West Marches Style: Bringing Us Together

Hey Everybody!
{EDIT: if you're on this page, please leave a note to let me know you've seen it so I don't keep bugging you about it, and maybe subscribe to the thread? I want all the input I can get!}
So I recently watched this video by Matt Colville about West Marches style games and he talked about the fact that a West Marches style game can have TONS of players in it (like up to 50) and even multiple DMs. So this started me thinking--what if we started a West Marches game in which anyone on the entire GP website who wanted to play could, and depending on how many players we had, we could have a bunch of DMs who would take certain adventures as parties formed and decided to try something.
Now I think there are several benefits to something like this:
First, it's not a whole lot of work for the DMs. I tried DMing once and it was hard! A lot of prep and very time consuming. But as Matt explains, a West Marches style game is played in a very impromptu way on the DM's part, where the players are the ones having to force the game along and the DM just has to react as the players advance. A West Marches game is especially easy over a forums-based game because the DM has not only all the time between the player's choosing what to do and them doing it, but also all the time between them posting.
Second, a West Marches style game, especially one this large, would have a very hard time "dying out". Now I love GP, but one of my greatest pet peeves about it is that games come and go like dandelions. A new game starts up and everyone's fired up to do it, but then after about a week of feverish posting the game starts to slow down and finally it gets so slow that it's nearly non-existent as the adventurers slog through what feels less and less interesting material and their great dreams for their characters begin to look less and less attainable. Or, the DM has a conflict and has to stop DMing. Sound familiar? Well, a West Marches game would be much harder for this to happen to. On the player's part, it's organic and constantly changing, so the players never get bored of the storyline or their comrades because both are new every adventure. On the DMs' part, they don't have nearly as much pressure on them to come up with great new content every single time, because they aren't constantly DMing because there are 9 other DMs helping them out. And if someone's life starts coming down around their ears and they have to bow out? No problem! We'll miss them, but the other DMs are more then capable of holding it all together until that person comes back, or maybe even one of the players can ascend to the status of DM and run a couple adventures until IRL stops killing the poor guy who had to leave.
Third, because of the nature of West Marches games, the DM often doesn't have the world mapped out already. Instead, he drops the players in a town with absolutely no adventuring opportunity in it and says "go out, young adventurelings". As the adventurers spread out into the world, the DM decides what they find and where, even randomly, but the adventurers have to keep track of this stuff themselves. The DM isn't going to hand them a perfect map. Because of all this, it means that the players are, in a way, forcing the creation of the world as they go along, a concept that I think is really cool. Again--less work for the DMs.
Fourth, it'd be a great community builder. Have you ever wished that you could get together a bunch of specific GPers and play a game with them? Go out on an epic adventure? If you're like me, you love playing with a lot of GPers. How do you play them all in the same game without bogging down the poor DM who has to bear the load? Well, in a massive West Marches game you can have a ton of people so if you want to play with everyone you can. And as to getting all your friends in, the parties wouldn't be determined by who the DM lets into the limited slots the game has; instead parties would be determined when Example101's character decides he wants to try to explore the cave Example105's character talked about nearly getting herself killed in. When Example101 decides this, he goes out and finds E102 and E103's characters and says "Hey, wanna go explore this cave with me?" So you'd get to play with all your old pals. But you'd also meet new people because if E101 is playing a wizard, E102 a sorcerer, and E103 a bard, they need some muscle. So they go over to E104's barbarian, who they've never played with before, and ask him to join. Voala, community building. (Or have you ever joined a game that was running much too fast [or much too slow] for your taste and had to bow out? Well in a West Marches game, parties are formed around preference, level equality and also who posts as much as you do. So that problem would probably go away as well, at least to a large degree)
Fifth, the DMs could join the game as well. Because of the structure of a West Marches game, no one really knows everything that's out there. So the DMs could each have a character as well. Obviously their characters couldn't go on adventures they were DMing, but if we had multiple DMs then DM101's character could go on the adventure with E101-104 because DM102 is running it. So have you ever wished you could play in your own game, as a DM? I have. In West Marches, you can.
Finally, it'd just be frikin' awesome. A game with 50 people in it?! Say, 10 DMs? That'd be so amazing, GP might even get some publicity out of it.
Now if everyone is like "uh, this kid is crazy", then fine. I get that, this does sound a little crazy. But I think it could be really cool if we worked it out. Thoughts? Comments? Critiques?

End Note: I was kind of assuming we'd do D&D 5e for this since it's the a) D&D, which is probably best for a game like this b) the newest edition of D&D and so hopefully the best and c) most universally mastered by players on GP, at least according to the number of people who want to play it.

Love it. I have some of that feeling in mardav's Kingmaker campaign now, but this would be even more of a sandbox. +1

I'm in mardav's Kingmaker campaign too and I love it, so that's part of where I got this idea from.

*nods* The only part that would get rough is the overall mapping of the area if they are all in the same world. For example, if you have two groups that are both pushing into a hex on a map to discover things, making sure that DM 1 doesn't go "Well, looks like you've found a massive desert!" and DM 2 says "Ah, but it is also a giant sea with a sunken kingdom!".

That would really be the only "rough" administrative part to it. You'd almost need one person overarching for the game to be "the" cartographer to make sure that it all jives.

Love the idea, though.

The other problem with having multiple parties is that things happen at different times. Group one may be on day 17, while group two is on day 4. Even though they may start their quest at the same time, things become complex with timing.

It can be done.

I'd love to join.

I'd love to join. I think timing and mapping could potentially be handled with a few admin-focused threads or maybe outside tools if there's something that fits the task perfectly.

What's the possibility of bein both a DM and a PC (in different regions, of course)?

So to steal one of those tired business tropes my management team likes to throw around, what is the "Yes, If" here? (Pardon the rambling thoughts)

Having a central cartographer is pretty easy to manage I would think.

As for timestream management in an asynchronus world.... what could be done to effectively track that? Obviously, you could have the adventure start at a specific date and time (even an arbitrary one: Month 1, Day 1). Then each character tracks their character's time stream just like they would hit points or spell slots or whatever. Perhaps the central cartographer is more of a "chronicler" rather than a DM. They would need to be able to keep track of the overall world time and overall map. Characters could "easily" do downtime activities between adventures to "catch up" the time streams. IT would still need some effort:

Group A and B set out on 1.1. Group A encounters a ton of roaming creatures and clean up a mine. This takes them four days in game. They return to camp on day 1.5. Group B doesn't encounter much, but spends several days mapping out some territory and helping to build a fort. This takes them 12 days. They return to camp on day 1.13.

However, Group A does this over a period of 7 Real World days. Group B does there task in 3 real world days. If they wanted to interact with Group A to discuss moving to the new fort, in game they would show up while Group A was practicing blacksmithing and be like "Hey guys, we made a new fort! Wanna check it out!?". However, in reality, they would be sitting in camp for 4 days waiting for that group to re-appear to "mesh up" the time streams.

If Group B is fine with the real life downtime, it's a null point. They park and wait until the others show up and voila. How would it be handled if they wanted something they could do while they wait out the real world time for things to catch up in the long term?

Adam Kobel and Steven Lumpkin discussed some of the pain points Steven had when running his West Marches campaign in a series of youtube videos. Quite in-depth and great discussion between them two. Several things that has mentioned so far in this thread has been discussed by them in addition to other concerns. I highly recommend everyone (especially so if you are considering being a GM in this thing) watch several of these videos.
West Marches Hack Attack

Oh, and I'm interested.

This would be a great thing to be a part of, I'm intrested

Unless there are overarching story elements that are fixed in time, I'd just handwave it. I'm not sure the complexity of keeping track of time would be worth it. Just assume time passes in a fixed rate in the quest hub, and people jump in and out of the quest hub stream whenever they aren't out adventuring.

