West Marches Questions

[PoisonIvy]

Heads up, upfront. This is a long one. I’ve got a lot of thoughts! Thank you to anyone who takes the time to read all the way through.

Hi all!

I’ve had an idea brewing for a Torchbearer game, and I can’t get it out of my head except by playing it. It’s a classic West Marches campaign (one town, rotating cast of players, slowly turning the Dangerous Unknown into the Dangerous Known, etc.). Like many before me, I think that Torchbearer is, for the most part, perfect for this type of game. But I think I’ll need to change some things, either about the rules or the campaign, to make the marriage work:

1. Hometown - In this game, there will be only one Town. Players who make it their character’s hometown will get their benefits every Town Phase. Those who do not will never get their hometown benefits. What would you do? Let the chips fall? Everyone gets the benefit, regardless of their hometown? Nobody gets the benefit, regardless of their hometown?

2. Town Events (1) - Some town events make a town temporarily unusable, and some wipe the town off the map. That’s a great source of drama in a normal TB game, but I think it could easily wreck this type of game. What would you do? Nix town disasters altogether? Rewrite them?

3. Missing Sessions - RAW, you get some fun little goodies when you miss a session. With a rotating cast of players, this will either never come up (if you “miss” a session, that’s no different than the 10 other people who had no interest in attending the session), or will always come up (these 11 people weren’t in the previous session, so they all get the goodies when they can make it next!). What would you do? Nix it altogether? Give it to a lot of people each session? Keep track of who actually missed a session?

4. Expeditions - Classic West Marches/Open Table problem: Party A went exploring the Caves of Chaos. The session ends while they’re still exploring. Days pass, and their rival, Party B has a session. They want to go to the Caves of Chaos, but what do you do to maintain continuity and player agency? There’s lots of solutions to this problem, but the one I’m going with is an Expedition framework: every session begins as the party leaves town, and every session ends when the party gets back to town. That way, future sessions have a game world devoid of other players, so no messy continuity errors.

   a. End of Session Hurting - Since sessions rarely end with the players neatly arriving in town, we need to “teleport” them home at the end of each session. This incentivizes certain exploitative behaviors (“Don’t worry about this dragon, guys! The session’s almost over. If we can wait it out for 10 more minutes, she’ll have to take us safely back to town!”). Again, there’s lots of solutions to this problem. I’m leaning towards, at the end of each session, if the party is not safely in town, rolling for some off screen misfortune that befalls them on their return trip.
   a.1. Does this sound fair? Any better ideas?
   a.2. How does the following End of Session mechanic sound?

At the end of the session, if the party is still exploring the blighted county, consult the following list of factors to determine how many dice you will roll:

– Night: +1D
– In the dark with no light source: +2D
– Party has no map with current location: +1D
– Lost: +2D
– Return path would require at least one Test (Pathfinder, etc.): +1D
– Actively engaged with a threat (middle of combat, etc.): +3D
– Accompanied by a guide: -1D

Total the number of dice that rolled a 4, 5, or 6 and compare that number to the below chart to determine what fate befell you:

0: Good Fortune! You make it out without worry or consequence.
1: A Brief Stumble! Every character loses a random item they were holding. If they were not holding anything, they do not lose anything. You know where you lost it.
2: A Torn Pack! Every character loses one random item from a random container on their person. You know where you lost it.
3: A Brief Stumble in the Dark! As result 1, but you do not know where you lost it.
4: A Torn Pack in the Dark! As result 2, but you do not know where you lost it.
5+: A Long Road Home! Gain Hungry & Thirsty. Additionally, gain whatever condition the Grind would have given next. For each result rolled above 5, gain an additional condition (per the Grind order). If you (through a frankly miraculous twist of poor planning and worse luck) will die by taking a condition via this table, tax your Nature instead.

