Is the Burning Wheel "how to play" advice useful for D&D?

[pemerton]

In the "World Worth Saving" thread, the topic of player and GM responsibilities came up - who should be responsible for what, if the game is going to be fun for all involved?

Anyway, I mentioned that the Burning Wheel rulebook tackles this head on, and [MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION] thought it might be interesting. So here goes (from Burning Wheel revised, pp 265-69):

Concept, Concept, Concept
When setting up a Burning Wheel game, the GM and the players come to an agreement about what this story/scenario is going to be all about. . .

Get this game concept out in the open right off. Sometimes, players will just have a concept for a character he wants to play. . . Pay attention to them. . .

Once the concept for the game is determined, pick and choose elements from the overall game that are appropriate . . . Toss out any skills, weapons, spells, etc that are inappropriate to your concept. Save them for another game. . .

Once the concept is agreed upon, the GM's job is to set the lifepath limits and overall power level of the player characters . . . If the concept calls for twinked out munchkin power, then it is the GM's job to set the upper and lower limits of player characters. . .

The GM should set the time of the Resources Cycle. . . Setting this cycle most definitely influences the time patterns of the story to be. . . Setting the cycle at a year means characters are going to need a lot of time to have their goals and desires met [because much game time will have to pass to earn money]. There'll be a lot of "season pass" narration. . .

If there are Faithful characters [clerics and paladins, in D&D terms] in the group, the GM and those players must decide upon the idiom of their faiths, whether it affects all creatures or just the believers, and any religious strictures placed on the characters. . .

Tying in Relationships
GM's: Don't let players buy useless relationships that won't have a bearing on the game. . .

With his view of the big picture, the Gm can and should advise players aboiut which relationships are useful and which aren't. . .

Tying in Beliefs, Instincts and Traits
If the game is about taking revenge on the wizards who tortured and scarred you, characters better damn well have Beliefs and Instincts that scream anger, hatred and vengeance (or even forgivenss, for extra drama). . .

Focus those Beliefs. Charge them. Prime them. Set them to blow. Make your character's life hard. Make it complex, entangled and difficult. Sure you could sit outside the story, be safe and watch, but what the hell fun is that? This is your game. Own it, live it, bleed it.

Instinct should be set to get you in all kinds of trouble. . . If a GM is creating situations whre the Instinct alarm bells aren't going off, he's not doing his job.

Lastly, there's traits. With traits, a player is paying points to say, "my character is this." The other players and the GM better damn wel include scenes and situations where those traits are prominent. . . .

Role of the GM

. . .

* To make sure the mechanics of the game run smoothly, make sense and gel with the story/actual play at hand.

* To get across my point/vision/idea (also known as the theme of the game).

* To challenge and engage the players.

* And to make sure that, whether the game is humorous or dramatic, everyone is involved and enjoys themselves.

In Burning Wheel, it is the GM's job to interpret all the various intents of the players' actions and mesh them into a cohesive whole that fits within the context of the game. He's got to make sure that all the player wackiness abides by the rules. When it doesn't, he must guide wayward players gently back into the fold. Often this requires negotiating an action or intent until both player and GM are satisfied that if fits both within the concept and mood of the game.

Also, the GM is in a unique position. He can see the big picture - what the players are doing, as well as what the opposition is up to and plans to do. . . More than any other player, the GM controls the flow and pacing of the game. He has the power to begin and end scenes, to present challenges and instigate conflicts. It's a heady responsibility but utterly worthwhile.

Most important, the GM is responsible for introducing complications to the story and consequences for the players' choices. . .

Role of the Players
Finally, there is the sacred and most holy role of the players. In Burning Wheel games, players have a number of duties:

* Prime among them is the responsibility to offer hooks to their GM and the other players in the form of Beliefs, Instincts and Traits.

* Use the lifepaths to build skeletons of your characters' background, but don't fill in all the details. Let the character develop as play advances - certainly don't write a history in which all the adventure has already happened.

* Players in Burning Wheel must use their characters to drive the story forward - to resolve conflicts and create new ones. Players are supposed to push and risk their characters, so the grow and change in unforeseen ways.

* Use the mechanics! Players are expected to call for a Duel of Wits . . . or to demand the Rnage 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!

* Participate. . . It doesn't matter if you "win", so long as the story spins in a new and interesting direction. If the story doesn't interest you, it's your job to create interesting situations and involve yourself. If a player's desires and priorities are disruptive for the group as a whole, then it's that player's job to excuse himself from the game and find another group.

Above all, have fun. . . Listen to the other players, riff off them; take their leads and run with them. . .

Don't forget to call your GM. Start ranting like a mad imp! Or if you are the GM (like me) hopefully you're frothing at the mouth right now (like I am [with a mad imp icon in the margin], bellowing "Hell yeah!"​

Opinions/responses?