I'm guessing the hub will be mostly used for staging new forays and exchanging banter anyways. Who cares if group A used two weeks on their crawl and group B only spent half a week, if they're all ready for re-grouping they should be available for it. (If you need an explanation, just say group B spent one and a half week in the tavern or waiting for supplies before group A came in)

As Drama and Naat have pointed out, there are still some things to work out. But I think that with some planning and coordination, we could work it out easily enough. As Azira and Drama said, inserting downtime, or even going out on little forays to fill the time, would make it easy enough to overcome these obstacles so long as we were willing to flex time and space a little bit. That entire spoiler is pretty much a response to Drama's first comment:
The idea of a Tabletop and a Library would also just be pretty much necessities for everyone. As we are exploring this place we need to have a map of what's actually there and a record of what happens or there will be inconsistencies and such EVERYWHERE.

I think that it could definitely be possible. Of course, if you're a DM who has access to the central cartographer and you are on an adventure which involves a bad mapping job, then you have to keep your metaknowledge out of it. But if you're comfortable with and capable of doing that, I don't see any problem, as I said in my fifth point in my initial post.

Would you necessarily need a central cartographer/chronicler, or would a sort of DM's toolbox (see my rambling spoiler about Tabletop and Library be all we need? A cartographer would be a pretty big job and if he had to quit for some reason we'd be up a creek without a paddle, but if we just had a communal "DM's Guild" going on in which everyone helped out and kept each other straight, for one person to leave wouldn't be the end of the world.

Interested, but this seems complicated to organize...

I think one thing Group B could do is just go out on another little escapade for a few real life days--the sort of thing that takes a few real-life days but is only a day or so in-game--and then when they get back it just means that Group A had to wait another day in-game, which is by no means the end of the world and is much more manageable than waiting IRL.
Overall, I think azira's comment about us being flexible with it is a good one:Though I think just completely waving time would not be the best idea, especially as real time goes on and our characters begin to do more than just explore and world-changing events might occur in which time is important, I think we can have it be flexible enough that its not a problem. Besides, we all have lives to live in the real world, so having to wait a day or two real time for Group A to get done with their thing IRL which actually took longer in game isn't the end of the world. We'll all be in other games, and you can use the time to do a write-up of what happened on your adventure or do character concept stuff--if you're that devoted.

True, but I think it could definitely be worth it. Besides, this kind of administrative stuff is fun to me personally, as my insane amount of posting on here demonstrates.

The organization mostly lands on the GMs' backs. Players just form groups and head out whenever they get a chance.

I didn't get that far before I knew I wanted in, ha. Glad to see it.

Haha fair enough. Posts that long are intimidating.

So... how do we get this rolling? I honestly don't even particularly want to be a DM, I just want it to happen.

I like the tabletop/library idea, seems like an interesting way of handling it. So long as there is a central home for what the map is, I don't care overmuch how it gets maintained. :)

This is basically an MMO through PbP and D&D. Not a horrible idea but I think it would be very difficult to pull off.

I'm always down to DM. I have found that having the control is where I like to be.

That's great, since you're also amazing at it.

Is there a reason why you think it would be harder to pull of than any other West Marches style game that's happened? I'm honestly curious, not being snarky. xD

I honestly would need to do some research on West Marshes style of plat. Not sure what that is, but as someone who is from the putside looking in the project sounds overwhleming. I will say this though, the more I think of it the more I want to do it.

I would think, hope, assume some would try to open their own shop or even towns to run. We could make this a whole world played by the entirety of this site.
You could make a character that tells stories about the other character you have played as. How meta is that.

Building the world from scratch is nice but like Drama said you could get some conflicting stories. I will post a few full worlds amd maybe vote on them or we could go back to building the world as we go.

These are 3 worlds I threw together.

That's the beauty of a West March style campaign, you don't design a world. You start with a frontier town in the middle of hostile wilderness, and you go out and explore and build the areas around that one town. A lot of people think West March campaigns are Hexcrawls because of this. They are very similar, but while the Hexcrawl has already listed ahead of time everything there is to explore around the settlement the players are in, in a West March campaign, the players are the ones building the surrounding areas. If you want a desert 5 miles south of town, and nobody else has mapped that area already, well guess what, there's a desert 5 miles south of town...

Wuh? This sounds more like Dungeon World than West Marches. Here is a series of blog posts by Ben Robins (creator of Microscope) and his West Marches campaign. I'm not sure, but Ben Robins was the first I heard of West Marches, so he is the origin of it in my mind. Ben Robins on West Marches

Oh, ok. I like that. Thank you for the quick reference.

Well, either way I feel the planet should be called "Venatus".

So if we've got this sort of rolling should we create a game? Get people joining?

Interested. I could possibly GM as well. I'm a player in a game similar to this on another site that has 20 players. We reached 5000 posts in under a month.

Dang, sounds awesome!

I am happy to GM as well, tho I can't say I am all that great of a story teller. I mostly steal and retell stories I love.

I will try and experiment with different options for mapping tonight and co.e up with some workflow recommendations.

Wd also need to have a quorum on the world setting. I for one really enjoy gritty, low magic settings.

For those interested in DMing, here are the resources we have compiled so far:
Matt Colville on West Marches
Ben Robbins on West Marches
Adam Koebel & Steven Lumpkin on West Marches
I've watched Matt Colville's video and read Ben Robbins' thoughts on West Marches and both are helpful sources when it comes to getting an idea of how the game will run. Matt basically takes what Ben wrote and says it again, in video form, with his own additions and such. Both are worth your time I'd say, but one or the other will probably do you fine as well. As for Koebel and Lumpkin, I haven't watched them and so can't speak on them.

I second the gritty low magic world. How interested are we with the variant of the healing proccess?

Wait, what? Variant healing process?

I don't think I am familiar with it, how does it work?

Is this the one where you just die? Sounds tough.

There are lingering injury variants in the DMG that are a huge bitch.

Pg 266 of the Dmg has healing surges variant and longer rest times required.

Not sure how I feel about those.

I think death should be a plausible thing tho. In games that I've played, a character dying is near unheard of, but in this game I think that if a player makes a dumb mistake and gets killed, that's on them.

This is a thing I've done on occasion--have my characters mention having encountered one of my other characters in the past. It's fun even when no one notices but me.

I think this project is great! The biggest attraction for me is the potential for involving the entire GP community!

Yeah I think if we got everyone together on it it could be really really cool.

I was thinking of how this would work in a game forum sense. To start a game you need a GM to start one then add threads. Would all who wish to partake be under one game or would we have multiple game under the name of "GP West Marches" or "Venatus" (That meams "gamer" in Latin. That is the reason fpr that word. I figured Gamer Planet sonce we are all part of it) as I like to call it?

I don't know what the max amount of players it is on thos site per game but I think having everyone joining one game would make connecting and sharing of information much easier. Also, if a player decides their are done adventuring and wants to start a shop they can start a shop. We cam make a thread of that shop and anytime someone wants to shop therr just go to that thread. The shop owner can even give out quests for supplies they need.

The West Marches style has everyone start at the same town, I'm ok with that but all the GM's will need to establish a starting town that has a few figure heads that players can talk to, just so there is little to no overlap of those type of characters.

The basic 5e PHB should be used (I say 5e because that is the system I know very well) with the Revised Ranger and it can be dicussed as to what expanded material can be used. This is to keep everyone on even ground.

Obviously starting at level 1 with starting gear, no coin rolls, as well as the point buy. Again, that is to keep everyone starting even. There is nothing known about the world outside the walls this town, The "Town of Orsus". (I love my hidden references. If we go through with this I will give inspiration to the first person to get the reference of the name of the town.) In the world of Venatus.

Now, your characters will die, you exploerers not hero's, yet. I will not hide or fudge my rolls while DMing, which is typical for this style of game.

It is late and I'm tired but I tried to cover or ask as much as I could remember to say and ask. Let this come to reality people.

I've set up a West Marches campaign. I want to aim for a low magic, gritty world. I will be establishing some house rules and some world setting details. However, the game is still open for everyone to play and GM. Anyone who wants to GM should join now and we will all hash out the details of the world (or region really) and debate house rules. We will also establish how we will maintain GM notes, maps, random encounter tables, etc.

