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Best System for a West Marches Game?
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<blockquote data-quote="Chgowiz" data-source="post: 5047006" data-attributes="member: 66172"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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)</p><p></p><p>FWIW, the blogger PatrickWR of RPGDiehard has run a West Marches style campaign using Savage Worlds. I loved the game I played in it!</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Chgowiz, post: 5047006, member: 66172"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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