It's a "west marches style" campaign

They definitely can be hexcrawls, but it refers more to a sandbox style where the farther away you venture beyond your starting place, the more dangerous of enemies you face.

I read through the original page describing the concept of a 'west marches' campaign. I have to say, it sounds like the most boring thing to run imaginable. It's very strongly like WoW- levelled zones, grinding monsters, few NPCs.

>it's a "faggot" OP

Why not just do a regular hexcrawl?

I know this is a setting, but sometimes it is used like some sort of style or theme. What's up with that?

the thing that pisses me off about it?
Western Marches. Marches are by definition large territories described with the appropriate adjective.
It doesn't sound like a big deal. but even if it were grammatically ambiguous, "West Marches" just doesn't sound as good.

That seems fine, though?

stop being a retard. They don't do prep work at all, that's exactly the secret

That would be an especially odd thing to say, given that it describes a setting style. So who are you quoting?

"West Marches" has become a meme word for shitty generic sandboxes. But really the problem is lacking adventure.

To use a video game comparison (since sandboxes have been fed in popularity by mmos), good hex crawls run like the Fallout 1 & 2 overmap encounters. You stumble upon weird and interesting shit that may not fit into a larger narrative, but stand on their own as something fun and novel. West Marches often fails this, instead being a generic map of snoresville combat encounters with scaling levelled difficulty.

Imo, the coolest version of something in this vein would combind OSR with something like the Tales of the Arabian Nights boardgame. Bring back a little narrative, but in an emergent, random way.

>They don't do prep work at all

Retarded across the board.

Believe me, I've run games like that.

It didn't end well.

West marches is more or less an attempt to emulate an MMORPG, especially WoW, on a tabletop setting, which is why you'll often see WM groups wanting dozens of players to swap in and out. What they don't realize is no one ever keeps the commitments, the GMs are invariably lazy shit who couldn't improv their way out of an open hallway, and it's a fucking boring system and concept to begin with, and with all that in mind, well whaddya know? It sucks.

Hexcrawls are very fun in singleplayer video game form when done right, like Fallout as you mentioned.

However, they're a classic example of something that does not translate well AT ALL into a genre like tabletop RPGs.

There's a difference between improvising some scenes, characters, and quests and adapting your plot and world to player actions, and literally starting a game having no idea what to do or even the most basic structure and just tossing your characters into a plot of land and saying "go do shit".

Theory - almost every 'west marches' campaign would be better off playing Dungeon World since you're literally meant to start off session 1 in a dungeon, then go to a town, and then the rest of the map is blank and you fill it in as you go.

And DW's system (while not as good as other PbtA games) is set up to generate conflict with general play, as well as encouraging GMs to develop threats that progress over time.

So like, there's a system already built up to do a 'West Marches' campaign that builds up and fills in a map over time perfectly, but instead people just use fuckin DnD.

Isn't the point of "West Marches" that you have a fuckload of content prepared beforehand, and then you let your players roam wherever they want? It sounds like most people running it are way too lazy, and only remember the part of the description where it says that it's player run game and think they don't have to prepare anything.

I don't know, it sounds boring, but I guess it could work if all your friends were busy with IRL things and you still wanted to play with them. I'm not sure if I'd want to play a game like that with random schmucks over roll20 though.

>doesn't translate well into
>the place they originate from
>Fallout is a hexcrawl

I mean the last one I'll kind of give you but aside from that,
u wot m9?

Hex Crawls are perfectly do-able and fun. I'd never heard of the West Marches before though, and that "further from center means deadlier" thing does sound like very weak or at least contrived world building for aspiring adventurers.

Jeez. All these descriptions seem to have missed the point of the original West Marches idea. Maybe the Roll20 games have forgotten that West Marches was supposed to be about exploration.

arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/

>you have a fuckload of content prepared beforehand, and then you let your players roam wherever they want

Similar to that, but you also need a bunch of players that talk to each other about what they find. I do like the idea of expeditions, where depending on the group of players you have on a given night you have a different group of PCs.

Players could set up their own kind of adventuring guild, with "quests" just being agreed upon points of interest that could warrant a full expedition of players.

People could do one on one sessions for scouting, or have a dedicated scouting group.

Yeah none of these fucks actually know what West Marches is.

You've got a large pool of players and no set schedule or party, just characters that can jump into individual adventures. There's no overarching plot, so it's functionally a sandboxy pickup game.

They're popular on Roll20 because you can set up multiple GMs and have a wide player base with different schedules to pick from. But since the base idea is so flawed (it really is more like an MMO than a traditional tabletop campaign) it's going to be shit 99% of the time.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

>what is X1
>what is pretty much the entirety of D&D wilderness exploration pre-2000 or so
Nigga you dumb.

>use DW
>instead of the system built for running these things
Turn back the clock on your D&D edition about 20 years and it'll be perfect.

>There's no overarching plot
Why wouldn't there be a plot? This sounds like a weird assumption.

never heard about this before, sounds super awesome, really want to do it now and it finally gives me something good to do with my homebrew worldbuild.

you've altered my life user.

The main critique I always see in these threads is that "West Marches" campaigns encourage lazy GMing, but they actually seem to call for a GM to have a whole map's worth of scaling dungeons pre-prepared.

>never heard about this before
Then you haven't spent enough time reading about RPGs.
>something good to do with my homebrew worldbuild.
Wait until you actually know a thing or two about RPGs.

