Let's Talk About "Intended Playstyle"

[aramis erak]

In my experience (and outside of Revised Sorcery), dice pools with more than 6 or 7 dice in them from skills, FoRKs and help, aren't that common. But Obstacles above 3 aren't that uncommon. Hence why I think that, if you don't have Artha, you're not really going to succeed.

In play of both BW and Torchbearer 2e, I find that the use of Fate to open up 6s is particularly important.

No argument about artha, but I've had in my BW, BE, and MG games quite a few times with 6d to 8d pools - especially with a 5d skill, a fork, 2 helpers. It's not that hard to get a skill 5 if one is focused on getting it in BW, BE, or MG. In BW and BE, it's even in reach as a starting skill.
So it's possible to hit those high pool tasks. Ob6 has been, ironically, EXTREMELY common in Circles rolls. (It's just too easy to stack up those Ob mods on Circles.) Number one reason for complicated success when I was running BW.

Note that MG has a fairly wide range of Ob defined by the difficulty lists; 6 is not that hard to find.

For others: Mouse Guard (MG) uses the same concepts as BW, but does advancement differently, has only one conflict system, very different character gen. It does advancement by (Level) Successes and (Level -1) fails, so it's advancement is actually easier, tho' it also lacks one of the three kinds of Artha (calling the remaining Fate and Persona as "Rewards" instead of Artha). It also has a scene budget (WWAM: Wilderness, Weather, Animal, Mouse), it's mission based, and a roll limit (one roll per scene, may be everyone once per session and may be a conflict once per session, at least if run RAW. I've routinely had Ob (the Target Number/Objective) in the 5+ range, and seen skills hit 8d in a campaign.
One of the dirty tricks is to not
Circles: the ability of the character to run into the people they need to run into.

 

[Aldarc]

I don't know what to tell you. That is not what it means in the context of games. It means that it demands very specific play.

Going back to December, you had scarcely heard of "opinionated" applied to games, and now you're trying to tell me what it means like you've always known? lol