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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5638317" data-attributes="member: 54877">As far as I can tell, in my limited play experience, but wider reading, the difference between combat systems in Burning Wheel is very slight in overall effectiveness. The main reason for this is that there are only three basic combat systems, and two of those are for specialized circumstances (mainly range or mainly melee), and the one that is general purpose uses far fewer rolls. This latter means that loss of effective in tactical play due to armor, weapons, precise spell application, etc. are compensated for by much more effective use of "fate" points (three types in BW).  There are some edges cases. A heavily armored group with very little "fate" available would generally prefer, on a strictly gamist approach, to go for the more tactical system, while the opposite would also apply. However, neither situation is one likely to occur in BW very often, and the gamist play in it is more focused on "use whatever you got" than particular tactics anyway. That is, in any campaign of BW, one would generally expect to use all three subsystems, or it you didn't, presumably you had some reason why not. And all that said, if it really started to be an issue because of drifted play, I think the "heavy armor" in simple combat is the only one that would be a long term problem--and it could easily be mitigated via several different simple house rules. Contrast that to the issue of modules for Fantasy Hero. In Hero, nearly all powers have derived calculations. If you decide, for example, that all spellcasters of a certain type need a several actions to cast their spells, then you must rework every single shorter spell used by that faction to have more of the "extra time" limitation--and this will change the point cost of the spells. And that is a relatively benign and easy change. If you make a change in such powers that affects the "active cost", the consequences will be more ranging. Moreover, FH is meant to be tweaked this way to evoke a certain flavor. Therefore, any module written for FH is mainly written for a given flavor, rather than any FH campaign. Of course, this isn't the best of examples, because BW isn't meant to be run with modules. Locations and creatures and spells and such may be useful to develop (to a point), but the module is supposed to evolve in play, and be somewhat based on character direction and changing situation.  If the supposed D&D modular version is going to edge into some of the same territory that FH hits, with its changes, then I agree that modules (and campaign sourcebooks) are not going to work very well. You simply can't get down to that level and make it coherent to read, let alone organize and play. If fireball is allowed to have functionally different effectiveness depending upon modules chosen, and you do that for all spells, it will never work. What might work instead is to have whole systems of magic, but then portray NPCs as using a set of things. Something like the Rolemaster spell lists will do for discussion, though I consider that rather clunky. Basically, an NPC has a block of spells with a label, based on form and style, rather than individual spells. So when you say an NPC is an illusionist of 7th level, you know that he uses one of several packages. However, that might be overkill, given the 4E direction with monsters not built as NPCs.</blockquote>

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