Open Table Campaigns

Does anyone have any experience or advice running an open table campaign where many players drop in and out of the same sandbox campaign setting? This has been a bucket list experience for me for a while and I know enough players now who would be interested.

One issue is whether time is synchronous for all PCs, or is allowed to proceed asynchronously. E.g. one group of PCs decides to travel overland, ignoring most encounters along the way, and a week passes that session. Does a week also pass for the PCs of absent players? This makes time-tracking much simpler but it's a bit weird that the amount of game time that passes between your sessions depends on what the other players do during theirs. I would need to have an unwritten rule that players can't rest for lengthy periods during play without good reason.

The alternative - which I think Gygax advocates on p.37-38 of the AD&D DMG, although the passage is confusing - is to allow time to pass asynchronously for the PCs. This causes many problems. E.g. on Tuesday (real time) a group of PCs heads out on day 1 (game time) and clears rooms 1 and 2 of a dungeon, rests overnight, then clears rooms 3 and 4. On Friday (real time) a second group heads out on day 1 (game time) to the same dungeon, and heads straight to room 4 - what happens? If the monster is absent now because it's "destined" to be killed here by the first group on day 2...might as well keep everything synchronized, IMO.

I do run an open table campaign featuring about 12 players, with typically 3-7 of them showing up at each monthly session.

However, it's not a sandbox. It's closer to the first 5 AL seasons (or the recent Eberron season). Each session is self-contained but also loosely linked to previous and succeeding adventures. So there is enough continuity there to reward people who show up every time or nearly every time, but people who only play every once in a while don't feel totally left behind by the plot and can just focus on the goal of that particular session. Running a sandbox would obviously present a different set of problems.

I occasionally present narrative forks where, at the end of a session, the characters who are present make decisions that will dictate what next month's adventure will involve.

It has run continually for about a year and is fun and casual. You have to accept from the get-go that some stuff you might see in a more focused campaign just isn't going to happen. For example, I might work in some minor hooks related to character backstories, but I wouldn't plan a session that depended heavily on any one particular character, because that player might not be there. So it tends to be a less personalized than my other campaign, which is a consistent group of 4 people.

I run an open table game campaign.

There are a lot of great resources online that provide tons of advice (I'll post some links below). For my specific campaign, I've foudn the following techniques have worked for me...

1. My campaign is an exploration focused hex crawl / dungeon crawl. The game is usually focused on some goal that is either reachable in one session, or can be ongoing and chipped away out. These goals are decided by the players and take the form of cool adventuring site they want to check out. I'm explicit about what these sites are, where they are located, and what monsters and treasures they are 'likely' to have. This gives my players the knowledge to make informed choices about what to do (of course I do have plenty of hidden locations as well, and sometimes the players just want to go East and see what's out there).

2. I have very limited external pressure on the players. This has helped keep the game focused on what the players want to do, not on what I want to happen. There are some things that rely on time, but they are never so important that they demand the players' attention. For example, there is a stone henge circle in my campaign that will grant a blessing if occupied on a full moon ( have a calendar that tracks this).

3. I make the time frame between sessions by default on the long side. I usually just do one day in real life between sessions is one day in game. This helps with 'quantum adventuring party collision' and keeps things a little more organized.Its not so important to dungeon adventuring, since that only takes a couple hours, but matters more for wilderness travel. A week to a month between sessions, in game time, helps with making sure characters are back in town and available. It also helps because I can sync my game calendar and the weather with real world dates.

4. Allow players to have multiple PCs. If Connie's fighter is on a month long wilderness trek and stuck in the Dearthwood, but she wants to play tomorrow, she can run her wizard instead. These characters may level up at different rates based on usage, which allows for more varied parties. In my campaign my players who are running 7th level characters rolled up some level 1's for when I had a couple new players join in. Maybe when some of the new players' characters level up high enough they can join in with the higher ups.

5. Accept that you may have a wider range of character levels adventuring together. Let the players make those kinds of decisions. If a player with a new level 1 cleric wants to play with a group of level 6's, let them. If they survive they'll get a ton of XP out of it.

6. I use XP for gold recovered from the dungeon / wilderness. I found that having an objective measure of XP that's not reliant on milestones or the whims of the DM to be beneficial. I've also found that decoupling XP from monsters helps with lower level character survival and mixed level groupings. There is less pressure to hunt out and fight tougher monsters that will splat lower level characters, because you don't need them for XP.

7. In the end, I've come to realize its more important that people have fun. As much as I wanted a very strict campaign where time passes and things like travel and distance matter, sometimes you just have to accept that a PC is going to somehow teleport back to town, or that those two clerics you were adventuring with in the jungle just disappeared somehow and have been replaced by some freaky warlock type. So, sometimes you got to let it slide a little.


A couple blog posts have inspired me towards this style of play:

https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/38643/roleplaying-games/open-table-manifesto
http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/
https://smolderingwizard.com/2014/03/02/the-rythlondar-chronicles-original-dd-at-its-finest/

I ran multi-group Stonehell Dungeon campaign for about 18 months - on a break since yesterday.

I use Gygax's advice that game time = real time, along with 1 week long rests, and a strong presumption that groups end each session resting back in town. Works very well.

If you haven't checked out these resources already, they would be worth a read/view:

This is the website of the person who first(?) documented the West Marches style of game.