If you must lose an item, and the item you randomly determine is a stack of items, lose the whole stack.
Only roll once for the whole party. You live and die as a group.

b. Phases - The expedition framework maps neatly onto Torchbearer's phases: During a session you are in the Adventuring/Camp phases, then you go back to town and have a Town phase in between sessions. That last detail sounds complicated (see next question), but, barring that, does this sound like a terrible idea? I really like the way it ties the game mechanics into the campaign structure, but I feel like there's a snake in this grass.

c. Town Phase - Town phase, taking place between sessions, with a rotating cast of players, sounds complicated. What would you do? Have everyone do Town phase at the end of a session? At the start of the next one? I'd rather do it via text in between sessions, but that sounds extra complicated.

d. Town Events (2) - If we moved forward with the whole "Town phase in between sessions" dealio, how would you handle the Town Events roll? Would you just, at the end of each session, announce to the pool of players what had changed?

e. Money Woes - If the players have to come back to Town after each session, they have to have a Town phase in between / at the end of / at the start of each session. Since the minimum lifestyle maintenance Ob is 1, each player would have to make, at minimum, an Ob 1 Resources test each session. Should I change that? Give out a bit more treasure than normal? Just let it be? Maybe characters could elect to return to town without having a Town phase?

[Koch (D. Koch)]

Hello and welcome!

classic West Marches campaign

Yes, I know of many folks in the community that have run a West Marches-style, so you should be good. Sounds fun!

Hometown - In this game, there will be only one Town.

You could run into trouble with this. For starters, town traits. Everyone would have one or the other trait, which would be limiting. Could this “one town” have various wards that would act as separate towns for character-creation purposes? I think this would solve the issue, plus many irl megalopolises actually work that way where a district has different traditions and institutions.

Not getting hometown benefits seems to me to not be such a big deal. In my experience, it is more of a nice-to-have bonus that might occur occasionally.

But, what is a bigger deal is the distance from town, the adventure difficulty, and the overall premise of a sandbox. In a typical west marches, the big attraction for the players is exploration. My concern is that the players will feel too tethered to the town “hub” of the hub and spoke campaign this would be. As a workaround, there are nomadic towns in the LMM or you could use the steading rules from the Middarmark book as a template. I think the mechanical component and importance of a town might work against your larger premise. Towns aren’t really important in TB until you need one.

Town Events

I would not get rid of town events. This is a dangerous game of consequences, and I would think the players would love the thrill of a potential armageddon. In reality, it is very, very hard to get a total disaster on the events table because 1) players don’t go to town all that often and 2) you need a negative number a few times in a row. The odds of that happening are akin to getting-struck-by-lightning and eaten-by-a-shark at the same time rare. I would recommend you make your own town events chart regardless, but this would also allow you to temper the harshness if you really must.

Some town events make a town temporarily unusable

You might be pleasantly surprised at the ingenuity caused by necessity in this game. So, I would recommend to keep them as is. This will really boil down to how hardcore your players are. Do they love the challenge of jury-rigging tools and coming up with things in camp? Because that’s half the game (managing resources).

So, I would recommend keeping the dice distribution and probability of the town events but changing the text to fit more thematically with your setting. Just minor tweaks is all.

Keep track of who actually missed a session?

Yes, that, I think. It is a nice little perk, but more to the point, there is the piece where they tell everyone where they were and what they were up to. That’s the good stuff. The mechanical bonuses are nice, but the point of all of it is to keep the players engaged and help them back into the game so they don’t feel like they missed out too much. Granted, with an episodic campaign structure, that’s even less of an issue, but the psychology is still sound.

we need to “teleport” them home at the end of each session.

My recommendation would be to encourage maps and not teleport anybody. Let the players play it out. There is already a system for maps, and it is basically this. However, they don’t get it for free, they must do it and earn it. So it squarely places the responsibility on the players. As a part of this system, it already addresses the “we are blocked by the dragon” concern, which is to say, that you cannot fast travel on a map unless the obstacles are clear. So now, the players are incentivized to not just sit around for the last 15 minutes and wait it out like you mentioned. Now, they have to find a way to sneak past the dragon to make it home.

One of the great parts of the later stages of the game is that getting to the dungeon and getting home are not always a given. Getting back home should be more challenging as the characters get higher in level.

Town phase, taking place between sessions

I have used a forum with threads for town. It works fine. The players understand that if they insulate their roll with cash dice, they get helpers automatically, but if they don’t they need to talk to the other players to muster helping dice.

If we moved forward with the whole “Town phase in between sessions” dealio

Having a town that feels like it is living and breathing seems important here. So, I look at those town events as a way to world build, measure consequences, and involve the players in unfolding situations. These events make great context for twists. For example, the town just survived a zombie invasion that nearly wiped them, so now maybe there are still lingering zombies, closed shops, or hesitant towns folk that add color to those twists.

