One awesome thing about playing in newer systems is that you always have new stuff to try out! This is also one of the terrible things.

When Pathfinder 2e only had one book, I co-ran a West Marches. It felt like every other month, we had a new supplement that added so many cool classes and ancestries and heritages. At first, allowing players to have more than one PC let people play around, but even that became an issue as players ran out of slots or didn’t want to manage yet another character sheet.

The GMs hesitated to let players retire characters left and right, because part of what makes game dynamics work is shared history. We didn’t want to lose half the town every time a new book came out. Sure, retraining exists, but it only goes so far and takes time. What could we do to make everyone happy?

Enter the Respec

What if there was a way to keep PC history and let people play something new? We didn’t want players changing things willy-nilly (so no swapping out every feat right before a game because you heard there’d be a red dragon), but surely once every few months wouldn’t be too unmanageable.

We started brainstorming. Here were some things we considered that were rejected:

• Only allowing changes from the new book. This leads to too much accounting.
• Only allowing a certain number of changes. Again, accounting. We would have to audit character sheets.
• Only allowing one per player. When we came to our final system, this felt unnecessary.
• Reset on gold and gear. PCs had a wide range of wealth, so this felt like it would punish our most active players.

I’m not saying that these were wrong decisions, only that they were wrong for us and our set-up.

Finally, we came up with what respecs would look like for us:

• Your history stays the same. All your old experiences and relationships are a part of your character.
• Your gear doesn’t change. If you need to buy new stuff, sell what you have and use your existing cash reserves.
• You can change anything else on your sheet. Ancestry. Heritage. Background. Class. Feats. Spells. ANYTHING.
• It’s up to the player to come up with the story. GMs can help but aren’t responsible for coming up with the idea themselves.
• No downtime is necessary. It just happens. If you want to roleplay it taking a while, that’s perfectly fine, but the timeline is up to you.
• Every PC gets one respec per book that includes significant changes. So, a Lost Omens book without a new class or ancestry might not count, but a book like Rage of Elements does.
• You can’t stockpile respec points. It’s one or none.
• You also don’t have to spend it right away. Feel free to hold onto it until the time is right.

The reaction was almost unanimously positive. Players got to try out new stuff, GMs weren’t overwhelmed, and town history stayed intact.

Metaplot

The biggest sticking point was explaining why these changes were happening. Some of the options we ended up using:

A Big Event. We put together a big event a few times that helped explain the sudden changes. Fey BS was a popular reason, but we also used disasters or other major events to explain the sudden shifts.

Reincarnate. The Reincarnate ritual was another option open for players, though with no rolling or money spent. They ‘die’ and are brought back in a weird new body with new ideas in their head.

A Clever Retcon. A few players opted for a clever retcon of their own story, like an Elf who realized he was an Android with implanted memories.

Fallout

Whenever I tell other GMs about this policy, they’re skeptical. It sounds like it would utterly wreck games and the immersion, so I must have dealt with a ton of fallout each time a new book came out. Except… I didn’t.

I won’t say it was a non-event, but players were game to accept the new reality around their fellow PCs and even enjoyed playing it up. Also, since major books aren’t realized too often, players were careful about spending that respec point. They would be stuck with it if they didn’t like what they ended up with.

What I did notice

Re-engagement. In a West Marches game, big releases meant more people logging on and joining games so they could play with new toys.

Growing pains. Right after a new release, if players used respecs, you have to GM with a lighter hand. Players are getting used to new feats and abilities, so the first game might have a lot of long turns.

Changed tactics. If respecs are done to a dedicated group, they might take a session to readjust their tactics to new play styles.

Happy players. Not to sound too dorky, but a GM is always happy to see happy players, and players with new toys are generally happy.

Investment in personal arcs. This was an interesting one, but some players didn’t respec for the new books, but to update their story.

So, all around a win, and worth a little chaos!

I’m going to start this post out by saying something up front: I am nowhere near ready to start a new West Marches adventure. I love the format, but I’ve really been enjoying having time to run smaller, more focused games. I’ve been chewing my way through some Paizo APs and Adventures, and I wouldn’t have the time to prep for them if I was worried about a sandbox game as well.

That said, I still find myself thinking about the next one… after all, it is a format I deeply enjoy, and surely, I’ll run out of Adventure Paths at some point, right? I might as well jot down some notes on what I’ve been mulling over.

The basics

The system, obviously, would be Pathfinder 2e for any fantasy sandbox. I’ve already written about how PF2 is well-tuned for West Marches, and time hasn’t dulled that opinion.

• The world is robust, so there’s no need for me to do a ton of worldbuilding.
• The math works for encounters, making it easy to adjust to pick-up groups.
• There’s so many heritages / ancestries / classes to pick from.
• It requires pretty much no GM fiat to run, making it easier to keep track of what house rules you have at a shared table.
• The rules are all free and online!

Lessons learned and potential improvements

It would be pointless if I co-ran a game for almost three years and didn’t come away with some lessons learned. No attempt is perfect, and there’s always ways to improve.

Levels!

One of the biggest bugbears we had was dealing with level spread. When we started, chat would determine how much XP we got, and everyone had different levels of XP, due to everyone starting at level one when they joined. Level spread became a bigger and bigger problem as time went on, to the point where the GMs started to burn out trying to offer enough games for everyone. In our experience, you couldn’t have more than a three level spread before someone overshadowed the rest or the lower levels were in danger of being one-shot.

