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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wil" data-source="post: 2794297" data-attributes="member: 3502">Because there's a dichotomy between encouraging and succeeding.  I don't see any evidence that having mechanics in place that force roleplaying (let's not mince words here, because this is what any proposed mechanic like this does) succeeds in creating "roleplaying".  This is most easily evidenced by games like Pendragon, which have quantifiable mechanics for character beliefs and values, where you can essentially play the character solely by the results of tests against those traits without ever really getting into the role.  While this is not necessarily the case with BW, the danger there is that it becomes too programmatical.The problem with comparing it to D&D is that it has a tremondously long history of people succeeding (at roleplaying) apparently (according to you) against the odds.  More on that in a minute.There's no question it has mechanics to back up roleplaying, the question is does it succeed at producing "Roleplaying" and do those mechanics improve the chances of producing it?Or, alternately, we have more complex rules than Cowboys and Indians to a) lend a sense of maturity to what many see as a childish endeavor and b) because the grandfathers of the hobby were old grognards.Of course, I can't argue the flimsiness of D&D's roleplaying encouragement mechanics - and while Artha may different in the rules for application, the basic mechanic exists in many more places than the Burning Wheel (SilCore has Emergency Dice and Genre Points; Exalted has Stunts and Virtues).Actually, it doesn't contradict human psychology at all. There's growing evidence that the more immediate the reward for something, and the more often that reward is given, that the subject's response will actually be not as great as time goes on.  In other words, they get jaded.  The response becomes rote.  And this still does nothing to prove that these mechanics create "roleplaying" - they instead just encourage behavior, that may or may not actual be the player roleplaying.  The player may just be playing the game by the rules at that point.But we're talking about not defining this stuff at the start of play at all.  There are people out there who want to not know their character at the beginning of play and discover the details as play progesses.  You'd be hard pressed to argue that the characters that result from this type of play are less developed than one that leaps whole-cloth from the player's brow.Actually, if this works like you say it should, they shouldn't have to play their BITS - the mechanics should take care of it for them.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /></blockquote>

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