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Post by tkdco2 on Mar 16, 2022 15:41:52 GMT -6
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Post by captainjapan on Mar 16, 2022 21:37:31 GMT -6
Without even seeing two minutes of this video, I can say that I think he's on the right track. The "campaign" that was going on hen Blackmoor was conceived in St. Paul (Dave Arneson and friends) was the Napoleonic mixed live and PBP game in which Gary played one of the world leaders, remotely, from Lake Geneva. Arneson would have handled all the record keeping and resolved battles at his house even if all the combatants weren't present at every session or even most sessions. There were just not enough wargamers in the immediate area to gather all at one table and so the sessions had to be staggered and also include participants that were geographically distant.
That being said, boy did those guys put in the effort to connect with each other! It was the proto- MMORPG.
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Post by Finarvyn on Mar 17, 2022 4:18:38 GMT -6
I'm alternating between watching and typing this, so it's interesting to see that some of my thoughts happen before similar material is discussed in the video. Yes, this seems to describe both Dave and Gary's campaigns quite well, which I think in part is why folks have a hard time understanding Dave's FFC. The world is set up in FFC with army totals and various factions, and players might participate at the army level or adventuring level or both. My own OD&D campaign in the 1970's was sort of like that, but on a much smaller scale. I had somewhere around a dozen players who would show up more or less at random to play. There were three of us who played almost constantly, plus a number who had characters and participated when they felt like it. At around the 5-minute mark the video mentions something that I had planned on mentioning -- how time works in OD&D. If a wizard makes a magic item that takes 3 weeks to create, the player doesn't get that item for three weeks of real time. Modern rules sets make it sound like you can just hand-wave a "so three weeks pass" sort of thing, but in the original campaigns you had to actually wait those three weeks. Also, you had to adventure with another character, since that wizard character had to spend those three weeks making the item. Anyway, it was a great video and thanks for sharing it.
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Post by dicebro on Mar 17, 2022 7:51:04 GMT -6
Managing 50 players in a fantasy wargames campaign sounds more like Dave Arneson's vision. But it makes sense because back then there were fewer referees.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 17, 2022 10:47:15 GMT -6
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Post by derv on Mar 17, 2022 12:05:11 GMT -6
If the question is, why has this style of play fallen into obscurity, I’m not sure if I agree with the premise. But I would suggest that it’s less common because it requires regular scheduled play to be worthwhile.The utility of its methods can break down otherwise. It also involves a fairly high amount of investment, particularly on the GM’s part. It’s much easier to pick up a prepackaged module or gazetteer. And this starts to make more sense when you have limited and irregular scheduled time to game.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 17, 2022 14:18:21 GMT -6
If the question is, why has this style of play fallen into obscurity, I’m not sure if I agree with the premise. But I would suggest that it’s less common because it requires regular scheduled play to be worthwhile.The utility of its methods can break down otherwise. It also involves a fairly high amount of investment, particularly on the GM’s part. It’s much easier to pick up a prepackaged module or gazetteer. And this starts to make more sense when you have limited and irregular scheduled time to game. There seems to be a sort of resurgence of this style of play in recent years. They're calling it "West Marches". I became aware of it via a Matt Coleville video. It seems to be a pretty big movement with its own subreddit and a few other online spaces.
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Post by derv on Mar 17, 2022 16:55:12 GMT -6
There seems to be a sort of resurgence of this style of play in recent years. They're calling it "West Marches". I became aware of it via a Matt Coleville video. It seems to be a pretty big movement with its own subreddit and a few other online spaces. cadriel had mentioned West Marches in his post. It was an approach that was forwarded by Ben Robbins during the early days of the OSR and there were a few other bloggers who championed and wrote about it as well. It was a thing for a while. It was basically an attempt to reason out in practice what Gygax meant in M&M- "Number of Players: at least one referee and from four to fifty players can be handled in any single campaign, but the referees to player ratio should be about 1:20 or thereabouts." It's been a while since I've heard anyone talking about a West Marches campaign. You need a pool of players to keep them going. I guess that's true of any campaign though.
