who gets to decide if a thing exists in Burning Wheel? Particularly a thing that the players don't know exist.
If the game says that the GM makes that decision, meaning that the GM can say there's a secret illegal kobold fighting ring in the basement there for the players to discover if they want to snoop around, then having the GM come up with a schedule inside of a guardhouse isn't "GM-driven" play that is inappropriate for a BW game. Especially since, in this example, the players have said that they want to go look for the guard schedule so they know what guard to avoid/bribe/kill/whatever in order to get over the border.
If the game says that the players make that decision (or can make that decision along with the GM), then that means the players can go into the guardhouse to get the schedule of their own volition, making it player-driven play that is appropriate for a BW game.
If nobody is allowed to make that decision, meaning that there shouldn't be secrets or mysteries in the game at all because all things need to be established first, well, that sounds pretty darn boring to me. I don't think it's this one though.
Content authority in Burning Wheel is distributed. For players, it is mediated via tests - typically Circles tests (to have one's PC meet a helpful NPC), Wises tests (to recall some useful bit of information about a place, thing, person, etc), or other knowledge/perception type tests. Here's an example of the latter (I've posted two accounts of it, because each highlights some slightly different features of the context and play:
a PC shaman was dominated by a dark naga, with instructions to bring the mage Joachim to the naga so that his blood could be spilled as a sacrifice to the spirits. Joachim had been badly hurt and was recuperating in a room in another mage's tower; the PC was rushing to that place to try and get there before an assassin who was determined to kill Joachim. The assassin got there first, and as the PC rushed in he saw Joachim being decapitated. At about this point in play, we switched adjudication from a somewhat abstracted time scale (which had finished with the PC failing the opposed Speed check to beat the assassin to Joachim's room) to the melee combat resolution framework. The player of the PC's first action declaration was "I look around the room for something to catch the blood in, lilke a chamber pot." The player spent the appropriate resources within the action economy, succeeded on the check (which was set at a fairly low difficulty given the likelihood of there being some sort of vessel in a bedroom in the tower of a well-to-do mage) and was able to grab the chamber pot and start catching blood.
I look around the room for a vessel to catch the blood was enough to establish adjudicable fiction.
one of the PCs is dominated by a dark naga, and has been commanded to bring the naga Joachim the mage (a NPC, and the brother of one of the PCs) so that Joachim's blood can be spilled as tribute to the spirits. Unfortunately, just as the PC in question finally found Joachim (lying badly injured in a bed chamber in another mage's tower), an assassin cut Joachim's head off. (This was the result of the two PCs trying to find Joachim failing in their Speed checks to arrive their first.)
The player's action declaration was "I look around for a vessel - a jug or a chamber pot - to catch the blood in!" I set a difficulty for the check - I can't remember what it was, but not too hard as the likelihood of spotting a vessel like that in the bed chamber of a recuperating mage is quite high. The player made the check, and was successful - hence his PC was able to grab a jug and catch (some of) Joachim's blood in it.
Had the check failed, a range of options would be open to me as GM - from "You look around but there are no vessels" (which would require the player to think up some other way of trying to get the mage's blood) to "You see a jug, but the fleeing assassin knocks it to the ground before you can grab it, and it smashes into pieces" (which eg allows for the use of mending magic to try and get the jug back) to who-knows-what.
This is an example of what I mean by letting the action declaration be resolved without having recourse to the GM's pre-authored notes/setting.
The setting is being established by reference to the player's action declaration - it is because the player's action declaration succeeded that it has been established that there is a jug in the bed chamber - but the player did not have a power of fiat narration. He had to make the check.
I also want to say that there are other ways that I perhaps could have resolved that situation: eg I could have just "said 'yes'" to the question "Is there a jug?" and framed the real obstacle as a physical check to catch the blood. (Last time I posted about this example, some posters suggested that atlernative framing.)
The reason I did it the way I did was because, as best I could judge sitting there in the moment talking to the player, what he really wanted was that there be a vessel in the room. And after we resolved that, I didn't call for any check to actually catch the blood in it. That would have been anti-climactic.
Here's an example of a GM making a decision, which involves the invention of a NPC and the framing of a scene where the NPC confronts Aedhros; you can also see, as GMing duties shift when the action moves from Aedhros to Alicia, me as GM deciding that there is a key to be taken:
Our last session ended with Alicia and Aedhros sitting out-of-the-way on the docks, Aedhros quietly singing Elven lays. I had set as homework for my friend to determine what trouble might result from this, to be the start of our next session of this game. It turned out that, despite having over 20 months to do his homework, he hadn't!
