I'm interested in learning and running a West Marches game, which books would you recommend for reading up on them?
>>96478304ADND 1E DMG. The only rpg book you need to read regardless of the game you are running.
>>96478304https://gofile.io/d/mbXX0T
>>96478320>>96478367Both based.
so anons, are you excited about 99% of ttrpg community calling every sandbox "a West Marches style game"?
>>96478923Yes.
>>96478923As opposed to linear railroad story games, yes
>>96478320I highly doubt it's going to help me run my Pokemon Tabletop Adventures game.
>>96478923I've yet to see it used without a hex map, though I'm not sure if it's consistently a synonym for hex-crawls.
>>96478923Just out of curiosity, is "sandbox" in itself a recent term? Because it seems like till AD&D1 using a hexmap for a campaign and letting the player run amok was a default assumption. At least that's what I think from reading the campaign supplements and adventure modules; especially with the hexmap included.
>>96478304Scalebros... not like this
>>96480237What are you talking about? 98% of games played back then were just modules
>>96479186>I'm not sure if it's consistently a synonym for hex-crawlsI think all WM are hexcrawls but not all hexcrawls are WM.To have a WM you need to implement an hexcrawl PLUS other elements (they way the whole environment is played vs different groups for example).
>>96479186you could do a west march with point crawl. But traversal is still the point.>>96478923I've seen it. I tried to explain how interacting inside a city wasn't a west march. I tried showing how different each play style was to appeal to the utility of different terms, I went down to describing how you're not marching to the west, I linked how sandbox is the word that has been used for that type of play for decades so it's more useful to find maerial if you use the proper term.They gave up talking about the subject wihout conceding a single point.But it was my bad. Some people don't care. They'll probably never run a game or run a couple and hate it and never do it again. And that was always the case. It's dumb to assume that everyone actually cares and thinks about a topic just because you care and spend time thinking about it. Let them be retarded.>>96479054are you joking about how people call linear games railroads as if they were the same thing? I saw a 5ekiddie doing that on youtube and he sounded retarded, zack the bold or some shit like that. It was like listening to my 12 year old nephew trying to sound smart.
>>96480237the term sandbox comes from videogames afaik.If you check the original manuals they bounced between that (sometimes asking you to go buy another game to do it) and making your own dungeon, BUT most modules were pretty linear if not a rail road.
>>96480237"West marches" is a term from 3e era
>read the thread>/tg/ obviously doesn't know what is a west marches style gameI hope you all just trolled me
>>96479186>I've yet to see it used without a hex map, though I'm not sure if it's consistently a synonym for hex-crawls.I saw somebody show his old map for a WM he ran, which was a square-based map from Google Sheets. He also says he regretted not doing it as a hexcrawl, lol.
>>96482467>He also says he regretted not doing it as a hexcrawllol mathlets don't know you can easily convert a hex grid to square grid just by adding/removing the row/column offset.
>>96483405>mathletsIt's great that you are enjoying your time up on mount stupid. We get it anon, you've been introduced to the offset square grid because there's no way that you have the ingenuity to stumble upon it yourself. It's unfortunate that a mathlet like you isn't able to understand the flaws of the offset square grid and why a hexgrid is still better.
>>96483916>it doesn't work despite being mathematically the same because...it just doesn't, ok?!oh fuck next you're going to tell me that a hexcrawl isn't just a fancy pointcrawl
>>96484961>let me act smug and pretend like I know what I'm talking aboutI hope that coping mechanism is working for you. It only looks pathetic to everyone else. By the way, have you tried having sex?
>>96478923No I hate buzzwords that replace things we already had words for and muddy the meaning of the buzzword itself.
>>96478923West Marches means parties made up on the spot from a player pool so you don't need to show up to every session.You could run a game of space opera or wild west or d100 or pbta and you could call it West Marches if every session starts and ends in a central hub and the party is whoever shows up.
>>96485157you stop at the middle of the concept and decided that was good enough. The mechanic to support so many parties, that most sandbox lack, is exploration in uncharted land. All lore and events are physical and open to interpretation. The point of this is forcing the players to interact out of the game, share maps, exchange information, etc; that way you off load part of the scheduling effort (keeping the players active and aware of what they've been doing) to them.If you try to do this in a social setting you need them to remember too much information that should be understood a single way, if the gang who interacted with the mob boss missremember what he wanted it's gonna fuck everyone. The open space makes mapping important, and that creates a power balance between players that pushes them to interact with each other and become actual characters by their actions. Civilized places have their own times and needs, you can't just go rob a bank any day you want, but in the wilderness whatever day you play is the same as the rest.There's a reasson why we call it west march, the west march part is important.
>>96485004why are you so mad
If you think Critical Role will use an advanced hexcrawl for their game just because they use the term west marches to describe it I'm sorry it isn't going to happen.
>>96488491Brennan is running it and he seems anal enough to make it work even if he's peak theatre kid
>>96485157No, that's open table. West Marches is a specific subset of open table campaign.Though at least your misunderstanding is better than the complete mangling of the meaning that the Critical Role idiots are doing.>>96488527Maybe he could, but he isn't going to, because it's not actually a West Marches; there aren't even rotating parties, but instead 3 distinct parties in the same world.
