D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Xamnam]

Burning Wheel has discussion of how to establish the session, the "big picture", etc. The Adventure Burner (reprinted in the Codex) elaborates on this.

Of course this is a group thing.

I had also hoped that my example of Thurgon, with his family and his knighly order; and of Aedhros, with his spouse and his hatred of his father in law; would have illustrated how the players are profoundly involved in establishing setting elements as part of the process of PC build.

I do feel like I understand the process of BW fairly (at least as is relevant to your example) at this point thanks to your posts, and I appreciate that. I haven't been questioning your play, or the system, in this thread. I was merely trying to answer your question of what I meant by 'scope' [to which the world exists], in my post extrapolating Micah's intention with his original statement.

Now I think the difference between things that are shared and things that are private are pretty fundamental in a game of shared imagination. So when you say "one or more" as if that's a trivial disjunction, it strikes me as utterly fundamental.

I don't say it as trivial. That quality is variable depending on the rule system and philosophy of play being used, and so I wanted to account for that.

 

[Faolyn]

WTF? Please read my actual play posts, to which I've provided links, and then get back to me.

I find reading actual play posts to be quite boring, TBH and not actually useful in determining how a game is actually played, since they rarely go into details about how the mechanics work. For instance, there's nothing in the pdf you linked that describes Wises. Maybe it's listed in the actual book, but the doc is only 74 pages long. (BW does, apparently, assume orcs are hateful, which is a point against the game IMO).

And also TBH, you're not doing a very good job selling the game, which doesn't bode well for the actual play post being any more interesting.

By "PCs" do you mean players? Otherwise what you ask makes no sense to me.

No, I mean PCs. The players are, presumably, sitting around a table or in front of a computer in a video call. They are Playing Characters in the game. These are the PCs.

The PCs are entering a tower. Describe it.

Or are you saying that, in BW, nothing is described unless the players first establish it? Because wow, that's boring.

Assuming that that is what you mean, as I've already stated - multiple times, I believe - the GM does the framing in ENworld. But suppose that it had already been established, say via a Wises check, that Evard's entrance hall is painted all in crimson red, then of course the GM would include that in their description.

I'm gathering, through some googling, that Wises means "skill" or "knowledge" (which, along with Artha, rather annoyingly means that BW is one of those games that feels the need to rename everything in order to be cool and different). So... what sort of skill check is needed to see the color red in this game?

Burning Wheel's approach to resolution, and its corresponding approach to PC build, lends itself to a relatively "gritty" attention to detail. (Compared to, say, Marvel Heroic RP, which relies on broad-brush and trope-y Scene Distinctions.)

I am missing what connection any of this has to deciding in advance of play where spellbooks might be found.

Really? You don't understand how the game handles description may have any effect on how the GM describes things?

Do you really think that no one can imagine a cave or castle whose inhabitant is away from home, unless a rulebook writes in a % in lair chance?

The point of the % in lair chance is to establish a gameplay process for managing the introduction of content into the shared fiction.

Burning Wheel uses a very different sort of process. I've described it at quite a bit of length in various posts in this thread, many of them in reply to you.

At this point, I have to assume you are deliberately misinterpreting what I'm saying.

No, clearly people can imagine creatures being away from home without the need for a roll. What I said is that even back in the earliest days of RPGs, people knew that the game wasn't limited to just what the PCs saw.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Also, I'm going to guess by your answer that no, BW can't do horror well. Everything you've described is stuff relating only to the characters. There's apparently no ability to do a slow build up and ratchet up the tension. I wouldn't be able to do the MotW Mystery I'm working on now, involving fetches from a GIger-esque biomechanical nightmare world that exists behind mirrors and who seek to increase their numbers by growing new fetches out of stolen organs.

I haven't tried it, but I think BW could do horror well if the situation of the game was set up correctly, with players that are onboard and characters burnt with the tone in mind. The reason that I say this is because BW does intimacy and immediacy really well — a common mistake in starting new games (and one I made in the last game I ran) is starting too big — and I think that can really help with horror. It may not pan out in play exactly how it might in MotW (which I can't speak to; I owned it but never played it and subsequently sold it), but it should definitely work, at least in terms of tension and build-up. As long as you can hit their beliefs and force re-evaluation of those beliefs throughout play, it'll work. It'll be medieval fantasy, because those are the rules, but there's no reason it couldn't be horror.

Tangential, but related, I ran a short game of Mouseguard 1st Edition that I hacked to play as Cthulhu by Gaslight but with mice. The processes of play are different, much closer to Torchbearer, which allows for some pre-authored setting/game elements, but it worked as a little horror game because of the way beliefs work.

 

[Faolyn]

This seems like a deeply ungenerous reading.

I don't really see how. I'm apparently not supposed to say "this thing logically exists in this location" unless the PCs first decide that it should exist in that location.