(I had done some homework of my own, writing up the Elven Ambassador to Hardby, and the Ship's Master from last session, as NPCs. But we didn't end up needing them.)
After a bit of prompting, he decided that a petty harbour official came up to Aedhros, telling him to move on and stop begging. (The singing being treated as busking, and hence a type of begging.)
Aedhros's response was to sing a short verse of the Rhyme of Unravelling, breaking the official's belt with the result that his pants fell down. I decided that Aedhros kept singing, sufficiently to give me a test to cause the official intense sorrow (this is the Dark Elf version of Wonderment from spell songs). The official - Will B3, we agreed - fell to his knees weeping bitterly, in remorse for all his pointless past actions (including his harassment of Aedhros). An attempt to further grind him down with Ugly Truth (untrained on Perception, and suffering a +2 Ob penalty from the Deceptive trait) failed.
My friend decided that this was about the time that Alicia awoke - she has an instinct If it shines in the dark, steal it, and he wondered if there was anything shiny revealed by the falling down of the official's trousers. I suggested a key. Alicia wanted to steal it as he wept. She called on the spirits of the coastal sea to help, and a mist rose up on the harbour. The successful Spirit Binding gave a helping die for a beginner's luck Inconspicuous test, lifting the key from the helpless, weeping man.
One of Aedhros's Beliefs was that Only because Alicia seems poor and broken can I endure her company. To keep her poor and broken, he pick-pocketed the key from her - an easy success for B4 Sleight of Hand with Stealthy and Inconspicuous FoRKs against untrained Observation.
Alicia, unaware of what Aedhros had done, wanted to know what the key opened. She Persuaded the official to tell her (an easy success against Will 3). I (exercising GMing powers, not playing Aedhros) decided that it opened the strongroom in the harbour office, where records and the like are kept. Alicia and Aedhros agreed to break into it, to find information that might help Alicia pursue her Belief that I will one day be rich enough to BUY a ship, and/or help get revenge on the master of the ship the two of us had sailed on.
Aedhros confirmed with Alicia that she can read; he reads and writes only Elvish.
I think this gives some example of what it means to frame a scene having regard to player-determined priorities: Aedhros has the Instincts
Always repay hurt with hurt and
When my mind is elsewhere, quietly sing the Elven lays, and the Belief
I will never admit that I am wrong: the narration of the petty official turning up to berate him speaks to all of those. And the key to the strongroom speaks to Alicia's Instinct, as well as her Belief that
I will one day be rich enough to BUY a ship.
So, returning to the secret Kobold fighting ring - does it speak to player-determined priorities? In which case, GM, knock yourself out. If not, then why are you talking about it?
The BW rulebook has a page setting out the role of the GM, and another setting out "the sacred and most holy role of the players (Revised p 269; the text in Gold is the same), which includes the following:
Players in Burning Wheel must use their characters to drive the story forward - to resolve conflicts and create new ones. . . Use the mechanics! Players are expected to call for a Duel of Wits or a Circles test or to demand the Range and Cover rules in a shooting match with a Dark Elf assassin. Don't wait for the GM to invoke a rule - invoke the damn thing yourself and get the story moving! . . . If the story doesn't interest you, it's your job to create interesting situations and involve yourself.
If the GM starts talking about kobold fighting rings, and those are not speaking to my conception of my PC's interests and priorities, then I will use the mechanics to move the game in a more interesting direction. Here are some examples from actual play:
* First, I build the PCs - Thurgon, a knight of a holy military order (the Knights of the Iron Tower), and his sorcerer sidekick Aramina. The GM tells me that we're starting play on the Pomarj-Ulek border - that's a bit warmer than I had expected (in my initial conception Thurgon is rather Germanic) but I roll with it. The backstory I've written for Thurgon includes that "Thurgon left the Iron Tower only weeks ago. The Knight Commander of the order sent him forth into the wilderness. He does not know why." And also that Thurgon has not set foot there in Auxol, his ancestral estate, for over 5 years, since he left to take service with the Iron Tower.
* Now there are some ambiguities in Thurgon's background as represented by some build elements: there is an Affiliation with the Order of the Iron Tower; and also a reputation as The Last Knight of the Iron Tower. So it's not clear if the Tower has fallen, or is falling. The GM doesn't push for certainty in that respect. Instead, he starts fairly low-key and as one might expect: we (that is, Aramina and Thurgon) are travelling along the river frontier (between the settled lands of Ulek and the wilder lands of the forest and the Pomarj), where there are old forts of the order (now abandoned) and also abandoned settlements.
