What is a West Marches game?

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The news that Critical Role's fourth season will be a West Marches style game is introducing a lot of gamers and critters to the term for the first time.

The name "West Marches" comes from a campaign run by @Ben Robbins, the creator of Microscope and other RPGs.

Robbins was trying to solve one of the biggest problems in RPGs: defeating the scheduling monster. Instead of coming up with an adventure and a time he could play, only to run into scheduling issue after scheduling issue among his players, Robbins made it their responsibility. He put the players in charge of who would show up, what day, and what they wanted to do in the campaign world, giving him enough advance warning so he could do the necessary prep. Sometimes, it would be a stable group of player characters, but more often, players and characters would change between sessions, moving in and out of groups.

To make this all work, he created an exploration-centered campaign, a sandbox where the player characters had a single stable base of operations in a wilderness (a keep on the borderlands, one might say) and players followed clues or just headed off to explore blank hexes on the map, as suited them. The player characters updated a map back at their home base, sharing clues and information, which helped shape what they wanted to pursue next (and helped Robbins flesh out the world).

Now, Critical Role will have a regular schedule of games and players, so DM Brennan Lee Mulligan won't be having to worry about that, but the new world of Aramán is largely unexplored and will only get fleshed out (to anyone other than Mulligan) based on what the three groups of player characters (which Mulligan and Matt Mercer have said they expect to be pretty fluid groups, as is typical in West Marches games) do in play.

If all of this sounds a lot like old school D&D, it is, although it has a more formal structure and some more thought to how the campaign would work, rather than the ad hoc way the earliest D&D campaigns typically ran. It's also a popular way to play Traveler and many other RPGs.

You can play a West Marches game with a randomly generated hex map, on a map where the real details are only known to the DM, or something in between.

For more information on West Marches, see Robbins' original article and these other links:






 
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I am planning to run a Shadowdark West Marches game starting in Autumn and are very excited to see a big D&D streamers take on it. Of course the whole scheduling idea is irrelevant to them, but I am very excited to see how they bring this sandbox game and different player groups together.
 

It might be fun to have an online group with the map and then break out to my home group for the individual adventures. Mayb if I was in touch with players from the 80s and 90s who had groups of their own and we could communicate online and expand a shared world but keep home play.
 

Ever since I've heard of the idea, I've been fascinated by it. How it the "one-shot" nature enforced? Does it never happen that real-life time runs out and the PCs are still in the "dungeon" or still in the wilderness?
 

It might be fun to have an online group with the map and then break out to my home group for the individual adventures. Mayb if I was in touch with players from the 80s and 90s who had groups of their own and we could communicate online and expand a shared world but keep home play.
I have always wanted to find a way to pull off a Massive Multiplayer Tabletop RPG Campaign, where different groups explored the same map and had real impacts on it. The hardest part, I think, would be getting everyone on the same in-world time schedule.
 

I have always wanted to find a way to pull off a Massive Multiplayer Tabletop RPG Campaign, where different groups explored the same map and had real impacts on it. The hardest part, I think, would be getting everyone on the same in-world time schedule.
Believe that was what Gygax did. Believe he said that you needed to keep copious notes on times of each groups, so you could weave it all together (not sure where I read that though, may have been in Dragon).
 

Believe that was what Gygax did. Believe he said that you needed to keep copious notes on times of each groups, so you could weave it all together (not sure where I read that though, may have been in Dragon).
It’s in the AD&D DMG. It’s where the idea of time passing at real-world speed between sessions comes from. And this is exactly why. To make keeping track of things that much easier. Group A played last Tuesday and cleared this dungeon to room 114. Group B plays tonight and is hitting the same dungeon.
 

Believe that was what Gygax did. Believe he said that you needed to keep copious notes on times of each groups, so you could weave it all together (not sure where I read that though, may have been in Dragon).

It’s in the AD&D DMG. It’s where the idea of time passing at real-world speed between sessions comes from. And this is exactly why. To make keeping track of things that much easier. Group A played last Tuesday and cleared this dungeon to room 114. Group B plays tonight and is hitting the same dungeon.

Right, but that only works with one GM running multiple groups. I was more wondering how to do it with multiple GMs running their own groups in a shared world.
 


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