As my cohorts and I are wrapping up three years of running a West Marches game using Pathfinder 2e, and I thought I’d do a brain dump about what worked for us, and what didn’t. This isn’t a guide that’s set in stone: Different approaches will work for different groups, numbers of people, etc.

Also, I’m focusing on the Pathfinder 2e specific stuff here. I covered the general stuff in another post.

Respecs

This isn’t necessarily 2E specific, but it becomes necessary because Paizo is a never ending source of system updates. New stuff is coming out constantly, and players will always want to play with the new things. At first, we considered telling players they could only change some things, but then realized we would get overburdened with paperwork. So, we told players that they could basically toss the old sheet (except for stuff they bought and the character’s personal history) and make a new one.

Whenever a major book came out that offered updates that you can’t train into (like ancestries), we offered every character a respec point. A few times we offered a meta for the server, but for the most part, it was up to players to explain why they were suddenly a strix, if they chose to explain it at all. Once a player used up that point, they were stuck with that sheet until the next time we handed out points. Also, characters never had more than one respec point, so that cut down on what we had to keep track of.

Surprisingly, being extremely permissive didn’t lead to any huge headaches. Players rolled with the changes, and they often lead to interesting plots as the PCs coped with their new forms. It also got players re-engaged with characters they may have ignored for a while, since they now had interesting new mechanics to play with.

Rewards and gold

Items and runes are incredibly important in PF2e. The math assumes that you’ve been upgrading your stuff as you go, and you’re expected to have a few useful potions on hand. Rather than worrying about giving out items for games, we just gave players a flat amount of gold, based on level.

One thing we discovered at the leaders level was that the math wasn’t perfectly linear. There’s several jumps where gear becomes much more spendy. If the only way players can get gear is gold, then we needed some math to accommodate for that.

After much tweaking of numbers and checking data, we landed on the following equation: Each game got a set base reward, plus an additional amount that was the APL * another number. To put it in math terms:

gold = base + multiplier * APL

And the values we came up with:

APL 1-5: Base 15, multiplier 5 
APL 6-10: Base 75, multiplier 25 
APL 11-15: Base 250, multiplier 80 
APL 16-20: Base 1000, multiplier 500

So, if you were a group of level 16 players, your payout is 1000 + 500 * 16, so 9000 gold. Level 3? 15 + 5 * 3, so 30 gold. Yes, this can feel like a lot of money! However, we had to keep in mind that some players could only make one game every month, or every other month.

I do think these numbers are super solid (we never had to tweak them again). However, I’m also open to giving all players a ‘base salary’ and just giving a multiplier for the games attended. I do think there should be some reward for attending games, but keeping track of physical items can be difficult if you have more than one GM. After all, GMs vary a lot when it comes to how permissive they are.

So what happened with the players who were flush with cash? They often indulged in buying things that many cash-starved players will ignore: Consumables. I know in my regular games, players tend to wait until they find them in the wild to actually grab them, or they get an archetype that allows them to make them for free. But if you have a pile of gold in your aresenal, why not grab some Antler Arrows?

GM compensation

Because items (and therefore gold) are super important, we decided that when someone ran a game, they would get the same gold as the players. This became super important early on, when we had fewer GMs running games, so the active GMs couldn’t actually gear up their characters.

Some GMs always remembered to pay themselves, and some only went back and grabbed the cash when they were low. We didn’t really notice any imbalance, and it seemed to be a fairly transparent way to reward GMs that didn’t lead to feelings of favoritism.

Variant rules?

PF2e comes with some great optional rules to help it adapt to any table. As time wore on, we found some rules that helped to cut down on the paperwork. Others, we avoided, but I’m open to using in the future.

Free Archetype: Everyone always asks about this. Players love Free Archetypes. On this server, we didn’t use them. I’m not opposed to them, but it didn’t quite fit the feel we were going for. On my next server, I’ll probably allow a limited number of them. This comes down to GM style, since FA can lead to a bit of a power creep, but can also be useful for GMs who want a certain feel for their server. I’m definitely eyeing the ones that could work for a game based around a Pathfinder Lodge.

Automatic Bonus Progression: I’ll be honest: If I’m GMing, this is now a ride or die rule for me. We adopted it because PF2e assumes that players are geared up in a certain way, but if a player couldn’t make as many games, they wouldn’t have as much gold laying around. ABP makes that much less of a worry, since it gives the base runes and bonuses for free. Sure we still had people running around with stupid amounts of money, but more often than not, we saw the rich players buying things for others.

Let’s go shopping!

Early on, we established the home base as a town that was ‘big enough.’ For levels 1-4, players could buy any item up to level 4. After that, they were capped at their current level. This helped players who could play more from getting too powerful.

Also, to cut down on the amount of admin work, we allowed all items but unique to be purchased. If it was written by Paizo and it had a price tag, have fun.

One thing we missed until the game was almost over was that “Access” on an item didn’t make it inaccessible. It made the item one level hard to get. So, if it was a Common Pathfinder item, it became Rare. Oof. Lesson learned.

Balance?

One of our biggest concerns going into this was balance. How do we make sure that a party is balanced in such a way to deal with whatever encounter they’re sure to face. Should we only pick monsters once the players signed up? What do we do if we have a group that shifts around at the last minute? What if we don’t have enough healers or tanks?

Shockingly, balance wasn’t something we had to be overly concerned about. As long as players adjusted tactics and built flexible characters, things were fine. Sure, there were some hairy situations, but over god-knows how many games, parties ended the session with everyone on their feet.

Some things that became super important:

• Healer’s gloves. OMG. Everyone had a pair of these. Some bought a spare and kept them in their bag.
• Battle Medicine. This, too, was vital when it came to keeping everyone on their feet. Many players made sure to keep their Medicine skill up, as well.
• Buy a damn ranged weapon. Sometimes, the solution is to keep your distance and kite the hell out of something.
• Keep one of every ‘healing’ thing in your bag. Potion. Anti-plague. Antivenom.
• Keep one of every mundane damage type on your person.

This is part of why having players with so much gold didn’t bother us: It let players build up an arsenal that let them take on pretty much anything, as long as it was at their level.

We also had NPC healers in town who could remove whatever ailed players, since it was never a given that PC healers would log in every day. No one wants to kill off Bob the Fighter because June the Cleric was backpacking in the Rockies for a week.

So, is PF2 good for West Marches games?

Personally, I say yes! It works exceptionally well when it comes to West Marches!

• The rules have very few places where the GM must make a call, so it’s easy to keep every GM on the same page.
• Encounter creation is fairly easy to do, while still offering a ton of options so things don’t get repetitive.
• While the game is balanced on a dime in many ways, it’s more flexible than some might expect. You don’t need a perfectly balanced party to survive.
• All the rules are online, and there’s inexpensive character builders to be had. This means players (and even GMs) can join without having to lay down serious cash.

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.