A reflection on my Burning Wheel games

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If you’ve read my blog with any regularity, you know I’m a fan of Burning Wheel.  I love the character-driven fiction it encourages and supports:  the lifepath system generates characters with a coherent history before play, and the Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits (BITs) really drive the game forward.  They also make it a cinch to GM, at least in terms of making the story relevant to what the players want. I also love the idea of the organic character growth and development that comes out of play – the skills you use improve, the ones you don’t stagnate, and your experiences change your character in long-lasting ways via BITs.

Unfortunately, I’m not really a fan of nitty-gritty  BW rules since I find them really cumbersome in play, particularly with a larger group.  The fundamental mechanics and rules are just fine – it’s all the added systems (in BW parlance, the spokes) that don’t really work for me.  In particular, my major issues with BW are:

• The Fight! mechanics are very fiddly, crunch heavy, incredibly difficult to learn, and become very hard to manage if you enter in to a mass melee.  The bloody versus alternative, on the other hand, feels pretty random and anti-climactic.  A year after playing BW regularly, I still find myself overwhelmed trying to use the Fight! mechanics. I’ll be honest, as much as I love the idea of the Fight! system and how “real” it feels (life and death are on the line), it makes my head hurt thinking about it.  It’s also been very difficult to teach to my players – the sheer number of scripting options, the way they interact, and the number of fine, if-then type rules (e.g., you can’t script two attacks in a row, a great strike requires you to script a “set” first) are pretty overwhelming.
• Traits are way too complicated and poor organized:  They’re spread out all over the Character Burner with many having very specific effects/uses, while others are simply descriptive and thus poorly defined in what they do for you.  I think Luke Crane got it right with the way the Mouse Guard RPG uses Traits – they have a common, easily usable effect and function a bit like Aspects in FATE.
• The Artha system is awesome and at the same time requires way too much bookkeeping and regular review to use effectively – Trait votes, etc. all suck up a lot of time.  The same applies to the advancement system (which I’ve already said I love) – the “routine/difficult/challenging ratings which are tracked for individual skills is a lot of bookkeeping.  These problems are something that with only a couple PCs don’t pose a lot of difficult, but I’ve found hard with 4+ players.
• The system is incredibly flexible for doing various settings and ideas, but it’s also really labor-intensive to port to a non-traditional fantasy setting.  Creating lifepaths is a massive job, one which has almost no payoff once you move beyond the character burning session.  Creating new races is even harder if you want them to be anything but a re-skinned version of one of the races outlined in the rulebooks.  Similarly, you can’t add a new skill without figuring out all the lifepaths where that skill should be available.
• The whole nature of skills, obstacles (Obs), and FoRKs is awkward in my opinion.  For example, you have a very limited range of Obs that a PC with a ‘normal” rating in a particular skill has a decent shot of succeeding at – with an Ob 3, a character with a B5 only has a 50/50 chance of success.  While failure (especially in BW) is cool, it’s not really fun for most players to fail half the time.  In addition, the lobbying for FoRKs (which is essential to have a decent shot at success) is something my players haven’t really gotten used to nor do any of use particularly like to do it.  It feels like a lot of extra work, the result of which often a desperate attempt to give your character a chance to succeed – after which he fails half the time anyways.  I’m not saying the system is broken in any way (it actually works really well in principle), but rather the type of playstyle is requires is something that doesn’t work for my group.

I think I’ll stop there since it sounds like I’m saying that “I hate Burning Wheel’s mechanics” which isn’t true.  I think with the right group and a concerted effort to master the rules, the game is so full of awesome it’s painful to think about.  Combat is absolutely electric and borders on LARP if everyone knows what they’re doing.  Characters grow in amazing ways and often feel like they’re walking on the razor’s edge, whether they’re  fighting an orc chieftain or arguing their case before the king’s Regent.  In all fairness, the rules mastery that BW demands isn’t much different than the last couple editions of D&D or other “crunchy” games.  The learning curve with BW, however, is much steeper.