This game will feature a dark and merciless world, where magic has lost its influence and lies mostly forgotten by the civilized world. However, pockets exist in the unexplored West Marches where magic lingers or even thrives, mysterious, dangerous, and most often evil. Spell casting available to PCs will be limited to 1st-level spells and cantrips - a character may not advance to a level in a class if it would grant 2nd-level Spell Slots or a feature that allows casting of a 2nd-level spell.

Humans are the only race available to PCs. Several human subraces will reflect the cultural differences of people from different regions.

The world is brutal and hasn't advanced technologically. House rules on combat and equipment restrictions emphasize this setting. Notably, plate armor and crossbows are not available.

In the end, this will be a game mostly about fighters, barbarians, and rogues, with perhaps a touch of magic, exploring the deadly wilds, struggling to survive and coming out with fantastical tales and treasures, seeding further adventures to brave the Western Marches.

I know that this sort of setting isn't everyone's cup of tea, so I encourage others that feel so inclined to form a Western Marches style game with a more traditional D&D setting. I'd play in it.

http://gamersplane.com/games/728/

You better hurry and approve me.

WTB GM Position.

Constable, do you mean for the game you set up to be the one I was talking about? Because I think a more traditional setting would be better for a site-wide game. With the limited races and classes you've stipulated, character overlap would be so rampant that I feel it wouldn't be ideal for as many people as we plan to have.

I have to agree with couchlord on this myself. I'm perfectly OK with gritty, but with the amount of people potentially playing having races limited to just human and mainly focusing on martial characters may come as a hindrance or put people off due to lack of diversity.

I actually enjoy the martial games @constable since I find that magic has a tendency to slow and complicate the game. However, I think that we have to allow as many races, classes etc as we can to a) draw people in with the diversity and b) to attempt to allow each character to be unique. Besides, this is a wilderness campaign. If you outlaw magic to that extent, rangers and druids (the two other wilderness classes beside barbarian) are both severely crippled and, in a druid's case, rendered nearly useless. I do think, however, that our game will end up being rather gritty and low magic just by its very nature. Rather than the DMs stipulating that no magic is allowed, we should leave it to the players to figure out what I guess will be the case: in a wilderness exploration setting like this, magic is not going to be your best bet. No matter how hard a wizard tries, they will eventually have to do some extensive physical stuff just because of the nature of the game. And then they're screwed. I think because of this purely magical characters will be few and far between without the DMs having to stipulate anything. Add to that the fact that because of magic users' rarity the few we have will be on high demand, I think it will create a really cool dynamic. But because of the rarity of magic users, I think there will be plenty of games for you to DM that are composed solely of martial characters.

Yeah, I didn't see these posts prior to signing up for the game that cbrew posted. I'm going to withdraw from that since the limitations/stipulations aren't my cup of tea at all. I'm down for the pretty well open boundary site wide concept though.

I think that's going to be the plan as CBrew did suggest in his post that if it wasn't for everyone to run another west marches game I've now realised, it just comes down to who sets up the traditional game, I would myself but I don't feel prepared to DM currently.

Gritty bloody low-magic games ROCK!
Humans rule the best worlds FOREVER!

West Marches games.....still deciding IF I LIKE THEM OR NOT!!!

haha. Great thread, fellas. Anxious to see where this goes.

Yeah I'd say we can most definitely have both, but Cbrew's game is for 50 people and I'm not sure he's gonna be able to get that many, unless he meant that to be the site-wide one, which is why I said I don't think that'll work, but as I said, I like that style of game and I want to do it. I just don't think it's right for the site-wide game.

Well, as soon as the traditional one starts, I'm in ! Maybe I'll add my name for Dming later...

I intend for my game to be site wide with the gritty aesthetic I enjoy. I encourage another game to be set up allowing the full 5e cast of characters. If my game were the DC Dark Universe, then the traditional D&D would be Archie comics, and that's alright. It may seem like we are segmenting the GP population, but we are all gaming sluts* and get around quite prolifically. (*Not slut shaming. This is a good thing.)

I kinda feel like that's not the best course of action. While we may not be segregating the pollution intentionally, it's going to happen. Despite the fact that we all get around, we only have so much energy to expend on games that we are in and for every game we add we split our energies another way. So I feel like trying to have too many site-wide games is gonna make it harder to have any at all. If we are splitting our attention between two games like this, the chances are very high that neither of them will be up to the standard we would like them to be. As several people have noted, this is gonna be hella hard to organize to the point where it's doable. If trying to organize one game effectively is gonna be hard, trying to organize two is gonna be nearly impossible. I would instead suggest bringing the player count for your game way down, like to 12 or so, and have it be a smaller game. That way it's not sucking a ton of administrative power away from the site-wide game that will be traditional.

Agree about splitting the community might be an issue for the major concept. That being said, I think that'll sort itself out as more people are lightly to flock to the "default" than the "hardcore" game.

I suggest CouchLord gets the default game going asap though, we can figure things out in there (you can always transfer the GM role later if you wish).

Also suggest that Keleth makes a sticky post to highlight the default West Marches game in the Games Tavern for new players and mindshare. If so, it shouldn't be a problem that there are other, niche west marches games on the site.

Absolutely. But a game for 50 people isn't a niche game, so that's why I suggested he lower the player maximum so people don't get confused.
I'm going to create the game now.

Well I can't do it right, right now, but I'll get it at about 10:30 EST when I get home.

Wow, I guess I can spend some time and get it started. I enjoy DMing and seem to be constantly placed in that seat. I also have talks with Keleth often. I will open the game later tonight.

I would like those interested in DMing to join soon so we may figure out the best method to crowd share the map and info that we have and also how to setup what the players will use for their map.

Like I said earlier, the basic PHB plus the Revised Ranger (as the PHB Ranger is garbage). We can discuss the extention of UA material as we play. Maybe thay can be unlocked or found as one of the advetures.
A rumor of untapped power is spread throughout the city. A team goes out and discovers it is locked inside the ruins of an ancient Yuna-ti city. They find the scroll containing the information to access the power and bring it back to display in the tavern.
You know, something like that.

No gritty world, it will be tranditional and since I am starting the forum I get to name the World, city and tavern you all start in. The rest can be up to the players. That is the only stipulation is the city you start in. It is walled high and guarded heavily, not unlike Attack on Titan. The wilderness is unforgiving and only the bravest leave the protection of the city.
If you adventure out but don't make it back all your stuff, secrets and info you had or found is now lost to the wilderness and anyone else can stumble upon it.

By it's nature it will most likely be low RP but I have no problem adding in more should a team enjoy that.

World: Venatus
City: Town of Orsus
Tavern: Joho Habu

Ok so I'm already calling it... I want to open a Magic shop !!!
Gonna be a bard or a wizard (maybe both...) eventually making my own magic items ! I'll try to buy as much of the magic items the players don't want and even have a public inventory, and a private dm only accessible bought/sold list.
I could be a DM in my shop and a player when I go on refill runs (probably have a npc seller to keep it running when my player is not there..). How about it ?

It's going to be called " The Magic Portal".

Could I request that the tavern have a more traditional name? Like, Bee and Barb or Frothing Flagon? Just an OCD thing of mine...

The Mad Mare.

I'd like to advocate for UA being available from day one. The most obvious reason for this is to allow more diversity among players, and in a game with as many potential players as we plan to have, diversity is going to be key. For instance: the PHB contains 3 fighter archetypes. UA adds about 5 more. With the original 8 races, there are 5 or 6 that make tolerable fighters. That means you have 18 different fighter variations if you use PHB alone. However, if you use UA, you have 48, and that's ignoring the fact that the Arcane Archer and Sharpshooter fighter archetypes allow halflings and gnomes to be fighters. Now of course we don't need 48 options, but it's just better to have more than less if you ask me.
However, a good case can be made I think that simplicity is best. I understand that. But how would characters "find" UA content? It's something that's learned, not read, and if you've already decided to go Champion with your fighter and then at level 8 you find UA content, are you going to be able to switch to Samurai at level 8? What happens then?
Just some thoughts.

