Open Table Woes
Couple weeks back, I announced an open table West Marches kinda project in my local meatspace RPG community. After the initial wave of prospects was somewhat lacklustre, the second ad had people running in my proverbial doors. In the project's Discord, I offered up a couple time slots and they were mostly filled within a day. So far, so overwhelmingly great!
The backdrop is: dwarves going ashore a week's travel away from a lost dwarven citadel, with the goal to explore/recover/resettle whatever they can get their grubby little hands on. The local polity patchwork consists of merfolk, lizard folk, kobolds and scattered humans, all of the settlements are village-sized at most. There'll be bigger factions further inland, but as the dwarves are technically still within the citadel's sphere of influence, no larger settlements have emerged yet.
For rules, we're using a well blended smoothie of Wolves Upon the Coast and Apocalypse World, with a whole bunch of other system fragments thrown in for good measure. Early on, without access to armour, it's intentionally very deadly—over the course of five sessions, three dwarves (and another three dwarf retainers) have perished, in about as many fights.
While what follows is mostly the bad, I don't want to give the wrong impression: Every single session has been excellent fun, and many of the hooks woven into the world have been swallowed whole. Players are coming up with theories on how things work, slowly exploring the world a session at a time, stitching together the glimpses shown, and at times drawing connections where there were none.
The first bigger issue here is that in those five sessions I've had about a dozen or so different players, of which only one was present for more than two sessions. This means that the shared world knowledge is heavily splintered. We've reached the point where recaps of earlier expeditions need to become more and more condensed and going on this will only get worse. I have thought about getting together one main group to create a narrative golden thread so to speak, or maybe there should only be one party, the entirety of dwarves moving about in one big caravan, characters shifting into the foreground as players are present? A play on The Banner Saga if I've ever seen one. I am unresolved on either.
The rules knowledge present a similar challenge: while the mechanical framework is very minimalistic, succeeding in it requires a different approach than more mainline TTRPGs. Combat is very deadly, in line with many OSR concepts. Wolves' boasts are a very unique levelling alternative, wholly new to my players. Lastly, inventory and resource management as an emphasised mechanic is something often downplayed in other games. Five sessions in, we're getting a better grasp on boasts and deadliness, but entirely new groups would have to suffer the same warm-up period and I don't like it. Not that I have a solution, of course, beyond making prospective players read the rules. Writing this, I realise I should probably create a must-read rules summary, offloading some of the prep talk I otherwise repeat every session.
My intent and interest lie with overland exploration leading into underground delves, but for exploration to matter it has to take time, resources, etc. It should also be a challenge in itself and lead to further hooks, think Witcher 3 marking nearby, yet unexplored points of interest with a tantalising question mark. But: That all takes time! So. Much. Time. And there's a very limited amount of time in a session, after which that specific party might never get together again. A partial solution is to fade-to-black on any uninteresting travel, cutting out a party's return to the nearest homebase, but that also devalues the rigours of travel, might even make travel feel like some pre-engineered cutscene …
Probably I need to be more brisk about pushing forward the game and cutting out anything that eats more into our time than it's worth. Some things, like character creation, are already swift and I don't think a bad thing to spend time on. One of the oft repeated mantras, by myself even, is to ask players what they'll be doing next session to avoid overprep, and I think I'll start doing that. Not at the end of a session, of course, but once a date has been found for a given group of characters. 'Which direction will you be headed/what's your aim in your expedition?' isn't much in the way of homework, after all.
I've also found myself struggling with organisation of notes, scrambling to find relevant hex keys and encounter tables. Part of the issue is limited table space in most locations … Well, truthfully the issue is more that I don't like GM screens even though one would create vertical space and also the idiotic amount of papers and folders on my end. Flipping through pages instead of just ctrl-fing through hundreds of pages eats time. This partially also stems from me handwriting much of my prep because I find getting work done much easier if sitting down away from a screen, and partially from me not having the whole exploration procedure memorised well enough yet.
I'll probably just shell out for a laptop.
Bonus image: The jointly drawn map as per session 5, on a roll of old, yellowed wallpaper which is perfect.