We eventually solved this by introducing banding, which worked, but I’ve since grown disillusioned with that as a solution. My other West Marches game (VtM V5) used that, but we eventually abandoned it to make everyone the same level.

Lesson learned: Kill level spread before it kills you.

XP!

In the last server, XP was awarded for chatting in our Discord. This made sense at the time, but also wore down mods and GMs who felt obliged to keep things active. After all, players who don’t get a level get cranky, and might just leave for greener pastures. This is another idea I’ll be swapping out. Some alternative ideas:

• A flat amount each month. Easy to plan for, but doesn’t motivate players.
• An amount for each game played, but given to everyone. Great for getting games on the calendars, but might cause some pain if we have low months due to Real Life.
• A totally random amount between 250 and 1000. I’m including this mostly because it amuses me.

Lesson learned: Link XP to something that’s sustainable for the GMs, since they’re the most limited resource.

Play-by-post!

This one is tricky… Many people love PBP. Hell, I love running and being in text scenes. I’ll also be the first to admit that it can take so much time. Our intention with pushing more PBP in the old game was two-fold:

• More XP at the end of the month
• Allow people to roleplay, with the live games being more combat focused.

In the end, it kind of worked, but it also fed the issue with GMs feeling burnt out due to pressure to post. We created a ton of channels so people could post in set “locations” (think #tavern, #bookstore, #market, etc), but newcomers were overwhelmed by so many options. Also, not everyone likes PBP, and would rather roleplay during a game!

While I don’t want to block PBP (the people who like it REALLY REALLY like it), I think I’ll tweak a few things:

• No creating dozens of channels. Instead, keep it to a single digits number. If channels are busy, players can always RP in DMs and post the result later if they want.
• Disconnect XP from posts
• Offer more games where RP is the focus rather than straight combat.

Lesson learned: PBP is great, but isn’t for everyone.

Time zones!

Good lord, this one bit us so hard.

If you have players separated by an ocean, scheduling games can become complicated fast. Most of our players were in the US, so games in those time zones made sense. This left EU or third-shift players without games unless a US GM was willing to run super late or super early. Personally, I didn’t have a problem running the odd early game on the weekend, but I wasn’t willing to do that every weekend.

I never want to tell someone they can’t play… but on the other hand, it’s not like GMs are paid employees who agreed to all-hours shifts. They’re volunteers who have their own lives, games, and need for sleep.

The solution for this one is tough, and one I’m still working through. “Have GMs in every time zone” isn’t feasible, and having GMs run at all times isn’t sustainable. Some ideas I’ve had:

• Have set timeslots and stick to them. This way, incoming people know if the server will work for them.
• Don’t set timeslots, but have core hours. For example, if the core hours are weekdays 5-12, games can start no earlier than 5pm, and must end by 12am.
• Do nothing and hope for the best? Obviously, this one is my least favorite.

Lesson learned: Round Earth is a terrible design. Whoever thought of it should be fired.

Classes and alts!

One awesome thing about PF2? It’s constantly coming out with new classes and ancestries and heritages! One rough thing about PF2? The exact same thing.

Because games blossom when people bond and make connections, I’m not a huge fan of a revolving door of PCs, especially if players expect that they’ll be pulled into the plot quickly. On the old server, we decided to let people have alts, allowing them to have multiple characters (three, to be exact). Some people loved this, and some had trouble keeping up. Also, to be honest, as a GM it became difficult to keep track of all of the personalities. Classes weren’t as much of a problem as bodies. People want to play with their buddies, but if the buddy is a different level / same class, they may not feel like they can ever be in a game with them.

I still love the idea of alts, because they give the server flexibility and let people try out new stuff without dropping an old character. So… is there a way to meld to two?

My potential fix: Let a PC have more than one build.

This would be built into the story via some sort of magic device. Essentially, PCs would be gifted an artifact that has the “impression” of another former adventurer. How this plays out is up to the player. Maybe it’s just one personality and three different classes, or maybe they choose to have different “personalities”, depending on which class is active.

This is one of those ideas that either have people super excited to play, or who immediately aren’t into it. My hope is that it’s a mechanic that can add to the game without taking away from anyone who would rather just have one class. As someone who never got to play her Rogue main in WoW, I 100% get that.

Lesson learned: Not everyone wants to juggle three personalities, and it can start to tax the GMs.

Streaming!

I’ll be real: This was a lot of fun to do. No, we never had a huge audience, but players who couldn’t join a game could watch, and it was fun to clip moments. I got so used to doing this that I started recording (though not streaming) my regular games.

It does require set-up to do, and a machine beefy enough to handle a VTT, Discord, and OBS at once, but this is one of the things I would pitch to the server as an option. The only problem would be if a player didn’t want to stream, which I 100% get. In that case, some options might be:

• Don’t record the game at all
• Stream the game through Discord
• Record it and post a link to the game later

I’m leaning towards the last one, since if you can stream, you can record.

Lesson learned: A record of games is nice to have!

Final thoughts

Okay, decent write-up, but when is the next game happening? A few months ago, I would have said “January 2023” but… I’m writing this in May 2023, so that obviously didn’t happen.

I would say it would be more likely to happen sometime in 2024. The itch for more loose games is growing, and I have a growing number of people I’d love to play with who can’t commit to a full AP. When it does happen, I’m sure I’ll post about it here!

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.