I was also thinking that, instead of having the traditional West Marches setting, characters are shipped to Venatus or teleported there from an unimportant location. A small group of people have been living in Venatus in the safety of their walled city for decades, but the PCs are the first to go out and explore. I dunno, I just liked the idea that the entire world is uncharted, rather than just the West. Especially given the maps you drew up @Apex, I think that building a ship and traveling to an island would be an eventuality, and possibly even the founding of kingdoms and such. But if that's the case then civilization and the logical decision to go east and get a ship would get in the way of and complicate that sort of thing. If our characters were simply dropped into the world somehow however (kind of like Lost, if anyone has seen the TV show), they really do have only themselves to rely on. Just an idea.

You chatacter could very well die and if that one found "knowledge" (That is the meaning behind the reading) of the UA the new character can now take part in that archetype.

I like the simplicity of just the PHB. I believe all the UA is still in the test phase and that makes it unbalanced at the moment. I would hate to complicate things before we even begin this endeavor. Having the UA "hidden" or "lost" knowledge will male for some more interesting plays later on, giving us all something to look forward to.

Also here is the link to the traditional play of West Marches for the site. Lets discuss.

A certain shop keeper could send a group to bring back some lost lore (or something) and pay them with a few magic items (their reward). The lost lore would then be available to new players, but they would be in debt with the shop owner who just so happens to need them to get something for him...(their first quest?)

I was thinking of using roll20 for the communal map, but not sure everyone is into that. Google also has a draw tool that works like google docs.
Anyone else have ideas for this.

I think Google doc is safest bet for the shared information, at least the safest way to keep the info cleaned up. We can have a sortof library thread for all that knowledge and have the Google doc, maintained by all you players, where it is more organized.

I'd say Google docs would be the best bet. Also works out nice for me (and possibly others) as most of my posting happens at work which has strict filtering so roll20 is blocked.

I think Google Draw and Google Docs are going to be our best bet. Roll20 is a little hard to figure out, or at least it seemed to me, but Google Draw is quite simple. Google Docs is great for a multitude of reasons, but mostly because of the ability to constantly save & share material. As soon as I get home from work I'll look into them and get us rolling. I've had quite a bit of experience with Google Docs.

I still just feel like the idea that the first adventurers find this stuff but can't use it is both a little unfair and a little just weird. They found it, I feel like they should be able to use it.
I honestly don't have another suggestion other than to just allow it (which I don't really wanna do either), but the idea of discovering it hits me the wrong way.

I've been lurking this thread and not contributing because I'm reluctant to commit time at the moment, but it's a very interesting idea.

I want to make a suggestion about the civilised starting area; instead of just being a town, could it be a valley cut off from the rest of the world by impassable mountains and a great big wall (I'm thinking gates of Mordor here)? The space inside could be as much as 60 miles long and 20 wide (at its maximum) and could have one sizeable town and several villages, farming communities, etc. Why? Well, if it was just a town where would the people get food? But also, it gives more variety for character backgrounds. There could be dwarven villages cut into the mountains, an eleven community in an upland forest, etc.

There could also be people who are employed to regularly go outside the wall to cut back encroaching trees because they need to be able to see, say, two miles beyond the wall. This would be a good background for Ranger and Barbarian characters.

There could be occasional beasts who manage to cross the mountains and descend on Orsus, giving the inhabitants a small taste, and a healthy fear, of what's out there.

Just some thoughts, what do you think?

I'm just gonna be honest: I love it. It also fits really well with the idea that this little Rivendell is the only pocket of civilization on the entire continent rather than that its a town on the edge of a utopian civilization that the adventurers have come out of. I honestly don't like that setting because it doesn't make sense. We have all these adventurers who specialize in martial and magical combat. If society is utopian and boring, where did the adventurers learn their skills? More importantly, why? You only learn things like that if you need them, so why did a random assortment of people decide to learn these skills just for the heck of it and they ended up getting lucky and finding a use for them. It just strikes me as much less likely. A situation in which a small fleet of ships sailed to a far off continent and settled there, building themselves a stronghold from which thy refused to sally seems much more likely to me. The adventurers could be a mix of friendly natives, those born in the stronghold, and those who came with the express purpose of seeking adventure on the occasional ship that comes from the mother country bearing meager supplies and such.

It also gives a good reason for these people to suddenly be venturing out into the wilds; water. There would be numerous small streams and plenty of wells, but no major river so close to the mountains. Their population has increased to the point where they are struggling to sustain themselves, the rich have all they need but the poor are getting desperate. Crime is rising and something has to give. The leaders have recognised this and are reluctantly opening the gates; at the very least it will reduce their excess population.

Why? It's not part of the original material so it was thought up after the release of the PHB. That makes it unknown knowledge. I think a player could even spend down time (not sure how long) and develop the knowledge. They could then open a training school to teach the material. Heck they could even develop more UA stuff.

My thought behind making it "discoverable" was to allow for some morr collaborative play and also to allow this idea of yoyrs, Couch, to grow naturally. This would allow it to survive the thread curse a bit longer.

The idea behind the West Marches play style is the town or city everyone begins in is safe. Nothing is supposed to happen within the walls. Granted some like that stuff and heck it could get to that point, but I certainty don't want to have the city in disarray at the beginning of this endeavor.

Let's say this is the highest point of this city's life. It is at its most safest and the people inside have learned to get along. That is not to say something may change later in but for now, just to get things kicked off, we'll say it is utopian-esk.

I like the larger area surrounded by muntains with a small wooded area inside. It could be segragated with the town center being the hub for intra trading. The city needs to be free flow as well so any player can come in and have their idea fit. Let's all agree it is a well off, large city that is the only known bright point left in the world. The players that adventure are those people that are getting stir crazy and want to see what is out there or they are part of the teams that push back the monsters that creep closer to the city. What I see in my head is a lot like Attack in Titan, where the city is safe and the Scouts leave to keep the city safe.

I was suggesting the overpopulation as a motivation device to get people out, I didn't mean there should be conflict in the city, but I take your point. Other options for them to suddenly want to go outside would be a religious crusade or a new ruler with something to prove. None of this should make much difference to the adventurers, they would only really be playing in the tavern or the wilds, but I just like the world building side of things and feel a strong urge to figure out why these things are happening. :-)

Understood.