Read.

>pre-prepared

The problem I see is how they're trying to start a West Marches campaign just because, not because they already have a large playerbase with scheduling problems, which was the idea behind starting such a game on the first place.

That, and everything sandboxy or hexcrawly seems to get called a "West Marches campaign" for no reason at all.

That's basically what DW did, it's just a bit better written.

I always heard that the appeal was that the players build the play schedule, not the GM. So if you want to check out a certain temple, you find others who want to come, set up a time, and meet the GM.

Because of this, there is no set meeting time and it's better for flexible schedules. Also because of this, you can have like 20 players in the campaign's shared world and just have a few play at a time.

The no-schedule thing is neat I guess but I don't see how it's any better than a weekly make-it-or-don't meeting. Maybe it's more suited for online play?

>Hexcrawls are very fun in singleplayer video game form when done right, like Fallout as you mentioned.

Do you even know what a hexcrawl is?? Do you ACTUALLY think it's like the fucking original fallout? Holy shit, read what it is before you post.
>And DW's system (while not as good as other PbtA games) is set up to generate conflict with general play, as well as encouraging GMs to develop threats that progress over time.

Wow look so is every other RPG out there that also has actual rules. Dungeon World is nothing special, and it's DM "advice" can be translated cleanly to another game, as it has zero interaction with the rest of the system.

>it's a "people can their lazy sandbox campaigns west marches without knowing what the fuck they are talking about" campaign

Just another excuse for lazy trolling, more like. I've got no opinion one way or the other but I see this exact same fucking identical thread several times a week.

Like what the fuck do you think you're accomplishing with this?

Because people are lazy and need straw men.

A good GM can reveal backstory for "that random windmill", in the same way falloutt does, with a scribbled journal entry, the layout of the bedrooms. The wizards tower had a story that's revealed through multiple sessions visiting it, even as it dissappears and reappears to another location in the forest.

The grown-up unicorn used to be imprisoned by the goblin tribe one hex over, and still bears the scars. Occasionally encountered skewering goblin with its horn. Will heal players of a disease they got in the Pirate's Cove in exchange for clearing out the tribe.

West Marches is designed for 1) large rotating parties to Maximize frequency of playtime (players can drop in and out over time, can jump in easily and revisit lower danger areas and still find interesting things) and 2) exploration and mystery, areas revealed through the exploration, curiosity drives the play.

Can be set up with no plot, or interesting tidbits of story interwoven like aforementioned examples.

Do it, it can be tons of fun. Make sure to focus on making lots of areas around the center, and ways of revealing areas that flows well with play (players ended up hiking up a hill en route somewhere and and spotted "the Grand Oak" in the distance)

Pissant.

>googling for resources for running a hex crawl
>on the first page is a thread on reddit about the difference between a west marches style game and a hex crawl
reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/3bveki/the_difference_of_west_marches_campaign_vs_a/cspy4r0/

>"West Marches as a campaign was pretty much designed from the ground up to be compatible with the tone of 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. This meant that it assumed a certain approach in how the game was to be run by the GM, one that feels very simulationist with a touch of game to it (if you're familiar with the terms from GNS theory). The idea here is that during the sessions, the GM truly is just a neutral adjudicator. Between sessions the GM may adjust what's in the world - building new content for the upcoming proposed session, for example - but during the sessions they assume strictly the role of an adjudicator: no dropping plots, no fudging dice, and improv is discouraged whenever possible. This is very much the 3rd edition D&D way to do things: actions should be strictly regulated by the rules, which makes them predictable. The GM is a neutral judge, not a story-weaver."
>"This also isn't a collaborative endeavor: you don't just ask the players "well, what do you find that treasure chest," because that defeats the entire point of them exploring the world rather than making it. That's not to say the GM is somehow against the players - the GM wants the players to succeed, too - but the GM should observe this strict separation of responsibilities, and must do what the rules demand for both consistency and transparency."
>"Many hexcrawls do not follow this approach to GMing."

WHAT THE FUCK DO THESE PEOPLE THINK OLD SCHOOL D&D WAS LIKE?

>DW is OSR
What. The fuck.

Someday I'll make an OSR-related parody of that sandwich alignment image, and Dungeon World is going straight into the Radical Sandwich Anarchy spot.

I was precisely trying to do something about exploration. Until now, I was going for an "escort the caravan through uncharted zone", but now I may consider letting the players explore the zone as they want. Maybe I will keep the caravan as a mobile base camp, or have them chose the caravan road.

>Maybe it's more suited for online play?
More like club play, the way Gygax and his friends did it

I just make a couple of entertaining fights with a comedic approach to the monsters/enemies.
Then I wing it. I figure out an over arching story if I see the opportunity for one.

How the fuck is it not? Unless your definition of OSR is something like "just OD&D clones, anything deviating from restructuring and reorganizing rules is not OSR" DW is definitely an OSR. It's simple, low power, is about a bunch of adventurers going into some underground place in search for riches, with the possibility of getting brutally destroyed by traps and monsters.

OSR puts focus on exploration and resource management. DW does not.

But it does?

You manage resources like torches, food, ammunition, gold, health/healing kits, adventurers tools and books, even things like your reputation. A pretty big chapter of the book is about exploration as well.

I mean, it may be a bit broad strokes but it's in there.

Do people just assume PbtA is magical tea party because they hear "narrative mechanics"?