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View Full Version : DM Help What are some common mistakes when running a West Marches Campaign?



Beastrolami
2017-06-20, 03:05 PM
Me and a Co-DM are planning a West Marches themed 5e campaign. The idea right now is that we plan everything out in advance so we can play-test it a bit, and make sure it works before running the actual thing. Although we may be able to catch some major bugs in play-testing, we are also adding a bunch of homebrew rules to make the game more "fun".

My question is, to those who have run West Marches games before. What are things you did which you thought would make the game better, but failed?

What are some things you wish you had done?

What are some things which you would tweak to make the game better?

Just to give an example of some of the homebrew stuff we have planned (so you don't come up with your own crazy ideas). The "hub" town they are starting in is going to be pretty run-down. Most of the gear they will be finding in their travels will be incomplete, and there will be a bunch of crafting supplies for them to find, so they can spend their off-time building up their base into whatever they want.

Yora
2017-06-20, 03:13 PM
The idea right now is that we plan everything out in advance so we can play-test it a bit, and make sure it works before running the actual thing.

Mistake #1: You can't plan everything and test it in advance because you don't have any idea where the campaign will go and what will be happening.

West Marching also doesn't have a base for the players. It's all about keeping pushing deeper into the wilds. Of course, you can add a growing home base to your own kind of open-world campaign.

What you can prepare is a starting location and a handful of settlements and dungeons that the players might reach in the next session, but that's about it.

Other than that, pretty much everything discussed here should apply. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?527689-Ingredients-and-Methods-for-Great-Wilderness-Explorations)

DeTess
2017-06-20, 03:21 PM
Just to give an example of some of the homebrew stuff we have planned (so you don't come up with your own crazy ideas). The "hub" town they are starting in is going to be pretty run-down. Most of the gear they will be finding in their travels will be incomplete, and there will be a bunch of crafting supplies for them to find, so they can spend their off-time building up their base into whatever they want.

This sounds like a really nice feature. However, unless you have a really in-your-face way of making sure that the players know they are supposed to turn this into their base (or if you know that the group is naturally inclined to base-build), don't assume they will actually do so.

Another main thing to keep in mind is this: PC's are incredibly stupid, no matter how smart the actual people playing them are. Always have a contingency plan to inform them of where they are supposed to go for plot, as they will trample over any tracks and eat your carefully set out bread-crumbs. Also, if your players just decide that the creepy vampire's castle that you where planning to use to advance plot is just too creepy for them, have a back-up plan. Preferably one that doesn't involve them getting thrown into the castle anyway (unless that's absolutely necessary).

Beastrolami
2017-06-21, 11:18 AM
Mistake #1: You can't plan everything and test it in advance because you don't have any idea where the campaign will go and what will be happening.

That was just a poor explanation on my part. I didn't mean we would be able to test everything and predict player activity in advance. However, we can build random encounter tables and test them against a generic party, as well as build some initial points of interest/dungeons and test them to see if they are too easy/difficult for a beginner party.

Here are some more specific questions:

Do you think the parties should be split? Meaning that the members of the first party should be split up into different parties after completing their first adventure?

Should we cap player "involvement"? Meaning that if one player with a bunch of free-time want to be a part of every party he/she can, and the party is ok with it, should we let this player get more exp and (potentially) gear than the other adventurers?

With the crafting and base building, our system is built around the downtime system from AL. Each day, each player can take a downtime activity, such as resource gathering, crafting, partying, etc. The idea right now is to have 1 real life day (when a DM is available, so probably 5 days a week) represent 1 in-game day. Have you experienced, or do you foresee any issues with a 1 day irl=1 day in game system?

The Glyphstone
2017-06-21, 11:38 AM
That's good for things like potions, but when you need to wake real-life weeks/months to make enchanted items, i doubt any players will bother.

Beastrolami
2017-06-21, 01:47 PM
We're still working on enchanting mechanics, but the idea is we would NOT use the phb rules which say it takes 5 years (or whatever) to make an item. It will probably take 1 day to do the actual enchantment, and maybe 2-3 days to gather the necessary materials if you do it yourself. That's the theory.

Yora
2017-06-21, 02:46 PM
In a sandbox time is actually a thing players tend to have unlimited amounts of. If one player wants to work on a big magic item for four weeks, it's not like the other characters would have to be somewhere urgently. They can just wait for the timer to count down and resume exploring once the player is done.

Vogie
2017-06-21, 04:01 PM
In a sandbox time is actually a thing players tend to have unlimited amounts of. If one player wants to work on a big magic item for four weeks, it's not like the other characters would have to be somewhere urgently. They can just wait for the timer to count down and resume exploring once the player is done.

Especially in a West Marches campaign, where a certain player may not show up each session. If you include time out of session, that's not a huge drain. You play one Saturday, end the session with the materials to craft something, and when they show up a week later, their character has completed 7+ days of crafting and other work.

