Let's begin our look of the play system with what I think is one of the starting points for a West Marches campaign, the Town. When I envision play in a WM campaign I picture the game centering around the home base that the players will be basing their adventures out of. I would like to have the town develop as a character unto itself as the game progresses. Characters will come and go in the town, some will die from adventuring or living on the frontier and I want that to be reflected in the story that is told.
I've gone back on forth on a bunch of different town creation ideas over the past several months on my internal documents. I've toyed with some pretty in-depth ideas on creating a town, applying a layout to the town and having that recorded by someone in the player party. After some internal play-testing of some concepts, I found that what I was originally going for ended up being way to complex and crunchy for town creation. As much as I want the town to be an integral part of the gameplay experience, I came to realize that players don't want to spend a ton of time setting up the town, its denizens and all of the relationships. I also realized that all of that stuff doesn't have to happen before the game starts. One of my core tenants with character creation is that your characters aren't heroes before they start this game and to a large extent, who they were and their backstory before this town doesn't matter. Your character will be made through their adventures. That same concept needs to apply to the town itself, that the makeup of the town, the flavor of it will all be determined from the play that occurs moving forward, not from before hand.
It was with that in mind that I scaled back my town creation concept quite a bit. I wanted to create something that was fun, quick, but still gave the players a general concept of how their town would be laid out and who the people in the town would be.
With that in mind, players will basically throw their dice set onto the table and assign houses/backgrounds from there. Someone at the table can quickly transfer that idea over to a piece of paper for tracking purposes. Over time as the town grows, denizens change and things change, that town layout and detail can change. Ultimately, I plan to design a town "tracking" sheet that will allow someone to easily track the denizens
Things can be loose here and not all of the townspeople need a name or need to have their profession fully fleshed out. All of that can happen later when/if a character comes into the story that is being told.