Best System for a West Marches Game?

[jasonbostwick]

I've been hemming and hawing over this recently myself.

Low level 3/3.5E has the granularity that is necessary for player progression, but I would hate to DM it again. I just don't want to run a system without completely self-contained monster entries.

4E would certainly be the easiest to design encounters for, and I love how it handles monsters. I worry though about the length of time combat can take - I want to be able to have random encounters en route to a destination, but not have it take 45 minutes to kill a pair of owlbears.

In addition, lethality is a hallmark of WM style games, so I'd like a system that has quick and simple character creation.
Power selection in 4E can take some time, and if you want to print out power cards to speed up combat, it can take even more time.

I want to play my WM style game with newish players, so I want a system where they don't have to worry as much about tactical minutiae and character builds as they do about the exploration.




One possibility I've just started looking into Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3E.
I haven't played it yet, but I got a copy for Christmas and have been looking it over.

Character progression is fairly granular, with experience used to purchase various advancements, providing a good motivation for exploration. Character creation seems fast and can be somewhat randomized.

Magic items are limited (only one is given in the core rules), meaning that treasure can be mostly monetary and randomly generated. There isn't any need for a +2 longsword to be able to hit monsters of your level.

Gridless combat means that maps of dungeons and bandit encampments only need to be roughly sketched out, saving a lot of time in prepwork.

WFRP is fairly gritty, so the threats of death and danger that Ben Robbins talks about are certainly there. Lasting, critical wounds can complicate a long foray away from town.


The major limitation seems to be the monsters.

It might be difficult to gauge the difficulty of monsters to put in each encounter area. There is no numeric level, CR, or hit dice to compare monster strength, just a rough estimate of difficulty ranging from one to six skull and crossbones.

Monsters are fairly limited in variety as well, with the core rules only containing 33 monsters across 11 'types'. If I were to set up WM style sandbox for WFRP3 play, I'd have to draw up a fair number of monsters stats myself.


Interestingly, the WFRP3 system doesn't seem to be designed for sandbox, WM style play at all. 1XP is rewarded per session (regardless of what was accomplished) and the DM's book presents adventure building from a strongly narrativist angle, with suggestions of a '3 act structure' to comprise each 'episode' of gameplay.

 

[harpy]

Some friends and I are putting together a West Marches style game where we have three co-DM's with their own regions. We're going to be using Pathfinder with the E6 system. Pathfinder because there is large pool of local players that know Pathfinder and so recruiting will be easy. We'll be using E6 because it just does a better job of framing the game and its intent.

The real problem with Pathfinder and E6 that we've been looking at is that it doesn't have a lot of granularity, but we think that the widespread use of the rules in our area is what will really help for the game to thrive.

 

[S'mon]

Any pre-3e D&D. Of currently available systems, any of the D&D retro-clones should work well:

BFRPG, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, Swords & Wizardry.

3e D&D is not very suitable due to the very steep power gradient and the dependency on healing magic.

4e has the advantage of robust PCs, but the disadvantage of long fights even at low level, and a lack of random tables. Running it in 4e would require some more design work in creating encounters (including random encounters), but this work should pay off very well in the West Marches design. Treasure needs to be pre-placed without regard for who'll find it; I'd suggest there be around twice as many magic items as in standard 4e since many will be sold.

 

[JoeGKushner]

One of my questions to the OP is what game systems do you have?

Which ones are you comfortable running?

Which ones are the players comfortable playing?

If you've got one of those everything goes groups, awesome. I love those guys. They make it easy.

In terms of game systems, from my own experience, 4e could be the way to go for a few reasons but the length of combat does go against the grain and the standard parcels of loot would have to be reworked.

If not for the 'grain' bit and the advancement of levels, I'd found that Fantasy Hero can work really well for things if you've got a lot of system mastery under you belt. I say that because it allows you to do a lot of reskinning without worrying about the numbers and while advancement is slower than standard D&D, it's lack of xp solely for combat purposes gives the players real reasons to avoid combat, to explore, and to do things that just don't involve the clash of steel on steel.

 

[Blackbrrd]

4e has the advantage of robust PCs, but the disadvantage of long fights even at low level

In my experience 4e has fights that last about 5 rounds, 3.5 has fights that last about 2 rounds. 4e fights and 3.5 fights take about the same time in minutes. The iterative attacks of 3.5, huge number of spells, etc, etc really slows it down.

One good way of making fights shorter is for the monsters to try to escape after it looks like they will loose the fight. This will consume less resources from the party but that can be resolved with the characters getting less healing surges/daily powers back at a full rest.

 

[S'mon]

In my experience 4e has fights that last about 5 rounds, 3.5 has fights that last about 2 rounds. 4e fights and 3.5 fights take about the same time in minutes. The iterative attacks of 3.5, huge number of spells, etc, etc really slows it down.

One good way of making fights shorter is for the monsters to try to escape after it looks like they will loose the fight. This will consume less resources from the party but that can be resolved with the characters getting less healing surges/daily powers back at a full rest.

Yeah, I don't personally have a problem with the length of 4e fights - mostly because I halve most monster hit points, give 2/3 XP, and use more monsters! And I also use morale; losing monsters will try to flee.

3e fights were quicker at very low level where the ogre would kill the PC with 1 hit; 4e fights are most similar to 3e in the ca 4-8 level range.

One thought I had for using 4e in a West Marches sandbox: replace most magic items with cash treasure, and let the PCs use the gold etc to purchase magic items, maybe restricted to Level +4. That avoids the whole problem of non-useable items.