I love world building too! That's part of why West Marches appeals to me so much--the world is being built as we explore it. It's awesome.
I think rather than saying this is the highest point in the city's life, we should just say it has established itself nicely. If it was at its highest point, it would have already explored beyond it's borders. I think we should still have plenty of room for it to grow or it will feel as if the adventurer's actions can't really help the growth of the town at all. I also think that having a huge, walled, heavily-fortified city (Attack on Titans) from which the adventurers are sallying is a little too much. The whole point of West Marches is that the adventurers are truly on their own in the wilderness, but if they have a huge city to return to I think that the game will turn into the players trying to persuade the city to help them every time they come up against a big problem. And as much as we could just say "you're not allowed to do that," the logical side of me wants it to make sense. So here's what I propose:
Venatus is a large, unexplored continent on the other side of the world from Civis. Civis has been under the thumb of civilization for eons now and has thousands of years of history: empires, nations, republics, dictatorships rising and crumbling to give way to the new regime. Wars upon wars have been fought there. Finally, about 50 years before our game picks up, Venatus was discovered by Civisene geographers, who realized through a series of magics that there must be a continent on the other side of the globe from Civis. This was announced to the land and, about 30 years ago a conglomeration of people from various races, classes, cults and guilds joined together to attempt the harrowing journey across the sea to the unknown continent. After nearly 6 months at sea, the Pilgrims were caught in a huge storm and carried quickly across the sea and to the coast that was their goal. But alas, the storm did not lay them gently on the beach. Their ships were run aground by the crashing waves and, though they managed to get most of their equipment and supplies out of the vessels, the huge ships that had been necessary to make that journey were smashed to bits by the pounding surf. Disheartened but determined, the pilgrims fought their way inland until they came upon a small valley nestled among the foothills. Here they stood successfully against the goblins which had been pursuing them and, realizing the defensive potential of the place, they settled there, erecting wooden defenses to keep out the monsters which lurked without.
Over the past 30 years, the pilgrims have strengthened and established their little hamlet, fortifying the wooden palisade that surrounds the valley three times over and keeping constant vigil on the walls for when monsters come lurking. Life within the walls is happy and peaceful, but the wilderness outside the walls is beyond their power to attempt to tame. Only a small corps of hand-picked, specially trained warriors sally forth on occasion to push back the beasts and bring in timber and meat. The pilgrims have had occasional encounters with the natives of Venatus, some of them friendly and others savage. This has led to some natives living within the walls, and their knowledge of the land has been invaluable. There have also been one or two ships more form Civis, bringing much needed supplies as well as more settlers. Overall, life is flourishing, if not expanding. Until now.
This is sort of a rough draft if you will. The underlined portions are stuff I thought particularly negotiable. But I think the idea that the town's very existence is precarious will discourage the adventurers from searching for help there and will bring home very powerfully to them that, when they sally forth, they can hope for little more than a burial from the town if they get in over their heads.

Me on the other hand, if I run some games I'm going to run them like an MMO. Every meets in town then divides up into group and goes off to their separate dungeons with different themes. People love combat in D&D, so it would be a balls to the wall dungeon dive to level up and make enough money to buy potions and gear in town.

While in town you can RP to your hearts content. Find a Thieves guild to join, or a fighters guild. Or just chat up the bartender on the tavern.

I would also do an arena for duels PvP 1v1 all the way up to 5v5 for different perks and discounts in town.

@Couch, I always thought the West Marches was the whole world was untamed not just a small island undiscovered. With Civis helping out the newly founded land, not unlike the colonies of America, it doesn't give the sense of danger as much. It's like, "Oh well this didn't work out lets go home" feel from what you said. This type of play should be kill-or-be-killed kind of life. No safe haven to fall back on should the town not hold up.

I like to think of it as simple. The world has had to start over, brand new. Nothing is known you must discover everything. Isn't tjat exactly what world building while playing is and is that not wjat you want? If their is a civilization already established it removes that feeling. So half the world is know but half is not. I want the players to discover and create this world as a whole, from the ground up.

If they find an ruined town from centeries past, before "The Event", they can decide that they want to begin a new town there and start expanding civilization.

I feel my niggest concern is timeline while playing. If a group leaves and taked 2 days to journey but 1 month to actually play it through. Then another group is gone the same 2 days but only tkae one week to play.
Not sure how this sounds but,
What if every IRL day the GM's gather to figure out the date at that time, or maybe every IRL week, and then post it in the tavern or OOC sp the players know where they stand on projects they have going on. Building boats, enchanting weapons that stuff. This should keep everyone active and if you are not ypu are thought to be milling about your normal life.

Thought? Comments?

(1) Oh, the whole world is untamed alright. Venatus is a massive continent as I envisioned it. The second map you brought up seemed like a good option to me, or perhaps the third. The way I see it, Civis and Venatus are about the same size, or maybe Venatus is even bigger. The Civisenes have realized that there is an entire new world out there.
(2) Civis only sent the initial expedition. The point of me saying that a) it takes nearly a year to voyage from Civis to Venatus and b) their sea-worthy ships were destroyed and they don't have the equipment to build more was that they are effectively broken off from Civis. They have rare magical contact with the motherland (i.e. enough to let the Civisenes know they are alive and that's about it), but everyone on Venatus has resigned themselves to living their entire lives on Venatus without any hope of going back. Their descendants won't even until they get the equipment to build high-sea worthy ships, which won't be for several hundred years at this rate.
(3) If that's how it came across I gravely misrepresented what I meant to. As I said above, they are stranded on Venatus and have resigned themselves and generations to come to living on Venatus with little to no contact with Civis.
(4) I definitely think it is a kill-or-be-killed situation. If their stronghold falls, everyone there will die soon enough. There's no going back to Civis and there's no getting help from Civis (at least not on demand--Civis has managed to get two ships through the entire 30 years they've been settled there; apparently it's a very dangerous journey and it's a miracle the first expedition made it through alive). With the situation I've narrated, the adventurers are not simply venturing out for their own curiosity, wanderlust and benefit, they must venture out to explore the land and push back the wilderness before the town's inevitable fall before the forces the land is throwing against them daily.
(5) I guess I was thinking that having Civis would explain how they have any magic, any refined skills, etc at all. If the world had had an apocalyptic event and had to completely restart, all sorts of fine lore would have been lost. What I hoped to create with this scenario is a completely new world (practically--it may be only a continent, but it's massive) but also an explanation for why they still have (relatively) advanced magic, advanced craftsmanship, etc. Also if there had been an apocalyptic event, one would think the landscape would reflect it while in a new continent we can put literally whatever we want without any inhibition of "well, wouldn't those be extinct after...?" The concept of a settling party also explains the diversity of PCs we most likely will have, while if it were an apocalyptic sort of setting one would expect people of same race would have banded together and so we wouldn't be able to explain how we got literally one of everything in this little town in the middle of the wilderness. Short of an intentionally diverse party, that seems like too much of a coincidence for my realism OCD to live with.
Also, having Civis makes for all kinds of cool story possibilities. If we get far enough in the story that Venatus becomes relatively tamed, Civis will obviously want to come and help themselves to the natural wealth that is present in Venatus. But by this time the Venatusians have a sense of identity apart from their motherland (most of them will have been born in Venatus by the time this happens) and probably won't love the idea of some random people they are supposedly related to coming and taking over. So a war ensues. Maybe even the Venatusians eventually invade Civis and there's this massive world war between the brave new world and the old regime.
Thoughts? Comments? Critiques? Disagreements?

I think something like this would definitely have to happen and I trust your DM instincts! This is obviously a really rough sketch of what would need to happen, but I think something like that is a must. I'm all for it.

To your previous post about the apocalypse. Not all world ending events need to be detrimental to the landscape. It could have been a multitude of otherworldly portals that opened from across the planes and monsters poured in from them. They have no desire to burn or destroy the landscape. They want to live in it, thrive prosper. My intention was not a Mad Max situation but humaniods had to retreat to a secluded place and try and survive this new threat. Almost none made it and the few that did (every and all races of humanoids) banded together to fight and survive. This is a joining of forces as if an alien threat was to come crashing to Earth. All humans, no matter their origin, would gather to defeat the threat.

That is what I had floating around, only instead of defeating the threat they need to learn to live with it. Generations past and only vauge stories of the world before now exsist. That would also be how knowledge and skills would have been past down.

I guess I felt that a West Marches game had more of an exploration element to it than a rebuilding after the apocalypse element. I don't really care either way, but I feel that it'd be very hard to explain how the strict ideas of race and class and the training necessary to have disciplined classes such as fighters, monks, bards and wizards are still around if the entirety of the previous civilization(s) was eradicated by some event. What sort of even eradicates civilization so instantly that all that stuff is forgotten, but leaves the landscape and the beasts in prime condition? The activation of a Halo Ring, I suppose, but other than that I feel like it'd be very hard to explain. As for portals being opened from various worlds, maybe this is just me but I'd rather keep that sort of cosmic supernatural stuff out of it. Again that's just personal preference, but this feels like it should be a very down to earth sort of game and if we have portals dropping animals in, it very quickly would get to be where our adventurers are on a quest to save the world and stop the portals, rather than just exploring the world. That feels like we'd have an overarching plot to discover what caused the eradication of civilization and what is opening the portals. I think an overarching plot is something we don't want because it distracts from the central goal of world creation and simple exploration. With my New World theory (as I'll call it), there's no overarching plot but to explore and figure out how to survive, which is exactly what a West Marches game is supposed to be, at least as I understand it.