I've been thinking about putting together a West March for my local player grounps but I'm hung up at the actual mapping part. The guy whose game coined the term apparently didn't use hexes at all, so that players wouldn't explore a hex and never return to it thinking they found all there was or will be there. Exploration was a lot more natural, just player made maps and the PCs explored in directions using landmarks as guides. There were many regions, and 100 square miles was "average" for one. https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/94/west-marches-running-your-own/So what's confused me is how the hell are PCs supposed to find locations that aren't immediately visible from the surrounding area? He mentions using rumors in town, but also not having NPC adventurers, leaving exploring entirely up to the players, so where are rumors coming from if it's an uninhabited frontier? Maybe the players aren't the first explorers but those that did aren't around anymore? But then how do players just stumble upon more hidden locations when they just pick a direction and walk? And when it's something too far from town for any feasible rumors to start?Maybe I'm overthinking it all. Has anyone else actually had any experience with more natural exploration or have any good resources or examples for it?
>>96490511when he says no NPC he means no people to find in the wilderness and have in character discussions, there should be people selling stuff to them, inn keepers, organizers, whatever you want in town but only in town. It's a very game-ist thing, but the whole concept is game first.He probably did a point crawl, you can look online for advice on how to run one, including opposing views. The general idea is that you have visible elements or indicators at a set distance, you meassure that distance rolling for random events each day (or week or multiple times a day, you can adapt that to different areas too so it's quick to get somewhere but challenging to cover a shorter distance). During those random events your characters migh find new cool stuff they want to check out, like old roads or a big tower, and you let them decide if they're gonna change destination or mark it for future explorations.It's a bit more abstract than hewcrawls and my experience is that GMs tend to really love one or the other. Try running some one shots to see how it feels for you.
>>96478923"westmarches" is about to become the "immersive sim" of ttrpgs and I think that's beautiful
Funny that this term has become popular.My friends and I learned to play rpg this way back in the 2000s with d&d 3.0. In fact, we didn't know there was another way to play until 2002, when a guy from my older brother school joined the group and told us he played differently.
>>96490945>when he says no NPC he means no people to find in the wilderness and have in character discussions, there should be people selling stuff to them, inn keepers, organizers, whatever you want in town but only in town. It's a very game-ist thing, but the whole concept is game first.Right, that's why I specified no NPC *adventurers*. It would be rather silly to have a town and just not have any resources available to the players.>He probably did a point crawlThat doesn't seem to be the case: >"I didn’t use hex maps, just free movement and distances. It kept things organic and made it easy to get lost / disoriented, which was good. To track movement I just got distances and bearings from the party (“we’ll march southwest for 2 miles”), checked to see if they were going the way they thought (wilderness lore) and then drew the vector on the map to see where they actually were.">"I made the maps in Illustrator, but during games I had paper printouts and just drew a line to plot the course the party was taking each hour of the day. So I always knew exactly where they were even if they didn’t. Make a little dot when they camp, put a date beside it if you want, then draw another line as they start marching the next day."It seems simple enough but I wish I knew what play looked like at the table. Do they just get lucky and a vector passes over or close enough to a location to get a hint about it? I'm very used to indecisive and unambitious players, which is why this appeals to me, but I wonder if most contemporary players won't get annoyed if they're expected to explore areas thoroughly.
>>96491025That kinda looks like Barbarian Queen, but the actors are different. Is it Sorcerer? I know it's not the argentinian Corman films but it reeks of Concord. I'd like to watch it.
>>96491075You could just have features noticeable enough that once you're near them you'll see them. The example is "2 miles southeast", no "half a mile south, circle around, a mile east, look around, a quarter mile..." so he was probably treating things as being areas more than unique points they had to meet.That process sounds way too hard for me. I can see how to molds play and it'd be kind of cool, but it's too much information to keep track of. Because then you have the wrong maps they make and share among each other, which means at some point all the discrepancies could pile up and make communication way too confusing with the GM. I'm thinking about it and I feel a hexcrawl is good enough. You could make it a secret hexcrawl, so players comunicate in cardinal points but you track their position, travel cost, variationm and thing to discover by hex.
>>96491270>he example is "2 miles southeast", no "half a mile south, circle around, a mile east, look around, a quarter mile..." so he was probably treating things as being areas more than unique points they had to meet.That would make a lot more sense. 100 square miles isn't massive, but it is large enough to have multiple points of interest all several miles from each other. The surrounding part of the region could kind of be part of the location as well.>I'm thinking about it and I feel a hexcrawl is good enough. You could make it a secret hexcrawl, so players comunicate in cardinal points but you track their position, travel cost, variationm and thing to discover by hex.I'm thinking the same thing. At the very least, I'm using a hex map to lay out the different regions.
>>96491023What is the ttrpg/westmarches equivalent of a game dev saying their game has "imsim elements" but they just mean you can pick up boxes?
>>96488774It wouldn't surprise me if they shuffled the parties up occasionally. We'll see how things go. Closest we got to these kind of games are the ones RollPlay did.