* At one of the homestead, I declared a couple of checks: a Homestead-wise check (untrained) to learn more about the circumstances of abandonment of this particular ruined homestead, which succeeded, and hence (in this case) extracted some more narration of backstory from the GM; and then a Scavenging check, looking for the gold that the homesteaders would have left behind in their panic and which the orcs would have been too lazy to find. Unfortunately this second check failed, which meant that Orcs from a raiding party had virtually infiltrated the homestead before I noticed them. Here we have an attempt at a player-authored plot moment, but the failure tilts the balance of narrational and hence situational authority back to the GM. The fight with the Orcs engaged Beliefs and Instincts, so there were local moments that expressed Thurgon's character in this bigger GM-established context.
* The Orcs (as the GM narrated things) were part of a larger raiding party, with mumakil. I think the GM was hoping I might chase the mumakil, but I have no animal handling, animal lore etc and so the mumakil remained nothing but mere colour. The larger raiding party was chased off by a force of Elves, again narrated by the GM. I wasn't surprised that Elves should show up - my GM loves Elves! I tried an untrained Heraldry check to recognise the Elves' arms, and failed - so the Elven leader was not too taken by me! In this there was cross-narration by me and the GM, but it ran in the same direction: as I was saying (in character) that I don't recognise the Elven leader's arms and wondered who he was, he (spoken by the GM) was telling me that he didn't like my somewhat discourteous look. I don't know what, if anything, the GM had in mind for the Elves, but one of Thurgon's Beliefs was (at that time) that fame and infamy shall no longer befall my ancestral estate. So I invited the Elf to travel with his soldiers south to Auxol, where we might host them. The GM had the Elf try and blow me off, but I was serious about this and so called for a Duel of Wits. Unfortunately my dice pool was very weak compared to the Elf's (6 Will dice being used for untrained Persuasion, so slightly weaker than 3 Persuasion dice vs 7 Will dice and 6 Persuasion dice) and so despite my attempt as a player to do some clever scripting I was rebuffed by the Elf without getting even a compromise. Here we have a player-authored plot moment. Although it ended in failure for the PC, it was all about what I as a player had brought into the situation. I'm pretty sure the GM hadn't anticipated this. So I don't know what he anticipated for the Elves' departure, but in the game it followed my failure to persuade them to join me.
* In the course of discussion the Elf did mention that one Orc - who may or may not have fallen in battle, he wasn't sure - was wearing a shield bearing the crest of the Iron Tower. I think the GM was expecting me to pursue this Orc, but I didn't, for two reasons: (i) having been rebuffed by the elven leader, I wanted to head off in a different direction, and (ii) I was a bit worried that Aramina is too squishy for hunting Orcs!, and Thurgon's pretty vulnerable too to being swarmed. So Thurgon and Aramina rode off to the northwest, following the river.
* The GM wanted to skip a few days, but I insisted on playing out the first evening, as Thurgon and Aramina debated what to do. Aramina - being learned in Great Masters-wise, believed that the abandoned tower of Evard the Black lay somewhere in the forest on the north side of the river (a successful check, initiated by me as her player), and wanted to check it out (and find spellbooks!). Thurgon persuaded her that they could not do such a thing unless (i) she fixed his breastplate, and (ii) they found some information in the abandoned fortresses of his order which would indicate that the tower was, at least, superficially safe to seek out (eg not an orc fortress a la Angmar/Dol Guldur). My notes are a little incomplete here, but I think we resolved this as a Duel of Wits with me scripting for Thurgon and the GM for Aramina. This was a player-authored plot moment.
Friedrich took them as far as the next tributary's inflow - at that point the river turns north-east, and the two character's wanted to continue more-or-less due east on the other side of both streams. This was heading into the neighbourhood of Auxol, and so Thurgon kept his eye out for friends and family. The Circles check (base 3 dice +1 for an Affiliation with the nobility and another +1 for an Affiliation with his family) succeeded again, and the two characters came upon Thurgon's older brother Rufus driving a horse and cart. (Thurgon has a Rationship with his mother Xanthippe but no other family members; hence the Circles check to meet his brother.)