I can see that. Lets give one more option.

A mad wizard's experiment went horribly wrong and the city and everything in a 30-mile radius (1 standard, 60-mile hex) was teleported to an entirely different plane of existence, one that is remarkably similar but entirely unfamiliar. The city is safe, its walls intact, its food stores equipped. What lies beyond, however is a mystery waiting to be revealed by those brave enough to sally forth.

I can see there being an event where civilisation crumbles; all you need is for some kind of resource which they rely on to become depleted. If we specify that this resource recharges gradually, perhaps now there is enough in the world to start again. Perhaps the magic in the world is created by some kind of tree? Or they require particular crystals? Perhaps we don't specify exactly what it is, the adventurers can figure that out.

Whatever the case, our valley was remote enough, and less reliant on magic, that it didn't fall as far as the rest. They proudly call themselves the last bastion of civilisation, not even realising themselves how far they have fallen, because all they can compare themselves to is the beasts which roam outside the gates. Their greatest and wisest wizards are probably no better than level 3, so very quickly the PCs will overtake them by rediscovering lost secrets. Probably after the very first successful sortie bringing back lost knowledge they will be awed by what their ancestors had accomplished, prompting a kind of gold rush to discover more.

Sounds good as well. Like I said the reason for this world being unknown is...well, unknown. So any player can make up what their character thinks has happened.

I have to say, I like couchlord's take best. The original West marches game was clearly made to capture the feeling of European exploration in the new world. Also, I don't get how any connection to the old world is a problem. If you go back you admit defeat, and just left the game. Having that connection could be useful for expansion, mundane supplies, quests etc.

I definitely want to play... and I'm very tempted to GM. I'm a little wary of over committing though.

I'm wary of the apocalyptic setting for three reasons:
First, it feels like it's not terribly realistic. The idea that this one little town is all that's left of civilization and that it somehow isn't plagued by all the sort of social chaos that reigns in shows like The Walking Dead is just too much for my extended belief to cover.
Second, it adds an inevitable overarching plot, something we almost definitely don't want. If we don't specify an event, the players are going to be looking for what happened. That's just how its going to go. And Ben Robbins specifically said that there was no overarching plot in his game, because that isn't the point of a West Marches game. If we want to add a plot later we can, but I feel that to begin with we need to avoid one.
Third, post-apocalypse just doesn't seem to be the feel of a West Marches game. As Azira expressed better than I've been able to so far, a West Marches game is about exploration, and I feel that a settling party will be much more likely to do that than the survivors of an apocalyptic event.

However, I think I've come up with a sort of compromise. We use my New World Theory, but instead of Civis being thriving and in existence, the apocalypse occurred there and the entire continent sank beneath the waves. The settlers of Venatus are the only survivors of the catastrophe who have fled the destruction of their homeland and must now explore their new home.
There are a couple benefits to this idea. First, there is no homeland to go back to or request help from, so that's no longer a problem @Apex. We also have the apocalyptic problem if we ever want to add in that plot line, but it's not as pressing and we can choose to ignore it altogether if we so desire. Finally, we also get that push to explore the new land that a post apocalyptic game would, in my opinion, be lacking (because honestly--how do you explain that no one knows what's out there if the apocalypse happened less than a generation ago).
Sound reasonable?

The great thing about this type of game is that, so long as we always have at least one GM, they can come and go. As I said in my third point in my initial post (way back when lol), if a DM has to bow out it's no big deal, unless they're in the middle of running an adventure. And even if that does happen, another DM just picks up where they left off.
Of course there's no pressure to DM, but if you want to, do by all means because you can step down at nearly any time, and step back up when life normalizes again.

Sounds like a good compromise to me.

Yeah... I just watched the Matthew Colville video linked earlier...and I'm 100% in. From a logistics point of view, I'd like to recommend a shared OneNote notebook as a means of documentation/coordination. We can have overall setting info open to all, gm only sections, etc... and it has wiki functionality to link info together.

Awesome!

Oh that is a good tool. I'd not considered that and I honestly don't think I know the full extent of OneNote's capabilities, but if we could get something like that going it could make an information thread unnecessary since a OneNote notebook will be much cleaner than a thread.

I have examples of "post-apocalyptic" stories that do not destory the landscape.
City of Ember
Matrix
Waterworld
12 Monkeys
Host
The Last Ship
Divergent
I Am Legend
Passengers
The Space Between Us
Maze Runner

I do loke your compromise though. Old world destoryed or left, new world needed to be explored. Also, I was saying that is MANY generations later where no one that could remeber what happened is alive.

Let's do the compromise then!

I. Love. OneNote. I use it for my campaigns. It is super easy amd wiki functionality is simple as well. Great suggestion WarDomo. I didn't know it had online sharing capability.

Just joined the game, and glad I am taking part! I've gotta say I'm on board with the compromise of the ideas, and can certainly vouch for OneNote's effectiveness as a DM. However, this time, I'll be simply playing. Looking forward to it!

Sounds good, I'm in! (Friend of Apexwolf)

Awesome! The more people join, hopefully the more people will join.

Yes sir

I like this idea a lot.

It's definitely interesting, but it felt out of place with the rugged, simple, low-magic setting of West Marches, at least in my opinion.

Hey guys. I'm super interested in this. Threw my application in!

It's a way to get an intact city into an unfamiliar environment without having to resort to a bunch of complicated, logic-twisting exposition. If you want the setting to be low-magic, then all you need is a simple addendum: "teleported to an entirely different plane of existence where magic doesn't seem as prevalent.

Hey Bad_Neighbor! I see your application, but for some reason I personally can't accept you even though I have GM status. I think the GM stuff is fritzing a bit, but hopefully we'll get you in soon!

I guess that's most where I take issue, is that we don't want a completely intact city. At least I didn't envision one; I was thinking more of a frontier settlement that was safe, but not a city by any means. Maybe calling what I envisioned a town would be appropriate, but it would be a stretch.

Great :D

I withdrew and re-submitted by application, in case that made a difference.

Tried it to but I get "Don't peak behind the DM screen! You might want to try looking somewhere else." in a very, VERY, small window pop up...
It seems I can't approve characters either.

I'm very interested, where do I sign up?

I've got the exact same thing. It must be a site problem; hopefully Keleth can fix it.

Game linked here!

This is a bug no one's reported yet; I haven't updated the code for this any time recently, so a bit surprised it's not working. I think I'm gonna need more info.

I'm down to play, sounds fantastic

I think it may be that the original DM is the only one who can allow people. Obviously we've been allowing people into the game, but I think the original DM (DM_Apexwolf) has been the only one doing that so far so that may be an element of the problem.

I have been accepting anyone that joins as fast as I can. I check every hour or so, sometimes more often because I have seen how quickly this has exploded.

Sent the invite.

Is there any more that would loke to join? We have 20 players now and are beginning to create characters. By the middle of next week, hopefully sooner, we should have the game up and running.
Game Link

I think we should look into ways to further advertise this. Ideas, anyone?

Just a couple thoughts I had on my way home from work:
1) What kind of economy are we looking at? Barter/trade goods? Currency? If players only start with whatever wealth their background gives them (cause no gold rolls) then how are we going to purchase things? Where will the "quest givers" and such get the funds they give as rewards for "quests" completion?
2) Will there be Generic blacksmiths/leather workers/bowyers/supply merchants? Maybe with a flat rate for different items and no bargaining or haggling? If a player has Proficiency in Martial Weapons, but doesn't get one from his starting equipment, how would they go about getting one? Are they stuck with their starting equipment until they get better gear as they play?