If you use some forum, you could have a bullet list of events and happenings in town so that everyone could follow along.

each player would have to make, at minimum, an Ob 1 Resources test

On the plus side, their Resources ability will be increasing as they progress. The game handles negative outcomes well in that you need to fail to progress. Fail forward!

I like your idea of electing to return to town. Yes, always player agency! Mechanically, you could give the player the option of camping outside of town (for which they would need to spend a check), or going to town and facing a Lifestyle cost. This gives the player a choice, and also takes some of the burden off you to have to meta-metagame the economy.

So, my personal opinion is that you don’t need to hack or change anything about the game. I think there are existing systems that fit the bill for everything that you want to do. Ultimately, I believe the success of this game style will come down to your players and what their expectations are in terms of where the focus lies. But, I think you could run it vanilla just fine.

[PoisonIvy]

Wow! Thanks for all the advice! A lot of it makes things slide neatly into place.

I do have a couple questions / confusions about what you wrote.

Could this “one town” have various wards that would act as separate towns for character-creation purposes?

I see a similar idea in one of the previous threads on the topic:

3. Districts? Instead of having a wizards tower as a separate location it could be a district in the city. The outskirts are the village, the city center is the metropolis, the market outside the walls is the crossroads, etc. Each district has it’s own flavor and politics. Also, since TB is specifically about delving dungeons and not politics or travelling between civilizations, I don’t think it really affects things much if there’s only one city. The mechanics work out pretty much the same, and your still encouraged by those mechanics to not stay too long there.

I love it! Would you just do this to give access to hometown benefits? Or would you involve them in the town phases? I might just not need to overthink it.

My concern is that the players will feel too tethered to the town “hub” of the hub and spoke campaign this would be

Could you elaborate more on this? I would’ve thought the opposite. With Cartography in use, players could quickly expand their “fast travel” frontier, reaching distant lands before any dice are rolled in a session, allowing them to explore far more quickly than exploration-focused games I’ve experienced in other systems. Is there some competing factor I’m not considering? Or am I misunderstanding your intent? Would you recommend having two or three safe towns that players could use as hubs? Or is that missing the point of what you’re saying?

The odds of that happening are akin to getting-struck-by-lightning and eaten-by-a-shark at the same time rare

O Fortuna!

the point of all of it is to keep the players engaged and help them back into the game so they don’t feel like they missed out too much

Ooo, maybe the missed-session mechanic could be used to prevent characters’ power levels from diverging as much? Like, if you didn’t get to play in either session last week, you gain a narrative and mechanical bonus the next time you play, so you don’t lag behind the more frequently-attending players on skills. On the other hand, Torchbearer, to my understanding, isn’t especially concerned with intra-party balance, so I don’t think it’d be necessary.

My recommendation would be to encourage maps and not teleport anybody. Let the players play it out. There is already a system for maps, and it is basically this. However, they don’t get it for free, they must do it and earn it. So it squarely places the responsibility on the players. As a part of this system, it already addresses the “we are blocked by the dragon” concern, which is to say, that you cannot fast travel on a map unless the obstacles are clear. So now, the players are incentivized to not just sit around for the last 15 minutes and wait it out like you mentioned. Now, they have to find a way to sneak past the dragon to make it home.

One of the great parts of the later stages of the game is that getting to the dungeon and getting home are not always a given. Getting back home should be more challenging as the characters get higher in level.

I definitely agree that players should make use of their maps as much as possible, but I’m worried about the situations where they cannot. If a party finds itself lost in the wilderness, no map, but our four hours are up and I need to get ready for work, we cannot play out the adventure of the party returning home. This and yet, I still want the next session to run without any continuity worries. I think that “teleporting” the party back is the only real workaround, and disincentivizing this contingency via the End of Session table seems necessary.


I would love other approaches though. I don’t feel like mine is the best. Or am I just overthinking the whole thing, and I should stop worrying and learn to love the retcon?




Other than that, I think everything you said makes perfect sense to me. Again, thanks for taking the time to share your wisdom!

[Koch (D. Koch)]

Would you just do this to give access to hometown benefits?

I would make it so that each ward had different accommodation levels and buildings so players could access all the usual things. But, I would not give them all a hometown bonus because I’m shooting for a player decision.

So, I’m saying each ward would act like a unique settlement but all within one “town.” You only roll for events and all that stuff once. Then, each ward has a different accommodation and town buildings. So you would choose your ward as your town, and that would also affect your hometown bonus, town actions, etc.

