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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Fezziwig" data-source="post: 9118538" data-attributes="member: 59">A few thoughts:(1) I think this has come up before, but it's worth noting that Burning Wheel is exceedingly bad at map-and-key-style, old-school dungeon crawling.  To the point where drawing detailed maps of locations is certainly a bad use of whatever prep the GM does.  As GM, you might have ideas about what a site looks like broadly, but you probably don't have a detailed map showing every garderobe.  (And it would probably be a waste of your time if you did create that map.)(2a) The difference between "I look for a pile of gold under a tree" and "I want to use my [Architecture skill] to find a secret entrance" is kind of significant in a Burning Wheel idiom.  The latter says something about the character (I'm an architect and know how this castle was built) and is a direct response to the situation at hand (which should be responsive to the character's beliefs).  To return to my first thought, if you're not working in a map-and-key idiom (to be clear, I love old-school map-and-key play as much as I love Burning Wheel), this is how you introduce secret doors, secret passages, etc. into play.(2b) Now, it's possible that someone could run a game where the former both reveals character and is responsive to a situation (and a player could create a character, Harold the Excessively Hopeful Pirate, that has the instinct "Always search under trees for piles of gold" in order to avoid a situation where he misses out on a pile of gold buried under a tree), but I think the derision that I'm sensing in your post is suggestive of how often that comes up.  In most cases, it's not appropriate for the fiction and to make that statement is as responsive to the game as having players cause fights at taverns in a D&D game.  At best, it's a momentarily amusing diversion, at worst it's disruptive.  There are other ways for BW characters to make money that fit with the intended play style, and there are other ways for D&D characters to get into fights that fit with the intended play styles.(3) Unless your characters have a fixation on secret doors or your game is, in part, about stealthy infiltration, "I look for a secret door" should not be a regular intent statement (intent because this only tells us what the character wants, but nothing about how the character achieves it).</blockquote>

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