Tell me about Burning Wheel

[half-dragon dragon]

First of all, apologies if I missed a similar thread about this. Anyway after a thread I recently started and seeing it mentioned a few times before, I've become rather intrigued with Burning Wheel. I read a few reviews and so far I'm very impressed with what I've seen so far, but before I invest, I wanted to get a few more impressions of the game.

I'm basically looking for any and all impressions y'all might have; good, bad, indifferent, scathing, anything really.

I do have a few questions/concerns, so any insight into these would be greatly appreciated.

How varied are the individual races in their life paths? Can I play forest-dwelling barbaric dwarf? I guess my real question is, how far outside of their fantasy archetypes/stereotypes do the races go in their life paths?

How 'bound' are the races to their emotion aspects (i.e. greed for dwarves, grief for elves)? As in, if I make a dwarf, do they have to be greedy, or can I generally ignore these aspects of the race if it doesn't fit my concept?

Less of a concern and more of a query, how do you feel about the combat/duel of wits scripting mechanics?

Also, are there any/many interesting options for non magical folk in combat?

Anything else you'd like to say about the game?

Thanks all in advance

EDIT: I should also mention that I'm more interesting in hearing about BW Revised.

 

[Jeremy757]

This game gets talked about a lot on RPG.net Try These threads:

Bruning Wheel Sell me or unsell me [Archive] - RPGnet Forums

Has anyone actually *run* "Burning Wheel?" - RPGnet Forums

 

[LostSoul]

I would go to the Burning Wheel forums and ask over there. Luke is very active there and he'll probably ask some questions that get right to the heart of it. If he doesn't think your group will be a good fit for the game he'll say so.

 

[exile]

I don't have my BW books in front of me. In fact, I let a friend borrow them, and he has yet to return them. In my reading of the rules (I have yet to ever play), the races all cling pretty tightly to their associated archetypes: dwarves end up as soldiers, craftsmen, etc., not forest dwelling barbarians. If memory serves, the races do end up being forced to pick up certain traits depending on the lifepath they follow, but even tow races that follow the exact same lifepath have some room for customization.

Chad

 

[Obryn]

Almost everyone has great things to say about Burning Wheel's character generation system.

What I've read here and elsewhere is that the actual gameplay is much less manageable. The Duel of Wits mechanics, in particular, are a sticking point for many groups.

I picked up Burning Empires about a year ago; it uses a lot of the BW mechanics in a specific (and awesome) sci-fi setting. It's ... dense. There's tons of information, and it looks like a challenging game to run or play.

-O

 

[Irda Ranger]

How 'bound' are the races to their emotion aspects (i.e. greed for dwarves, grief for elves)?

Very. BW's Lifepath rules basically take an implied setting and make it an explicit part of the rules. To change the races or the setting you need to rewrite all of the Lifepaths. BW is not generic fantasy.

Less of a concern and more of a query, how do you feel about the combat/duel of wits scripting mechanics?

It's fast. If you don't want to waste a lot of time on combat, you won't. Fights are brutal and over quickly. To use a very rough D&D example, imagine if everyone had a slightly higher AC but only 7 HP. This is true for "real" fights and the Duel of Wits.

My #1 problem with the Duel of Wits is that it would allow a single PC (whoever has the highest Charisma) to really exercise a great deal of control over the rest of the group. It's great for encounters with NPCs though.

I found BW to be extremely interesting and creative, and a great source of ideas by for how I run my D&D campaigns (particularly with respect to alignment, experience awards and quest/campaign design), but ultimately the race and class rules were too rigid for me. You can't run BW in multiple settings like D&D, because the rules are the setting. So, no Dark Sun, for instance. Or barbaric jungle Dwarves driven by battle ecstasy.

 

[Thor]

Hey man,

I'm the editor and a developer of the Burning Wheel line, so I'm biased. But here are my thoughts:

There is a great deal of variety within the lifepaths themselves, but the dwarves, elves and orcs draw heavily from The Hobbit, LOTRO, and the Silmarillion. The standard lifepaths give you the ability to create a great variety of characters that would fit into that setting, but are a bit more restrictive outside it. That's why we created the Monster Burner supplement. Part of the Monster Burner is devoted to showing you how we made lifepaths and traits and gives you rules for creating your own. Once you've got the hang of it, it's not too difficult to alter the racial stocks to your vision or create entirely new ones.