 

[Enrahim2]

in DnD, you roll to see how well your character attacks the enemy, the dice represent your skill in taking an action but the action requires the orc to be there in the first place, you cannot say 'i desire to attack the orc' in an empty hall, roll a success, and an orc manifests out of the air for them to then hit because they rolled well, in DnD the act of looking for spellbooks is an entirely separate matter from if the spellbooks are actually in that location, because the world exists as more than raw grey potential, the rules of BW permits everyone and anyone who can look for the books the ability to make those books appear if they suceed on a dice roll,

As outlined in my post #2106 in this thread, the GMs is to my knowledge free to effectively block any intent if they find it not making sense. It is just very rarely used, as players tend to be reasonable. Also the GMs are asked to be very accepting of player input.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It is the duty of a Burning Wheel GM to frame player characters into situations/scenes that place their defined Beliefs into question. The establishment of dynamic situations, creation of consequences, shifting the spotlight between different characters et al requires an active and skilled GM. It is not the same skill set as a world builder / referee / adventure designer, but it is at least as active and vibrant part of play.

That a game defines the GM's role and responsibility differently does not mean that they are not substantial or require an incredible amount of creativity.

I knew the answer would be "scene framing"!

 

[Aldarc]

I don't really see how. I'm apparently not supposed to say "this thing logically exists in this location" unless the PCs first decide that it should exist in that location.

I think that it's less a matter of "should" and more a matter of "could." Milk is not something that logically exists in my fridge. Milk is something that could logically exist in my fridge. Moreover, just because it could logically exist in my fridge doesn't mean that I have any milk in my fridge. That reminds me. I should check to see if I have milk in my fridge in case I need to go out and buy more for tomorrow morning.

 

[Faolyn]

My apologies for the misreading. Thinking about it, I don't think my answer changes meaningfully. Unless the game's situation is about a particular set of spellbooks or a player's beliefs touch upon them, their existence isn't relevant until a player cares about it enough to bring it up during play.

And this brings up my questions about horror, mysteries, and twists.

What if the purpose (or one possible purpose) of the spellbooks (or some other item) is to provide a twist in the game? Here's this MacGuffin that other people are going to want to use, possibly for harm. Do the players keep a hold on it? Try to destroy it? Use it for themselves? They may never have thought to even look for the MacGuffin, but here it is. Now, I'm not a Tolkien fan, but think like Bilbo accidentally acquiring the One Ring. He didn't think to look for it; he found it by chance--and look at all the drama--worldly and interpersonal and just plain personal--that came about by this bit of GM fiat.

There was an example of Thurgon's grandpa being a demon. Does this mean anything in the greater world now? Or is it just a personal torment that has no bearing on anything unless the PCs bring it up again. Can the GM have this new fact affect Thurgon in any way?

 

[bloodtide]

I think @pemerton has provided a few examples of Burning Wheel play in this thread. In BitD I might propose that,

Ok, but here is the disconnect:

Classic Game: GM has all the Absolute Power to do anything they want in the game on their whim and the players can only take small limited actions that their characters can attempt to do. All player actions must have the GMs approval and are under the GMs control. Players have no or very little 'agency'.

The Other Games: The GMs power is limited and the player have equal or greater power then the GM. So the player has full agency to do whatever they want on a whim, and all the GM can do is say "yes, player".

So...then the examples given are: Ok, so the game is 99.9% exactly like a Classic Game, but once a session for a couple seconds a player can "say something" very limited and still under the GMs approval and control.

And this is the example of the Other Type of Game? Five seconds of extremely limited "player agency" is all that is needed?

I gave one example, but there are plenty more things about Blades in the Dark that limit the GM authority and increases the players'. Neither role has absolute authority.

Well, it's not to helpful to the conversation to give a vague limited example.

No, RPGs collectively don't need this rule. But this game has this rule, and many others like it.

Maybe not you, but many posters immediately say "all games should be like the Other Games" whenever anyone mentions any other game.

No, I was just giving a few examples to give you an idea. I figured it was likely futile, but I figured I'd give it a try.

But limited examples don't help.

If I gave the example of : Railroad games are great because sometimes you have to force players to have fun: Like in a recent game Mike was bored, so I Railroaded a Plot right over his character and he had fun.

Does my limited example help you at all to understand how I use Railroading in my game and why it is such a great thing?

Sounds healthy.

It very much is.

 

[Oofta]

sigh, wishing i could let myself leave this thread be but i keep opening it up every time i see it's recieved new replies, i don't feel like much of anything has been achieved in how ever many tens of pages this conversation has gone on for now, people are just talking past each other and repeating the same points over and over because the games and styles of play they prefer work on fundamentally different structures and principles.

I'm kind of in the same spot. Kind of like watching a slow motion car crash. You want to look away, but keep hitting the repeat. When it's at the point where people could copy/paste responses and you could skip 2-3 pages and not miss anything ...meh.

I could us a "ignore thread" button.