Herobizkit
Adventurer
I keep coming back to the series of blog posts about The West Marches.
In short, a DM decided to run a pure sandbox campaign using the "blank hex" style adventure coming up in PF's Kingmaker. He ran multiple PC's through multiple quests, mixing up the groups, planning adventures for players who decided that they wanted to play. In a way, he ran several groups of players against each other, exploring random hexes and discovering the map in "real time".
Here's the summary from the first page of the blog:
Thoughts?
In short, a DM decided to run a pure sandbox campaign using the "blank hex" style adventure coming up in PF's Kingmaker. He ran multiple PC's through multiple quests, mixing up the groups, planning adventures for players who decided that they wanted to play. In a way, he ran several groups of players against each other, exploring random hexes and discovering the map in "real time".
Here's the summary from the first page of the blog:
This would be an interesting endeavour in a PbP format - it's sort of what they're doing with Living EnWorld et al around here, except each adventure is tailored for the current group rather than having everything pre-set with multiple groups running the same adventure at the same time.West Marches blog said:West Marches was a game I ran for a little over two years. It was designed to be pretty much the diametric opposite of the normal weekly game:
1) There was no regular time: every session was scheduled by the players on the fly.
2) There was no regular party: each game had different players drawn from a pool of around 10-14 people.
3) There was no regular plot: The players decided where to go and what to do. It was a sandbox game in the sense that’s now used to describe video games like Grand Theft Auto, minus the missions. There was no mysterious old man sending them on quests. No overarching plot, just an overarching environment.
My motivation in setting things up this way was to overcome player apathy and mindless “plot following” by putting the players in charge of both scheduling and what they did in-game.
A secondary goal was to make the schedule adapt to the complex lives of adults. Ad hoc scheduling and a flexible roster meant (ideally) people got to play when they could but didn’t hold up the game for everyone else if they couldn’t. If you can play once a week, that’s fine. If you can only play once a month, that’s fine too.
Letting the players decide where to go was also intended to nip DM procrastination (aka my procrastination) in the bud. Normally a DM just puts off running a game until he’s 100% ready (which is sometimes never), but with this arrangement if some players wanted to raid the Sunken Fort this weekend I had to hurry up and finish it. It was gaming on-demand, so the players created deadlines for me.
Thoughts?
Last edited: