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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8377233" data-attributes="member: 6670763">For the sake of this discussion, a West Marches campaign is one that has more players that play at any given time, who go on many site based adventures in constantly changing parties, based on who's playing on a given day.There are lots of different ways to approach this, like enforcing that each adventure is a one-shot and each game must end back at the starting town so every character is back in the stable next time the GM runs an adventure, or players having multiple characters so that several ongoing adventures can be active at the same time without the players having to wait for all the players in the party to find a time to continue before they can play again. You can make it a strict rule that all adventures have to be in dungeons outside of the starting town, or you can havr a campaign were some adventures deal with the locals of the town. Amd you can set up all kinds of systems do handle scheduling.What matters in the end is that you have a larger number of players whose characters don't have fixed parties, and who tell the GM which places in the environment they want to go visit next time, instead of the GM telling them what adventure they'll be having today.Running such a campaign comes with its own limitation of what works well as setups for adventures, but also opportunities you don't have in the same way in other campaigns. And I believe that it worls much better in an environment that is set up with these dynamics in mind. And of the world that the GM describes feels like it makes sense for the PCs to go on adventures in the way they do. I see this primarily as an issue of how you arange your pieces in the sandbox environment, but I think being selctive about what pieces you want to put into it in the first place could also help with making the campaign feel more engaging and believable.Something that I thinkmis kind of an unstated default assumption with these campaigns is that they are taking place in a lawless borderland and that the main activities of PCs is checking out nearby caves and ruins.Setting the campaign in an area with a small population, little existing infrastructure, and barely any official authority creates a good environment in which adventurers have free rein to roam around like a small army and can stumble on numerous places that have not been cleared of any potential valuables centuries ago.Having just one major town, which might be fairly new, can be a great compromise between having the wilderness right out the door, and having access to a great number of services. And it also doubles as the point where the many PCs keep coming together to form parties for their next adventure.When you have only one real town where all PCs always return to, I think it could be a really good investment of setup work to give that town some detail. That's one of the things I'm really interested about with this topic.If the campaign is strict about each adventure being only a one-shot and not being left in the air to be continued at another time, then all the places players can go to would need to be pretty close together. Say you have 3 to 4 hours to play a whole adventure, then you don't want to spend more than 30 minutes getting to the dungeon and back each.But that range can be extended to open up new areas for adventures by having other settlements that can serve as forward base camps, like keeps or highway inns, that are connected to the starting town by a road that allows PCs to directly move between them without spending any play time on it. The characters are assumed to have formed a group in the starting town and having travelled to the base camp without incident, where the adventure begins, and then later the adventure also ends there, with the journey home to the starting town also assumed to have been uneventful.An important thing about the dungeons is that an adventure that needs to  e wrapped up in one go doesn't need to explore the entire dungeon.You can also have larger dungeons that will easily take 3, 6, or 10 adventures to explore fully. But I think such dungeons in particular should be close to the starting town or one of the base camps. Even when you handle the journeys to and from the dungeon in a way that you can do three or four days of travel in 30 minutes. It would feel a bit strange that PCs would travel for a whole week two spend two or three hours exploring and then returning to civilization to do the whole thing again. If they can set out from a place where they can rest and recover in the morning snd get back before nightfall, then constantly going back and forth makes for a much more believable story.One thing from the original West Marches campaign, that I think might actually have been the player's idea, which seems really useful is to have some kind of master map for the campaign that is accessible to all PCs (and respectively players), to see what has been discovered about the environment so far. This should be an object that exists as an object somewhere in the game world, probably the starting town. This can be the original approach of a big tavern table in which adventurers scratched doodles to plan their next adventures. For my campaign, I am planning on having a small cartographer's society that has a big public map of the border area where travellers can submit their own notes which are added by the custodian scribe after having compared notes from different people. There's probably other cool ways this can be done.</blockquote>

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