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Thanks for the input guys. My game is a little different to iserith 's since it features a wider variety of locations and the wilderness is going to be a bigger part of the game, but I think I'm still heading towards a simplified approach. I'm certainly *not* going to do a proper "hexcrawl" with...

Hi All, Looking for some guidance/opinions on handling wilderness navigation for an online VTT West Marches game. I'm already familiar with many of the standard hexcrawl approaches to this - particularly those on The Alexandrian. Generally these entail a more or less involved process of working...

Apologies, double post. Deleted.

Couldn't agree more. It's fantastic if you can find a robust way to make it work in the fiction, but that's tough, and a clear rule outside the fiction is much better than a half-assed system within it. I guess my point was that once you start including fictional explanations for these things...

This sounds good - I was going to use something very similar to this originally. If you go down this route you need to find an "in fiction" way of signalling this if the PCs are e.g. in a dungeon. Depending on how they do things, they might end up spending a day or two below ground, or they...

Wow. That's really cool - I like it. I had been drifting towards a magical barrier that more or less followed the geographical one myself for much the same reason. I'd been thinking that spending time outside the "protected zone" would expose PCs to some environmental effect that would eat away...

Thinking about this a bit more based on responses so far, 'm wondering along these lines: The wilderness is subject to some sort of terrible disturbances (meteorological? magical? other?) at short but irregular intervals - every few days normally The arrival of such disturbances can be...

I thought about doing something like this, but it does run counter to one of the primary conceits of the West Marches game. I've got quite a few potential players for this but they're all casual gamers and attendance is likely to be patchy. I think it's fairly essential that we can have a...

Did the players ever make it out of the dungeon, but run out of game time to complete the return home? If so, who did you handle that?

Realism isn't, of itself, a concern for me, except insofar as it contributes to the atmosphere of fear in the wilderness. But I also want to pace the game right. Those two things are pulling somewhat in opposite directions and I'm not sure how to resolve the conflict.

I'm intending to try and run a West Marches style campaign for my next game. The wilderness map is coming together, I've got a bunch of interesting areas/locations with their own character/danger level, and I'm reasonably confident that I understand the mechanics of running it. There's one...

We need to be careful not to conflate two different things here. As @iserith has pointed on several occasions, the intention of the passive skill rules is not originally to model passive vs active usage; it's to obviate the need for a dice roll in circumstances where an outcome is "fictionally...

Thanks for the feedback! Hmm. Is that really a problem? That's one of the archetype's special abilities, and I think having lockpicking take '10 minutes' (this is, after all, an abstract approximation) by default gives that ability some real crunch. If lockpicking is quick (a few...

Or you can go with a version of what AngryGM does for group checks, although I imagine some people won't be comfortable with that - it's quite a big change, if a reasonable one, to my mind. That depends on how long a search you believe is required to give automatic success. If there's a DC25...

Bear in mind that the frequency of the check is only one part of the equation - the probability of success also comes into it. In order to keep the tension high I want to be rolling frequently - the players need to feel threatened by staying in the dungeon rather than just wandering around...

Following on from lots of helpful feedback on some Searching/Passive Perception tweaks, I was hoping to get some comments on the closely related ideas I had about running movement and time tracking in a dungeon. Once again, a lot here is stolen from @iserith and Angry GM, but with some twists of...

Right. I do more or less the same but none of our group are good at timekeeping, so anything that make it easy and obvious to run is good. Saying that by default every exploration action that isn't trivial takes 1 "unit" (nominally 10 minutes) makes it pretty clear what the stakes are to...

Right, so the PCs enter a room and decide to search it - and they have the choice whether to do that fast - less chance of WM check, but lower chance of success - or slow - more chance of WM, more chance of success. Either way, you're going to make the WM check, but the probabilities change. I...

This is really cool. I like the way there are lots of interesting trade-offs for the players to make. One thing that isn't clear to me: how do you run WM checks and time tracking with this? You're keying quite a lot of stuff off the pace of movement, but in practice movement makes up only a very...

Sure, that was my point. If you'd spoon-fed the player the theory in the first place based on a roll, that would have been awkward (to me) - but as you say, the roll is to confirm/verify the theory within the game. I have some quibbles about the terminology of "deduction" and I think that the...