I’m just trying to fold everything together so that the players have options and can have more fun strategizing between which town they want to stay at while also keeping the “one town” design you had in mind. This way, if you need the healing functions of the hotel, but your hometown only has the flophouse, you have to decide which benefit you want. If you want to take Guild actions, you need to stay in that ward and pay for the Inn. Things like that give the players some choices.

Would you recommend having two or three safe towns that players could use as hubs

Yeah, I think that would work better, but these would be very, very small steadings (not full towns) waaaaaaaaaaaaay out there. For example, there could be a dwarven outpost that the players had to discover. Just any place to rest and re-equip that encourages even farther travel. The wilds must still be largely uninhabited, but I think having that as a possibility is also intriguing for players to explore and find.

You could still accomplish the episodic mandate by connecting them via various routes, but the point I was trying to make is about Difficulty Scaling. As characters advance in levels, the game gets harder because everything gets tougher and the Obstacles get higher. The Cartography and the Pathfinder obstacles increase the farther you get away or the more areas you need to map, and you need to map more because you have to keep going farther and farther out. So, for 1st level characters, you might only have a Cartography and Pathfinder Ob of 2 but as the player base starts to level up more, that number increases, which increases the difficulty. So now, even with a steading out in the hinterlands, your Ob would 4-5.

you gain a narrative and mechanical bonus the next time you play

Yup, right. You could just say if you miss any number of games, you get one “while you were gone” result. So you can still schedule freely, and people are still connected with a fun little perk.

a party finds itself lost in the wilderness, no map, but our four hours are up

It can still work without free teleportation or the fixed table. When time is up, they still make a test to get home, but all those things are factors to the difficulty. Usually, that test might be a Pathfinder to get home, but it depends on what they narrate on how they plan to do it. For example, maybe they found a cart and horse out on the wilds, and they want to get that home. You test Rider to see if the everyone makes it. As a twist for failure, the horse perishes, and the cart needs repairs, but they are home. So the players are incentivized to get as far as they can but also have a plan to get home. Then, they must pay the piper if they overextend.

Your end of session table is very close to vanilla TB and what I am describing, but the nuance is that the test and the Ob is not always a given. You can add Evil GM factors as needed, and the skill that is tested is dependent upon Describe to Live. The twists could be those things on your list, but I wouldn’t bind yourself to that because good twists fit the context, and there is no way a fixed table could ever know what the state of the game will be at that moment. But now, with a normal factored test, you have the flexibility to challenge their plan accordingly. Then you can twist or apply a condition as appropriate.

[DaveHiggins]

@PoisonIvy

Hometown - In this game, there will be only one Town

In the campaign @Mark_Watson is running, we went to visit the home of another character and discovered it had been badly ravaged. Because my character really worked hard at restoring everything to a great state again, they gained a small permanent bonus to future Town Phases there to represent not merely seeming all right for an adventurer but actually an ally of the place.

So, you could make home town advantage something that can be gained (by characters who weren’t born there) and lost (by characters who were but don’t treat the town like it is their community) by more than normal actions either way.

Thus, in much the same way as the Fresh condition, each player makes a call on whether it is worth the effort to gain/keep or better (for them) to focus on another goal.

[kendesign (Prevail)]

My impression as a GM has been that actions by the characters tend to move in the opposite direction. What I saw more often was a movement from the dangerous known to the dangerous unknown as the characters were forced into difficult scenarios and troubling questions. That's not saying everything became more chaotic, but it is to say they prompted chaotic things to point toward them as they grew and established a presence. In other words, the dangerous things of the world will generally ignore the mundane, but as the characters poke around, they attract the attention of potentates of the chaotic wilds. Despite this, the players seemed to be more engaged as they saw the shambling mound of chaos encroaching, so it's a good method. Ultimately, I would say they prompted the destruction of much more than they established the safety of anything. The world, when we stopped the campaign, was a great deal more chaotic and damaged than when we started the campaign.

<1. Hometown> As mentioned by Koch, having a multidimensional town or a region with supporting towns would serve the characters. A large city with an outer busy crossroads and a few remote villages, then a peppering of way houses, a few hidden elf homes, a couple dwarven forts or mines, some religious bastions, and a crumbling borderland keep? Hey, throw in a ramshackle dilapidated port on the edge of the sea and a marsh town along the brackish tidewater! It’s not too hard to pack the town types into a metropolitan mishmash. And, having a bit of space between, like little exurbs that fringe each town, means the characters might have to actually travel between the towns depending on their needs or wants.