Basically, use an altered Farmville model for certain things in relating to the hub or things that are crafting-related.

MintyNinja
2017-06-21, 05:11 PM
I've always wanted a well done West Marches campaign but my local community's a bit sparse and it doesn't seem to come up often in PbP. Would you and your Co-DM consider online play?

Also, maybe you've already thought of it, but an NPC Gossip could help you discuss what some parties reported, or what the town thinks about those adventurers, etc.
Maybe an organization could be present as well, akin to the Hudsons Bay Company or other trading posts. Something that makes sense in the frontiers.

Beastrolami
2017-06-22, 08:58 AM
I've always wanted a well done West Marches campaign but my local community's a bit sparse and it doesn't seem to come up often in PbP. Would you and your Co-DM consider online play?

Also, maybe you've already thought of it, but an NPC Gossip could help you discuss what some parties reported, or what the town thinks about those adventurers, etc.
Maybe an organization could be present as well, akin to the Hudsons Bay Company or other trading posts. Something that makes sense in the frontiers.

Me and the Co-DM are in different cities (friends from College), so the idea is to run the game on Roll20 when we're done. I think we have a combined 1.5k hours of DMing on Roll20.

We have tossed around the idea of npc gossip, but we are very early in the development of the game, so the first thing we are trying to figure out is how the Hub town, and crafting works.


In a sandbox time is actually a thing players tend to have unlimited amounts of. If one player wants to work on a big magic item for four weeks, it's not like the other characters would have to be somewhere urgently. They can just wait for the timer to count down and resume exploring once the player is done.

I understand if someone misses a few weeks, they may want to go back and retroactively do some crafting. My issue with giving one person a month skip is what happens if a party wants to adventure for 4 weeks in-between? What if 3 parties want to adventure for 4 weeks in-between? Is the person crafting excluded from adventuring because they already decided they would be busy?

The plan is to track every day, one at a time, and drop the crafting time down to 1 or 2 days instead of months, and drop the adventuring time down to days instead of weeks or months, so that everything is consistent, albeit unrealistic. Although, your comment did bring up a flaw in the system which is good, because that's the point of this discussion.

New issue: If we are tracking 1 day irl = 1 day in game, what happens when a party stops mid adventure, and plays weekly? Do we adventure retroactively? What happens when they want help crafting their loot, and the people in town already spent their crafting days? hmmmm.... Or, is there a better system to track time which will maintain consistency between players/parties?

hymer
2017-06-22, 09:50 AM
New issue: If we are tracking 1 day irl = 1 day in game, what happens when a party stops mid adventure, and plays weekly

They really shouldn't. Ideally, every session ends back at the base, or in a TPK. I have instituted a Rune of Teleportation (which the group helped develop and can buy for relatively little money, but still something of a gold sink), which can teleport them back to base after a ritual casting.

To the original question: I think my main mistake in the first WM style campaign I ran was to vastly overestimate the players' desire to take initiative or explore for exploration's sake. I could count on one hand (if I could recall clearly enough) the sessions where a group set out to explore just to see what was in an unexplored area. Any sort of hook was seized on and clung to, and few personal quests were invented by the players. That wasn't what was supposed to happen, but a few months in, I had to change my approach to adventure site construction and make them far more of a web. It wasn't enough to know there was a ruin/lake/mesa/whatever, they wanted specific reasons to go there most of the time.
I also found that few in the group wanted to draw a map. One player did, and he made some splendid maps. But when he wasn't present, they tended to pass map making around like a hot potato.

Beastrolami
2017-06-22, 12:46 PM
They really shouldn't. Ideally, every session ends back at the base, or in a TPK. I have instituted a Rune of Teleportation (which the group helped develop and can buy for relatively little money, but still something of a gold sink), which can teleport them back to base after a ritual casting.

True, and early on, I think they will. But as they quest farther and farther away, how can I justify a party missing 2-3 days of crafting to travel to an appropriate encounter? Should I just skim past all that dangerous territory, or still roll up random encounters? What happens when they are in a dungeon, 3 days from camp, and only get halfway through in their session? Do i teleport them out, and let them rest, heal, prepare and teleport right back in? I'm trying to find a happy medium, and my initial thought (usually the wrong thought, but a good starting point) is to treat the game like any other campaign in that the party has to travel, and if they decide to rest partway through a dungeon, the session will end there and we will pick up where we left off later. (Obviously that is problematic, hence the issue).


To the original question: I think my main mistake in the first WM style campaign I ran was to vastly overestimate the players' desire to take initiative or explore for exploration's sake. I could count on one hand (if I could recall clearly enough) the sessions where a group set out to explore just to see what was in an unexplored area. Any sort of hook was seized on and clung to, and few personal quests were invented by the players. That wasn't what was supposed to happen, but a few months in, I had to change my approach to adventure site construction and make them far more of a web. It wasn't enough to know there was a ruin/lake/mesa/whatever, they wanted specific reasons to go there most of the time.
I also found that few in the group wanted to draw a map. One player did, and he made some splendid maps. But when he wasn't present, they tended to pass map making around like a hot potato.