The West Marches, Running the Game #30 from that guy with the book and the stream

I've been running a shared world for a few groups of players with some overlap. We've found that it solves the problem of "Bob and Mary can't make is Saturday so we need to reschedule" - instead it's whoever can make it becomes the party for that session. Some players even have multiple characters that they play. I've found it helpful to keep everything synchronous - especially where a player and their chosen PC might show up in multiple sessions exploring the same area. You can't very well "reset" the clock in that case, unless you want a confusing time-travel vibe. As it is now, I do most of the scheduling as the DM, but my hope is someone else will take up the reigns from time to time to run without me OR I might actually get to play in the campaign.

Using something like Slack or Discord or MeWe would be useful to keep everyone informed of the storyline. Directly related to that is the concept of a "home base" town or village where the PCs hang out during their downtime between adventures to rest and share their stories with the other PCs. Speaking of which, the players who can't show up for a given session might appreciate the opportunity to exercise some downtime for their PCs - a good chance to explore those options in Xanathar's.

Anyway, hope that is helpful. Have fun!

I tried to, ultimately I had issues with players not coming back to town at the end of the session. The other problem was that each game a new person was around so I had to RP their game introduction.

I have been thinking about starting over but with a different concept.

Something like a mad god of war has them trapped in a dimension and they just appear there with no memories and have battles. So every encounter is a reset and at the end of the session the day ends and they get a long rest.

Every day they wake up they are with different people.

I was thinking of having some kind of progress bar. Like a tattoo of each day a character survives.

It's not fully baked as an idea but it's a work in progress in my head.

200orcs said:

I tried to, ultimately I had issues with players not coming back to town at the end of the session. The other problem was that each game a new person was around so I had to RP their game introduction.

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You don't have to RP their introduction - you say "OK so you met this Cleric in the tavern, he's just arrived in town and looking for ADVENTURE!"

I found with 1 week long rests & game time = real time between sessions, players don't try to stay in the dungeon. Basically I establish a clear social contract - no long rest during session, the session is what happens BEFORE you long rest. The long rest happens at end of session.

I ran a few campaigns using the Leilon modules on DMsGuild where each would take roughly a single session. I have the groups rarely meet in town and mostly just during downtime back in the Inn. NPCs are recurring all the time and the players like that for the most part. In one adventure, a NPC party helped them out and saved their butt, but in another adventure another group of PCs met the same group and remembered them, and that they had a item from the last group that could help them in this group.

For one of the groups, the campaign was going to use a few PCs for each player and they would get to choose at the start of play, but once the first PCs began to level, they just kept those PCs and the others never got played. The problem is most likely that there is only 3 players instead of 7-10 to make it go great.

Libramarian said:

Does anyone have any experience or advice running an open table campaign where many players drop in and out of the same sandbox campaign setting? This has been a bucket list experience for me for a while and I know enough players now who would be interested.

One issue is whether time is synchronous for all PCs, or is allowed to proceed asynchronously. E.g. one group of PCs decides to travel overland, ignoring most encounters along the way, and a week passes that session. Does a week also pass for the PCs of absent players? This makes time-tracking much simpler but it's a bit weird that the amount of game time that passes between your sessions depends on what the other players do during theirs. I would need to have an unwritten rule that players can't rest for lengthy periods during play without good reason.

The alternative - which I think Gygax advocates on p.37-38 of the AD&D DMG, although the passage is confusing - is to allow time to pass asynchronously for the PCs. This causes many problems. E.g. on Tuesday (real time) a group of PCs heads out on day 1 (game time) and clears rooms 1 and 2 of a dungeon, rests overnight, then clears rooms 3 and 4. On Friday (real time) a second group heads out on day 1 (game time) to the same dungeon, and heads straight to room 4 - what happens? If the monster is absent now because it's "destined" to be killed here by the first group on day 2...might as well keep everything synchronized, IMO.

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My general campaign is designed like this, and each player has at least three characters. That way they can choose an available character depending on which players show up.

For a while I was running two nights, with an overlapping group of players, and all were in the same time and place.

Time for each was tracked independently, but we tried to make sure they would sync up when necessary. Things moved forward for characters that weren’t involved while they were back at home (since it was all based around a single village). There were some groups that traveled outside that region.

All actions altered the world for all of the characters, and since a few players played both nights, some characters moved among both groups.

Due to people moving away, jobs, etc. that large group has wound down, unfortunately, but I’m working on building it back up. I prefer running things this way because then it doesn’t matter whether people could make it or not, and as players come and go. Nights could be as few as 3 players and as many as 10, although usually around 6 or so (my sweet spot). The largest total number of players between the two nights was around 16, if I recall. Each with at least three characters.

My campaign itself has been running this way, on and off, since ‘87.

The key for me is I don’t run AP-style adventures, and I don’t write a plot. I have lots of schemes, plans, events, and organizations, and those progress based on what the groups are doing.

I run a sandbox West March type of campaign with ten players. Each player has a primary character and two alternates. Everyone shows up to play every two weeks for the main quest. Yet during the interim everyone be it primary or alternate characters has side quests. The first part of the main quest is spent with everyone catching each other up on the news and tidings of what they have done or integrating one of the characters who was engaged in downtime activities.

I try to keep all times concurrent with each character. This week the primary paladin, druid and ranger are prisoners elsewhere. The one mage who fled can or will stagger in to tell the others of the sad news. The players of the paladin, druid and ranger will choose which one of their alternates to go on a rescue if the group decides to do that. The two primary thieves are in a guild war and rather take care of that.