1) I think that currency is unrealistic. This settlement is currently the only one of its kind, and a meager 500 people or so are living in it so currency would not have any value outside of itself anyway because there is no government. Also because they have no one else to interact with, money and even gold and gems are of little use to them. Rather, things like a good sword or a bushel of grain will be worth more to them than a chest of gold. That's my gut instinct, because none of them have any hope of returning to their homeland.
2) I would think there would most definitely be generic blacksmiths and the like. While small, this settlement is relatively well established and they would have brought with them the craftsmen they needed to survive. A blacksmith and his fellow practical craftsmen certainly fit into that category. I think that as for paying, a flat rate is fine unless the shopkeeper grants a discount for some reason. Or if a character feels the need to make a persuasion check, that might be of use as well. But I think that when it comes to trading, we can take the PHB value. So if a certain sword is 50 GP, you could trade 50 GP worth of goods to the owner for the sword, assuming they were interested.

For the magic shop I will be more than open to barter/trade with the players !!

For getting this game out there more. Keleth could put it as a headline game for the main page. It has to be one of the quicker growing threads this site has had.
Also, just start inviting player you have played with before and you know can be active and committed, or just ones you think may enjoy a game, or those that have had nothing but bad experiences.

So what programs did we decide to use for mapping and sharing info?

As I understand it, we are using OneNote and possibly Stormboard. Maybe RealtimeBoard? I'm honestly a little out of that loop.

Hi All. For those also interested in playing in a very low magic, bloody, gritty, deadly version of West Marches, Dark Thrones - 5e Low Magic West Marches is getting close to being ready for play. Hop in now and start planning your characters. The Dark Thrones House Rules feature a low/no magic versions of the Bard, Paladin, Ranger, and Wizard. Humans are the only race and have a selection of setting specific subraces which grant extra feats.

Intriguing, I will be watching. Subscribed.

The Dark Thrones one, the traditional one, or both?

We have 23 players now and are in the midst of begining advetures into the wilds. If you don't wish to be left behind I'd suggest joining now.

Applied

Noticed that the Game Master's Journey podcast is doing a series on West Marches campaign. If anyone is interested, check out Ep. 167: Preparing & Running a West Marches Campaign and Ep. 166: West Marches Campaigns. Good luck on your game everyone!

Nice find, thanks @len

I sent an application! Really want to play this game! Let's explore!

The first adventure for the gritty low magic West Marches is underway. New PCs can still join up, but that window will be closing later today. (You can still join, but you'll need to organize a separate exploration party.)

http://gamersplane.com/games/728/

This looks and sounds really cool! I have applied to the Venatus game.

Welcome young explorer. Hop aboard.

Sorry I am a bit new to this thread as I had a hiatus from GP recently. Can I ask some questions about it here?

Ask away!

Okay so is it a special game with dozens or hundreds of players? Or is it several different games that are in the "same world". Also how does it work when you move from one group into another in terms of leveling? Do we have it so that there is great variance among the level of the players in each party?

Hey Nik! Welcome to the game community.
It is a special game and it does have dozens and could hypothetically have hundreds of players. That said, it is several different games running simultaneously in the same world and possibly overlapping. When you move from one group to another, you join together with others of your same level. Depending on how many adventures a character goes on, there could hypothetically be a great variety of levels among player characters.

We've only just begun, so at this point everyone is still level one. Though I expect those of us that survive our first adventures (RIP Malark), will be 2nd level by the time we get back to town. So at this point the variance won't be too big.

Well I would love to be a part of it. I was looking for a 5e game to possibly join on here now that I am back on the site. How do I get started?

Also one more question (for now I suppose), is it that you are only in one group at a time, or are you in multiple groups at the same time? I'm assuming more of the one-at-a-time thing, but thought it worth asking.

Apply here, possibly shoot a PM to Apex to tell him you're interested and that you applied.

It is one group at a time per character, I believe.

How would one go about "earning" unearthed arcana and whatnot? That just a future possibility?

You would quite literally unearth the knowledge. There is a thread where you can request an unearth arcana feature, race or class. Through that thread the GM's will try, at some point, try to figure out how it can fit in the world.

Straight from a thread detailing that, I'm not 100% sure where it falls into your character development though.

This sounds super interesting! Hopefully I am not to late to join.

Nope, you're not too late to join; apply here. If you're fast enough you could make it in time to join the party that has gathered at the tavern and are getting ready to leave.

Yeah already applied just waiting to be accepted :)

Sorry, having internet issuses at the moment. Have been trying to approve you for a while now.

Al Gore should have made a better product...

If you think it would be beneficial for me to withdraw and re-apply just let me know :)

As this is REALLY growing, I need to talk to GMs/players for this to help figure out what I can do to support the project in the GP redesign.

Thanks so much Keleth!

What do you need from us Keleth?

Seconded, let us know what you need from the GMs, Apex and I can brainstorm it.

Nope, got it. Welcome to the chaos.

The first and foremost question is: how is Gamers' Plane getting in the way of something like this.

Second: as you all have experience with GP, if you could add any feature to add to GP right this second to improve this project's ease of use, what would it be?

They may end up being the same answer, but I hope you see what I'm getting at. We can take it to a different thread/location if we want to keep this just for new players.

A new thread could work. Better to leave this for the new players.

Thanks Keleth!

Is there a central West Marshes game? Maybe with a GM/admin forum?

I created a sub game for myself where I detail the adventure and pre write some interactions. Mostly it's for notes. It's a private game since no one else needs access.

We do have a section for the GMs set aside inside the game as well, where the GMs communicate.

Ok, we'll figure something out. Maybe we should have a central West Marches game, that's more communication and centralizing than anything else. And it could lead to a few potential features I'm thinking of.

Can you access the game, Keleth? If not we could add you as a DM so you could look around yourself, if that’d be helpful.

One thing that makes it tough for players is that the game's forums are always highlighted since there is always people posting. I'd like if the forum could indicate specifically that the threads I've subscribed to were active. Like maybe the red dot is a different color if my subscribed threads are active.

I am lord and master of the site! I go where I want! ... with people's permission, most of the time.

Just send me a DM with the link to the game? I'll go in there and make a thread as appropriate.

Here are some things I've been thinking about:
GMs have access to everything, possibly creating a sub type of GM as temp to allow access to specific things
-- sub to above -- GMs can play games but notes appear automatically for all threads
best avenue for retiring adventures
possibly a day/time tracker as adventures occur inside the same game.
creating maps and additional image support for players maintaining a map of the area.

In the upgrade, I'm going to have a "View subscribed threads" list, like there is for new posts. That should help, and we can refine that to improve it.

I like this time tracker idea. Maybe have it floating on the thread at the top or bottom somewhere.

I would also love, and I know this has been said before, a section under the character's image to display; AC, HP, race, class. It would make it easier as I have to keep or reopen a lot of extra windows.

One thing that would be very useful for a game of this size is a revamp to the character bar. As it is right now, characters in the game are displayed by username of their creator in descending alphabetical order when the "Characters" tab is opened at the bottom of a screen in-game. However, in a game like Venatus, there are literally 50 characters, which means only people with usernames at the end of the alphabet will be able to see their characters. If scrolling/a search bar could be added so that you can access the characters you need by name/username of creator, that'd be incredibly helpful for trying to find a character sheet easily in-game.
On that same note, the "Character" tab at the top of the page could use a revamp as well, at least, in my opinion. As it is right now, clicking on it drops down a short list of characters, which are the first 5 or so of your character list, which is arranged in alphabetical order. After that is a tab "All Characters", which you have to click on to see the rest of your characters. But for someone like me (I've created 42 characters and Apexwolf, for example, has created 53), seeing the five characters that we created whose names happened to start with A is rarely helpful. If instead we could favorite character sheets to appear in that drop down tab, that'd be much more helpful. Does that make sense? That way we could access the characters we use the most quickly, instead of having to take the multiple steps to go into our character list and find them.
These things will make having a game with 50+ people in it run just that much more smoothly.

