Is the Burning Wheel "how to play" advice useful for D&D?

[Nemesis Destiny]

@Nemesis Destiny

Another comment on Beliefs: they occupy the same sort of game space as alignment in D&D, or as personality flaws in games like HERO or GURPS, but work in more-or-less the opposite way.

Ron Edwards gets this pretty right, I think, here:

Consider the behavioral parameters of a samurai player-character in Sorcerer and in GURPS. On paper the sheets look pretty similar: bushido all over the place, honorable, blah blah. But what does this mean in terms of player decisions and events during play? I suggest that in Sorcerer (Narrativist), the expectation is that the character will encounter functional limits of his or her behavioral profile, and eventually, will necessarily break one or more of the formal tenets as an expression of who he or she "is," or suffer for failing to do so. No one knows how, or which one, or in relation to which other characters; that's what play is for. I suggest that in GURPS (Simulationist), the expectation is that the behavioral profile sets the parameters within which the character reliably acts, especially in the crunch - in other words, it formalizes the role the character will play in the upcoming events. Breaking that role in a Sorcerer-esque fashion would, in this case, constitute something very like a breach of contract. . .

a character in Narrativist play is by definition a thematic time-bomb​

In D&D or GURPS, departing from your alignment (or violating your flaws), particularly at crunch-time, is tantamount to cheating - gaining an unfair advantage.

Whereas BW takes for granted that the GM will be confronting the players with situations where they will feel the pressure to violate their Beliefs, and how the player repsonds to that - and whether the player decides to keep Beliefs despite violating them, or to change them in the fact of the new situation, is up to the player. And (as per my earlier post) Fate Points can be earned either way. BW doesn't care what the answer is - it is aimed at forcing the player to deliberately choose an answer!

Insightful post; basically confirms my feelings on the issue. [MENTION=336]D'karr[/MENTION] does a decent summary of my feelings on the issue of Alignment in D&D, and especially in AD&D:

Yep, until a belief is tested it's is simply a label on paper. The old adage of a captain goes down with his ship is usually uttered by captains whose ships are still upright and floating.

What I always disliked about the alignment system is that it was usually used as all stick with no carrot.

Especially the last sentence. Alignment is ALL stick and ZERO carrot, by RAW, especially AD&D. There was always the ad hoc xp awards for "good roleplaying" that very few DMs I gamed with ever seemed to use, but all this did was encourage a player to play their PC within their alignment, not for pushing the limits of their character. I wouldn't learn why I hated this tired old routine that seemed embedded in the game until much later, but now it's obvious to me. If I use alignment at all, part of what I use it for is to help guide the arc of character development, which usually gets interesting and fun, when the character crosses the line into a different alignment. To me, that's a huge part of character development, to others, particularly AD&D traditionalists, that's you failing to play your character properly. That causes a huge mental disconnect for me; people aren't allowed to change? The game punishes them for doing so? Yep. Thanks, Gary & Dave.

Some of my favourite PC & NPC story arcs have been defined by alignment shifts caused by external circumstances, but I was only able to really pull that off after finding (and marrying) a DM that was sympathetic to allowing characters to do this sort of character-narrative exploration. Two early examples: I had a grey elf mage who started chaotic good with a hate-on for the orcs who burned his village to the ground and killed his family, who gained greater power and embarked on a genocidal quest (becoming evil in the process), who later realized the folly of his ways and settled into a more believable Neutral. I played a LG noble military brat, trained in tactics and leadership but basically green (a warlord if ever there was one in AD&D), who was put in charge of increasingly difficult missions that eventually required her to decide between following orders and her concern for the welfare of her troops; she went from naive to neutral good after a couple of these, and became a bard after earning her own followers (hitting 9th as a fighter).

By the book (and at every table I'd played at to that point), there would be several lost levels and experience point penalties. You should be getting bonus experience for this sort of thing, not a penalty. I understand why the game was written that way; Gygax was a afraid people would game their alignments, since there were several powerful magical items that had alignment-based functions. "No, you can't turn evil just to read the Tome of Eternal Darkness so you can gain that bonus level, then switch back when it's all over!" Given that those were the assumptions of the game, it's little wonder that nobody else I played with tried this sort of thing, even when I ran the game and tried to encourage it.

