D&D General Setting up and running open-table sandboxes and West Marches campaigns

[Blue]

Do not have any randomness to character creation. Either use Point Buy or Array, and either force them to keep class & background equipment (which is faster) or give them the average starting gold. You don't want to have to watch people make characters, allowing them to do it all away from the table.

Absolutely.

Set rules for treasure. Players shouldn't be able to loan/sell magic items or other treasure to any characters, especially their own. Otherwise you'll see every magic item each time.

Caveat - allow trading among the party that is out. If one character wants to give a potion of healing, or loan his cloak of elvening to the paladin while attempting a group sneak, or permenantly trade the +1 short sword to the rogue for his boots of water walking, go for it. It doens't change the items on the adventure in that case. Also not allowing any trading within the active party nerfs the artificer who is good at filling in gaps of what the party has.

 

[Yora]

A big question to me is what the real meat of a West Marches campaign is supposed to be. The thing that players come to play for.

In games with complex combat system, this can be the fun of playing tactical skirmish encounters.
In games with central stories, it can be to see the characters improve and become accomplished.
In a dungeon crawler, it can be fun working on puzzles and other challenges.

For a West Marches campaign, I find the first two less suitable. Complex combat tends to lead to long fights, which means slow progress. This means that either adventures get quite long, or there is little that gets done if the adventure is kept short.

With constantly changing characters, and possibly quite large pools of characters, there is little room to express the personality of individual characters. And with adventures of limited length, also not much time to indulge in such things. I am not sure where this idea is coming from, but I also feel that such a campaign also should have real dangers of PCs getting killed. (It does not seem to be an automatic requirement based on the overall premise.) Players should assume that there is a considerable likelihood for any character to die, and be open to introduce new characters when scheduling issues make it a convenient solution. This generally doesn't work well with players getting deeply invested in their darling characters.

And I personally just never understood how puzzles can be made to be both fun and appear plausible within a believable game world. I know many people love them, but I simply don't get the appeal.

I think a kind of enjoyment that a West Marches game is very well suited to provide for players who don't make the campaign about their characters, is for the adventures to reveal a world. The structure that allows players to set their own paths and pace of exploration is uniquely suited to creating a sense of discovery. Because players know that they are not walking through a curated experience like a movie or most videogames, and that there are many things that will remain hidden from them unless they take actions to reveal them. And they will have to overcome obstacles to reveal them.
Because of this, I believe that a West Marches campaign will benefit greatly from solid and thought out worldbuilding. In a dungeon crawl focused campaign, where the obstacles are the meat of the game, you can get away with generic Fantasyland as the nondescriptive overworld where the entrances to on the fly created dungeons are located. But for a more exploration focused campaign, I think exploring rooms is much less interesting than gathering pieces to assemble a greater picture. However, the challenge in this respect is that the players would need to have a constant sense of accomplishment. A player who plays only three times over four months should still walk away with a feeling of having discovered something interesting. As do the players who play every week for three years. Perhaps one approach to this is set things up so that every site has a story that can be partly pieces together just from clues in the environment, but also interactions with the current residents. But in addition to that, each site also helps providing context for a big picture to create a long-term progression for the regular players.

In addition to sites, I believe a lot can be done in regards to worldbuilding with encounters on the way to and from the sites. I am even having a hunch that a campaign could be possible in which random wilderness encounter can be main form of content for the game. But these would need to be more than just attacks by wolves, goblins, and bandits. There would have to be a well established ecosystem of bandit gangs and goblin tribes, who are having their respective territories and ongoing conflicts, and occasionally try to use interactions with players to use them to their advantage against their rivals. To that you can add various cults, and possibly guilds, and certain wizards and druids. Gathering information, through interactions, about these factional ecosystems can also be a great source of discovery. Especially when it is connected to the histories of the sites.

 

[Mannahnin]

Indeed, if you don't have multiple GMs, there's not a whole lot of need for the West Marches style.

Well, as you know, the original concept was invented for a single GM with a good amount of free time and a flexible schedule, but too many players interested for him to run all at once. Similar to what Gary and Dave and Rob were dealing with at the beginning with OD&D.

The biggest challenge with the original concept always seems to be having a) that much free time and flexibility on the GM's part, and b) sufficiently-motivated players to self-organize and schedule their own sessions with consistency.

I'm in a Discord-based West Marches campaign right now with a handful of DMs, and some of the DMs and players are indeed flexible, but while there ARE some pick-up sessions, most of the play does seem to center around certain scheduled time slots where a given DM usually runs every week for whoever happens to be available.

The practical reality of life is that most of us adults have busy lives, and it's easier for us to play on one or two or three scheduled time slots each week. Most of us aren't college students with a whole lot of free evenings, or besotted new players absolutely entranced with the game and jonesing to play as much as possible like many of the first wave of 70s players.

 

[Umbran]

Well, as you know, the original concept was invented for a single GM with a good amount of free time and a flexible schedule, but too many players interested for him to run all at once. Similar to what Gary and Dave and Rob were dealing with at the beginning with OD&D.

What it was originally intended for, and what it is really good for in the broader sphere, are often two different things.

The biggest challenge with the original concept always seems to be having a) that much free time and flexibility on the GM's part, and b) sufficiently-motivated players to self-organize and schedule their own sessions with consistency.

Yeah. While it was in the original experiment, and it might work for a few, broadly I would not expect player-initiated scheduling to work. Every time a player goes, "I'd like to play Tuesday," and no GM answers, that ends up as a disappointment. Repeated disappointments train players to not bother asking, and the thing falls apart.

GM-initiated scheduling, "I'm available to run Tuesday, who is in and what do you want to do?" is probably more practical. And maybe that GM runs every Tuesday, that initial message from the GM is still a good way to kick off the discussion about what the players will want to do.

Most of us aren't college students with a whole lot of free evenings, or besotted new players absolutely entranced with the game and jonesing to play as much as possible like many of the first wave of 70s players.

Yep. No argument.