The only problem with this is that the adventures are going to move at a different pace, right? So while Adventure Group 1 quickly RPs through 2 days of exploring a desert within a week RL time, Adventure Group 2 might spend that week to RP their vicious battle with goblins during Night 1. Am I making sense?

Really like the second idea though.

Yes, that is the problem and why the tracker would be nice for the GMs. So when we go into an adventure there is a way to know where people are in terms of the time line.

Right now we manage that in a forum post where we are keeping a list of each thread with a day count next to it.

So group 1 goes out and spends 5 days (2 days IRL time) in the desert and returns to town.
We cant' have them show up before group 2 who has spent 2 days fighting in the swamp and returns to town (1 week IRL time)

we also have people in the town trying to do things like form groups.

We are also trying to maintain cohesion between events that would effect all groups like weather. Maybe trying to maintain all this continuity is pointless and just more work for us then we need to spend, but it makes the world a little more consistent which I think is the point of west marches.

No I like the cohesion it brings and I agree that the tracker would be useful. I think my comment was more about the implementation and I may have been confused by wording.

I think you hit the nail on the head, how do we implement it to be useful :)

One thing I tried to do in my Exalted game to keep track of turn order in combat was to use the post title. So (using the Advanced Post editor) I would prefix the title with Round XXX, Tick YYY. It was ok, but the title resets to Re: THREAD TITLE on the next post. It would be nice if the edited title would carry forward rather than the thread title.

If this is how the title behaved you could just prefix that title with Day: XXX and you could track it at a glance.

rather than cobble game mechanics into to title, having a sidebar would be great. Add custom text and collapsable notes would go a long way in keeping scene relevant details readily available i stead of having to click back through several pages of combat or open up a separate thread where that stuff is posted.

Agreed, I was just trying to offer a solution that may be an easier lift from a coding perspective.

Heh, a lot of ideas, too much to parse through. I think we'll need a bunch of new threads in Site Discussions, each for a different idea, with some details on what it would be like agnostic to West Marches along with how it'd benefit this project.

Heh, a lot of ideas, too much to parse through. I think we'll need a bunch of new threads in Site Discussions, each for a different idea, with some details on what it would be like agnostic to West Marches along with how it'd benefit this project.

This sounds awesome. I only recently came back to Gamer's Plane. I also consider myself to be a semi-decent DM if that helps? Any slots left?

Yep, still five slots left.

Being a DM would help eminently. Invite sent.

Would definitely play. Sincerely doubt I have the chops to DM in this.

Hey just a quick update if you are a player in the West Marches game and do not currently have a character I am going to do some house cleaning tomorrow and purge you for space. I'd like to keep the game open to people who want to play and we're almost at max capacity.

Thanks

Could I still be added to this campaign?

Sure! See HypCo's last post above for the link.

Would this be something a new player could do. I would like to get in on this if I can.

Sure! It'd honestly be a great environment to learn the game. Link is a couple posts above you.

Sure! It'd honestly be a great environment to learn the game. Link is a couple posts above you.

I withdraw my request to join.

I applied to this game, curious how it has been progressing / what sort of levels people are and how it is working out?

Hey! I applied. I have no experience with 5e other than having looked through the books but I'm looking forward to this grand experiment.

I applied because this kind of big, sweeping thing sounds really interesting to me. A bit chaotic, perhaps, but fun all the same and not something I've been apart of before. New to 5E, but I can generally learn pretty quickly with the rulebook(s) at hand.

I'm here, and I've seen the first COUPLE of postings... far too many for me to read tonight (though I'm trying to keep up as an active member of the community). I just have one question that makes me (a veteran DM, GM, Storyteller, Marshall, Judge, etc.) feel like a NUUUUB....

What...is...a..."Kingmaker" game?

Kingmaker is a Pathfinder Adventure Path where the party is tasked with exploring an uncharted land and eventually building a kingdom there.

Unless there's some other definition I'm not aware of, of course!

Is either Kingmaker or West Marches still alive as a project on GP?

I'm running a Kingmaker game right now, actually

The West Marches game that was up has since closed. It's a lot of moving parts to take care of and people in the individual adventures kind of faded out.

Shame about the West Marches game, but I can understand how it could go wrong so many ways, both as tabletop and PbP. I'd be interested to try Kingmaker if you're not that far into it and have a free spot, Naatkinson.

The West Marches game was the first pbp game I played in, and it was a lot of fun while it lasted! I'm sorry to see it go :(

If anyone's looking for something vaguely similar, I've got a group playtesting a bunch of 5e subclasses that a friend and I have been designing. If you want some fast-paced "one-shots" at a variety of levels and some deep discussion of these new player options, that's what we're going for.

Game details are here if anyone's interested.

Real shame that this concept didn't work out.
I actually was part of a discord server that used mics and organized one-shots in a vast common campaign, used roll20 as support etc.

I think transposing this huge community to a play-by-post format really has a lot of potential, but yeah, we'd need a team of say, 3 serious DMs and 6-15 dedicated players to get it going, some of these doubling up as "maintenance crew" (compendium updates: stories, cities, dungeons, maps, timeline, etc).

It's some work, not much, but would have to be done with dedication and regularity.
But it could be done.

On another note, one can also start opensource world-building with simple, straight-up creative story-telling, that can be adapted or integrated into roleplay later.

Yeah, I don't think we ever had more than two DM's at any given time. I think you're right about needing at least 3.

There was definitely potential, but very tough to execute.

I enjoyed DMing this format and its was more exciting to be the to get it started, sadly life got in my way and I could not keep up with all the cross information.
I am sad I had to drop out but life has seemed to loosen its grip on me some and if we take what we leanred from this first attempt and can discuss and come up with a concrete solution for the timeline and how and who would organize all the information I'm up for DMing this again.

I'm a storyteller not very skilled with the OneNote and organization.

After having been excited about the concept and fizzeled out in this as well as my own attempt at the same, I don't think that WM style game would work well in PbP format. Western Marches style games work because each session is a minimal commitment by players - a one shot played in a continuing world. But in PbP, even a simple adventure will take several weeks. Attrition is just a fact of life when so much time passes and real life can get in the way.

Sorry to be all negative. However, I do think that recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of PbP, admitting what works and what didn't, can help us all figure out new ways to play.

One suggestion I would have is that we could post here to organize video/voice chat games and write up the session summary. Multiple GMs would be able to continue the game world story and no one is committed to any more than one 2-4 hour session.

You nailed it constable... it's just too long for it to really work.

Might I suggest Rolegate for such an endeavor.

No negativity, you are helping us all figure out how to make this site better. If we try to force this style it will only weaken the format. Good call.

Allow me to say that over on Unseen Servant Marullus is doing one hell of a job on a West Marches style.

Labyrinth Lord:The North Marches

Valdus, thanks for sharing. Always nice to see examples of great games.

this sounds truly beautiful is there a game open yet?

youd probably need a starter team of dms to maintain the initial interest and then bring more in as population increases and though im inexperienced i would love to talk further about helping you really get it rolling. PM me if i can help, i do have pc experience just not dm and can pick up quickly what we would need to know to start.

Not to shill for another site (cuz I love GP), RPG Crossing is another PbP site that has done a couple successful West Marches games. They ain't gonna help you set one up here (it's against the rules to help rival sites), but the West Marches games are public, so it may be worth it to lurk around there and see what they've figured out to make it run.

Thanks Jab will check it out.

What I would say for a West Marches style campaign is flesh out the setting using Microscope and/or Kingdom as well as watching Matt Colville's video on it.

I would be willing to contribute as a DM and as a player if this were Pathfinder. I understand that 5e has more support in general but 5e lacks customization compared to Pathfinder and when you're talking about dozens of players customization is going to be paramount, IMO.

As far as I know, this game is dead in the water. Feel free to try and run a similar idea as pathfinder. fair warning though: very tough to keep this going

I'm eager to hop in if it ever takes off. Maybe as a GM too if needed.

As War said, this format is very difficult on this media. Keeping everything coherent is almost impossible.