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

[Manbearcat]

None of those are weasel words in this context (you could make a case for generally...but why bother?). They're straightforward. But if you think willful contortion of what I wrote, 3 word sarcastic snark and lack of engagement on a non-controversial (at least it should be...but I guess you're protesting), good faith break down of an issue is going to earn you any future interest in folks talking nerd hobby on the internet with you (which I assume is why you're posting in the first place), you're mistaken.

How about this:

D&D world wants to kill you.
Don't let D&D world kill you and you will progress.

Burning Wheel world wants to challenge you.
Accept those challenges, lose them and you will progress.

You're a prolific writer with a lot to say on our hobby (from what I've seen). I'm a good dude and a fellow kindred spirit D&D dork. Maybe you could indulge me a few more words than 3 and mix in a breakdown of the issue showing me where those 4 innocuous statements are somehow off the reservation.

 

[Celebrim]

None of those are weasel words in this context (you could make a case for generally...but why bother?). They're straightforward.

Yes, they are straightfoward qualifiers. All imply variation and exceptions or the possibility of variations and exceptions. Since you say you don't mean them as qualifiers, then I don't know what you mean, nor am I completely sure you know what you mean. Explain to me how treating a word that is a qualifer as a qualifier is 'willful contortion' of what you wrote.

I RP with my (young) elementary age girls. I think they would be utterly bored and would reject a game of them as adventurers taking on risk. They would not take that as an assumption of what it meant to play. Monsters would not be seen as fun, least of all combat with them. But I think they would be utterly facinated by a game where they played shopkeepers, and got to make sales and resolve conflicts with customers using profession skills, craft skills, social mechanics, appraisal and so forth. Is it still D&D? We are using all the same rules? In fact, most editions explictly bless in one way or the other me awarding XP for achieving story awards, so we could even advance them up to 20th level epic shopkeepers selling hats to storm giants and balancing a top ladders and never once monkeying around with the combat rules. If it isn't D&D what is it? It's all the same rules? What has changed?

D&D world wants to kill you.

But that's just wrong. The D&D world as personified by the DM doesn't want to kill you. It is not my goal of play to kill the characters in any sort of normal game of D&D. I have abundant goals in D&D, but in so far as those goals impinge on this topic, it is precisely that the 'D&D world wants to challenge the players'. Killing characters is trivially easy. Blue bolt of lighting, take 400 damage, you are dead.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Ok, now that I'll listen to. Tell me more. I'm happy to enlarge or refine my theory. Tell me about the experience of 'how'.



No, no, no. It's not a question of torture. It's a question of expectations. It's a question what a GM makes of a system when he approaches it and how he imagines preparing for and playing it, and also the preconceptions that a player brings to the table about everything from a system to how to relate to the GM. I'm saying that these experiences of play aren't necessarily being done consciously. Now, I will say that in BW's case the author has gone out of his way to tell you how to play BW in a way that is pretty unique compared to older RPGs. He doesn't just give you the mechanics and expect you to make play with them, but he presents the expectations and guidelines and agendas of play as if they were rules and alongside rules with equal billing and then tells you THIS is the right way to play. That is IMO incredibly insightful, and recognizes something that I don't think was really recognized consciously 20 or 30 years ago.

So I'm hardly surprised that BW played very very differently than D&D; I wouldn't expect anything else. But I think it would be a big mistake to focus on the mechanics and the way conflict is resolved as the major reason why it plays differently.

The mechanics are inseparable from how the story is told. That same insight that tells you how to play it isn't just tacked on. It's telling you what will cause the mechanics to work. Because one of the reasons the insight is there and so clear is that there is very little in BW that isn't consciously thrown in there to produce exactly that kind of play.

Take for example how skills are mechanically handled. We could talk for days about this (including some things I don't care for very much, BTW), but for example I'll key in on skill progression. Generally, you can start with zero dice and eventually get to 10. 2 dice is enough to be fairly successful with routine things, while 4 is pretty darn competent. Not by coincidence, if you spend character resources at start on a skill related to stats that you are moderately decent at, you'll nearly always get 4 dice. In fact, there are some funky rounding rules and rough edges to make it come out that way. Finally, getting from zero to 1 dice is a special case, fraught with risk (or a lot of practice time during down time, which ... has its own set of risks in the resource cycle).