There was a reunion between Rufus and Thurgon. But (as described by the GM) it was clear to Thurgon that Rufus was not who he had been, but seemed cowed - as Rufus explained when Thurgon asked after Auxol, he (Rufus) was on his way to collect wine for the master. Rufus mentioned that Thurgon's younger son had married not long ago - a bit of lore (like Rufus hmself) taken from the background I'd prepared for Thurgon as part of PC gen - and had headed south in search of glory (that was something new the GM introduced). I mentioned that Aramina was not meeting Rufus's gaze, and the GM picked up on this - Rufus asked Thurgon who this woman was who wouldn't look at him from beneath the hood of her cloak - was she a witch? Thurgon answered that she travelled with him and mended his armour. Then I switched to Aramina, and she looked Rufus directly in the eye and told him what she thought of him - "Thurgon has trained and is now seeking glory on his errantry, and his younger brother has gone too to seek glory, but your, Rufus . . ." I told the GM that I wanted to check Ugly Truth for Aramina, to cause a Steel check on Rufus's part. The GM decided that Rufus has Will 3, and then we quickly calculated his Steel which also came out at 3. My Ugly Truth check was a success, and the Steel check failed. Rufus looked at Aramina, shamed but unable to respond. Switching back to Thurgon, I tried to break Rufus out of it with a Command check: he should pull himself together and join in restoring Auxol to its former glory. But the check failed, and Rufus, broken, explained that he had to go and get the wine. Switching back to Aramina, I had a last go - she tried for untrained Command, saying that if he wasn't going to join with Thurgon he might at least give us some coin so that we might spend the night at an inn rather than camping. This was Will 5, with an advantage die for having cowed him the first time, against a double obstacle penalty for untrained (ie 6) +1 penalty because Rufus was very set in his way. It failed. and so Rufus rode on and now has animosity towards Aramina. As the GM said, she better not have her back to him while he has a knife ready to hand.
In order:
*I (pemerton, the player) was not very excited by my GM's Elves - so I (Thurgon, the PC) tried to bend their leader to my will, and have him join me to help liberate Auxol. Predictably, I was not successful: but the <X - 15, say?> minutes spent playing that out were focused on my stuff, not the GM's Elf-y stuff.
*I am likewise not very excited by the Orc bait, and so I (Aramina, the PC) draw on my Great Masters-wise to recall something more interesting in the area - Evard's Tower! That is player content-introduction.
*I initiate the argument between Aramina and Thurgon, in which he persuades her to mend his armour (and also to go first to a fortress of his order, to get more information about Evard's Tower).
*I, the player, want an encounter with family - and so make the Circles check. And a very interesting encounter with Rufus results.
These are practical examples of the player
using their characters to drive the story forward, resolving conflicts, creating new ones, using the mechanics (and calling for their use), and creating new situations when the existing ones don't interest me.
<double mega facepalm>
That's... not a discussion about mending armor at all. Not even remotely That's a discussion about personal autonomy. Thurgon wants to control Aramina's movements. Perhaps he has good reason for it because Aramina is being a doofus and wanted to go to Certain Doom Valley. Or perhaps he's just overprotective. Or perhaps he's a sexist jerk who doesn't think a girl should go off on her own. I have no idea. I don't care. Completely not important. But the discussion was not about the armor
<snip>
The characters were having a discussion about Aramina's desire to do something that Thurgon didn't want her to do, particularly without adequate gear.
Did you sneak, ninja-like, into the place where I was playing Burning Wheel in the suburbs of Melbourne? If not, then can you please refrain from making confident assertions about events that contradict the actual eyewitness account you've been given (ie by me).
The argument between Thurgon and Aramina, as I have said, was about
whether or not she would mend his armour. Thurgon's armour was damaged (I would guess down a die of protection, though I don't recall the details); Aramina has Mending skill (and Thurgon does not). I've told you the context, and the Beliefs that were in play. As per the notes I found in an earlier post, quoted just above, Thurgon also persuaded Aramina to get some information first.
But it was not an attempt to
control movements, nor was it about "personal autonomy". And the discussion
was about the mending of the armour. That, more than the other aspect, is what has stuck in my mind for the years since the actual play of the episode.
If you can't recognise how the Belief
Aramina will need my protection might prompt Thurgon to request that, before they go to a dangerous place, she should at least mend his armour, that's slightly odd to me, but whatever - it doesn't mean that my recollection and account of what actually happened is wrong. Likewise, if you can't see how the Belief
I don't need Thurgon's pity might make Aramina bristle at Thugon's request, given the context that is motivating it, ditto.
And on the broader matter of the way that the intimate can become central to the action in BW, here's a post I made about the session with the armour argument, the same day as the player of the session:
I'm finding that quite small things, of little consequence for the universe (actual or in-game) as a whole, can take on a high degree of importance for me as a player when they matter to my PC, and I know that my own choices are what is bringing them to the fore and shaping them (eg repairing the armour; laying the dead to rest; not fighting the mad skeleton knight of my order). I'm not going to say that it's Vermeer: the RPG, but the stakes don't have to be cosmologically high in order to be personally high - provided that they really are at stake.
And, again, this is what would inform and determine the results of the GM attempting to make the Kobold fighting ring central to play.