I was overjoyed, to say the least, when I learned 4e had officially simplified the restrictive alignment system, and absolutely thrilled that there were no longer alignment restrictions on class. That was one sacred cow long overdue for the slaughter.

Sorry, I got a little sidetracked - it wasn't my intent to turn this post into a rant about alignment in D&D - but it's something I feel pretty strongly about.

 

[Celebrim]

Sorry, I got a little sidetracked - it wasn't my intent to turn this post into a rant about alignment in D&D - but it's something I feel pretty strongly about.

I love sidetreks. If the road goes off long enough, we can always fork.

I'm one of those alignment 'traditionalists', and I believe that the two axis alignment system is the most brilliant short hand system any game has ever created, which is why you see it so frequently used as short hand by nerds describing narratives outside of D&D. That isn't to say that alignment hasn't been grossly misused and misunderstood over the years, even by various designers, because it has but I find that most peoples problems with it are based off of one of two things. Either that misunderstanding about what alignment is, or the players own philosophical stance about 'reality' which itself can often be described in short hand as an alignment stance. For example, some players will insist that 'good' and 'evil' and 'chaos' and 'law' aren't real. However, from the standpoint of the game world, this is the stance of a True Neutral who believes that what is really 'real' is balance or perhaps something else not describable within the easy two axis framework. However, that's a little less interesting of a problem than people who reject alignment because they misunderstand it or can't figure out how to leverage it.

To begin with, the statement, "Forcing a player to stick to their alignment forces them to not play a character than changes or grows", is based off off the huge misnomer that most literary change or growth is best explained as an alignment shift. You see players simultaneously claiming that alignment isn't real but that they also need alignment changes to explain the growth in their character. In point of fact, literary characters rarely change their alignments. Take the most obvious example. In Tolkien's stories, the characters are radically transformed by their adventures. Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, Pippin, Sam, Gimli, and Thorin are not the same people at the end of the story than they were at the beginning. They have changed radically. They have grown. Bilbo is less fearful, more thoughtful, more compassionate, and far less shallow and self-centered than he was at the beginning of the story, but there is no indication at all that his alignment has changed. His fundamental moral outlook has remained the same, he just has a deeper, wider, wiser expression of those beliefs and has lost some of the rudeness, cowardice, and apathy that had hidden his true nature from not only the Dwarfs but even himself. Gandalf however knew all along.

By viewing alignment as something that must change to reflect changes in the character, you a making the fundamental mistake of thinking that alignment is the sole descriptor of a character, that alignment is the same as personality, and that alignment is the same as feelings. It's a shallow mistaken understanding of what is being described.

Alignment in a literary story rarely changes except as a dramatic moment. It's the moment when Jean Val Jean falls down at his knees and weeps for having stolen the sous. It's the moment when Darth Vader turns to the light side. If you feel the need to change your alignment on a more moment to moment basis without dramatic shifts in focus, its probably because the character you imagine doesn't have an alignment. He hasn't accepted that piety or philosophy should be a guiding framework for how he lives his life. He thinks all that is BS, and he's living life according to some other standard. Characters in literature don't change alignment easily. Javert reaches a moment where he has to change his alignment, and its so traumatic for him that he kills himself rather than face it. That's story about alignment. Not random and easy drift.

When I hear about character journeys that people describe as needing the flexibility of no alignment, usually I feel that the journey may be interesting but how they've leveraged alignment during that journey isn't interesting. One example that has lots of strong backing from literature is the character which has an alignment, but which believes that they are of a completely different alignment. This is the character of Han Solo. We have lots of indication that when Han comes back, it isn't because his alignment has changed, but because he's discovering he's really being true to himself. He never really was the apathetic hardened self-interested person he was trying to be. Characters that lack self-awareness are staples of literature. When you look at alignment journeys, consider whether you need any alignment initially other than neutral or whether it might be more interesting to consider being a character who thinks that they are good or lawful or whatever, but really is something else. Or maybe someone who is trying but failing to be something else. Is your good character going to convert to evil, or is your good character already evil but believes he isn't?

You should be getting bonus experience for this sort of thing, not a penalty. I understand why the game was written that way; Gygax was a afraid people would game their alignments

First of all, I don't think there needs to an expectation of experience reward for changing your alignment. It's not fundamentally good RP to change your alignment any more than it is fundamentally bad RP to do so.