 

[fba827]

I'm in something similar to that, and we're using 4e for it. But a couple observations about it ...
(all this said with the caveat of "at least how we've ended up playing, i know it's possible for this not to necessarily be the case")

1) Passage of in-game time gets dragged, hence it's entirely possible to have just one encounter per day (turning daily powers in to encounter powers) so things to either delay the recharge of daily powers (i.e. have to meet 2 milestones per dailies recharge is a house rule I've seen people talk about) or find ways to pack more encounters per day.

2) Rations/Water: if they don't have reason to believe food and water will be available, they'll need to take a wagon with such supplies. Thus leading to a tally for rations to subtract over time. And also the logical details of "what will we do with the horses and wagon while we're off exploring that cave" and then if you decide to have NPC companions as a way to explain who is watching the horse, but that leads to "well, can that NPC help us on adventure X? or are they even capable enough on their own to guard the supplies without getting captured and killed because we don't want to keep having to save them."

3) treasure: can't quite place it the same (at least we try to have some sort of natural explaination for it, even if just to say it's been forgotten in the dungeon for centuries) but a holy avenger longsword +5 laying in the woods is a little trickier to explain ... so an inherent bonus increase isn't a bad alternative to minimize the amount of unplausible explainations you need to come up with for other stuff...

4) ... hmm, i had more but forgot right now. If I think of it, i'll add more later.

 

[Derulbaskul]

Savage Worlds would be perfect with its flatter power curve and ease of preparation. Plus its mass combat system is very good if you ever want to play army vs horde.

 

[Chgowiz]

Hello! What a great question! I think one of the answers nailed it completely on the head - run the system that you're most comfortable with and that provides the best mechanism for you to be able to run an exploration/survival type of game.

I've been running a West Marches style campaign for about a year now. We're entering our second year. I have two tabletop groups and I just started a Google Wave game for an online group.

The system I use is 1st edition AD&D. I advertise it as an AD&D/OSRIC game as I support OSRIC (and old school games in general) as a free way of getting the 1e goodness. I have bastardized 1e a bit - I use Philotomy's Combat Sequence. I have some interesting houserules. I could easily run this using OD&D or the newer retroclones. I think, though, with a year of fiddling with running a sandbox-exploration based game, that any system that offers the ability to really lethally challenge players, to provide for exploration and resource management, that can provide for random encounters, you'll have a system that works.

Where I've been challenged in running West Marches is on the social end and DM end: getting players to schedule games (my fault as I took over that duty from the get-go, that's changing in year 2); getting players to agree on goals and run with them (we're working on speeding up the "where will we go" discussion using the email list); making the wilderness more interesting (my fault, I made the dungeons far more interesting, that's been changed...). I think I would have run into these issues with any system I ran with.

The single-most biggest thing that has worked for me... letting the entire thing be player-plot driven. Yes, there are events and things happening, but the players have control over what they want to do in a game. If the goblyn and kobold armies are marching on the home base, but the players want to investigate a dungeon, that's great! I let them. I know what will happen in the world as a result of the players' actions, but there is absolutely no railroad. I think that is the real key to West Marches... letting the players truly drive the game. It's worked for me and 25 players (now 31, counting the 6 in my online game)

FWIW, the blogger PatrickWR of RPGDiehard has run a West Marches style campaign using Savage Worlds. I loved the game I played in it!

Good luck with your game! I really could write for a long time on what I think you'll need to do, but in the end, West Marches sandboxes are as much an exploration for the DM as they are for the players.

 

[Wik]

These are all great replies! I'll need to go into them in more detail, but it'll have to be later. For now, though, some quick answers:

1) JGK: Current games I have access to are 4E, 3.5E (but NO. I refuse to GM it again), Earthdawn 1e and 3e, Savage Worlds, Shadowrun (also a NO), Eldritch Role-playing (maybe?), Serenity (some possibilities there...), Basic Role-Playing (ie, Call of Cthulu), 2e D&D, BECMI D&D, d6 Space, d6 Fantasy, d6 Adventure, d20 Modern, WFRP 2e, and a bunch of d20 variants... and maybe half a dozen smaller games that I've forgotten I own. I'd be most comfortable running the d6 system, but I'm thinking there isn't enough to differentiate PCs in ability unless I fully open the Character Generation system to the players... which will result in a huge power differential between PCs (one of the faults of the new d6 system). A redesign on my end could help, but I don't know if the system meshes well with a WM game (d6 is very much a heroic game...)

For what it's worth, I'm asking this question more because I'm designing a game for the RPG design contest with the goal of making the "perfect" WM system, and I want to see what games people recommend so I can see what are the advantages for each (and, because one of these days, I will run a WM game!)

S'mon: I was seeing that possibility with 4e, too - weaken the monsters, and then just use more of them! And I was planning on losing magic items almost entirely, and using a gear list of my own creation. There would have to be some serious house-ruling for D&D... I'd also limit the number of books used, and keep that limit in place throughout (so you're not punished for coming into the game earlier, when there are fewer options open - every player has the same options available).

As for Savage Worlds, I know I'd have to use the Dungeons and Savages PDF (so good!). But there seems to be a lot going against it - the flatter power curve springs to mind. The problem I see is a character with no experience whatsoever could thereotically adventure with a group of seasoned characters and there'd be little to differentiate them. Or, to put the same problem in a different light, it'd mean that the flatter power curve also applies to the various zones in game - there is less to differentiate my ECL 1 zone from my ECL 3 zone. Or am I reading too much into this? It could be because I haven't played too much Savage Worlds...