Way back in the long before, before the world turned into a flaming dumpster fire, I was approached with the chance to do something I’d want to do for a long time: Start up a West Marches server. One thing that had been stopping me was the effort that goes into recruiting players and finding like-minded souls to help GM, but this one would be attached to a stream and existing community.
So… why not?
Two and a half years later we’re planning on winding it down when we hit the three year mark. The players will be hitting level 20 soon, so it feels like a natural time to close shop. I’ve done large scale games before, and one thing has been true with each one: Everything dies, but it’s on you to decide if it’s via entropy or explosions.
Now that we’re approaching the end, I thought I’d write about lessons learned, because boy, I learned a lot. The large games I’d run before had been mostly play-by-post (PBP) and been under the Amber system, which is a completely different animal. They’d also had a more stable player base (again, nature of the community)… and also didn’t happen during a freaking pandemic.
Leveling system
When we started, we gave out XP every month based on how much everyone had chatted. Seemed sensible: It encouraged people to talk to each other, and players who had been around longer would have more XP, which seemed a fair reward for joining earlier. When we added alts, we decided that players could choose how to allocate their XP between their three characters.
Over time, however, level spread became a huge issue. Games would either not make (not enough people with a character at that level available at that time) or people wouldn’t be able to play a character that month (GMs were already spread thin). Some of us found ourselves running double the usual number of games just so people had a chance to play that month. Some players wanted to rush to 20, but found they didn’t have enough fellow players hit the minimum for a game.
In the end, we switched to a banding system: Every character on the server got a set level of XP, leaving us with only three levels to plan for. This made planning so much easier. I could easily plan three encounters without having to worry about scaling. There were always enough PCs bumming around to make games happen.
To be honest, in the future, I probably wouldn’t worry about chat XP, but instead, set a steady rate for leveling (maybe a level every other month?). Or, maybe set milestones, so players can race towards the next level, or choose to screw around at their current level a bit.
Alts
We introduced alts because PF2 had so much stuff coming out (seriously, when we started, the only thing out was the Core Rulebook). Alts allowed people to try out these new classes and races. It also gave people a chance to shake things up, if they were bored of their current character.
There were upsides and downsides to alts, though. Some people loved having more characters, but some really only wanted one. It also meant more characters to remember and engage with, even as a player. I won’t say it was bad, but it’s also something I probably won’t bring into the next server I put together. Instead, I’d rather have a mechanic that allows players to explore different builds if they want, and let people retire characters more often.
Respecs
Respecs became very important on the server as more and more cool stuff came out. There was some initial discussion about how much we should allow, but I was wary of anything that forced the GMs to look over sheets. Admin work can be killer, and looking at sheets can be arduous. So, our only rule was that your history stayed the same, but everything else could change.
This is something I absolutely will be allowing in every server I run. Hell, I’ll probably allow it for every home game: If a big book comes out, feel free to change anything you want. We just have to figure out the meta for it (and the fey are always an excellent excuse).
Time Zones
I don’t know who decided that the earth should be round, but that was a terrible design decision.
I kid, but… it’s also kind of true? Having time zones that are far apart lead to resources being spread thin. It lead to clusters where it was hard to get cross-pollination of players. It lead to hurt feelings. And hey, maybe we were just a weird collection of variables where it didn’t work this time, but worked well for others. If so, awesome! But, in future servers… I’ll probably keep player slots to those who can work with a more limited number of time zones, rather than pushing for 24/7 gaming possibilities.
Establishing jobs and expectations early
Running a West Marches game is absolutely a team effort. Maybe some people make it work with just one leader/GM, but once you hit a critical mass of people, you need people to help you keep it going. At a minimum, you need more GMs (trust me, I was solo GMing the server for a bit, and it was rough). It also helps to have other rules experts who can help make tough calls, and people to help out with the admin work, like looking over sheets.
Balancing this can be tricky, because enthusiasm makes you feel like you can do literally anything. This was especially true during lockdown, because hell, what else were we doing with our lives?
But, even if you’re still not going anywhere [ waves in permanent remote worker ], enthusiasm will eventually wane and become a normal level of interest. If you don’t want to burn out, you have to be reasonable in what you commit to.
I do think we established some good division layer at the top, even if the roles were fuzzy. We each had our own areas of expertise, and big decisions came to a vote. Below that, though, things weren’t quite as clear. I absolutely didn’t want to put any pressure on GMs ever (I was grateful for every game they ran, since that took the pressure off). However, we probably could have put some guidelines out there, like expecting GMs to run a game a month, or something like that, or what time zones people would cover.
Scheduling
We went through a few phases of how we do scheduling, and I’m still convinced that the right solution depends on how many people you’re working with.
When the server was smaller, polling worked great. Toss up some times, have people react if they’re interested. When I started having to make several games out of one poll to get things to work out, we switched to a sign-up sheet. That worked great as well, though sometimes we had to prod to get things to fill up.
Which solution would I use in the future? Eh, hard to say? Calendars are hard. Humanity has been trying to figure them out for 5000 years and still there’s start-ups out there that want to “fix” your schedule.
Will I do it again?
I mean, if you missed the context clues of me saying “next time” over and over, of course I’ll do it again. I loved running a large server and having a chance to see all sorts of groups of people play together. While I also love a dedicated table, it is fun to watch how characters interact in different groups. It’s neat to watch them build relationships outside of their ‘core’ group. And, well, I don’t have enough hours in the day to game with all the people I’d want to game with. And, as a GM, it’s nice to have a simple encounter idea that I can toss out there and see what a round group does with it.
It won’t be attached to a show (while that was fun, it’d be nice to completely control the meta), and it likely will be a smaller crowd (though still big enough so that not everyone can sit at one table at one time). But I’ll absolutely throw my hat into the ring again. I’m just going to need a chance to replenish my energy reserves first.
Katie Plays Games 