<2. Town Events> As mentioned, keep those. And, this might be encouraging for those portions of the larger settled region as the characters move around in different places. If they’ve caused a bit of disaster in one spot, they can head to another location nearby or try to resolve the disaster. But, it doesn’t have to all be happening to a single town that’s sooooo small that disasters are felt in every corner.

<3. Missing Sessions> I would place a higher requirement on commitment for players and a smaller number of available seats per session. I simply wouldn’t let it be such a “Dungeon/Monster-of-the-week” style of campaign. Force, no. FORCE your players to pick factions, write hard-hitting beliefs and creeds, write challenging goals, and engage with the setting and other characters. Absolutely hold their feet to the fire and do not let up! Make it an absolute ironclad requirement. Otherwise, send them packing. They can find another game. Then, for those that miss sessions, there will be some meat on the bones of their tales about what they have been doing while away from the group for a session.

<4. Open Table> Similar to Koch’s reassurance, you will have to place a heavy burden on the players to engage and use the available skills, like Cartographer, Survivalist, Pathfinder, etc. to solve difficult travel problems and get back to settled areas. Also, you can use remote villages or steadings as settled places with minimal services and accommodations available. Modify the Rites of Hospitality, or use whole cloth, to place one more test of Orator on the list of available skills for getting to a safe place at the end of a session. Additionally, warn players they might not complete a module in one session–I never saw a group of players (as GM nor as a player) resolve all the ‘rooms’ of an adventure in a single session.

<4. a. End of Session> I’m not certain what to say, but if you eliminate the given that characters start and end a session from town, you can simply start a session where things left off before. If someone shows up at a session in media res, maybe that’s a fair moment to pull out a table and determine how tough things have been for them to catch up with the group.

<4. b. Phases> Similar to a. If you eliminate the given return to safety, the phases remain a major milestone in progressing the adventure. Don’t skimp. Drive the characters through the process. Players can choose (mostly) whether to camp or head to town. Place that on their shoulders to choose.

<4. c. Town> Similar to a. If you eliminate the given return to safety, the town phase can be played in full. It is a valuable period of play, and you should not skimp on it. Drive the characters into the settled world and push them against the hard rules and laws, grind them against the market prices, fatten them up with a few free drinks and free meals, then gut them on the cost of lifestyle and taxes! Don’t skimp out on such a fun portion of the phases.

<4. d. Town Events> Well, play out the potential disasters during Town Phases. Don’t skip the phase.

<4. e. Money> Well, play it as written. It should cost much more than a minimum Ob 1 Resources test for most Town Phases. But, you can rig some visits to town without making a Town Phase of it. Also, using steadings or Rites of Hospitality offers alternatives to Resources tests that I found (as GM) entirely more satisfying and enjoyable than resolving things by Resources. It has a place, but it is better to keep the Resources tests in place for cities, towns, villages, and other big settled places. Just, if you use steadings or something like steadings (like maybe a way house), having those alternatives is quite a good method to introduce a price other than money.

Honestly, I disagree that TB is a good fit for a West Marches-style campaign. I think your bundle of questions illustrates many ways in which TB functions much differently and requires more investment or commitment from players in terms of time, effort, energy, attention, and attendance. It is not impossible, but there are issues to resolve. I feel it is best to remove elements of the West Marches in favor of TB as written rather than remove elements of TB to fit the West Marches.

[luke (Luke Wheel)]

@Koch

You might be pleasantly surprised at the ingenuity caused by necessity in this game. So, I would recommend to keep them as is.

I would add to this particular point. The LMM has rules for long term camps — and for developing those camps into settlements. Do you imagine that the players could establish bases out in the wilds? Managing camp resources might be a bit more engaging and simple than heading back to town to pay tolls and taxes every session.

[Koch (D. Koch)]

long term camps

Yes and that would give the players something to do with unspent checks. They could invest those in the base camp rather than lose them if they go to town.

[PoisonIvy]

Yep! I definitely was hoping that the players would end up establishing bases for themselves to aid in exploration.

Do you think I should set them up with a long term base camp from the get go? Or just let them develop one naturally?

[luke (Luke Wheel)]

In your West Marches format, I might start them with a small (inadequate) camp out in the wild.