I think that's a pretty clear description of what participants' jobs are. It's also an allocation of responsibilities that I like.

Because I'm GMing 4e rather than BW, the systems for sending signals and hooks are a bit different - rather than Beliefs, Instincts and Traits, for instance, it's class, role, race, paragon path etc, plus more informal flags the players run up. And I think overall my game is probably less intense than the sort of game Luke Crane is pushing for in his rulebook. But the emphasis on collective responsibility to push the game forward, on using the mechanics to drive the story, on theme, situation and character rather than setting - all that works pretty well for me.

 

[Celebrim]

The big problem with any discussion that takes at its root Forge theory, is that Forge theorist always assume that either something is true, or else something else is true. Things fit into nice discrete categories. And, if something isn't lying in its nice discrete category with firm theoretical backing according to their theory, there is an assuption that its incoherent or somehow defective. In short, Forge theory has at a basic assumption that you can play from a Simulationist or you can play from a Narrativist perspective or you can play from a Gamist perspective and the system you play with can support only a single such mode of play at a time. So what you are supposed to do if you are thinking in Forge-speak is look at a set of rules or guidelines and drop things into the correctly labeled bucket.

I find that works only when you are either arguing things on a bulletin board or else consciously playing according to some Forge approved paradigm.

In other places, you've asserted two things quite strongly. First, that my general 'proposition-fortune-outcome' loop is very different than 'say yes or roll the dice', and secondly that my game is very different in practice from Burning Wheel. I will insist that neither distinction is particularly real, and that in practice there is a fuzzy continuim that means often in BW you are doing 'proposition-fortune-outcome' and often as I play D&D I'm 'saying yes or rolling the dice'. From a minute by minute description of play, you can't make those clear but wholly artificial distinctions.

Take your quotes. Everything in the 'Concept, Concept, Concept' section could be said to apply to my game and I can give concrete examples. Every player spends about two weeks communicating back and forth with me about their character, the backstory they want, and the story goals they have that follow from that backstory. Everyone massages that conception subject to my advice and guidance but not authority, because this is their character, to fit into the games existing themes, concept, power level, and prevailing intraparty social structure. Everything about Faithful character said applies also to my games. One of the fundamental distinctions might be said that I as storyteller have a larger role in setting up what the story concept is, and also am keeping secret several of the things that the story is actually about to reveal during the course of play, but I'd bet many BW GM's also keep secret key concepts or story themes in order to make grand reveals. And if they don't, then they are saying that BW must forgo many of the narrative techniques that in other mediums enrich and make stories interesting.


While my game doesn't necessarily define mechanical resources in quite the same way, the advice it gives about the mechanical resources equally applies to how mechanical resources are used in my game. The players are spending resources to acquire distinctions and influence over the narrative we produce. I am making sure that they are relevant and will be relevant and if I can't see a way to do that, I'll guide them toward other resources or at least warn them of potential problems. I will take that background and pile on complications and twist the knife on the character. I actually however ask players to give me a score from 1 to 10 stating how much they are willing to let me me mess with them, and depending on the responce I'll either foreground them and twist thier perception of who the character is or I'll background them and let them develop without as much complication and pain.

The section on the 'Role of the GM' I agree with 100% and I'd argue that it corresponds more closely to my description of what I think is the role of the GM, than what you have advocated. It is the GM and not the player that is most responsible for introducing complications to the story and consequences for the players' choices. The section one the role of the player fundamentally agrees with with some subset of what I'd call skillful play in a player. Providing that section as advice to my players save where there are difference in the mechanical system would be perfectly reasonable. Provide meaty 'mess withe me' hooks, build a character with a story that will unfold rather than a character whose story has already happened, stay in character, interact with the game world, be proactive, take risks, move the story in the directions you want, be creative in your proposition framing but also leverage the rules to underpin the thing you are offering up and use them to your advantage, participate, above all have fun, and if you can't be interested then gracefully bow out. All that is good advice.

Fundamentally this is a description of a gaming system which shades into indistinguishability with how I run my table. I can think of maybe two sessions out of 50 that might have played out very differently using BW's mechanical assumptions - a murder investigation that fizzled out temporarily because they missed all three clues and a very tragic session returning from a Holiday break where party cohesion broke down and there were unfortunate player deaths in a scene that really wasn't as grand as it should be, should have never happened, and I think was generally regretted by everyone. But for the most part, you wouldn't be able to reverse back from a narrative of the game events to be able to tell whether we were playing 3rd edition or BW. There isn't anything in the BW guidelines and framing you quote that would have been completely revolutionary at my table 20 years ago.