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Post by dicebro on Mar 17, 2022 17:28:18 GMT -6
If the question is, why has this style of play fallen into obscurity, I’m not sure if I agree with the premise. But I would suggest that it’s less common because it requires regular scheduled play to be worthwhile.The utility of its methods can break down otherwise. It also involves a fairly high amount of investment, particularly on the GM’s part. It’s much easier to pick up a prepackaged module or gazetteer. And this starts to make more sense when you have limited and irregular scheduled time to game. I am not sure what the blogger is trying to assert.
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Post by acodispo on Mar 17, 2022 19:41:01 GMT -6
Anybody playing like this these days?
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Post by derv on Mar 17, 2022 21:22:11 GMT -6
The only caveat I have with the West Marches is that they don't seem to reflect Gygax's campaign design advice found in U&WA and the intro of M&M. Rather than a bottom up approach it seems to require a top down approach to the setting. Nothing wrong with that. It just requires a bit more thought and work up front on the part of the GM.
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Post by tetramorph on Mar 18, 2022 0:32:34 GMT -6
Anybody playing like this these days? Well, I don't have 50 players. But, yes. Basically, this is how we run our campaigns. I have been running an Outdoor Survival board campaign since about 2015. They have still only covered less than a third of the board. The players all have more than one character, scattered throughout the "Hollow Lands."
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Post by Finarvyn on Mar 18, 2022 4:26:54 GMT -6
The only caveat I have with the West Marches is that they don't seem to reflect Gygax's campaign design advice found in U&WA and the intro of M&M. Rather than a bottom up approach it seems to require a top down approach to the setting. Nothing wrong with that. It just requires a bit more thought and work up front on the part of the GM. derv I'd like to know what you are thinking with "top down" versus "bottom down" here. I am unfamiliar with West Marches and don't know how they ran a campaign.
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Post by rsdean on Mar 18, 2022 6:29:39 GMT -6
None of that is controversial, is it? Just forgotten? Practically speaking I haven’t run anything that way since the heady days of the summer of 1977, but it’s more because I haven’t had enough (or tried to recruit enough) players to do it that way since then. One would still need to decide what to do with a synchronization issue; say Party A having a session with a two month overland journey to get to a location, followed by a Party B session the following week that started the recommended game time of one week later, but uses flying travel to reach the same location in a couple of internal chronology days, so that they are there “before” Party A. I feel like the keeping of the required strict time records ( ) would be the limiting factor for the DM these days. I had a great deal more free time in a week in the summer during high school than I do now. When you look at something like Tony Bath’s Hyborian Campaign ( Setting Up a Wargames Campaign) or Star Empires or even the 1970s monster hex-and-chit wargames, it’s clear that “everyone” had a taste for pushing paper and pencil record keeping to the limits. That sort of game based on detailed bottom-up record keeping really screams for computerization, tempered by the loss of game master control over the design process in setting things up. (That is, I can play Stellaris on my computer, which is very Star Empires-like, but I can’t tweak the system at all.)
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Post by rsdean on Mar 18, 2022 6:38:34 GMT -6
derv I'd like to know what you are thinking with "top down" versus "bottom down" here. I am unfamiliar with West Marches and don't know how they ran a campaign. I’m interjecting, but here is a link to Ben Robbin’s West Marches posts: arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/I’m guessing that derv meant that the West Marches wilderness was designed to have identifiable regions of increasing danger when being set up, in much the same way that the 10th level of an OD&D dungeon is more dangerous than the 1st level. To do that design work, one would need an overarching plan to get started, including appropriately clueing the players so they don’t wander into an overwhelming situation by accident. This would be a contrast from the as-written wilderness rules in U&WA, where, as we all know, you could wander out into the wilderness from your base town only to immediately encounter a family of huge ancient red dragons.
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Post by waysoftheearth on Mar 18, 2022 7:10:46 GMT -6
The other seismic shift that doesn't seem to have attracted much attention yet is that from: a larger group of (raucous?) players making their own fun in a ref moderated world to: the ref providing a (beatable) story-line for a small focus group of content tourists. That's a pretty big deal right there.