Thanks for the advice, I've added that to my notes. Our original plan was to put a huge emphasis on exploration and resource gathering, but you're right. Players love quests, and will usually forego exploration in favor of questing, even if exploration gives better rewards. I'll have to add better plot hooks to keep those players interested.

Yora
2017-06-24, 04:57 AM
Exploration is the default goal that players can always pick up if they don't have any other specific things planned. Having such a "backup plan" is actually really vital to running a sandbox (http://spriggans-den.com/2017/06/05/quicksand-sandbox-what-are-we-going-to-do-tonight-brain/) because the players will not always have a specific goal, especially in the early phases of the campaign. But going exploring is only a method by which the players go searching for adventures. As soon as they find a goal that could be pursued they can, and perhaps even should, concentrate their efforts on that.

I got a question myself, which is about the density of fixed sites of interest. I am not a fan of hexcrawling and instead favor following clues that form a trail leading to an interesting place. (Which is how West Marches did it too.) Since my own campaign is also going to be really wilderness heavy I want to make the journeys relatively long with a good amount of random encounters and 5-room-dungeon lairs and ruins along the way. So the sketch I have now for the map is pretty huge, being 300x180 miles big. That's about the size of Ireland. But instead of wanting to fill out the whole area I want to go more for a web of very narrow corridors with huge white spaces left between them. Can this work? Realistically there would be almost no chance to find a specific place in such a huge forest just by chance by going off a path in a random direction. But does that carry over directly into a campaign? Would having only a dozen major dungeon and settlements each spread over such a vast area still work well?

Ratguard
2017-06-24, 08:52 AM
True, and early on, I think they will. But as they quest farther and farther away, how can I justify a party missing 2-3 days of crafting to travel to an appropriate encounter? Should I just skim past all that dangerous territory, or still roll up random encounters? What happens when they are in a dungeon, 3 days from camp, and only get halfway through in their session? Do i teleport them out, and let them rest, heal, prepare and teleport right back in? I'm trying to find a happy medium, and my initial thought (usually the wrong thought, but a good starting point) is to treat the game like any other campaign in that the party has to travel, and if they decide to rest partway through a dungeon, the session will end there and we will pick up where we left off later. (Obviously that is problematic, hence the issue).


I know the original West Marches guy just kind of handwaived random encounters if it was the end of the session and they needed to get back to town, at that point random encounters are a problem, and the issue is if you keep people in the wilderness, they have to keep playing those characters next session, and can't pick up and play with anyone else, they also gotta all meet up again. That is far less efficient and effective than saying "You doggedly work your way back towards the settlement of Candle Smoke, the journey takes a hair longer due to the extra caution you take on the way back, on the Plains of Torment you had to lie prone for an hour in a small demon catapult crater in order to avoid the notice of the Cultists of the Eternal End, and in the forest of Whydyver you were able to stick to the tree cover and avoid the defeated but still formidable raiding party of goblins that you almost crossed roads with, but eventually the small palisade walls of Candle Smoke appeared within view, and you knew you had made your way to safety."

Yora
2017-06-24, 09:26 AM
I believe early on it wasn't unusual for players to have multiple characters for specifically that reason. I guess it's become a lot less popular with newer games being more variable in character power and nobody wanting to fall behind.

Which I think is another thing to consider. If you play a campaign with irregular parties and especially irregular attendence, the rules should allow for parties to consist of a wide range of indivdual character levels. Nothing worse than not being able to go on adventures with your friends because your character can't catch up to their level. It's one of the big flaws with standard MMOs of the 2000 and would even be worse in a campaign.

hymer
2017-06-24, 01:25 PM
I believe early on it wasn't unusual for players to have multiple characters for specifically that reason. I guess it's become a lot less popular with newer games being more variable in character power and nobody wanting to fall behind.

Which I think is another thing to consider. If you play a campaign with irregular parties and especially irregular attendence, the rules should allow for parties to consist of a wide range of indivdual character levels. Nothing worse than not being able to go on adventures with your friends because your character can't catch up to their level. It's one of the big flaws with standard MMOs of the 2000 and would even be worse in a campaign.

There's a definite charm to letting PCs just gain the XP they deserve according to the rules. My first West Marches campaign went with that, but that was 3.5 Its XP system has built-in buffs and nerfs that allow those behind to catch up, and keeps those ahead from pushing too far ahead. There's some of that in 5e, too, but not nearly to the same degree. So I went with a modified Milestones solution, so all PCs are within two levels of each other all the time. It lacks the charm, but people can adventure together no problem.