In other words, system doesn't matter. System is probably no more than 4th on the list of what matters when it comes to determining how a table plays, somewhere distantly after things how the DM prepare to play a game, what the social contract that is effectively in force is, and how the players call their actions. Those things are generally well outside of what the system can actually control.

 

[Nagol]

The sections look at best tengentially valuable to the way I run and prefer to play D&D.

It looks much more relevant to the way I run games with stronger up-front characterisation like Strands of Fate, CHAMPIONS, or even Pendragon.

When I'm investing in D&D either as a player of a DM, I'm looking for a different experience. After all, if I weren't, I'd be playing a different game. In D&D, I'm looking for characters to navigate an indifferent world to the best of their ability as they decide what to attempt to change, if anything.

 

[howandwhy99]

It sounds very story heavy vs. pretty much any other way to play. So it's only going to suit a particular brand of play styles, gamers and fun. I say brand because the advice is so particular rather than broad. It has a definite series of ideas about how each type of participant is supposed to play the game. That's great for a single game like Burning Wheel, but D&D has so broad a purview of game play that the above advice, while focusing it, will also limit it. I think the ideas are popular enough to definitely give them a try and done so openly in order they might gel after awhile. However, like [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] intimated above: almost everything coming out of Forge Theory has a particular uniformity due to its limited collection of ideas popular within that community of thinkers. What amounts to good for them may not be so for you, at least at any given point you want to play an RPG. In other words, don't try this stuff out expecting greatness, but allow it to surprise you if it does so. Also there tends to be a preponderance of attention paid to a unique variety of narrative in Forge-bred games, perhaps better titled Narrative to point out its specific definition, but narrative isn't necessary to make or play a game. Over thinking things like this can lead to a kind of reductionism like saying all games are political and then refusing to talk or design them outside a predefined political vocabulary. While it may be a ladder to truly awesome political games, it's ultimately limiting if used exclusively. Kill your Buddha and all that.

I actually have grown to like some of the elements of Burning Wheel though I doubt I use them any way the designers intended. And I'd definitely give a try to the program of game play in the OP, if only to see if its to your taste. I'm sure it could be ported over to D&D with a little effort.

 

[delericho]

It's not for me. I don't run my games like that, and I suspect I would hate to play in a game that took the advice in the OP as holy writ.

That said, if others find it useful, then more power to them.

 

[Celebrim]

It's not for me. I don't run my games like that, and I suspect I would hate to play in a game that took the advice in the OP as holy writ.

Could you elaborate? My principle complaint about the advice - beyond the ugly, condescending, and vulgar tone of the writing - is that if you divorse it from what it is saying about its own mechanics it is so generic that you could play in just about any manner and still say you were following the advice. For example, suppose your concept of fun is hack and slash adventure, well if you provide powerful monsters to fight and amazing treasures to be won then you could say you were doing exactly what the above advises. If the DM makes sure that the characters abilities match the provided challenge, then well, you are again following the advice. If the DM talks to the Paladin character before the game starts about what 'lawful good' means in the context of his game, so as to avoid disputes later on, you are following the advice. In other words, outside its discussion of the somewhat unique mechanics of Burning Wheel, such as the fact it encourages the players to invent custom 'feats', the overall advice isn't really that revolutionary IMO.

What about the advice, other than the tone of brutal one-way-ism it adopts in delivering it, bothers you?

 

[the Jester]

Looks useful for some playstyles. For mine? Not even close.

IMC the roles of the players and the dm are much more distinct, and the players don't get to make or alter the rules unless they figure out how to do it in-game. Also, no pre-decided story. Also- well, I could go on, but why bother?

BW's advice looks pretty ideal for a group that prefers heavy story games, with a lot of things tied to specific pcs (who don't generally die).

 

[Ratskinner]

The sections look at best tengentially valuable to the way I run and prefer to play D&D.

It looks much more relevant to the way I run games with stronger up-front characterisation like Strands of Fate, CHAMPIONS, or even Pendragon.

When I'm investing in D&D either as a player of a DM, I'm looking for a different experience. After all, if I weren't, I'd be playing a different game. In D&D, I'm looking for characters to navigate an indifferent world to the best of their ability as they decide what to attempt to change, if anything.

Opinions/responses?

I think that's a pretty clear description of what participants' jobs are. It's also an allocation of responsibilities that I like.

Because I'm GMing 4e rather than BW, the systems for sending signals and hooks are a bit different - rather than Beliefs, Instincts and Traits, for instance, it's class, role, race, paragon path etc, plus more informal flags the players run up. And I think overall my game is probably less intense than the sort of game Luke Crane is pushing for in his rulebook. But the emphasis on collective responsibility to push the game forward, on using the mechanics to drive the story, on theme, situation and character rather than setting - all that works pretty well for me.

