The Lady and Tiger

I’ve been running a dungeon crawling sandbox campaign of Worlds Without Number for a month or two now and things have been going well. So well, in fact, that I’ve decided to pull the trigger and try to convert my current game to an open table. This was partially motivated by my players’ busy schedules making it difficult to get the whole table together but it’s also been a dream of mine ever since I read the original West Marches posts by Ben Robbins.

There’re a lot of moving parts involved in campaign play however, and I’ve spent the past few weeks giving this decision a lot of thought. I want to make sure to get as much right in its inception as possible, and to ensure that I set up tools and procedures for myself that make running the game as painless as possible. I also need to be very clear on what kind of structure I want the game to follow and determine how best to go about onboarding players, especially if my goal is to foster drop-in play. Last but not least, I want to be clear on what I need from my players in order to prevent miscommunication and misconceptions.

Many of the ideas I explain below don’t originate with me and may seem obvious to those with more GM experience (especially in OSR games). Still, it’s important to make my own approach clear, if for no other reason than to ensure I maintain a coherent, cohesive and consistent gaming environment that aids in developing players’ skills while respecting their agency. In addition to the advice present in West Marches: Running Your Own, Justin Alexander’s Open Table Manifesto is a big help here, as he’s already done the hard work of identifying many of the potential hardships anyone aiming to open their table to drop-in play might face.

Play Structure & GM Goals

Session Structure

A major stipulation of the game’s structure is that each session ends in a town or safe haven of some sort. This is a common piece of advice across the blogosphere, and after adhering to it loosely in the current incarnation of my home game I can see the benefits. With a play group where players may drop-in one week, or where player schedules make it difficult to make it to the table weekly, being able to easily justify why different characters are present for one adventure vs another helps minimize awkward moments where the party that finds themselves in the dungeon one week weren’t the group that entered it before.

To make this even simpler, I plan to have all travel between major settlements be completely safe. This means that players don’t need much justification for why their characters can make it to Town A from Town B for an adventure, and simplifies travel when the party isn’t explicitly exploring the wilderness. Going from towns to dungeons or other adventure sites will still involve travel rules and wilderness encounter tables, but I feel minimizing time spent at the table stressing about travel between safe locations will go a long way to prevent any dead air during a session.

Ruling Consistency

Since WWN is a somewhat crunchier system than other B/X derivatives, I need to make sure that they way I approach my own GM rulings is consistent. Since skill checks serve as a particularly easy place to become lax in maintaining consistent rulings, I’ve decided to break down my own approach to skill checks in order to offset decision making on the fly by breaking down checks to the following 4 tiers:

• Trivial
• Challenging
• Very Difficult
• Impossible

These roughly map to the skill check recommendations on page 41 of the book, with Trivial rolls being Difficulty 6, Challenging rolls being Difficulty 8 or 10, Very Difficulty rolls being Difficulty 12 and Impossible rolls being Difficulty 14. Player characters will be able to help another with their skill checks as long as the character providing aid possesses at least level-0 in the skill in question (level-0 representing a trained skill in WWN).

Trivial checks will only be rolled in situations where failure is particularly interesting, otherwise being treated as an automatic success that takes up time as normal. Similarly, Impossible checks will also not be rolled unless serious extenuating circumstances exist, instead serving to illustrate what lies beyond the upper bounds of a reasonable skill check.

Prioritizing Player Skill

I don’t want players to feel constrained by their character sheets, however. I worry that using WWN over other OSR systems, with its inclusion of a skill list and the depth of character options present, can encourage players to treat the information on their sheet as sacrosanct. This isn’t a huge problem as of yet, and most of the players I currently play with are new to either the hobby in general, the OSR or both and I haven’t had much difficulty in making this clear to them. I do want to keep this in mind as I listen to players try to solve problems within the game and make sure that I gently encourage the styles of play I’d like to see more of.

Player Buy-In & Other Potential Pitfalls

In order to run the campaign effectively, I definitely need to set myself up with some solid resources to make planning and play easier. I’ve identified a number issues that lead to friction during play and that I think need to be adequately addressed in order for an open table environment to run smoothly. These include;

1. Difficulty with character creation and character planning,
2. Complexity of magic and other subsystems,
3. Familiarity with combat rules,
4. Adjustment to differing playstyles,
5. Unfamiliarity with the VTT and other tools.

It’s easy to notice that many of the above pitfalls are all related to system mastery. Despite how easy it can be to onboard new players, even simple games can engender option paralysis. I want to ensure that I reduce friction as much as possible at the table and a big part of that requires my players to achieve some measure of skill and familiarity with the system and tools being used. Nothing slows gameplay down to a crawl more than players asking what the abilities on their character sheet do every combat, or forgetting what dice are rolled for which action each session.

I’ll try to break down the first four of those obstacles below. There isn’t really an easy out for handling the fifth – I simply need to improve at using the tools I choose. As I get more familiar with them, I can help resolve issues and answer questions the players may have, and that’s probably the best I can hope for.

