An Online Multi-DM Campaign Setting Experiment:Black Marches

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp · Mon Sep 03, 2012 12:04 am

Dear all,

I recently completed a 10 month campaign experiment which I reminisce about here about the context for the experiment, the results of the experiment, and thoughts on a future method of designing and running an online RPG could be done.

I welcome your thoughts and questions if anything written there wasn't clear enough.

Thanks,

Bill

Midnight_v · Post by **Midnight_v** » Mon Sep 03, 2012 9:37 pm

Really cool stuff, sad I missed it.

DragonChild · Post by **DragonChild** » Mon Sep 03, 2012 10:23 pm

For what it's worse, as someone who lurks on open, and had previously been deeply involved in Therafim, a similar, older project, I had considered joining Black Marshes. Tthe entire reason I didn't is because it was very, very obvious there was no standards for what balance "should" be, and that a group of people who just didn't like you could vote on what was or wasn't acceptable, rather than any sort of real accountability.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Mon Sep 03, 2012 11:42 pm

Very interesting read. You really got to level 21?

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp · Tue Sep 04, 2012 12:44 am

@Dragonchild

The issue I've had and part of the experiment was to see what an optimized Online Campaign would look like. What happens when you explicitly allow all D&D material with only the caveat of avoiding infinite loops and toning it down if asked politely to.

Those were the standards, and overall the campaign was a great success. What was clear is that there are very different opinions on what's acceptable, what's overpowered and whatnot even amongst the optimizers themselves. Some would refuse to do certain tactics on principle even if it meant staying competitive with other players.

And that was part of the reason there was a laissez-faire approach to the rules. Since 3.5 D&D / PF isn't balanced and it's irritating to write pages of houserules or supposed fixes , and even with all those houserules , the game still wouldn't be very balanced and players could still whine about others outperforming them, we took the simple approach and blatantly said you need to optimize to stay competitive.

The results showed that it really doesn't matter how you try to account for imbalances, whether you try to ad-hoc knee-jerk fix them (majority of campaigns) , or you try to play the game the way it is as much as possible (Black Marches) the gameplay experience is still hampered very largely by the quality of the game design.

@Red Rob

Indeed, the following characters made it to level 21 or above

Aegis
Roc
Kilroy
Umbra
Syrius
Ivar Heavychain
Xavash
Kaiyo
Nina
Nightmare
Kamigawa Light

Whatever · Post by **Whatever** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 1:08 am

Did any of them take Epic Spellcasting? Or was that soft banned?

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp · Tue Sep 04, 2012 1:42 am

Epic Spell was taken by a couple of characters. Effectively all it did was add another way to play Rocket Launcher Tag.

Only infinite loops are explicitly banned. Characters are not allowed to take things which make challenge meaningless aka Pun-Pun.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 1:44 am

A few weeks (months? I don't remember) ago I looked through the wiki and I thought the idea was kind of interesting. There are some similarities with the Pathfinder Society Online Collective, in the sense of playing "pickup" games via virtual tabletop software.

Questions:
* Where did you advertise for players/DMs?
* Presumably some DMs were more active than others. Was there a "core" group of very active DMs? If so, how many? You mentioned "Bill Bisco, Soft Insanity, and Duralan", for instance.
* Did any "cliques" form? E.g. player X refuses to play with DM Y, etc.

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 3:43 am

First character on the list is a shapechanging awakened living spell. Sweet.

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp · Tue Sep 04, 2012 4:05 am

@Hogarth

Keep in mind that Black Marches has its roots in early 2010 and was at the time, the only place I was aware of that was using a wiki to organize an online tabletop shared campaign setting.

Also keep in mind that unlike Pathfinder Society, every Black Marches adventure is unique and DMs are allowed to make up their own adventures and as a result Black Marches is much more character focused.

Regarding your questions:

1. Where did you advertise for players/DMs?

I advertised at:

Tgdmb.com
minmaxboards.com
thetangledweb.net
enworld.org
rpgobjects.com

2. Was there a core group of DMs

Yes. I advertised Black Marches and ran the game once a week for nearly every week for 10 months. Soft Insanity began running games while attending mine and then Duralan began running games while attending mine. Soft Insanity was present for almost every Bill Bisco and Duralan game and Duralan was present for almost every Bill Bisco and Soft Insanity game.

