Game Structure

The campaign is being run with a "West Marches" structure, which is different to a normal campaign. At the end of the day, it is an experiment though - if something's not working or not fun, let me know and we'll see what we can do to improve it.
So, when we're setting up a game,
- Everyone plays one character who lives in the same frontier town, but any one adventure will only have some of them playing, with each party pulled from the larger cast of characters.

If you want to play, post a message to the group proposing an adventure, objective or mission, and see who's interested in coming and when. No hard rules about how many people can play in a session, but anywhere 3-7 can work fine, with 4 or 5 being the sweet spot.

Because you won't play in every session, notetaking, recaps, and marking the map are important! If you write or make anything that helps fill in the other players, your character starts the next game with a point of inspiration.

If a particular plot or adventure is important to you or your character, I'm happy with people "calling dibs" every now and then - asking everyone not to investigate a particular plot hook, story or place without them is okay.

Once we've started playing a game

Each adventure starts in the town, and travels to somewhere outside it. At the end of the game time, you can choose to head back to town, or continue exploring with the same group in another session. This needs us to schedule everyone together again, preferably soon, but returning to town and coming back another day is always an option.

As long as you're ending in a fairly safe spot, we can assume any returns to town made at the end of a game are succesful, one way or another.

It's a cooperative game with a lot of exploration and building - all the PCs should be able to work with each other, more or less. If you want to have conflict with another PC, that's okay, but they have to be totally onboard with it, and not in a way that's going to ruin anyone's fun.

The campaign is going to be guided by plot hooks, but it is open for exploration. If you can get a few people on-board for a plan, as long as it's interesting we can give it a try. Anything from having a perfect plan for a plot hook, to just wondering what's in that uncharted region of the map is fine, what we run is up to you!

Being a more open campaign, some places are more dangerous than others. In general, the further from town you travel the harder things get, but there's always particularly dangerous or risky challenges you can find. These are *always* going to be telegraphed; nobody has fun accidentally walking into a "level 20 area" without knowing it. Keeping your distance, retreating, or coming back later with more experience are all good options. But, maybe with a good plan or some luck, you could pull it off anyway...

And for levelling up and working together,

Levelling is through milestones rather than XP, reducing bookkeeping. Characters earn one milestone each time they meet the goal of the adventure they set out on, and level up when they return to town with **three milestones**.

Some characters are going to end up higher level and better equipped than others, and that's okay! Nothing wrong with having a spread of levels in a party; I'll make sure it works out.

Because the game's more interesting and easier to organise when everyone's roughly the same level, we can assume characters help each other train up. If there's another PC in town that's two or more levels higher than yours, then you can level with only two milestones as you train with them in town (at no gold or time cost).

If it's been a fair while since you played, and the level gap's gotten too big to have a fun game where everyone can contribute, I'm very willing to let people spend long periods of downtime to just level up to a point where they'll have more have fun. But, lets see how things play out as to how this happens.

And as for the rules,

I'm a big fan of reskinning abilities. If there's an ability or spell you want to look different, go for it, be creative!

We'll try to keep things rules-as-written where possible, just so everyone's expecting the same thing. But, if a rule or character option isn't working or isn't fun, we can always change it if people agree.

Bookkeeping is already high enough in D&D. I've got no interest in tracking rations, encumberment, arrows or anything like that. If there's exceptional circumstances, maybe, but it general it just bogs things down.

And, worst case scenario? If we give it a try and the whole thing isn't working out, we can always move the characters and story over to a normal structure, and keep going with a more traditional campaign (or two) instead.