That was actually a very interesting post for a few reasons.
The first is that I'm kind of interested in the player who likes interesting stories as well, because 'stories' can mean a lot of things. Is it that they're enjoying the emergent narrative that's arising at the table in the way they would enjoy any other story? are they enjoying uncovering the narratives that you've scattered around the world? (environmental storytelling simply
fascinates me, as an exploration player myself.) They might not even be sure themselves, or it might be a combination of elements, or they might just be vibing off of the various characters and their interactions, its neat.
The second is actually what you say near the end about deviating from the West Marches. I feel as though what's most interesting about the format of these games is that there aren't any real 'maps' of how to do them. Ironically, the very act of running open tables, west marches, and similar gameplay styles is itself something every individual game is sort of discovering by itself, in the same way that players might make their own maps in a west marches that is only semi-accurate. Ben Robbins and Justin Alexander obviously exist, and so do some of the records of the early games when such play was the default (I recently mined the ADND Dungeon Master's Guide to help me develop my own thoughts on how to handle time.) But not all of the ingredients each individual game utilized is necessary for all games, and changing them can lead to different outcomes that are mutually desirable in their own ways. You're using a consistent, small gaming group which lends the proceedings a natural continuity-- everyone mostly knows what's happened to all the characters in the overall narrative without any fancy emergent information sharing stuff, for instance, which likely has advantages.
To contrast my game, which will have the rotating player cast, we're looking at using
Heroes to create a miniature social network of players and adventurers, which will doubtlessly be a different dynamic than the Ben Robbins blueprint even while it strives for some of the same elements. One of the things that keeps me coming back to this board is actually the handful of other people who are kicking at the same tires as me in different ways, I love the idea that we're all doing our own little permutations of this game type, and exploring how our variations affect these larger scale, exploration centric gaming experiences. Everything from the type of system we're using, to how we handle different elements.
It really is ironic, we're like a loose community of explorers, exploring a territory that isn't well charted but certainly has a history to uncover and learn from (e.g. Robbins, Alexander, Gygax's writings and so forth), while our own journeys are shaped from what and how we choose to pursue it, the people we pursue it with, and our perception of what a game like this should even be like.
Also, I need an Agenda and Principles, it reminds me of an old article by the Angry GM on defining themselves as a GM.