Now let's look at why that is, and how it affects the story. For starters, getting 3 or 4 dice at something your character is supposed to know is pretty easy and straight-forward. You are competent with a blade, you know that 4 dice is the place to land. 3 is if you want to start almost there and hit it fast in play. 5 is if you want to start closer to a true expert. You aren't moving much off of 4 without radically changing your character. Whereas if you start with 1 (or even zero), you are saying that you want your character to learn this totally in play--or maybe just pick it up when and if it comes up. Or you might bend every resource at your disposal to go higher, but this is going to have all kinds of side effects--inherently as part of character generation.

No matter which one you pick, however, you'll be chasing Artha (fate and other points for others reading at home) in order to improve. With some cautious and clever "aid another" style play, you might get from zero to 2 without much risk, though it will take a lot longer. But you aren't going much beyond 4 or maybe 5 without putting it all on the line--fight for what you believe in. There's no clever, strategic, tactical, etc. way around this basic fact (played as written). All of those will give you a better shot at not dying while you pursue it, and a few shots at some extra fate along the way, but they can't be used to circumvent the risk. This fact is because of conscious design in the mechanics.

Now, the flip side of this in the BW advice, and a big part of why you need the advice, is that it isn't merely telling you about play to help you grok the intent of the rules (though that helps a great deal, as BW is an odd duck). It's also telling you some things that aren't going to work very well. If, for example, you decide to put on that DM rules tinker hat and award advancement outside the printed options, go for more color-driven play as the goal, you may ride along merrily the same way an imaginative DM might turn Basic/Expert into a treatise on intrigue. But you won't be playing BW anymore.

More likely, what you'll get is that play will be very flat. Suddenly, the life path options look thin. The somewhat ad hoc nature of the skills has no reason anymore. (Why should an elf sing to do something akin to what a man does by training?) And if advancement is bypassed without risk, you'll have to curtail it yourself some other way, or deal with the fact that the system start to break beyond the written caps. And even worse, you could have gotten a more BW game merely by sticking to the rules but starting everyone in "gray" territory.

That's longer than I set out to write to start. If you want another example, look at Dwarven greed and Elven grief. It's impossible for an elf or dwarf in BW to be played like a pointy-eared or short human. You can try, but if you play by the rules, you'll end up sailing West or babbling over your treasure before the campaign ends. That someone who worked at it could play a D&D elf or dwarf like a BW elf or dwarf does not change the fact that in BW you are forced to play that way to succeed.

 

[Manbearcat]

Yes, they are straightfoward qualifiers. All imply variation and exceptions or the possibility of variations and exceptions. Since you say you don't mean them as qualifiers, then I don't know what you mean, nor am I completely sure you know what you mean. Explain to me how treating a word that is a qualifer as a qualifier is 'willful contortion' of what you wrote.

I'm not going to get into semantic games. When someone uses the term "presuppose" when referring to "orthodoxy" they aren't qualifying anything. They're merely saying orthodoxy exists and the default assumptions of the ecosystem around it behave in accordance. As they do. In any facet of life. I'm not going to get into some existential debate and deconstruct orthodoxies and try to unpack if there is meaning there or if we're just living in an absurd world of orthodoxy figments.

I RP with my (young) elementary age girls. I think they would be utterly bored and would reject a game of them as adventurers taking on risk. They would not take that as an assumption of what it meant to play. Monsters would not be seen as fun, least of all combat with them. But I think they would be utterly facinated by a game where they played shopkeepers, and got to make sales and resolve conflicts with customers using profession skills, craft skills, social mechanics, appraisal and so forth. Is it still D&D? We are using all the same rules? In fact, most editions explictly bless in one way or the other me awarding XP for achieving story awards, so we could even advance them up to 20th level epic shopkeepers selling hats to storm giants and balancing a top ladders and never once monkeying around with the combat rules. If it isn't D&D what is it? It's all the same rules? What has changed?