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Post by rsdean on Mar 18, 2022 9:02:52 GMT -6
The other seismic shift that doesn't seem to have attracted much attention yet is that from: a larger group of (raucous?) players making their own fun in a ref moderated world to: the ref providing a (beatable) story-line for a small focus group of content tourists. That's a pretty big deal right there. I don’t disagree with you, but isn’t the original style what is generally shorthanded as “sandbox gaming” these days? While scarce, my impression is that it’s still more common than the MMORPG “play at the world” style. (And is a subset of it?)
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tedopon
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Post by tedopon on Mar 18, 2022 9:51:26 GMT -6
This is mostly a recurring fad term that comes up every few years and people talk about it like it is a revolutionary approach to gaming. Since ~2007 this idea has repeatedly made the rounds on a reinvented wheel. When a friend of mine said we were going to "do a West Marches style campaign" a few years ago it made me cringe, not because of the concept (the concept itself is fun in execution), but because every time I hear or see the term it just seems so pretentious. The osr reddit has three or four threads going right now where a bunch of "in the know" people show their pretty maps they claim to be running West Marches campaigns in. Again, not raining on anyone's parade, gaming is fun. Just a few things like this I find repellent because they remind me more of disposable fashion trends than anything relevant. Also reinforces my contention that one of the problematic hallmarks of "OSR" is this constant regurgitation of the same eight or ten ideas over and over again.
EDIT: but I would argue that rpg gaming as a whole is in a period where it is just recycling, and to me it feels like it will be for several years to come.
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Post by derv on Mar 18, 2022 18:27:14 GMT -6
derv I'd like to know what you are thinking with "top down" versus "bottom up" here. I am unfamiliar with West Marches and don't know how they ran a campaign. The guiding principle behind a West Marches campaign could be paraphrased as, anyone, anytime, anywhere, doing anything. Being player driven in this manner requires the setting and its locales to be pretty well roughed in from the start. So, the campaign begins with an over arching concept that defines the setting and you necessarily have to develop and populate the map to offer the players choice. Myself, I much prefer a bottom up method of growing a campaign, much like Gygax describes- a town and a tower, castle, or ruins with a dungeon of at least 3 levels to start. I usually draw a simple map and start to develop the surrounding terrain. I will add to the map at my leisure or as seems necessary due to the players pursuits. That's not to say I don't have ideas rolling around my noggin that I might want to include on the map or introduce as rumors and lore. But I find I rather enjoy these sort of things developing out of the players decisions and interactions with the game environment instead of being preplanned adventure points. In this way, you could say player choice is what develops and populates the map to a degree. Chris Kutalik was another who wrote a bit about the West Marches on his Hill Cantons blog. His campaign started out as a West March but he found himself constrained by some of the principles, like no town adventures. Here's a good post of his from 2012 Whither the West Marches?. He talks a bit about how his own tastes evolved from those early games, perhaps wondering out loud if the West Marches must necessarily develop into something else.
