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Voting in the West Marshes

STAR voting

So the differences between my boatmode campaign and a West Marches game is that we don’t have a safe&boring town or fixed starting point, and we have a smaller pool, currently 4 players, but was ten at one point (I’ve always been inspired by West Marches and I was playing in a West Marches megadungeon game before I started DMing). We do have the player driven scheduling, sort of: players and DM vote on days and then bots announce when the game days are. Learning about STAR gives me ideas for how to run it differently. We currently have three levels: yes, maybe (counts as .1 of yes) and no.

Straight up STAR wouldn’t work for our current situation because our algo (cooked up by yours truly: armchair political science, Dunning-Kruger style) selects two days from each weekly ballot, not just one.

Even if I could adapt STAR to work with the current “select 2 days out every weekly ballot” system, there’d be no gain in that since we already have a solution. But I have bigger dreams. I would want a system that ideally improves on what we have in a few ways:

1. Not sure weekly ballots are good compared to something rolling/continuous? Like, I would ideally be able to go to any distant future date and mark it as busy or especially desirable, not just dates the upcoming week. Not sure that’s even possible. Below items still assume weekly.

2. Instead of twice weekly, I’d wanna play as often, or as seldom, as the player base supported with their votes. Maybe some weeks there’d be just one, or no games. Other weeks it’d be D&d every day.

3. Be able to support a bigger pool. Players indicate how often they wanna play and they score days 0 through 5 or w/e. And then the algo puts together parties and days. Never six or more players at the table (5+DM would be the cap), ideally exactly four (+ DM). Robust enough in times of player scarcity to be able to schedule parties of two or three.

Some good traits to aim for when cooking up the algo would be:

Match any given players desired frequency of play. Some wanna play every day, some every month.
A ‘duh’ consequence of the previous but worth singling out: don’t consistently shun one player. Let people play. I mean, they could get kicked out of the pool of course, but people who are in the pool should get to play. It’s badfeel to sign up for a game and get “we already have five this week.”
3+3 is better than 6 and maybe better than 4+2 too?
Someone might not get their fave day, and that can be worth it if it means someone else would get to play who otherwise couldn’t.
If the same parties/groups kinda form that’s a good thing (or?) and the algo should encourage that. Someone could be in both but with two separate chars. Or should the algo encourage mixing it up?

Crews on ships, people in different towns or camping in different dungeons… this is where the “no safe&boring town” difference to West Marches is biting me.

For example an 18 people pool might form five 4p parties, with two people in two parties each and the other 16 people in one party each and then maybe those parties have different frequencies of play.