As a result there was a lot of synergy between the games offered between these three. We created a shared game setting, history, and lore together. When one of us made a decision about the world via an adventure or wiki, the others of us did not contradict it but went along with it. As a result it gave me some insight into shared story writing from tv shows and comics.

At any rate there were several other DMs, many were one shot , a couple were three or four shot. Notwifit gave several other games of his own , Zeldalb and Aethre gave some too, but generally speaking none of them contributed to the main arc. Ichai gave a couple and Animelord gave a couple but those were the exceptions outside of the main three DMs.

3; Did any "cliques" form? E.g. player X refuses to play with DM Y, etc.

There weren't any cliques of that kind per se. Later on in Bill Bisco's tenure as he offered higher and higher level adventures, newer players tended to join in other DMs' games since they'd have to play a few of Bill Bisco's games to catch up in level to be effective.

Other things more involved personal preferences. The Woo didn't play in Bill Bisco's games as he liked E6. Syth stopped playing in Soft Insanity's games because of the Hostiity toward one of Syth's characters.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 5:34 am

ModelCitizen wrote:First character on the list is a shapechanging awakened living spell. Sweet.

goddamn, dat goo.

and the second one is... a blue kobold in sunglasses

and the rest are various angel girls, catgirls, dragon people, and men with spikey hair and big swords.

Damn, I wish I knew about this 10 months ago!

Wouldn't an E6 cap solve some of the issues with overshadowing and combat length? Or is the loss of high level play too much for you and your players?

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 11:14 am

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp wrote:@Hogarth

Keep in mind that Black Marches has its roots in early 2010 and was at the time, the only place I was aware of that was using a wiki to organize an online tabletop shared campaign setting.

The Pathfinder online group is slightly older (Sep. 2009), but it doesn't use a wiki (as you note below, there's no world-building involved).

Bill Bisco wrote:Also keep in mind that unlike Pathfinder Society, every Black Marches adventure is unique and DMs are allowed to make up their own adventures and as a result Black Marches is much more character focused.

I definitely agree that the Black Marches is a much more ambitious project and I'm impressed with the result. On the other hand, I would probably have mixed feelings with such a campaign.

For instance, the number of games (almost one a day!) is eye-opening, but personally I usually can't schedule more than one session each week or two, so I'd worry that I'd never be able to participate in a whole plot arc with a single character; the plot would keep moving along too fast. Was that a concern for anyone, or were the more casual players generally happy with jumping in and out of the story?

EDIT: Some other questions which might be answered somewhere in the Wiki:
* Was there a limit on party sizes other than "GM's discretion"? How big were the parties on average?
* Was there a limit on wealth by level other than "GM's discretion"? Did some GMs give out large amounts of treasure?
* Was there much interaction between high level PCs and low level PCs? E.g. could/would a high level PC give a cheap resurrection to a low level PC? What about high level PCs adventuring alongside low level PCs (resulting in the lower level PCs leveling at an accelerated rate)?
* How did chronology work? By that I mean: if GM Joe's game session takes place over 3 months of in-game time, does GM Frank's game session the next day take place immediately after Joe's? Or could they be simultaneous, or in reverse chronological order?

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 4:45 pm

Yeah, I'm particularly wondering about the casual players versus the elite players. The people that made it to 21; how many of the 340 adventures did they make? ~100? One every 3 days? How long were the adventures?

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 1:10 am

Some character sheets have logs on them detailing the character's history. The level-21 characters appear to have attended approximately one game every two to three days. Note that there are occasional four-games-in-one-day sprees, which indicate to me that games may be only a couple of hours long.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 5:26 am

How is the passage of time handled across different games?

Schleiermacher · Post by **Schleiermacher** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 9:47 am

Are you planning to do anything like this again?

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp · Wed Sep 05, 2012 12:37 pm

OgreBattle wrote:Wouldn't an E6 cap solve some of the issues with overshadowing and combat length? Or is the loss of high level play too much for you and your players?

The original intention of Black Marches was to play a full campaign.

1. Because I had never participated in nor run a campaign that went all the way to level 20 or beyond and neither had the majority of players

2. Because I wanted to allow and see what happens if the full optimization experience is allowed as opposed to suffering a knee-jerk reaction and cutting it all short.

There were some games that were explicitly E6 and the Black Marches rules were innovated such that players could start gaining feats at level 6 instead of levels and whatnot.

