” to whatever region that is the furthest ahead. It’s a bit weirder with regards to time keeping, but since our regions are further apart, it’s also harder to notice as a player. When I’m a player, I basically have a character in each location and they don’t interact.
On all cases, We basically have multiple campaigns running “next to each other” with a little overlap between our responsibilities. On the campaign where we all share the same starting village, there’s more character interaction and more mixing of parties, of course. If you’re interested, take a look at the character roster. The roster also contains pre-generated characters that haven’t been picked or hired, yet. That’s one of the things I introduced at the beginning to help newbies get started quickly.
Finding retainers or hiring hirelings happens once per session: the party can invest 10 gold to hire 1d6 people. Roll a die for each one: odds means it is a potential retainer who wants half a share of all treasure found, even means it’s a potential hireling who wants 1 gold per day if they fight or 5 silver per day if they don’t. Then roll the appropriate number of d6 to figure out, which candidates actually show up, counting from the top. – Monday Characters
Another thing I noticed when listening to the podcast was how they deal with quick travel into the dungeon.
Is there a quick way to skip the upper levels? We’ll find out. My players still are on the first level of Stonehell after all these sessions!
Is it ever safe or “cleared”? Not in Stonehell. I use restocking rolls after every one or two sessions, so a third of the rooms seen get new occupants.
How do you get out when time runs out? I try to push really hard towards the end. “OK, 30 minutes to go, start thinking about what you want to achieve down here.” Or: “OK, 10 minutes to go, time to start thinking about getting back to the exit.” Once we’re out of the dungeon, the way back to the starting village is safe. For encounters in the dungeon, I usually eyeball random encounter checks and roll a 1-in-6 chance ever two turns, where I’m assuming one turn for a corridor and a turn for a room. So basically: once for ever room. It could be a random encounter in the room, possibly adding to the one already there, or something sneaking up on the party, or trying to ambush them on the way out. When the party is moving back to the exit, rooms aren’t examined carefully, people stick to corridors if possible, and so I usually just estimate the number of encounters as I narrate the way out, and roll an appropriate number of 1-in-6 random encounter checks. Usually two or three d6 is good enough these days. But yeah, it has paid off to keep one *sleep* ready for the trip home.
I also noticed the conflicts between different interest in character play for different players. I’m firmly in the camp of: let’s use the procedures to push the game forward, let’s focus on decision making and therefore let’s not focus on descriptions or interactions with ordinary people, let’s not focus party member interactions… sure, let’s speak in character for a few lines, but then let’s go back to making decisions. Some people have called it boardgamey, and they have a point. The moments of drama happen between the lines. It’s when the ghoul baron taunts them and their shields are splintering that we see the characters interact. It’s when they face and best Ferdinand the berserker and his annoying friends for the third time that we see what their alignment really is.
Anyway, I’m loving it. West Marches style campaigns are great. You don’t get monumental plots, you don’t get character focus, but stuff is going on, things are happening, and you’re in the middle of it, meddling with it. Or at least that’s the part I try to emphasise when I run the game.
#RPG
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We play that it's significantly faster to go where you've already been:
Movement within in known-and-clear space is way faster. It’s more like a 2000’ by 2000’ area, like a third of a mile. But, just like before, any interaction on the way is a tick. So if they’re like “We go to the fountain room” but there are some skeletons in the hallway on the way there, that’ll slow them down.
This is only for places they’ve already been. The first time through, use the smaller exploration areas. So if they move 300 feet without interacting anything, that’s still 5 ticks, but then they can go back through there without a problem. Whether restocked areas count as “known-and-clear” is up to the characters’ perception. If they don’t know that ghosts have moved in, they wouldn’t suddenly slow down. My take is that it’s primarily about finding their bearings in the architecture of the place.
