Explain Burning Wheel to me

[d20Dwarf]

Wil, you're still confusing player and character knowledge. You know about the mechanics. Your character cannot..

I think part of the problem is that Dave Turner said BW has mechanics tied into player goals, when I think maybe he meant player-stated *character* goals.

Burning Wheel has some good ideas.

 

[Wil]

When you play a character in an RPG you are playing somebody living in a different world. Somebody who doesn't, who can't have acess to what you know. For him gaining levels is not a viable goal. Improving is.

Yes, when your character levels up he improves. But that is player knowledge. All the character can know is that he is improving. How he improves, why he improves in game terms is beyond his ken.

Right, I understand that - I was simply countering what Dave Turner had stated - the D&D does not have any mechanics in place to allow for player-set goals for the character. The thing is, it does - just not in the way that some people might want to see it implemented.

Another thing I think I'm seeing with a lot of this debate is a muddying of mechanics and rules. They are not one and the same to me. Most people will play by the mechanics in the game, but may modify the rules as they see fit. Levelling up is a mechanic; the requirements for levelling up are a rule. Levelling up for a particular class will work out of the book in nearly every game group - but in some groups, they may modify the rule for how to level up (or bypass it entirely and say, "All of you start out as 10th level characters"). Rolling d20+BAB+whatever else is a mechanic; how to apply additional modifiers is a rule.

This is part of the reason I'm not impressed with the "But there's not a rule for that in x game, but there is in mine" - even if one of the rules of the game is that the players must abide by all of the rules of the game, that rule is usually going to be more easily ignored than the mechanics. And if someone wants to get pedantic about "there's no rule for that", most games include Rule 1 which is, "If you don't like it, change the rules" - which covers everything that the rules don't cover anyway.

This is kind of a digression, but in a lot of ways it reminds me of another thread with the ad-hoc argument - where the assumption was that ad-hoc is bad or means a game is incomplete. I think part of the outcome was the realization that ad-hoc means different things depending on the person's background - from where I come from, ad-hoc is oftentimes necessary. There isn't always a stored procedure that can get me the data I want. Usually, if the data that's being returned from a website isn't correct, performing some ad-hoc queries is the only way to find out why. My company may have rules for how and when and who can perform ad-hoc queries, but the mechanics (how I write those queries to get the effect) never change.

As such, just because a game doesn't have rules to handle something like character goals doesn't mean that it can't handle character goals, and just because a game codifies rules for character goals doesn't mean that it's necessarily innovative. From what I've seen, BW has some neat tricks but nothing to make me jump out of my seat and shout about.

 

[mythusmage]

I think part of the problem is that Dave Turner said BW has mechanics tied into player goals, when I think maybe he meant player-stated *character* goals.

Burning Wheel has some good ideas.

And so imprecision in language on the part of one party leads to misunderstanding between two other parties.

As David Drake and Eric Flint keep pointing out in their Belisarius series, grammar matters.

Or as my dwarf Buddhist cleric (lapsed) once said, when a kidnap victim pointed out he'd said he'd watch her, "Yeah, but I never said I wouldn't let you go."

 

[mythusmage]

Right, I understand that - I was simply countering what Dave Turner had stated - the D&D does not have any mechanics in place to allow for player-set goals for the character. The thing is, it does - just not in the way that some people might want to see it implemented.

Another thing I think I'm seeing with a lot of this debate is a muddying of mechanics and rules. They are not one and the same to me. Most people will play by the mechanics in the game, but may modify the rules as they see fit. Levelling up is a mechanic; the requirements for levelling up are a rule. Levelling up for a particular class will work out of the book in nearly every game group - but in some groups, they may modify the rule for how to level up (or bypass it entirely and say, "All of you start out as 10th level characters"). Rolling d20+BAB+whatever else is a mechanic; how to apply additional modifiers is a rule.

This is part of the reason I'm not impressed with the "But there's not a rule for that in x game, but there is in mine" - even if one of the rules of the game is that the players must abide by all of the rules of the game, that rule is usually going to be more easily ignored than the mechanics. And if someone wants to get pedantic about "there's no rule for that", most games include Rule 1 which is, "If you don't like it, change the rules" - which covers everything that the rules don't cover anyway.

This is kind of a digression, but in a lot of ways it reminds me of another thread with the ad-hoc argument - where the assumption was that ad-hoc is bad or means a game is incomplete. I think part of the outcome was the realization that ad-hoc means different things depending on the person's background - from where I come from, ad-hoc is oftentimes necessary. There isn't always a stored procedure that can get me the data I want. Usually, if the data that's being returned from a website isn't correct, performing some ad-hoc queries is the only way to find out why. My company may have rules for how and when and who can perform ad-hoc queries, but the mechanics (how I write those queries to get the effect) never change.

As such, just because a game doesn't have rules to handle something like character goals doesn't mean that it can't handle character goals, and just because a game codifies rules for character goals doesn't mean that it's necessarily innovative. From what I've seen, BW has some neat tricks but nothing to make me jump out of my seat and shout about.

Ah, clarification. Helps clarify things.

Now I wouldn't say that D&D has any explicit mechanics for setting character goals. What it does allow is for the players to set character goals, by not prohibiting it. It doesn't specifically permit it, but more importantly it doesn't prohibit it.

The real difference is that Burning Wheel requires character goals, whereas D&D does not. In practice a D&D character will have a goal (kill things and take their stuff usually ), but his player is not required to state that goal.