Secondly, gaming your alignment IMO is far more common than being thoughtful about it. And given Gygax's assumed agendas of play (challenge, for example), there was more need to enforce not gaming alignment, than there was a need to support narrative empowerment.

I can agree with you about there being no restrictions on alignment for a class. However, I don't believe that because I think alignment is bad or because I like 4e's bland take on alignment, but because I think restrictions on alignment for class is a fundamentally a primative view about what a class is.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

At no point did I advocate changing alignment as a frivolous thing. At no point did I state that alignment MUST change to reflect character growth. However, I do feel that sometimes, it is appropriate to do so. In my character's arcs that I described, they were definitely at what you would call "pivotal" moments, and happened either gradually, or sparingly, or both.

I don't hate alignment as a concept, or even the 2-axis system per se, but I *do* hate most of the mechanics that tie into it. I despise alignment spells especially. And I'm not advocating that 4e's alignment system is universally better, necessarily, since I think of alignments themselves as handy labels, and the addition of Unaligned to the mix is, IMO, quite desirable. I think of them, as AD&D put it, "a tool, not a striaghtjacket" but strongly feel that the context of that advice was dubious at best considering that the rules of the game did, in fact, use them as a straightjacket.

I've seen other game systems whose alignment systems were just as decent; I rather liked Palladium's system, for example, even if it was a bit more limited to typical tropes.

I don't know to what extent you are projecting your views of alignment misconceptions onto me, my views of it, or my examples, so I'm not going to speak to those things, other than to say if what you mean is that I'm Doing It Wrong, then I'm going to politely disagree and that's that, because no good will come from arguing about it.

In terms of the literary examples, I suppose that is possibly true, though I don't really care about that in the context of alignment, since I'm not necessarily focused on imitating literary tropes with my characters. Nearly all of them have grown in the capacity you describe, and they often do stick to their alignment, but some don't. When they don't, I generally have a pretty good reason for it in the context of the fiction. Sometimes I've made changes because my initial declaration of alignment wasn't actually what I had in mind, wasn't as fun as a different approach to the character, etc, so I make a change. Mostly it's a quick erase and scribble on the character sheet and it's done.

As to the experience award, I don't necessarily think there should be an expectation of an award *just* for changing alignment, but I *do* think there should be one for roleplaying a good character, and if that means a shift in alignment, especially a dramatically appropriate one, then so be it.

 

[Balesir]

If you look at a system like GURPS, what he describes is only one way of playing. But there is text in the GURPS game the blesses negotiating the replacement of a flaw with a new flaw of equal worth in reaction to events that are happening in game. There in a nutshell, admittedly perhaps a bit concealed and much less blessed and highlighted, is the basic mechanic of rechoosing your 'Beliefs' as used in BW. Likewise, in a game like D&D, alignment gives a mechanical benefit, but there is an expectation that alignment can move around and shift in responce to player initiated actions, eventually changing to a new description based on how you play.

With GURPS I think you could go further and point up the mechanism by which you can lose a disadvantage subject to the need to "pay it off" with experience before you can buy any further character improvements.

D&D alignment I think just gets into trouble because, much as is sometimes complained of in 4e systems, it uses "natural language" terms like "good" and "evil". These are problematic mainly because there exists no really universal definition of them IRL.

I think both systems miss a central point of what the BITs advice is saying in BW, though. BW is suggesting that the character should suffer for their beliefs (or the changing of them), not the player. GURPS' loss of xp and D&D's loss of level(s) both punish the player far more than they punish the character; but it's quite possible to punish the character while the player is having a blast!

 

[pemerton]

I'll concede that within the context of 4e's whole thing and the caveats of player awareness, choosing class & race may constitute decent signalling.

Like my posts in the other thread indicated, I see the default cosmology/history as pretty central to the 4e play experience. In the structural sense, it's a bit like Glorantha.

Currently, I have the problem that I am likely the only one at the table who will have read or considered anything beyond the applicable pages of the PHB.

The race pages have quite a bit of this stuff. But you do have to read beyond the stats, and the profundity (that you noted) of "play this guy if you like beards/pointy ears/looking like dragon".

Staying by the books...everything felt kinda b-grade action movie.