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Post by derv on Mar 19, 2022 7:55:50 GMT -6
When a friend of mine said we were going to "do a West Marches style campaign" a few years ago it made me cringe, not because of the concept (the concept itself is fun in execution), but because every time I hear or see the term it just seems so pretentious. Why not just take it for shorthand that you, the players, will be driving this thing? I mean, for the most part I see it primarily as a means of shifting responsibility away from the ref and onto the players for organizing actual game time. All the ref has to do is create the setting and agree to run it when players decide when and what they want to do.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 19, 2022 10:23:31 GMT -6
This is mostly a recurring fad term that comes up every few years and people talk about it like it is a revolutionary approach to gaming. Since ~2007 this idea has repeatedly made the rounds on a reinvented wheel. When a friend of mine said we were going to "do a West Marches style campaign" a few years ago it made me cringe, not because of the concept (the concept itself is fun in execution), but because every time I hear or see the term it just seems so pretentious. The osr reddit has three or four threads going right now where a bunch of "in the know" people show their pretty maps they claim to be running West Marches campaigns in. Again, not raining on anyone's parade, gaming is fun. Just a few things like this I find repellent because they remind me more of disposable fashion trends than anything relevant. Also reinforces my contention that one of the problematic hallmarks of "OSR" is this constant regurgitation of the same eight or ten ideas over and over again. EDIT: but I would argue that rpg gaming as a whole is in a period where it is just recycling, and to me it feels like it will be for several years to come. Isn't one of the points of OSR to keep classic tabletop conventions viable and visible for new generations of gamers? To me, the ideas being regurgitated is a good indicator that new gamers are discovering them. It's not old ground for them. It's fresh and new because it's being seen with fresh sets of eyes and processed by new minds. I can't find the negative in that. To me, that's a good thing. It might be something they grow beyond but it's worthy of trying and being excited about, especially if all they previously knew was some railroaded 5e style, right?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 19, 2022 11:12:28 GMT -6
The only caveat I have with the West Marches is that they don't seem to reflect Gygax's campaign design advice found in U&WA and the intro of M&M. Rather than a bottom up approach it seems to require a top down approach to the setting. Nothing wrong with that. It just requires a bit more thought and work up front on the part of the GM. This is one of those "game as presented vs. game as played" things I keep running into when learning about early D&D. People construct these elaborate theories about what kind of world or campaign Gary intended or Dave intended through extrapolation, but then they present explicit advice or examples of play that directly contradict what's written. I think maybe West Marches style represents something that actually occurred through necessity early on but wasn't necessarily meant to be the main focus of the game as more people picked it up, hence the "ground up" advice during the Greyhawk era. Arneson presents similar concepts in "Adventures in Fantasy" with its small sandbox approach. But, like I said, WM is still a valid approach and something I am happy that younger players are looking into. The mainstream style carries the legacy of Dragonlance in it to this day, and to me that's a horrible sin against the original spirit of RP, more so than any other point people argue over.
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Post by rsdean on Mar 19, 2022 11:28:51 GMT -6
BTW, this seems related. I ran across a link to this document, on implementing the worldbuilding advice from Europa 6-8: rayotus.itch.io/gygax75
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Post by Deleted on Mar 19, 2022 12:13:32 GMT -6
BTW, this seems related. I ran across a link to this document, on implementing the worldbuilding advice from Europa 6-8: rayotus.itch.io/gygax75Yes, see, this works as a counter-point to what Ben Milton is talking about in his video. I feel like West Marches is catered to the original, adult wargamer scene and the Gygax '75 style that became the norm for the middle school groups was catered more to the wider audience coming in with Greyhawk and the Basic Set. It just happens that the 2nd option became the de facto style for D&D. Taken to its logical extreme, it becomes the "three hex campaign start" that's brought up just as often in the OSR scene as the West Marches revival.
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Post by retrorob on Mar 19, 2022 13:10:58 GMT -6
Anybody playing like this these days? I do. I've been a big D&D fan since ca. 1999, but my "first fantasy campaign", I mean an oldschool sandbox, began in 2016. We started with a small module set in the Pictish Wilderness borrowed from Howard. Now, after six years and 282 sessions (we play on a weekly basis) there are three main continents, some islands, many kingdoms and nations, alternative timeline and another planet, including time dilation. 24 players participated, now there are just three. So far 44 years passed in my world. We had dozens of characters (much more than 100), many parties, frequently competing with each other etc.