Since I’ve chosen to run my game within Worlds Without Number, I’m missing out on some of the benefits of running a more simple system such as B/X and its closer relatives. WWN has a skill system as well, feats (in the form of foci), more complicated character generation as well as multiclassing, more detailed combat options than other OSR or OSR-adjacent games and additional subsystems for crafting. These aren’t negatives (in fact, many of them contributed to my decision to pick the system) but they each represent another hurdle for players to overcome in terms of understanding the system well enough to engage with it effectively.

My general approach has been to onboard new mechanics slowly (since I’m also quite new to the system) and to communicate with players frequently regarding any issues that do crop up. I want to be more explicit about this as I transition my table to a more drop-in, drop-out style however, since infrequent players will be more likely to forget elements of the system.

Character Creation

In terms of character creation, my goal is to create a document detailing a simplified process of creating your own character (very similar to the steps outlined beginning on page 6 in the WWN rulebook). I also want to include screenshots of different sections of the book, such as the background selection table or class overviews, as well as screenshots of the steps required in Foundry (my current VTT of choice) to create a character.

Magic and Subsystem Complexity

Magic is a bit more difficult. Creating my own document detailing the different spells and traditions is a lot of work that I think runs counter to my end goal, which is to encourage my players to engage with and learn the system themselves. Instead I want to prioritize non-magical classes for beginners and strongly encourage players who do select a mage tradition to sit down and memorize their spells and arts. Considering that this comes up to roughly 4 spells and 2 arts per character, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable ask.

Crafting and other systems like it are less of a big deal, at least at first. I would like to encourage engagement with these systems, especially in the form of downtime activities, but they don’t represent a required pillar of effective sandbox play and I’m perfectly fine with players engaging with them at their own leisure, at least for now. If it becomes an issue I’ll revisit it but I don’t want to go overboard and inundate players with homework prior to play since that’ll only turn away folks and lead to disappointment.

Combat Familiarity

Combat is another section that can get complicated, especially since WWN provides a number of different combat options that can slow down play. Many of these options are effective, fun and/or evocative, so my goal isn’t to remove them but instead make them as easy to engage with as possible for players. I’ve previously presented players with a Google doc outlining the pages they need to read but here I’ll instead compile each of the combat options and common skill applications into a document and pin that in my game’s discord server.

I’d also like to make this information available within the VTT if possible, if only to reduce the steps required for players to access and reference this information. I’ve heard of people introducing timers into their games to limit indecision in combat but I don’t want to punish my players for indecision, I just want to help them get over the hump and begin playing with more intentionality and efficiency. Besides, combat in WWN and games like it are hazardous enough.

Playstyle Adjustment

I’m generally aiming for a more OSR oriented playstyle, prioritizing player skill, player agency and communication in order to run a sandbox environment where the players and I discover the story as a procedural result of play as opposed to something planned out in advance. There’s a litany of blog posts, essays and diatribes describing this kind of play but ultimately none of it is necessary as a player-facing supplement in my mind.

I’ve had some success onboarding players to this style of play, whether they be old hats to the TTRPG space or new to the hobby entirely, and it’s led me to believe that, much like just about anything you care about, the way to as effective an envoy for something you care about and get people to engage with it in good faith is to communicate effectively, listen to what they have to say and work with them to find what makes everyone comfortable. A few quotes from Courtney Campbell of Hack Slash Master, one of my favorite blogs, will explain it more succinctly than I can:

There is no way for a group of random human beings to know what your baseline expectations are for a situation—how often have we been surprised by how another person deals with something? If you don’t give them information, and you’re not explicit about it, then you are destroying their agency. It isn’t necessary to tell them how to solve the puzzle, but letting them know there’s a puzzle and what the pieces are seems an appropriate approach if you want a puzzle solved. 

Hack & Slash: On Resurrecting the Quantum Ogre and Having Him Over for Tea (hackslashmaster.blogspot.com)

Listen to your players. If they are asking questions they are telling you what they want to know. Don’t ever only tell them no – always say the reason why you are telling them no, and provide them a path to accomplish what they want. Be realistic about what is possible and not, and allow them to deviate from what you envision for them.

Hack & Slash: On Resurrecting the Quantum Ogre and Having Him Over for Tea (hackslashmaster.blogspot.com)

Closing Thoughts

This has been my longest post by far, and writing it has take even longer. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and I’m not sure exactly how much of what I’ve written here will survive beyond session one, but I do hope that writing this provides me with a north star to follow that fellow GMs can take a look at and maybe take something from.

I plan to follow up this post with more detailing how I hope to ensure my game’s setting and dungeons are coherent, and how I hope to structure the game world to work specifically with drop-in play. Future posts will (hopefully) involve my process for developing material in a timely fashion that avoids getting caught up in session planning for its own sake, as well as play reports and check-ins on the state of my game and whether or not the open table remains a pipe dream for now.