What has changed is no you are in fact not playing D&D anymore. Its not Badwrongfun. I'm sure its great. But the fact remains you are now playing Shopkeepers and Artisans, specifically Celebrim's Shopkeepers and Artisans. There are no default assumed rules that mechanically incentivize playing Shopkeepers and Artisans. You can come up DM forced, SWAG ad hoc variants in AD&D 2e and 3.x, but that is explicitly Celebrim's house rules and Celebrim's house rules to adjudicate Shopkeepers and Artisans on their track to level 20 where they parlay their efforts toward Merchants and Aristocracy. Story, Roleplaying and Noncombat encounter awards in AD&D 2e and 3.x are not important enough to have legitimate, designed XP systems and mechanical interfaces to facilitate them. They are not default. They are not orthodoxy. And professions yield no XP either. They offer that you can make them up and hand wave some truly vapid guidance. But they're quiet neutral, at best, on those things (lest they would produce systems for them and advocate for those systems). We've had default XP as treasure accrued, monsters/traps/hazards defeated and 4e has a mechanical system for XP for story awards and non-combat encounters.

But that's just wrong. The D&D world as personified by the DM doesn't want to kill you. It is not my goal of play to kill the characters in any sort of normal game of D&D. I have abundant goals in D&D, but in so far as those goals impinge on this topic, it is precisely that the 'D&D world wants to challenge the players'. Killing characters is trivially easy. Blue bolt of lighting, take 400 damage, you are dead.

The codified mechanical resolution systems as the means to deal with challenges and the incentive system to progress reveal the base assumptions of the game; accrue treasure, kill monsters, survive in the most fundamental sense of D&D. That doesn't mean that as a GM you actively want to kill your players. And it doesn't mean that you have the authority to work outside of the resolution systems and arbitrarily say "you are dead" (unless you don't want players for very long). It means "here are the mechanical parts of the game to resolve tasks/conflict...fill in your color as you wish...but these are binding and tell you what the game part of the game is about." If D&D was meant to be mechanically drifted as Shopkeepers and Artisans (by rule/default assumption...if you want to bend it to your own will...have at it), then there would be legitimate, codified resolution systems for it and accompanying codified XP.

I can try to break out a baseball game in my Sunday morning basketball but in no way does the basketball ruleset assist me in that nor is the greater culture unflinching when I attempt to do so.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION], [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION], and maybe some other posters I'm missing, have all drawn attention to one significant difference between BW and classic D&D.

In BW, you can't advance your PC abilities (stats, skills and the like) without confronting a variety of challenges at a range of difficulties, some (perhaps many) of which you will fail. So players have a strong mechanical incentive - via these advancement rules - to put their PCs into losing situations.

In play, this is mitigated in a couple of ways.

First, there is "fail forward". So players in BW can afford to have their PCs lose. Traditionally in D&D the penalty for failure is PC death. That is a huge difference. The only edition of D&D to really go out of its way to suggest something different from this is 4e, which in various places (eg skill challenge guidelines, its "say yes" advice) advocates "fail forward"; and which has clear rules that 0 hp need not equal death.

Second, there are the "fate point" (in BW terminology, "artha") rules. Certain ingame choices, including many of those which might lead to failure, earn fate points and the like. Which means even when a player's PC is losing, the player is still deriving mecahanical benefits. And (as Crazy Jerome pointed out) those fate points can be spent to turn some of the likely failures into successes, which means that the player has at least a modicum of control over how the really key situations play out. The closest analogues to these mechanics I'm familiar with from any version of D&D are, again, in 4e: players can (per Essentials) earn Skill Challenge XP even if they fail the challenge, and you could also envisage player-designed Quests where the player gets Quest XP even if the player doesn't succeed at every encounter; and players earn action points, plus magic item unlocks (daily usages, certain items with milestone triggers, etc) for undertaking more encounters between rests.

This relationship, in BW, between PC failure and mechanical rewards for players (advancement, fate points) also feeds into the game in at least a couple of other ways.

First, it helps give the game a type of crisis-ridden or potentially pathos-ridden air: because of the Fate Points on offer, players have an incentive to hurl their PCs hopelessly at the things their PCs care about, or that are related to their PCs, rather than at any random losing cause. Which means the dramatic stakes of those situations where the PCs are clearly outmatched are likely to be high.