I really would need to write a full review to put my complaints into the proper context, something which I don’t have the time to do at the moment.   Instead, what I’m really driving at is that while much of the philosophy behind BW works well with my group (they love it), the actual mechanics don’t work very well at all for what we want from a game.  It’s a reflection on how the game’s rules have interacted with our playstyle and group.

Much of the difficulty I’ve experienced running BW has to do with the nature of the group:  Only one of the players is a native English speaker.  While the others all are fluent (some remarkably so), the nuanced language of Burning Wheel which is an inherent part of the game from cover to cover (i.e., skill system, FoRKs, stake setting, actions in Fight! & DoW) are way too difficult for them to parse and use in a meaningful way.   I think most native English speakers would find a lot of the esoteric language pretty hard to decipher.

For example,  Falsehood is the skill you use to lie, Soothing Platitudes is the skill used for brown-nosing and groveling… you use the Inconspicuous skill to blend in to a situation, while the Conspicuous skill is used to draw attention to yourself.  Of course this is what I think they do because they’re not defined anywhere in the actual book but instead you have to infer what they are meant to be used for.  You need a thesaurus and a dictionary to figure some of them out.

The fact that we only play 1-2 times per month also needs to be taken in to account.  If we were to play weekly, I’m sure much of the difficulty we’ve had with learning the rules would disappear.  However, with our current play schedule, what’s happened is that I have to remind everyone each session how to do certain things (especially ones that don’t come up all that frequently) which means everyone feels like their starting from zero each time.

Finally, the size of the group (4-5 players typically) also hasn’t helped because it means the complexity of the interaction between the various parts has gone way up:  A combat sequence involving all of the characters, along with say a half dozen foes, is a huge undertaking as actions can easily interact with multiple other actions, creating something that is really hard to manage. The inclusion of a sorcerer in the group (Gator for those following the Beyond the Breach AP) has made things even more complicated because magic interacts with the Fight! mechanics in very unpredictable ways at times.

Therefore, we’re going to be switching systems once Beyond the Breach wraps up (I estimate we have 2-3 sessions left – my next AP post will explain why).  However, I’m not walking entirely away from Burning Wheel – instead what I’m going to do is take what I love about it, and parts of a couple other game systems I really like (Silhouette & FATE) and create a new system that’s a hybrid.  More on that later.

Prologue:  What about Mouse Guard?

In many ways, I think Luke Crane got it right with the Mouse Guard RPG.  Many of my criticisms about the finicky nature and archaic language of BW have been removed.  Traits, no matter what they are, work in a very logical, story-driven, and uniform way.  The skill list is well-defined.  FoRKing is gone, replaced by the idea of bringing in a -wise skill to aid a roll.  All very cool and a huge improvement.

Unfortunately Mouse Guard works awesome for what it’s designed for (team-based stuff) but doesn’t work very well with larger groups – I’ve found the sweet spot for MG is 3 players.  While 4 or 5 works, the nature of how combat works is less rewarding and my ability to tailor the story to the individual PCs is much harder with more PCs.  The nature of the combat system also doesn’t work well if you want a gritty, blow-by-blow, fight.  When I tried the system with Beyond the Breach, the players found the “disposition running out” not very fulfilling when it came to feeling like their lives were on the line and that their individual actions mattered.  The issue was that the nature of the characters and story didn’t encourage the group to act as a team – they all have individual motivations – and thus combat felt wrong.

The group’s playstyle, at least for the stories we’re interested in telling at the moment, wouldn’t work well with Mouse Guard.  It’s not that we’re pure PvP;  it’s that we’re all interested in playing complex, individual characters who aren’t necessarily each other’s best friends.  In fact, this playstyle has caused problems in other of our games as well – our “super team” in another of our campaigns (the Balance of Power super-hero game I play in) is completely dysfunctional.  Similarly, 4E has a been a bit of a challenge because while the combat rules require you to work as a team, the personalities of the characters are such that they don’t necessarily get along.   As players we’re all on the same page, but when it comes to creating characters none of us really want to play in a game where “we’re all best friends and always work to help each other.”  So Mouse Guard isn’t a good choice.