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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thor" data-source="post: 4491980" data-attributes="member: 74284">Hey man,I'm the editor and a developer of the Burning Wheel line, so I'm biased. But here are my thoughts:There is a great deal of variety within the lifepaths themselves, but the dwarves, elves and orcs draw heavily from The Hobbit, LOTRO, and the Silmarillion. The standard lifepaths give you the ability to create a great variety of characters that would fit into that setting, but are a bit more restrictive outside it. That's why we created the Monster Burner supplement. Part of the Monster Burner is devoted to showing you how we made lifepaths and traits and gives you rules for creating your own. Once you've got the hang of it, it's not too difficult to alter the racial stocks to your vision or create entirely new ones.The Emotional Attributes (Greed, Grief and Hatred for dwarves, elves and orcs, respectively) are central to the character stocks. You can't really ignore them (unless you alter the stocks as mentioned above). Dwarven Greed allows us to have characters like Thorin, who was a great hero but ready to cut Bilbo down for looking at his Arkenstone funny.However, you can play against emotional attributes, and that makes for some really great play. In one of my current campaigns, my friend Rich is playing a dwarven prince who struggles with Greed. He plays his character as magnanimous and generous in an effort to fight his Greed. In fact, due to the way he's played the character, we gave him the Virtuous trait at our last Trait Vote.I love love love Fight! and Duel of Wits. Some people don't. It's going to come down to your personal taste.Fight! makes combat incredibly interesting for non-magical characters. You always have choices to make and those choices make a real difference! I would say that the number one complaint about our combat system, and the thing I love the most about it, is that it requires a degree of player (not character) skill. There are a lot of ways to be good at combat, and having a high skill in your weapon of choice often isn't enough. Sizing up your opponents and their capabilities and changing your tactics as a result is a must.I love watching players get better at Fight! The more they play, the more savvy and tricky they become.The same, incidentally, holds true of the Duel of Wits, which works very similarly. Duels of Wits are some of the most tense and exciting moments in our games.Hope that helps!</blockquote>

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