You make a valid point there, RPGs are not the sort of game where permitted behaviors have to be spelled out. So long as such behaviors are possible in the real world. It is only when a behavior, a knack or skill, is not possible in reality that rules allowing for the behavior become necessary. Sometimes it is necessary to describe how a behavior works in a setting, but the lack of such a description, especially where something like deciding on character goals is concerned, does not make such a behavior impossible.

In short, an RPG's system does not spell out what one can do, an RPG's system describes how things work in that RPG's setting. Where a system does not describe how something works then either it is something that can be modeled using a rule governing something similar, or it is something so basic (such as deciding on a character's goal) it needs no explanation.

To put it another way, some things don't need rules.

 

[Jim Hague]

So, what about explicit (Burning Wheel's Beliefs or SC 2's semi-concrete result-based rewards) versus implicit (D&D's method of handling character goals and to an extent alignment)? Obviously, it's not 'this is good, this is bad'...but what's a good balance? Should this vary by play group (based on the assumption each play group has its own social contract and play goals), or be set at some happy medium?

Just thinking out loud here.

 

[Wil]

In short, an RPG's system does not spell out what one can do, an RPG's system describes how things work in that RPG's setting. Where a system does not describe how something works then either it is something that can be modeled using a rule governing something similar, or it is something so basic (such as deciding on a character's goal) it needs no explanation.

To put it another way, some things don't need rules.

Another way to put it is that mechanics limit what the characters can do in the game world; rules limit what the players do with the characters. Most rules can be universally applied to any game, unless they are strongly tied to mechanics. It's not really that cut and dry, though.

In some cases, not enough restrictions can cause the player to not make any decision at all - limitation can encourage imagination by working within the boundaries. By forcing the player to choose a goal for the character, with a mechanical aspect to support that choice, it's just a codification of activities that players and GMs have been doing for 20 years.

 

[Glyfair]

The real difference is that Burning Wheel requires character goals, whereas D&D does not.

Which is a small minus in my opinion. Sometimes you get into a game and don't have a strong idea of your character, especially goals. It's nice to be able to develop them within the game. Burning Wheel apparently doesn't address this.

I think perhaps something like the way Heroquest addresses character generation might be appropriate in this area. It has at least 3 different ways of generating a character. The main version has you write a 100 word character description and your GM pulls your skills out of it. A tertiary method allows you to gain them when you play. Something like this applying to belief might make it more approachable for those who aren't strongly for the "improvisational acting" school of roleplaying.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

As for Diplomacy fixes like Rich's, that's one of the reason I went ahead and designed BW. So I could stop fixing another game and just get what I wanted from one system. If Rich's fix does it for ya, great. If not, I've got something you should check out.

I like toolkits. One of the things I enjoy about d20 is that, being an open game, I can plug-and-play different system modifications from different authors until I get the style of play I like. However, I'm also a big fan of small games with focused mechanics and a well-defined style. Some of these appear in my signature. The problem with these games is that they do one thing well, and if you don't want to do precisely that thing again, you need to change systems. On what end of this continuum, would you say, is BW?

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Now, we come full circle back to the beginning. The player decides. Right then and there? Hell, no! He decides what the big conflicts will be when he writes his Beliefs for his character.

"I will plumb the hazards of the Tomb of Horrors, no matter the price! I will have her secrets and treasures!"

Right there, that player -- ok, me -- just said, "There better be some serious trap-laden peril for me to overcome." And so, after a rousing adventure, we come back to the Hall o' Traps and the BIG CONFLICT that the GM has just laid in my lap. He's just reached across the table, poked me in the head, and said, "No matter the price, eh? Well, what's that Belief really worth to yah, huh? Do you really mean it? Or is just empty words? You gonna roll the dice, or you gonna sit there and cry all day? Are you gonna get yourself and all your friends killed for your ambition? Huh?"

-Luke

I assume from this kind of quote that beliefs are temporary. Otherwise, you accomplish your destiny before breakfast and the rest of the day looks a bit slow. So what are the rules for changing beliefs. How do you differentiate between "this belief sucks, it's too hard to accomplish so I want to squirm out of it," and "this belief sucks, it looked good on paper but it really doesn't manage to set up good challenges," and "okay, I killed the one-armed man, what next?"

 

[Henry]

Luke,

To reiterate what Jim Hague said, thank you for coming in and contributing. The forums are focused on d20, but we also enjoy input on other games as well, because there's always room to try something new!

I think that a lot of the play style for BW is not to my taste, though it does have some neat concepts to try out in other games, and give me a possible new way to think of players' involvement in the session.

One thing I definitely can't help but notice is the equalization of GM and player - almost to the point of sounding antagonistic about any possible authority of the GM over the other players. My philosophy is that a fair, but finally-authoritative, GM works better than Burning Wheel's approach. "Round-Robin D&D", something that forum member "der Kluge" introduced me to, is very similar in style, in that it is a collaborative story approach, but where the GM still retains story-setting power, but that power is shared in cyclic manner with all players at the table. While fun, it was very mentally draining, as I had to keep track of the story facets that ALL DM's introduced. To do that on a regular basis via Burning Wheel is something that I don't find as fun.

I'll take manual locks on my car doors, my Warner Brothers over my anime, a TV with no remote, and no smog filter on my car, too. I'm Luddite that way.