E6 is nice in the fact that the range of power disparity is not as great as two twentieth characters could/would be. The problem is of course that there's still a wide gap between characters there.

After DMing this campaign for awhile I began to understand a lot of the drive in people's minds about E6 especially with the likelihood of having more satisfactory combats. However, what we really need is a better gaming system that's much more relatively balanced to begin with.

hogarth wrote:
For instance, the number of games (almost one a day!) is eye-opening, but personally I usually can't schedule more than one session each week or two, so I'd worry that I'd never be able to participate in a whole plot arc with a single character; the plot would keep moving along too fast. Was that a concern for anyone, or were the more casual players generally happy with jumping in and out of the story?

Well keep in mind that I generally only offered 1 game per week. Whenever I had more energy or was enthusiastic to present another adventure I felt important to the story, I offered another game. If you had only been able to attend 1 game a week , you would have been fine. I can't recall anyone indicating that the plot went too fast. The only thing that happened a couple of times was that I had an adventure about a character but the player wasn't there to enjoy it, a slight disadvantage in what happens when you interweave characters into your plots but they don't show up. However, this only happened twice out of all my games. Otherwise things went quite smoothly and well.

What the high number of games should tell you (on average there was more than 1 game offered per day ) is that there is a high demand for D&D games. Some people have a fair amount of time on their hands and if given the opportunity would like to game quite often. Just like any online MMORPG , a high appeal factor is that you can play the game any time and hook up with your friends to enjoy the camaraderie. With D&D much of the appeal is the same. People want to be starts in an interesting story with engaging combats and mysteries.

What the Black Marches experiment shows is that even if the game system is imperfect (and 3.5 D&D / PF is), people will still stay and play it a lot if a convenient system is set up for them. If an average intelligent gamer can set up a long-term shared campaign setting and get people to play D&D online, there's no reason that Wizards of the Coast couldn't. This really highlights their incompetence and lack of foresight. Far more games can be played online than offline and the number of online Tabletop games will sooner or later outnumber the pen and paper tabletop games. Wizards of the Coast could have really raked the market share right back to them. People would absolutely pay for a regular official gaming medium tied to the official rules, but they screwed it up and gave up. What that means is that there's great opportunity for someone to come in and do it well and snipe both Wizards of the Coast and Paizo.

Back to your question. There were some more casual players that jumped in and out. They seemed ok with it. They probably would have liked some more spotlight time, but that is hard when your attendance is sporadic. Still, some highlight games were still had for them.

As to your other questions

2. Was there a limit on party sizes other than "GM's discretion"? How big were the parties on average?

There was no mandated party size limit nor was it necessary for there to be one. Bill Bisco's games had no limit. The maximum I can recall playing was around 12. Other DMs had trouble with more than 6 or 7 players or felt that the game dragged too much with more than that. On average the size for my games was around 7. For others I'd say 4 for non-main storyline DMs and 6 for other main storyline DMs.

3. Was there a limit on wealth by level other than "GM's discretion"? Did some GMs give out large amounts of treasure?

There was the wealth by level guideline and there were the treasure value guidelines. DMs were encouraged but not bound to abide by those guidelines. We didn't have an issue with a DM that gave out too much treasure.

The only thing that happened was that we had 2 separate instances of PCs making Artificer characters and offering their services very cheaply for other players. And, one instance of a player using the Business rules to get an exorbitant amount of gold, although this wasn't abused too much

4. Was there much interaction between high level PCs and low level PCs? E.g. could/would a high level PC give a cheap resurrection to a low level PC? What about high level PCs adventuring alongside low level PCs (resulting in the lower level PCs leveling at an accelerated rate)?

If a low level PC died in an adventure I'm sure a higher level PC would have helped them. Keep in mind that Black Marches used an Action point system where adventurers start out with 4 action points per game and it takes 2 action points to Avoid death and just be unconscious. As such PCs rarely died, they just got Ko'ed for a battle, got Xp, and were stronger for the next adventure.

There was definitely a fair deal of powerleveling. This was on purpose so that newer PCs could catch up to longer term ones in my adventures.

5. How did chronology work? By that I mean: if GM Joe's game session takes place over 3 months of in-game time, does GM Frank's game session the next day take place immediately after Joe's? Or could they be simultaneous, or in reverse chronological order?