The Emotional Attributes (Greed, Grief and Hatred for dwarves, elves and orcs, respectively) are central to the character stocks. You can't really ignore them (unless you alter the stocks as mentioned above). Dwarven Greed allows us to have characters like Thorin, who was a great hero but ready to cut Bilbo down for looking at his Arkenstone funny.

However, you can play against emotional attributes, and that makes for some really great play. In one of my current campaigns, my friend Rich is playing a dwarven prince who struggles with Greed. He plays his character as magnanimous and generous in an effort to fight his Greed. In fact, due to the way he's played the character, we gave him the Virtuous trait at our last Trait Vote.

I love love love Fight! and Duel of Wits. Some people don't. It's going to come down to your personal taste.

Fight! makes combat incredibly interesting for non-magical characters. You always have choices to make and those choices make a real difference! I would say that the number one complaint about our combat system, and the thing I love the most about it, is that it requires a degree of player (not character) skill. There are a lot of ways to be good at combat, and having a high skill in your weapon of choice often isn't enough. Sizing up your opponents and their capabilities and changing your tactics as a result is a must.

I love watching players get better at Fight! The more they play, the more savvy and tricky they become.

The same, incidentally, holds true of the Duel of Wits, which works very similarly. Duels of Wits are some of the most tense and exciting moments in our games.

Hope that helps!

 

[Wombat]

Count me in the group that doesn't like the Fight! and Duel of Wits rules. The scripting feels weirdly artificial and often group decisions, even in combat, devolve to a single person making all the choices (the scripting); this process was exacerbated in Burning Empire.

I love the character creation system, simply because the characters become part of a broader society, either working within its parameters or consciously working against them.

Many people who play 4e will be amazed to see the "Yes!" rule showing up in BW ... several years earlier. And Luke cheerfully admits that he got this rules from others. A GM should say "Yes" or roll dice.

The role of the GM is a peculiar one under BW. At times it is directly adversarial, especially in combat, but at other times it is more like You Buddy The GM who is supposed to help you along.

I will freely admit that I only played in two aborted BW/BE campaigns -- the BW one lasted three session, the BE only two. But overall I like a number of concepts in the rules (such as character generation and handling wealth) while disliking several others (combat, social combat, lack of definition of terminology, the latter especially in BW).

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I agree with most of what has been said here so far, especialy in regards to personal tastes. You won't really know until you try it, because BW is definitely different.

That said, for me reverse the views about char gen and how it runs. Char gen is my least favorite part of BW, by far, but I love the way it runs. My group largely agrees.

I'm not so against the way the characters are tied to the setting. I happen to like most of the defaults, anyway, and getting BW Revised + Monster Burner is still cheaper than many games, if you want to alter the defaults. (Of course, now you will probably want to get Magic Burner, too.) I guess I'm simply not a fan of life paths or massive skill lists.

If I had it to do over again, I'd design pregens (2-3 per players) for our group, without beliefs or instincts. Then let the players pick something suitable from those pregens while they were jointly developing the beliefs and instincts. You'd lose out on the players picking traits, but I could live with it. Because once we got to running, we were covering a lot of ground.

And note that you don't have to use Duel of Wits or Fight! (and a bunch of other options), if you don't want to. Sure, all or nothing may not be the best choice, but the really nice thing is you can change your mind from one scene to the next. My players were kind of bummed about not using Fight! in our first combat scene at first, but once they realized what Fight! does, they were fine. For that matter, there is nothing wrong with letting the players choose to use Fight! or the default Bloody Versus.

 

[mmu1]

BW is a game I want to like, but don't.

I think this is mainly because the rules encourage failure - the assumption goes that Failure = Complications = Drama = Fun.

Combine that with "Let it Ride" (only one roll to resolve a particular task, made ahead of time), and you not only fail a lot, you know you've failed but have to go through the motions anyway. Great if you're into roleplaying your character's emotional journey in detail, miserable if you're more goal-oriented.

Generally speaking, the game has too many damn mechanics that dictate not just what my character will do, but what he'l think and feel.