No version of D&D that I'm aware of has this feature (though 4e might come closest, if player designed Quests loom large at a particular table). For instance, the milestone rules give the players an incentive to press on, but it's not linked in any mechancal fashion to player-set dramatic stakes. This is one thing I have in mind when I talk about 4e as supporting vanilla narrativist play - there are no mechanics that will automatically engender this sort of dramatic cycle, the game instead relying on the GM to do it him-/herself in framing scenes.

A second important consequence of the role of failure in BW is that, because players have a mechanical incentive not to always confront mechanically easy challenges (because if they do, their PCs won't advance), so they have an incentive not to always use all the bonuses that might be available in a given situation. This means that you can have rich and flavourful augment rules (in BW terminology, "helping" and "ForRKs = Fields of Related Knowledge") without worrying that they will break under the strain; because players won't always want to use them.

A related consequence is that BW's system of "objective" DCs isn't always subjected to maximum pressure, because it's not always in the players' interests for DCs to be as low as possible. (Because high DCs help advancement).

A further related consequence, pointed out explicitly in the Adventure Burner, is that it's not always a bad thing to get wounded, because wound penalties increase the difficulty of challenges and therefore open up adavancement opportunities.

These all take pressure off the GM and the role of GM adjudication in important ways: the augment rules are somewhat self-regulating; the DC-setting rules are also somewhat self-regulating; having your PC wounded is good as well as bad, and hence there is no sense that the GM, in wounding your PC, is just hosing you.

These are elegant design features. No version of D&D has anything like them that I can think of. 4e's approach to managing DCs is to go for scaled rather than objective DCs. Its approach to wounds is to go for scaled damage in a hit point system, and a complex system of conditions and condition removal, rather than wound penalties. And it has no very good system for augments at all (as can be seen in various iterations of the skill challenge rules).

Anyway, these are all things one would have to think about if trying to play D&D in a more BW-ish style.

 

[pemerton]

I recently was sent by pemerton to read the Burning THACO pdf, and although it didn't achieve what I wanted to see achieved (a module for No Myth play), it was rather interesting in that it largely proved an assertion I had once made, namely, that if you prepared to play by creating a dungeon map, stocking it with monsters and treasures, and then your players came to the table with the expectation that the game was about killing things and taking their stuff, that pretty much every system would or at least could be played like 'conventional D&D'.

In one game system, you take on risk, get yourself out of trouble, and then recieve a reward. And in the other game system, you take on risk, get yourself out of trouble, and then recieve a reward.

I don't see a hugely strong resemblance, especially once we go beyond simple tropes ("What scrapes will our heroes get themselves out of this week?") and into actual gameplay.

For instance, it is a default assumption in D&D that the content of the module is secret from the players. And there's a good reason for this - part of the challenge of play is a result of being surprised by the GM's challenges. Whereas Burning THACO gives the following advice for dungeon-bashing BW play (at p 11):

I recommend discarding any of the old notions that the players should be completely surprised by what's coming. Show the players the cover of the module you're running. Read them the back cover blurb. If it has an intro section, consider reading that to them.

You don't have to reveal every twist and secret; just give them a broad overview. In other words, if the module is about delving into the Lost Temple of Whatsit to recover the Orb of Destiny that was stolen by Whosit during the reign of Thatguy, etc., tell the players! Then all of them should write at least one belief that takes them on the quest.​

And this isn't just a stylistic thing. In classic D&D, knowledge is key - and by using it you can circumvent challenges and get the treasure, which is where the real action is. So rationing knowledege is a GM responsibility, and trying to acquire it is a player strategy (which Gygax and Lewis Pulsipher both discussed at length in early D&D texts).

Whereas in BW, telegraphing the stakes is more important - once they're known to the players, then the players have a reason to engage despite the fact that the challenges are horrible. (The canonical mode of monster building in the BW Monster Burner involves player feedback on GM monster designs. Think about how out of place this would be in Gygaxian dungeon play!)

