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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9079604" data-attributes="member: 42582">I went back to pages 10-11 of Burning Wheel Gold (2011), under the heading "The Flow of the Game", and lo-and-behold what did I find:Burning Wheel is best played sitting around a table with your friends - face to face. It is inherently a social game. The players interact with one another to come to decisions and have the characters undertake actions. One of you takes on the role of the game master. The GM is responsible for challenging the players. He also plays the roles of all of characters not taken on by other players; he guides the pacing of the events of the story; and he arbitrates rules calls and interpretations so that play progresses smoothly. Everyone else plays a protagonist in the story. Even if the players decide to take on the roles of destitute wastrels, no matter how unsavory their exploits, they are the focus of the story. The GM presents the players with problems based on the players’ priorities. The players use their characters’ abilities to overcome these obstacles. To do this, dice are rolled and the results are interpreted using the rules presented in this book. The first paragraph is not especially distinctive of BW. It would not be out of place in any RPG rulebook. (Though it is also perhaps a bit dated, given the contemporary prevalence of video-conferencing.)The second paragraph is where we see something more distinctive - not the stuff about playing NPCs, pacing and rules interpretation, which again are reasonably generic (though there is some RPGing, like some dungeon-crawling, where pacing is not a relevant notion), but the bit about challenging the players.This is fleshed out in the third paragraph. That the PCs are main characters in the events of play is not that remarkable; nor that the players use their PCs' abilities to overcome obstacles. These remarks would be perfectly fine in RuneQuest, 30+ years earlier then when they were published by Luke Crane.But we see, in this third paragraph, how the GM is to challenge the players: by presenting them with problems based on their priorities. This is fundamental to Burning Wheel. It is non-neutral GMing. All the rest of the game is built on this foundation.If a GM who thinks of themselves as running a sandbox is doing this - that is, is challenging the players by presenting them with problems based on the players' priorities - then whether or not they know it, they are probably playing in a manner that those of us who care about the term would label "narrativist". But my impression is that most self-proclaimed sandbox RPGers are not doing this, and rather are adopting a "GM as neutral arbiter" approach, in which the challenges the players confront are constructed out of the GM's setting elements, worked out primarily in accordance with the GM's priorities (which include the GM's views about what would logically happen next).</blockquote>

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