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Grading the Burning Wheel System
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9279611" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>One of the things I like to do regardless of the fantastic conceits of the setting is take seriously what life in that setting would actually be like and how that society actually would work. I use that as a basis for generating imaginative play. I don't expect anything like perfect rigor. I just like the setting to be coherent enough that it doesn't fall apart the first time you take the setting seriously. </p><p></p><p>It is worth noting that there are aspects of the setting that appear to have been given this treatment. The ecology, geography, and geology of the setting is pretty rigorously the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with almost all the animals that appear being animals that could plausibly appear there. Even the fact that this is one of the few areas of the North American continent that has both iron and copper deposits on the surface in a smallish area plays a role in making a believable society for our fantasy mice. But I find it pretty impossible to reconcile the scale of the setting with the scale of the animal life in a pre-Industrial North America, and for me one of the biggest issues not addressed by the setting which would absolutely shape mouse life was the relationship of the mice not to megafauna like deer and wolves and stuff, but to the other mouse sized species that they would be living among. There are also issues like, "How big is the mice army?" given the scale we see in the books of the weasel war and the tables that suggest how many mice are required to wage war against megafauna. </p><p></p><p>The fact that I know the setting is the Upper Peninusla of Michigan lets me fill in all sorts of details in a way that is going to be rich and rewarding because reality is so much richer and more rewarding than anything you could dream up on your own. Even if I take liberties I'm still likely to end up with all sorts of ideas that I wouldn't have come up on my own.</p><p></p><p>Now sure, these complaints about the rigor of the setting are admittedly minor complaints. You can in fact handwave them away especially for the sort of one shots and mini-campaigns that the book seems aimed at where it would appear that spending say 16 sessions on the game would be a very long campaign. But one of the joys of having a good gameable setting is that play within it over a longer period reveals deep sociological, philosophical and moral questions about the setting and the more I thought about it the more I came to the conclusion that Mousegaurd could not really do that for me because the fundamental difference between humans and mice is that humans are top order predators. We are megafauna. Very few things except other top order predators can prey upon us, and that at their peril. Our lifespans or family order or human social structure depends deeply on that. And the trouble is that mice are not top order predators in this system as written. They are still mice. And so importing the human family structure and human social order and human lifespan on top of that creates for me a real challenge to imagine this world in a coherent fashion. </p><p></p><p>This is again a minor complaint compared to how janky I found the system and how ill-suited that sort of complexity felt to creating narrative driven play, but it is a real thing. I can't turn my brain off to the fact that much like the Harry Potter setting, the world building is incoherent as written. It's a much bigger problem than the for example the number of Clones created for the clone wars is canonically vastly less than you would need to not only fight a galactic scale war, but the canonical number of droids created for that war. That is comparatively easy to fix.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9279611, member: 4937"] One of the things I like to do regardless of the fantastic conceits of the setting is take seriously what life in that setting would actually be like and how that society actually would work. I use that as a basis for generating imaginative play. I don't expect anything like perfect rigor. I just like the setting to be coherent enough that it doesn't fall apart the first time you take the setting seriously. It is worth noting that there are aspects of the setting that appear to have been given this treatment. The ecology, geography, and geology of the setting is pretty rigorously the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with almost all the animals that appear being animals that could plausibly appear there. Even the fact that this is one of the few areas of the North American continent that has both iron and copper deposits on the surface in a smallish area plays a role in making a believable society for our fantasy mice. But I find it pretty impossible to reconcile the scale of the setting with the scale of the animal life in a pre-Industrial North America, and for me one of the biggest issues not addressed by the setting which would absolutely shape mouse life was the relationship of the mice not to megafauna like deer and wolves and stuff, but to the other mouse sized species that they would be living among. There are also issues like, "How big is the mice army?" given the scale we see in the books of the weasel war and the tables that suggest how many mice are required to wage war against megafauna. The fact that I know the setting is the Upper Peninusla of Michigan lets me fill in all sorts of details in a way that is going to be rich and rewarding because reality is so much richer and more rewarding than anything you could dream up on your own. Even if I take liberties I'm still likely to end up with all sorts of ideas that I wouldn't have come up on my own. Now sure, these complaints about the rigor of the setting are admittedly minor complaints. You can in fact handwave them away especially for the sort of one shots and mini-campaigns that the book seems aimed at where it would appear that spending say 16 sessions on the game would be a very long campaign. But one of the joys of having a good gameable setting is that play within it over a longer period reveals deep sociological, philosophical and moral questions about the setting and the more I thought about it the more I came to the conclusion that Mousegaurd could not really do that for me because the fundamental difference between humans and mice is that humans are top order predators. We are megafauna. Very few things except other top order predators can prey upon us, and that at their peril. Our lifespans or family order or human social structure depends deeply on that. And the trouble is that mice are not top order predators in this system as written. They are still mice. And so importing the human family structure and human social order and human lifespan on top of that creates for me a real challenge to imagine this world in a coherent fashion. This is again a minor complaint compared to how janky I found the system and how ill-suited that sort of complexity felt to creating narrative driven play, but it is a real thing. I can't turn my brain off to the fact that much like the Harry Potter setting, the world building is incoherent as written. It's a much bigger problem than the for example the number of Clones created for the clone wars is canonically vastly less than you would need to not only fight a galactic scale war, but the canonical number of droids created for that war. That is comparatively easy to fix. [/QUOTE]
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