The reasons that BW plays differently in this respect have been set out by Crazy Jerome and me above. The version of D&D that comes closest to this, of those I'm familiar with, is 4e - because it has resolution mechanics (especially in combat, but skill challenges also display a similar character) which makes telegraphing the stakes a way of engendering engagement and upping the pressure. (This is part of, though only part of, what people are getting at when they describe 4e as "combat as sport".)

just changing the simultaneous secret declaration to one action at a time (rather than 3 at a time) and doing some things to model Basic D&D's order of play would get you really darn close.

That's kind of like saying "Take RM combat, but strip out the crit and wound mechanics in favour of hp attrition, and you'd have something pretty close to D&D."

The simultaneous secret declaration of 3 "volleys" (which may be anywhere from 1 to 6+ actions) at a time is a key part of the game. It's how you can win in melee even if you're weak, for instance: because you outsmart them and strike when they're not defending.

 

[Libramarian]

Libramarian, I enjoyed your two posts which both made sense to me, and just wanted to ask a bit more about this: at what point do you think it gets unfair in classic D&D (eg the elevator is supersilent, the basement room is visually indistinguishable from top floor room, the whole thing is warded against scrying, etc)? I don't feel that the classic D&D advice always made clear how far the GM is expected/permitted to push this sort of stuff.

I've never secretly moved PCs up or down levels, but the dwarf and gnome do have a "determine approximate depth underground" ability that could stand to see some more use. I would either have the elevator make a slight whirring noise or have some sort of visual clue that they're on a different level.

I would say I am a notch less hardcore than the style of play that comes across in the 1e books. Generally, a trap/trick that the players could conceivably anticipate based on physical/cultural knowledge outside of the game is better than a trap/trick that only exists as a trope inside the game that someone playing for the first time would have no chance of understanding, like earseekers or random contact poison. But I don't have a huge theoretical problem with the latter. Sometimes it's OK to use a thing where there's no substitute for having played the game and seen it before. It's a cheaper thrill but coming up with good, unique traps is hard work, sometimes you've got to water down that orange drink a little bit.

My five room dungeon here is a pretty good example of the kind of tricksy stuff I like. Those are basically the five most interesting rooms taken from a much larger dungeon strung together, the rest of the dungeon being mostly random monsters/treasure and a few basic traps like tripwires and pit traps, so in reality that much creativity is good for about 10 hours of play. I used a map from the donjon generator.

I think the texts could be better on this issue...but at the same time I think this is the point where perception is going to vary based on the experiences and subjectivities of the real people around the table, so there's only so much that advice text can do, you just have to develop a good feel for it. Just like how a narrativist game text can try to help you develop a knack for scene-framing but can't give you a rule determing exactly what scene to frame at a particular point in-game, I think, following the symmetry between gamism and narrativism as the two metagame agendas.

I've heard that the advice for trap design is really good in Adventurer Conqueror King but I've never read it.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION], thanks for the link (I hadn't noticed that thread before). What level(s) was that for?

(Also: good point about the balance between advice and experience/knack, and the symmetry across agendas.)

 

[Libramarian]

Level one (I -- roman numerals for dungeon levels!). And yeah, I can see how hosing a player's PC in a way that they felt was cheap or arbitrary seems like a much riskier thing to do than just framing a pointless or...what would a poorly framed scene be--being too aggressive, skipping past important stuff? But I think those are actually equivalent things, in terms of the gamist and narrativist creative agendas. I don't think one is inherently riskier or more of a recipe for social contract breakdown than the other, if everybody is on the same page and has adjusted their perception of the player-PC relationship appropriately in both cases.

 

[Nagol]

<snip>

First, it helps give the game a type of crisis-ridden or potentially pathos-ridden air: because of the Fate Points on offer, players have an incentive to hurl their PCs hopelessly at the things their PCs care about, or that are related to their PCs, rather than at any random losing cause. Which means the dramatic stakes of those situations where the PCs are clearly outmatched are likely to be high.

<snip>

Why not at any random losing cause? Neither advancement nor Artha comes with a restriction that the PC need care about the cause. The PCs should be grabbing at everything so far as I can tell.