I'm not going to argue with that!, and I've always tried to be upfront that I don't see any necessary connection between (light) narrativist play and thematic profundity. I think it's a mistake in the Forge presentation to exaggerate that potential aspect of narrativist play, which leads to confusion between topics/tropes/themes (which can be very wide ranging) and RPG techniques (where in my view even a light or hackneyed game can learn a lot from Edwards, Czege, Luke Crane etc).

 

[pemerton]

The type of play Ron wants to describe as unique to Sorcerer, isn't

He's not saying it is. He's using it to illustrate narrativist play. Heck, the non-uniqueness is shown by the fact that (i) in his own essay he goes on to discuss another example based on The Riddle of Steel, and (ii) I was able to use his discussin of Sorcerer and GURPs to illustrate a contrast between BW and traditional D&D alignment.
[MENTION=336]D'karr[/MENTION], [MENTION=98255]Nemesis Destiny[/MENTION], interesting posts on alignment. I've always found alignment rules, especially in the classic form with XP penalty for changing alignment, pretty horrible.

I particularly dislike 3x3 alignment, because it has pretensions to being a comprehensive system of moral classification, whereas it is (in my view) utterly hopeless for that task.

I prefer the original Law-Chaos version (or the 4e variant on that) because rather than pretense to comprehensiveness, this is clearly the presentation of a particular setting conceit. So in 4e, LG through CE correpsonds to gods/civilisation/humanity through primoridals and the Abysss.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I will say that people should try out BW. Get it, give it a spin. At the very least, it can help you understand why a certain style does or does not work for you.

I like a lot of BW for my personal wheelhouse (I came to D&D from JRPGs, storytelling and gaming for me are pretty intimate), but I do lean far afield of it in some ways. It's emotional goals are quite distinct from the emotional goals of D&D's typical game design. It's got some good ideas, if you're into a character-driven game, narrative concepts like character development, conflict, and scenes, but it's not everyone's bag.

I've also gotta say that BW's tone and jargon jarr me a lot. That's not the system at play, though, just the writers (clarity, muthafraker, can you use it?!).

 

[Ratskinner]

I'm not going to argue with that!, and I've always tried to be upfront that I don't see any necessary connection between (light) narrativist play and thematic profundity. I think it's a mistake in the Forge presentation to exaggerate that potential aspect of narrativist play, which leads to confusion between topics/tropes/themes (which can be very wide ranging) and RPG techniques (where in my view even a light or hackneyed game can learn a lot from Edwards, Czege, Luke Crane etc).

I agree. That Capes game which I bring up is the most deep-end narrative game I've played, and it tended to sail straight for melodrama. Its the only game I know of in which performing a soliloquy bemoaning your past failures or successes has a mechanical benefit! (If only Vampire had such a mechanism...) I do think I would have liked a little more flexibility in that thematic profundity from 4e. If I get the chance, I intend to experiment some more with it.

 

[Nytmare]

I would agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment that Burning Wheel's "How to Play" can be very useful to some people's style of D&D. I have personally used Beliefs, Instincts and Traits in all of my D&D games, completely devoid of mechanics, since I first came across them in Mouse Guard.

 

[LostSoul]

The downside is the action is basically scripted.

Except that you have full agency; you don't have to follow your instincts.

I had a PC in BW who had a pretty aggressive Instinct - something like "If I think someone is under the influence of an evil spirit, I will draw steel." In the game I ended up drawing steel on the daughter of a powerful lord - which got my PC in a lot of trouble - but I had the choice to stay my hand.

I also got a Fate point because of that action.

It would be pretty easy to port into D&D. A Belief would give you like a +1 bonus on all rolls when you were in a scene that tested your beliefs and acting in direct accordance to your beliefs. I'd give you a penalty like say -4 when violating your belief, but then after 24 hours I'd let you take a new Belief if you wanted.

Beliefs don't grant you any special bonus when you're trying to achieve them. It'd be more appropriate to grant XP if a PC went after his Belief - or that Belief was important to the game - than any sort of modifier. Now, after the game, you may get some Fate or Persona points based on how you act in response to your Belief; I'm not sure how you would translate those to D&D.

There would definitely not be any sort of penalty for violating one. That's just insane - it defeats the whole purpose of playing the game - and makes me think that you don't understand how BW plays at all.

An Instinct would be like a 'Held Action' that let you take an immediate action whenever the condition was triggered. Only you had to take the action.

Once again, you don't have to follow your Instincts.