 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and today I'd like to draw your attention to an oft-forgotten part of the D&D ecosystem, the DICE DAB for tabletop withdrawal, West March campaigns. Large-scale campaigns with heavy emphasis on a hop-in hop-out style of storytelling, where you don't have to dedicate hours of your schedule to a weekly commute with your friends, only for them to cancel an hour beforehand. I'm gonna talk about what is a West March campaign, as well as what makes them unique in the system of D&D, and whether or not you should remember the West of March. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like West March servers are for the lonely and the desperate, feel free to play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So a West March campaign is a very abstract style of playing D&D, where instead of forcing one person to bear the load of storytelling so that everyone else can have fun, the game is told between a number of DMs who are all creating one-shots that the group chooses to play in whatever order. Most of the time, the parties aren't set in stone either, with individual players signing up for whatever one-shot seems interesting to them, and then the DM pairs up whoever they feel will make a good party dynamic. The ultimate goal of all of this is to create a free-flowing campaign where people aren't locked into rigid schedules, which is especially great for people who schedules are constantly being changed week to week. For those people, and everyone else, they can just look on the Help Wanted board to see what one-shots are available at the time, then sign up, play, and sign up for a different game at a different time, as they see fit. Everything else in a West March is up to the group that's running it. Some groups use XP instead of milestone, because XP actually has a purpose here. Some West Marshes have certain plot-heavy one-shots that progress the story of the world, and others ignore a grand plan entirely and just make what looks like it'll be fun. I spent a few months trying out different West March servers online, and the thing that I love the most was my ability to pick and choose adventures based on my personal preference. One day, I was fighting a Lich's Minions, the other, I was in a dance-off to save the universe. The only times I wasn't allowed to play a certain adventure was when it was a direct sequel to the previous one, which just meant that I had to play the first one, since pretty much every one-shot could be played by multiple groups so that everyone could have fun and the DMs wouldn't burn out for making a million encounters, or when my level was too low and the DM didn't feel like scaling down. Still, it was a completely different feeling for me to not feel like I was the chosen one, picked by Destiny to save the world. I was just James Targetman, the fighter with an unfortunate rate of being hit. One of my favorite things about D&D is starting the first session, because I get to meet everybody's creative characters, and West March campaigns just let me meet dozens of new people, both players and DMs, giving me that first session feeling all the time. And I recommend that if you're the type of person who has an erratic schedule, or you're in a place where you can't easily find a D&D game, or you just want to expose yourself to how other people DM their games, I would recommend at least dipping your feet into the marches. One that I personally liked was the Forged Concordance, I hope I said that right, which I found using the Looking for Group feature on Roll20, and had an overall pleasurable experience with. That said, for all the good that West March servers have, they do end up trading in some of the things that make home games great as a result. The first and most obvious problem is that being a random schmuck in a big pool of schmandum rucks makes you feel insignificant in the grand scheme of things. When you play a home game, everything is tailored to you. You ARE the hero, but in a West March, there might not even be an overarching story to follow at all, which can make your adventures feel a little aimless since none of them really connect and you're just going around solving stupid people's stupid problems. Also, the fact that you're swapping DMs and players all the time means that there's no guarantee you'll like everybody with the next roll of the dice. I'm not trying to imply that there are a ton of shadowy neckbeards waiting to ruin your day as soon as you sign up to their table, and in fact, I had a really good time with almost all of the people I played with, but when you get that one guy who can't resist making it about himself, it makes you wonder why you took the time out of your day just to get subjected to Buffmin, the barbarian who follows his own code and refuses to help the party unless you play along with it too. Still, if you don't care about being the main character and you recognize that bad apples will be on just as soon as they arrive, and then you can avoid them whenever you see their name on a list, then you'll have a good time playing in a West March, and when you feel like you've had enough fun, you can just disappear for a few months with no hassle and come back when you're feeling dicey again. The one thing about West March servers that does irk me is the degree of competitiveness that some people have, and I've never seen it so prevalent than in this type of campaign. See, when you put a bunch of people together and then tell them that their goal is to be a hero, you're gonna get a lot of people who want to be the best hero there ever was. That's cool, but when it's done in a normal home game, there's a built-in sense of camaraderie because you have four or five buddies who are all there to see each other succeed. That sense of camaraderie disappears when you're playing with different people every day, and you're the only person you have to worry about building up, and it's led to me slamming my head in my desk as I listen to the 87th person talk about how cool their character is because it can kill a tear-ask at level nine. Whoa, that's interesting, but I sure don't care. This is just a personal irritation, and players make their characters to fulfill different fantasies, and it's really cool how West March has become a melting pot for number nerds and theater kids alike, but while there's no wrong way to build your character, West March DMs tend to only look at the level when they're pulling people into their one-shots, not recognizing any inherent difference in character build, and it's led to some interesting games. When this mindset infects the DM, they assume that everybody is building the most optimal build possible, and expects frame-perfect wave dashes in their pen and paper game, and that leads to one in about every five one-shots where the difficulty is wildly out of proportion because the DM didn't watch my balance guide and so doesn't understand why the guy who built their character to be a skill monkey barely does damage, but the level five iron chef is pulling the weight of a level 10. For some reason, they assume that difficulty scaling is a four-letter word, and so just like with Buffman, I have to look out for certain DMs who don't take the time to check out the characters they're running for, and then get a reputation for being deadly, which by the way is more often than not just a secret message to warm people about bad DMs without saying it to their face. That said, this problem is just as avoidable as the rest of them. The only reason I feel the need to specify it is because a bad player will muck up your one game experience, but a bad DM has the potential to muck up your entire character, and in a system that emphasizes wiping the slate clean every week, you don't want to cripple the only constant that you have. Overall, West Marshes are a great time, they're a lot of fun, and I definitely prefer them over the Adventurer's League, which despite being the official Wizard of the Coast endorsed West Marsh campaign, somehow manages to be incredibly restrictive while also forcing you to pony up $10 for every four-hour hit of cracked dice. I'm not your whore, wizards, you pay me. Still, if I had to choose, I would probably stick with the dedicated home game, because as long as I have a good DM, I know that I'm going to get a game crafted specifically for me and my homies. I like being able to talk to the DM and ask them stuff like, hey, can I have this weird homebrew thing? Hey, my backstory is cool. Hey, DM, do things for me. Still, nothing says that you can't do both, and when I'm bored and looking for something to do on a Saturday night, I love the fact that I can just dust off one of my character sheets, sign up for a game, and then roll the dice on a new table. Buuuut, that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video, be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can make the conscious choice not to invest in Adventurer's League. But yeah, Davie out.