West Marches in the Spinward Marches

[Studio Cat]

Has anyone used the West Marches style of campaign play in Traveller? If so, what were the results? In particular, what were the problems found with scheduling players?

 

[Vormaerin]

Since the players are responsible for the scheduling in a West Marches campaign (at least, in the original meaning of the term. I've heard it used to cover entirely different concepts from the original), there shouldn't be any problems with scheduling the players.

The original West Marches campaign rules was for a large group of players who were responsible for organizing their parties and deciding what they were going to do and then informing the GM, so it could be scheduled. One of the other key rules was that there was a central town you always had to end up in, so there was no question of whose character could or could not be part of a group. And you didn't have to worry about people not showing up, because every character wasn't expected to be present at every session.

I would tend to think maintaining the central hub would be a bigger issue than anything else given how travel works in this game.

 

[Saladman]

Has anyone used the West Marches style of campaign play in Traveller?

Not in Traveller, but I've GMed one and played in two in different flavors of D&D. I'll talk a little about that.

If so, what were the results? In particular, what were the problems found with scheduling players?

In all three cases we eventually coalesced around a core group of players with occasional drop-ins, rather than the full open table we started with. How long it took to do so depended on how explicitly open the GM was to running on different nights and different times.* The busiest GM collapsed to a single group the fastest, the one with the most available nights took a lot longer but sometime in the second year it still became one main group of regulars scheduling the same night each time. But, if some players are checking it out and deciding its not for them, that may not have been a bad thing.

*Bolding this part after a re-read because it might be the most important thing in this post, especially since you're asking about players scheduling. You have to be available for players to schedule. Gygax himself supposedly was running D&D 5+ nights a week at one point, for whoever showed up, ten people or just one, which was part of what inspired the original West Marches experiment. The fewer days you have open the more its an open table but not full West March.

This also reminds me, have a plan, and some adventures, to run for smaller groups, maybe even solo. I learned this in and out of West Marches, the more consistent you are and the less you cancel or delay a start for more people, the more people show up in the long run. But I worked through some small sessions to get there.

I also learned, first with these then later independently with Traveller, that you can have some disparity in character level/power/competence and still deliver a good experience for everyone, but only up to a point, not out to infinity. Feedback in my game and what I saw in the others was that a 2-3 level difference in old school D&D was no big deal, but around 4-5 and higher it wasn't even fun for new players. Weaker characters but still able to make meaningful plays is no big deal, but past a certain point they're not fully able to play the game the more powerful characters are playing, so they might just as well have been invited to sit and watch.

Traveller is less bad about this than level based, and keeping everyone to the same rolling regimen with no dice fudging usually results in everyone in the same range band, but I'm now a fan of term limits in character creation to keep people in the same range. And very rarely I'll step in and either bump up or offer to re-roll a hopeless character, though I do that without any explicit pre-published house rule.

Back to Traveller West March proper:

I kicked around but never ran the idea of an adventure-of-the-week Traveller campaign featuring the crew (or working passages and slow-boat passengers) aboard a heavy freighter. So not a true West Marches campaign, but would have accommodated a rotating cast of players. A Navy ship or Scout tender on an extended mission could also work for this.

For a full on West Marches game I'd be tempted to get away from the starship and do some street level adventures around a home base. Or to keep it space-based, convert all ship share results to Small Craft results and stay in one system. Could base at a highport, a breakaway colony on a moon, or a Belter's hub in an asteroid belt.

Or if you must keep starships, I would go full on Gygaxian DMG: "YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." Combine with downtime where one day in real life = one day of game time, and you can keep it all straight. That jump time out and back will keep some characters out of play for that real time week in between adventures is a feature not a bug, it encourages players to run different characters if they're going to show up to multiple sessions. Doing more of that in our West March runs would have put off the day of reckoning when the most active players and their main characters took over the whole show.

 

[Anstett]

I am setting up a Drinax centered campaign this fall. It will have a combination of Play by Post on a website for the campaign tied in with meeting in real time in FG occasionally. Leaving FG up 24/7 for players to roll checks, look up details on other Travellers, see shared maps, etc. Then on a date everyone interacting live.

I like this idea of giving a voting option (which I can do in FG also) for "when do you want the next live game session" and give a selection of dates/times. Of course can do many other options for polling also outside of that.

Turning this over in my mind, it might allow more players to participate, especially with the story/roleplay feeling I am going for.

Thank you @Saladman for clarifying how this could work.