Every 1 real life day corresponds to 3 days in Black Marches time in order to give adequate time for adventures to occur and presumably for adventurers to leave an area in order to move to the next one. DMs need to design adventures such that players can leave and not lock them in. There are a few exceptions where for chronology reasons I might delay a game for another game to finish, and there are times when a game had to end so I made a path for the adventurers to leave and come back and then just took it all back up later. It's not perfect, but overall it works fine for adventurers to move around between locations and DMs. Discrepancies and order could be retconned later if really needed, but overall it worked just fine.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 1:42 pm

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp wrote: What the high number of games should tell you (on average there was more than 1 game offered per day ) is that there is a high demand for D&D games. Some people have a fair amount of time on their hands and if given the opportunity would like to game quite often.

Absolutely, at least if you're recruiting from a global pool of players. My recent experience is with the Pathfinder Society online recruiting group and the Paizo play-by-post message boards, and in both cases recruiting for "structured" games will usually fill up in a few hours.

(When I say "structured", I mean Pathfinder Society scenarios or published adventure paths as opposed to some dude's vaguely described homebrew campaign.)

Another question: Were most players USAians? Was there a particular time of day (or week) that was most popular to host games (e.g. Saturday afternoons, EST)?

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp · Wed Sep 05, 2012 2:17 pm

Ikeren wrote:Yeah, I'm particularly wondering about the casual players versus the elite players. The people that made it to 21; how many of the 340 adventures did they make? ~100? One every 3 days? How long were the adventures?

Out of the 340 games offered, he following people offered this many games

Duralan 103. Who had ivar heavychain
Soft insanity 71 special mention cause 1 character could have reached 21 or higher if he chose to attend
Bill Bisco 62
Anime lord 17 who had Kamigawa Light
Notwifit 12 who had Bloodbeard
Niserie 6 who had Aegis

Adventures tended to be around 4 hours on average.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 2:38 pm

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp wrote:
Ikeren wrote:Yeah, I'm particularly wondering about the casual players versus the elite players. The people that made it to 21; how many of the 340 adventures did they make? ~100? One every 3 days? How long were the adventures?
Out of the 340 games offered, he following people offered this many games

Duralan 103. Who had ivar heavychain
Soft insanity 71 special mention cause 1 character could have reached 21 or higher if he chose to attend
Bill Bisco 62
Anime lord 17 who had Kamigawa Light
Notwifit 12 who had Bloodbeard
Niserie 6 who had Aegis

Adventures tended to be around 4 hours on average.

I think you're misinterpreting the question, or I'm misinterpreting the answer. He's asking how many sessions would it take for a PC to reach level 21. Surely that's more than 6 sessions, unless you were allowed to start at much higher levels.

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 8:53 pm

Yeah, not sure what just happened there. Looking for how many sessions/how long to get characters to 21.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Thu Sep 06, 2012 5:00 am

Ikeren wrote:Yeah, not sure what just happened there.

Maybe he assumed that, since every character sheet on the wiki has a nicely-formatted, numbered, and dated log of everything that ever happened to the character, you weren't wasting time by asking for an answer that you could have gotten yourself in less time than it took any of you to do the writing.

All of the characters here finished by participating in the same final battle, so I'll just list join dates. All of the characters here are either level 22 or 21.


Character	Games	Time
Aegis	77	5/7/12 (103 days)
Roc	139	11/5/11 (287 days)
Kilroy	70	2/9/12 (191 days)
Umbra	63	1/15/12
Altharid	76	10/22/11
Xavash	55	5/9/12
Kaiyo	35	6/4/12
Nightmare		2/1/12
Kamigawa	118	2/13/12

As I said, a game about every two to three days.

I also took a look at a few chatlogs. The four sessions I looked at were 4 to 7 hours long, with at a rate of a few messages per minute.

@Bill Bisco, what technologies did DMs use to run games? Was everything IRC, myth-weavers, and wiki, or did some DMs use additional or alternate tools (virtual tabletops, networked dice-rollers, google docs, etc)? (edit: I was looking over another game and saw mention of OpenRPG, so I'll change this: did you observe players having any trouble switching between DMs and technologies? Going from a tabletop to an IRC channel or vice-versa is a bit of a jump.)