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Post by derv on Mar 19, 2022 22:21:15 GMT -6
This is one of those "game as presented vs. game as played" things I keep running into when learning about early D&D. People construct these elaborate theories about what kind of world or campaign Gary intended or Dave intended through extrapolation, but then they present explicit advice or examples of play that directly contradict what's written. It's not clear to me if you are speaking about Gary's advice in the LBB's or Ben Robbins advice for West Marches here. I think maybe West Marches style represents something that actually occurred through necessity early on but wasn't necessarily meant to be the main focus of the game as more people picked it up, hence the "ground up" advice during the Greyhawk era. Arneson presents similar concepts in "Adventures in Fantasy" with its small sandbox approach. But, like I said, WM is still a valid approach and something I am happy that younger players are looking into. The mainstream style carries the legacy of Dragonlance in it to this day, and to me that's a horrible sin against the original spirit of RP, more so than any other point people argue over. There are many workable approaches to designing and running a campaign. West Marches certainly falls under that category. If you are speaking in generalities when talking about West Marches (as a sandbox) I'd say it contains some sound advice that was practiced. Two notable elements that contribute to being able to run multiple mixed parties is, starting and ending a session from a home base (town) and tracking the campaign in real time. But, when West Marches are taken as a whole that includes the original guide lines to running them (see Ben's post here) I think I can safely say it does not reflect "game as presented or game as played" when making comparisons to Dave and Gary's early campaigns. High on that list is the exclusion of town adventures and avoiding the use of NPC's, as well as encounter levels in the wilderness. That's not a diss on these ideas, just a recognition that the OP is titled "Was This Gary's Vision?". Really, I don't believe Robbins ever made any claims to trying to emulate Dave or Gary's methods. This seems to be something others may have projected onto his efforts.
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Post by howandwhy99 on Mar 20, 2022 4:40:53 GMT -6
Responding to the video, I would call this massive player style of game play: Troupe play; and I suggest it is every bit as possible using the standard rules as the more typical Party gameplay.
However, if every session is a loosely connected episode with a random collection of players from a large list night after night, then I suspect it is difficult to gain continuity momentum. (And with all that work done tracking this game). I'd say this doesn't sound as enjoyable for a game often about hunting down secrets and revealing unknown elements, but I haven't played like this.
The inter-troup conflict sounds fun. As well as raising a domain, training armies, and going to war... against other players.
I suggest a "Campaign" could as easily refer to a single character rising from first level 0 XP to Name level and retirement as to any kind of party or troupe play, much less plot following or storytelling. So perhaps it is the "Beat the Game" aspect per player that was "really" intended. Players used to be mad for advancement.
Perhaps the real takeaway should be that everyone back at D^D's creation was mad to track everything and build devices to simulate anything. And the players purpose was to advance, increase their holdings, their wealth, and (if all too much) play it like a war game.
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Post by howandwhy99 on Mar 20, 2022 5:08:45 GMT -6
Regarding campaign prep for a Session 1, I don't think either bottom-up or top-down work fully.
I stand here stationary and can see each blade of grass at my feet. I look up and can see the world only directly around me. On my best day I can only see as far as the horizon. But I prefer to look up. My gaze lifting and holding the countless stars which fill my vision.
I heartily agree with Gary's starting map advice: Town, Dungeon, Wilderness, Go! But where did these things come from? These are answers. They are already here. Knowing how they came to be begs a question Players may want answered. Having unshared answers for them to discover is part of the allure of a mystery game like D&D. You know, they do not. It is up for them to search or not. As they desire.
Where did the making of metal and pots and swords come from? Mustn't there be another town nearby? Do the creatures in the dungeon plot some end? What tactics will they use? What do they know (and practice in life)?
Bigger answers come with bigger pictures. I feel I can begin small as Gary suggests as well as broad: To account for all the stars in the sky and blades of grass in the field. It just takes a willingness to make different kinds of maps.
-Edited for some...coherence.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 20, 2022 12:17:51 GMT -6
Having unshared answers for them to discover is part of the allure of a mystery game like D&D. You know, they do not. That's why I personally like to refer to lists like Jeff's here when I put a campaign world together. If I have these types of questions answered behind the screen and can comfortably rattle them off when and if they come up (as in, when players engage with the world in such a way that they organically uncover the info), I feel like I'm more than halfway there with worldbuilding. It doesn't have to be this list specifically, but I really like these questions, and Jeff's got a ton of experience running the game and knows what the average D&D player will engage with in a world. On top of that baseline, I can feel free to expand things as much as I want, or as little, depending on what the players are apparently interested in.
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Post by doublejig2 on Mar 20, 2022 14:12:38 GMT -6
Yeah, I love that list. I actually got Mr. Rients permission to work it into Dice or Die, which I did!
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