D&D 5e West Marches

Most communities on WestMarches.games play D&D 5e, and a new 5e community needs little setting up. It starts with the standard 5e experience ladder, and characters get Species and Class fields. For the campaign itself, see Running West Marches.

What's a session worth?

The 5e ladder says a character needs 300 XP for level 2 and 355,000 for level 20. It doesn't say how much a session is worth. With several GMs, that has to be written down, or one generous GM makes the rest look stingy.

Pay for time played and for how hard the adventure is, not for what the party fought. Nobody has to add up encounter XP after a long session, and a careful party earns as much as a reckless one. This table is based on the one from the West Marches I play in. For every 30 minutes played, everyone on the adventure earns the XP and gold for its tier. Round the time to the nearest half hour.

So a three-hour tier 3 adventure pays each character 2,400 XP and 540 gp, and Distribute Rewards on the adventure pays them all at once. Use the Levels column for the adventure's Minimum Level and Maximum Level. The tiers overlap, so more characters can join each game.

Put the table on a GM-only World Wiki page, where every GM can find it.

Does the sheet have to be on D&D Beyond?

Nope. The Character Sheet URL field on the character form takes any link, so the sheet can be on D&D Beyond, in a Google Doc or wherever your players already keep it. You can even make the field optional for players who use paper. Session rewards and the stat and hit point rolls don't care where the sheet is.

With a D&D Beyond link, the character page also shows the sheet's ability scores, Armor Class and max hit points, and the DM screen below reads the sheet too.

The character page warns when the levels don't match: "D&D Beyond sheet is level 7, but this character is level 6." The site levels a character from their XP, but the player levels the sheet by hand, and the two drift apart. Better to spot that on the character page than halfway through a fight.

All of this needs a public sheet. In D&D Beyond, set the character's privacy to Public (Campaign Only isn't enough, because the site isn't in your campaign). The site keeps a copy of each sheet for five minutes, so a change can take that long to show up.

Who's at the table tonight?

At a home game you know the party. In a West Marches you might be running for five characters you've never seen, and next week it's a different five.

If any of the party's sheets are on D&D Beyond, click DM Screen on the adventure. It opens in its own window, with a card for every approved player whose character has a D&D Beyond link. Each card has the numbers you'd otherwise ask the table for, such as passive Perception, saves, spell save DCs and spell slots. It lists the conditional advantages everyone forgets too, like advantage on saves against poison.

The gear button in the corner opens Display settings. There you can turn off the sections you never look at, hide a card, or add a sheet by its D&D Beyond link, like a sidekick the party picked up.

It doesn't track the fight, though. There are no current hit points, conditions or turn order. Keep your VTT or Avrae for that.

"I rolled an 18, honest"

Maybe they did. In a Discord full of strangers there's no way to tell whether that 18 was rolled or typed in, so let the site roll it.

Switch stat rolls on under Settings → Character Settings → Stat Rolling. The formula starts as 4d6kh3 (4d6, drop the lowest), rolled six times. Change it if your table plays 3d6 straight. These decide how strict it is:

• Roll SetsHow many sets a player picks from. One is the strictest.
• ThresholdsSet a minimum total and nobody gets stuck with a row of 8s. A set that misses a threshold is rerolled before the player sees it.
• Roll ExpiryHow long the sets last. A player can't roll again until they make a character or the sets expire, so this is your reroll rule too.
• OptionalPlayers can skip the roll and use point buy or the standard array.

Players roll from the character form and pick a set. Once they make the character, the whole batch is spent, including the sets they didn't pick. Until a GM approves the character, the player can still switch sets on the edit page, and after that it's locked. The Rolls tab on the character page shows the scores and every other set they got.

Pick a Stat & HP Rolls channel under Settings → Discord Channels, and the bot posts every roll there. It edits the post later to show which set went to which character.

Hit points on level up

5e lets a character roll their hit die on level up or take the fixed average. Rolling has the same problem as ability scores, since nobody saw that 10 on the d10. Turn on Hit Point Rolls under Settings → Character Settings, and every character gets a slot on their Rolls tab for each level from 2 up. Level 1 has no slot, because 5e gives the full hit die there.

The player opens a slot, picks their hit die (the site doesn't know which one their class uses) and does one of these:

• Roll it hereThe site rolls the die.
• Take the fixed average valued6 4, d8 5, d10 6, d12 7.
• Enter a value I already rolledFor a roll made somewhere else, like at the table or with a dice bot in Discord.

You choose in the settings whether players get the last two. Whichever they pick, the slot is locked, and only a GM or admin can correct it or clear it for a new roll. Rolls and averages post in the same Discord channel as stat rolls.

If you switch this on mid-campaign, every existing character gets empty slots for the levels they already have. Let players enter values by hand while they fill in their old rolls, then turn that off if you want every new roll made on the site. GMs can enter values either way.

The site doesn't change anyone's sheet. Players copy the numbers over by hand.