Also, it would be cool if you could produce some nice graphics about the game's statistics. Session timing, session length, character involvement (chat lines plotted against each session), character lifetime graphs, EXP totals as a function of time, levelups as a function of time, number of characters per session, that kind of thing. Convincing people that this strategy works would be a lot easier if you could show people that people that join tend to keep up, stay in the game, not miss sessions, and generally stay entertained and involved.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Sep 06, 2012 2:33 pm

With respect to suggestion #3 (Paying for Adventures from Company DMs), it's interesting to read the chapter in "Freakonomics" where they talk about unintended consequences when using money as a motivator. For instance, paying a token amount for blood donations might decrease the number of volunteer blood donors, although the idea is controversial.

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Thu Sep 06, 2012 7:46 pm

I didn't open any of the character sheets, so I was unaware that info was there. I was curious, but not that curious. Thanks for the info, though.

Duralan · Post by **Duralan** » Thu Sep 27, 2012 12:08 am

Good day to you all. (I hope tis does not count as thread necromancy)

Bill, why haven't you notified me of this topic ? Oh well.

Ah yes, forgive me my manners... I am the very same 'Duralan' who joined BM in October 2011 and played/DM-ed/modded the site... well I am still doing so.

The setting is alive even though our activity ratio lowered a bit with vacations being over and such. Also, we had a "mini-restart" pretty much a weak or two so ago - a 10-year big time skip occurred... good opportunity to sent some older chars on well-deserved vacation after defeating the first grand BBEG of the setting while also introducing the "new" generation.
http://blackmarches.wikidot.com/forum/t ... st-1560734 (this topic is WIP but as you can see also allows for some events mid-skip).

I am going to take liberty of perhaps describing the whole experience from my own perspective a bit.

Bill forgot to mention about him advertising on the now non-existent (save for "read-only form) Brilliant Gameologists boards. This is how I got hooked up here.

Initially only Bill DM-ed but it changed after few weeks. From my own experience, indeed, having one "strong" DM can easily create opportunities for other members to become one too.

That was also true in my case.
During those several months of gaming I observed that it may be a bit hard for the "freshmen" to find themselves in the setting at the beginning which is why they will resort to the creation of their own locations, with their own NPCs/organizations etc etc so as not to by mistake perhaps damage the work of the others. This precaution was quite beneficial for the setting in the end as it managed to grow, branch so much more in the long run than when it would be a case should we simply solely build around the "main arc".
The connections were mostly made between Bill's, Soft's and my arcs but that was not always true.

From player's perspective I had helluva fun no matter the char I've used. In spite of being at times branded as powergaming haven I've found here the best RP's so far. In truth the only DM's who hosted high-power games (in addition to more "modest ones") were Bill, Ichai and me.

I didn't open any of the character sheets, so I was unaware that info was there. I was curious, but not that curious. Thanks for the info, though.

Technically each player character was required to have both character sheet and an up-to-date wiki page containing gp/XP/item alterations as well as some brief description of the event itself to be legally employed (if you cannot find one then seek some 'collapsibles' at the page's bottom, like tis the case on Ivar's page http://blackmarches.wikidot.com/altharid . Such was done to avoid problems of the previous iteration of the Black Marches.

@Bill Bisco, what technologies did DMs use to run games? Was everything IRC, myth-weavers, and wiki, or did some DMs use additional or alternate tools (virtual tabletops, networked dice-rollers, google docs, etc)? (edit: I was looking over another game and saw mention of OpenRPG, so I'll change this: did you observe players having any trouble switching between DMs and technologies? Going from a tabletop to an IRC channel or vice-versa is a bit of a jump.)

We used Open RPG and its fork AKA "traipse" in 99,99% of cases. both are compatible with one another although I find the latter to be more functional from DM's perspective.
The apps are not truly hard to use, especially when you're a player.
If you are feeling fancy then you can have it parse html code (inbuilt function, no plugins required) to get fancier effects.
The App itself is open source for which I am greateful (Ubuntu user here).

Initially we used separate wiki-pages for chat logs however... I was not truly satisfied with those which is why I've started using google docs (ORPG auto-saves logs in html format, with some minor editing you can have your log posted in few minutes, really) and well it became standard later.

One DM tried to use "fantasy grounds" for his 2 games at the begging but the app was simply not.. open ended enough to allow for streamlined gameplay IMO.

Sorry if my post looks a bit like a chaotic mess but tis hard for me to suddenly summarize the biggest project I happened to be also part of in few mins I have left today heh.