– Sandra 2022-12-04 16:01 UTC
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I absolutely agree with you that exploration speed almost never matters: it’s just ticks, and they only matter because of the random encounters involved. As for movement through known areas, my thinking is that they could either assume present danger and move as slow as before, so same number of random encounter checks, or they could believe themselves safe when they are not, moving at double speed, so half the random encounter checks, but now if they do run into a new trap or an encounter, I’ll try and remember that they are most likely surprised, or the area is actually safe, like they befriended some dwarves and helped them secure the area and now there are dwarves living all over the the area, guarding it. It is safe, there are no random encounters and therefore time does not matter, like in an urban adventure. Just say where you want to go and I’ll narrate a little transition if a player is new or it’s just: “sure, no problem.”
In general, my impression is that I’m laxer when it comes to the details like counting how many squares can be searched or whether there are enough torches to all search in parallel. Those things hardly ever come up in my games.
– Alex 2022-12-05 10:03 UTC
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Yeah, we count torches (or other light-resources like fireflies, magic moss, lantern oil) and food and water and other resources carefully. Logistics is such a huge part of our game.
The “fast” movement in our game is 33 times faster than the “slow” speed. (Because fast speed uses 5e speeds and slow speed uses B/X speeds.) It works pretty well because it keeps our focus on what’s new and unknown. “OK, we go down to the lever room on level five.”
This also means that our time-counting is primarily by “interactables” rather than by distance walked, and if there’s stuff to interact with in previously cleared space because of restocking, that’ll eat up ticks, too.
– Sandra 2022-12-05 13:04 UTC
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I think your game sounds awesome BTW.
Yeah, I missed that part of narration one time when we had a guest player. He got really confused; they were in the jungle out of sights of a city, and then suddenly they were doing stuff in the city. We’re just so used to that sort of fast play when it’s retreading journeys we’ve already made. I scratched time and shoe-wear for the journey, the journey canonically happened, it was just… jarring to him since he didn’t get to see the initial approach to that city a few sessions back.
They were like “We should explore that tower again.” and “Yeah, OK, in the chest room—are those cat people still there?” and I was like “yeah, you peer up over the stairs, see their paws” etc. Like, insta journey. 🤷🏻♀️
– Sandra 2022-12-05 13:10 UTC
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“[...] let’s use the procedures to push the game forward, let’s focus on decision making [...] let’s not focus on descriptions [...] You don’t get monumental plots, you don’t get character focus [...]”
In a way I can agree, and I’m fascinated by those old games boardgamey procedures ... however I’ve recently started to doubt, if this is something I really like on the emotional level.
If I ask my self what I want most out of rpgs it would be that feeling of *other world immersion*, acting deeply *in character* and the sensation of *collectively imagined awesome visuals*.
Also, I found that my group seems to work much better with set-piece adventures.
So maybe I’m a secret story gamer after all? 😅
– Wanderer Bill 2022-12-06 08:23 UTC
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Time to hand back that membership card! 😆
– Alex 2022-12-06 08:52 UTC
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On Mastodon, @E_T_Smith was wondering about the difference between rules and procedures, saying that “the difference seems rather arbitrary.”
I’d say that if you as the referee prepare a setting, in writing, that’s a lot of work. Any writing you replace with formulas, tables, or if-then statements form procedures. Clearly, characters are not part of the setting description so the character sheet cannot be replaced by procedures.
On the other hand, the effect of what’s on the character sheet is determined by the rules and by judgement calls at the table. In Freies Kriegsspiel, judgement calls at the table are all that’s required, so rules are not necessary.
All of the above aren’t my real opinions, though. Those are just interpretations to try and make sense of what you asked. On a gut level, I agree with you: the difference seems arbitrary and I’m not interested in quibbling about the meaning of words.
In German, that’s the discussion I hate: Begrifflichkeit. A discussion about the exact names for the concepts used in the discussion. I prefer a sense of pragmatism in the discussion. What are you actually going to do? Let’s talk about the specifics.
– Alex 2023-06-23 19:12 UTC