At this point, I mostly agree with Nagol. I'm starting to look at D&D's first best function as a light, casual game, and if I want a "serious" dramatic game I'd turn to MHRP or FATE. Which isn't to say that D&D should never be able to handle "dramatic" scenes, or that such games shouldn't inform anything about D&D, but I don't think its D&D's wheelhouse.

When approaching a game like Burning Wheel or FATE or MHRP, you definitely need that "pre-nup" type of agreement and more importantly that commitment. The mechanics just don't support the game without it (MHRP perhaps less so.) However, IME the majority of D&D players do not approach D&D that way. I haven't found as you have, that choosing class, etc. are good indicators of the type of drama that players want, if any. Certainly D&D play works just fine without it, even in 4e.

What I'm a little less clear on, is what happens after a campaign gets going. Even in groups that start play fairly divorced from dramatic thinking and focus almost entirely on exploration, I regularly see that they develop attachments to locations, NPCs, etc. that become fine foci for dramatic play. Much like @pemerton mentioned about combat in another thread, there is something very visceral to that kind of "organically" developed attachment.

Should the rules address or acknowledge that in some way? I dunno.

 

[Celebrim]

At this point, I mostly agree with Nagol. I'm starting to look at D&D's first best function as a light, casual game, and if I want a "serious" dramatic game I'd turn to MHRP or FATE.

I'd like to quibble with that. D&D doesn't impose a play style by default. It's rather silent on the issue of play style, which is one of the reasons that in practice there are so many kinds of D&D tables - even amongst ones using the same rules. One of the advantages I've found in not imposing a play style is that the light casual gamer can often play at the same table as the very drama thespian gamer and be engaging the same game in different ways. Or the same gamer can move between two different tables with the same or similar rules and play two very different game.

For me it is a very open question whether hard mechanics intended to support drama actually encourage or detract from dramatic play. I think the answer might well depend on the group, just as different groups argue over whether putting a morality flag like 'alignment' detracts from or enhance examination of morality or whether having rules for arbritrating social encounters add or detract from thespian style dramatic play.

However, IME the majority of D&D players do not approach D&D that way.

I'm not sure how I feel about that blanket statement, particularly because you yourself seem to ammend it to something more nuanced later when you note that as campaigns tend to 'mature' (in the sense of the campaign itself getting 'older') dramatic tension has a tendency to accumulate as players invest emotionally in aspects of the story or setting. Maybe the lack of explicit rules for pre-linking your character to the setting or conflicts of the setting tend to mean that dramatic play is not from the outset assumed, but I don't know of an RPG that doesn't develop dramatic play in the hands of any reasonably mature gamer as the story advances.

 

[Ratskinner]

I'd like to quibble with that. D&D doesn't impose a play style by default. It's rather silent on the issue of play style, which is one of the reasons that in practice there are so many kinds of D&D tables - even amongst ones using the same rules. One of the advantages I've found in not imposing a play style is that the light casual gamer can often play at the same table as the very drama thespian gamer and be engaging the same game in different ways. Or the same gamer can move between two different tables with the same or similar rules and play two very different game.

For me it is a very open question whether hard mechanics intended to support drama actually encourage or detract from dramatic play. I think the answer might well depend on the group, just as different groups argue over whether putting a morality flag like 'alignment' detracts from or enhance examination of morality or whether having rules for arbritrating social encounters add or detract from thespian style dramatic play.

I don't think we're as far apart as it may sound. All I was saying was that D&D is most effective at delivering that exploration-heavy dungeon/adventure experience. Certainly, you can play D&D (especially old-school) in a variety of playstyles. Heavy narrative play, in particular, doesn't require very much in the way of rules. However, that doesn't mean that D&D is very good at driving that kind of play. If I'm looking to play a drama/story-centered game, especially right from the get-go...I think I'm better off using a game designed for that, rather than trying to bash D&D into that shape.

As far as mechanics supporting drama...I agree. I think there are maybe qualitative differences in the types of drama that make that question harder to address.

I'm not sure how I feel about that blanket statement, particularly because you yourself seem to ammend it to ...

Perhaps a should have said "...D&D players don't approach a campaign that way." I only mean that I rarely (as in "can't remember ever seeing it") see a player choose a class or race in order to signal something to the DM about the game they want to see. Some groups certainly discuss campaign parameters ahead of time, but that's not the same as what Burning Wheel does.

Pondering it a little more while writing this response. Maybe that's because we usually already know what a D&D campaign will be about. I mean, the only times groups engage heavily in that discussion (IME) is when they are planning on deviating significantly from D&D's "script." "Let's do an evil campaign" "Let's do an all-thieves campaign" or something similar. Otherwise, you're generally free to roll up your Dwarf Fighter start play...many times even without a name.