It's insane how this game is one the best and worst games of all time all at once.
So many nice concepts and novel ways of doing things, but nothing works that well and everything is crushed beneath a gigantic pile of unnecessary byzantine rules.
Has anyone polished it and made it more streamlined and playable?
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If it's a neat idea but doesn't work, it is a bad idea.
If it's a dumb idea but works, it's a good idea.
Hmmm... not exactly. Have you tried to make a game before? Sometimes you'll have a good idea for a mechanic but it might take months for you to realize how the finer details should be for it to work smoothly.
Burning Wheel is full of these imo. Like, I'm pretty sure you can make simultaneous combat with their same style of maneuver vs maneuver but much better.
Nah, that's how it works.
Something they doesn't function is a shit idea even if the concept seems neat.
Shit doesn't work, no matter how much you give it sight tweaks. So, it's bad, needs a total redesign, and can't be considered the same idea at that point, just inspired by it. TTRPGs are full of shit mechanics that seemed neat in theory but were dog shit in practice. It also has ideas that seem moronic as hell but are great in practice (Genesys narrative dice is a good example here).
Sorry man, but I don't agree at all. Numerous times when I was designing a homebrew, an adventure, an art piece, something at work, whatever, I was struck with this spark of what seemed like a crazy good idea but at the same time I couldn't finish it and make it work right at that moment.
So I write things down and a lot of times after some more days of sitting on these ideas and processing them the solution just comes naturally to my head and they fit in great, work great, etc.
Don't agree with "just inspired by it" part too. If someone invents vanilla ice cream but ruins it with waaaay too much vanilla and 300 toppings and I go "hmmm maybe this new vanilla ice cream thing could be good if we tune it a little bit and take out all the unnecessary bits" I'm not just being inspired by it, I'm taking this thing that they invented and presenting it in a better form. The vanilla ice cream idea always had a lot of potential, it just needed to some fine tuning. This is true for sooo many other things in life that I don't know how you can argue against it.
Explain why the idea doesnt work, in detail.
>If it's a neat idea but doesn't work, it is a bad idea.
Correct.
>If it's a dumb idea but works, it's a good idea.
Wrong. skimming money off the top from the work you're doing for the cartels works, you get tons of extra money for little extra labor. You'll rarely, if ever, encounter someone who did it and found it didn't work for them.
Because most of them died begging for death, as will you, most likely.
"Does it work" is very important, necessary even. But it's not enough.
There isn't such a thing as "a good idea". Any concept can be good if you take enough time working on it to make it good. And for the same reason, any concept can be bad if undercooked.
Burning Wheel is a very interesting game, because if feels simple and complex at the same time. It also feels familiar enough and a different thing entirely. Just reading the books, its a lot of ideas.
The best thing about Burning Wheel is that it really feels like an unsolvable game.
You can find solved builds and combos and best of this and best of that for pratically any game. I haven't been able to find the same in BW. And yet, it doesn't feel like an inane "balance" where your choices don't matter because the outcome is the same.
I agree it feels incomplete somehow, but I doubt it wasn't intended: the game is like a challenge. Read it, make it work for you and your party.
>There isn't such a thing as "a good idea".
Yes there is, you're just too dumb to recognize them.
>You can find solved builds and combos and best of this and best of that for pratically any game. I haven't been able to find the same in BW.
That's always a sign that nobody plays it.
I've played it weekly for a couple years now. My favorite RPG and not as rules dense as OP makes it out to be. You are not meant to play with all the rules at once or to introduce players to everything at once. I would never call the game elegant, but it is genius design and works exactly as described if you just play it as written. One of the most unique RPGs that also has a very broad range of possible campaigns.
>not rules dense
>look inside
>500+ pages of rules
I said it wasn't as dense as OP makes it out to be. Of those pages the first 77 contain all the core rules and is all you need to actually play. Then there is a big chunk of character creation which is just lists of lifepaths followed by the lists of skills and traits. It's no rules just information. Then the last 200 pages are the optional rules which are not all meant to be used in a single campaign. It is certainly a dense game when you dig into it, but the rulebook itself gives advice on how to step up the complexity over time and advises to start with just the basic rules. I really don't think it is that much more complex than something like 5E which I always found to be an obtuse bore.
Do you use the combat rules frequently? Did people manage to learn and use it quickly?
I can only imagine it would be a nightmare to explain to my players.
No we don't use those rules often, perhaps even less often than Luke would advise. We've had 4 full Fights in my latest year long campaign. The rules are annoying to explain, but if the GM knows them they can mostly guide the players through till they get it. We have had more Duels of Wits and having plenty of experience with that made learning Fight a lot easier. I wouldn't say we use Fight "quickly" but the purpose of the full fight rules is to make a dramatic encounter which will take up more time than a single die roll so that is kind of the point. Because the system is so deadly it is hard to have fights drag too much. Of the four fights we had, two ended quite quickly in about the fourth or fifth volley and less than 30 minutes including rules questions/re-explanations. The other two lasted maybe an hour or so each or a little longer? On the scale of TTRPG combats that isn't so long.
Where the complexity can bite you is if a player doesn't fully understand how risky certain things are and how dangerous fights can be. They need to be OK making a mistake or two with some perhaps drastic consequences as they learn. A single unlucky hit can be devastating and put a chatacter out of commission for weeks or months in game time. A well armed amd armored PC can still be wrestled to the ground and subdued which can surprise players when it first happens to them.
I've read it from top to bottom, it doesn't say how to deal damage to enemies
There is an entire chapter titled "An Anatomy of Injury" which covers exactly that. You must not have very good reading comprehension.
In addition to the whole chapter on injury, there is the core resolution system. If the player's intent to is to kill the enemy and they succeed, the enemy is dead.
It's a good game. You guys just have poor comprehension and refuse to look at tables.
My thoughts exactly. I want to like this game so much but it just seems to not quite work in play. Feels off, no matter what you do.
Everytime i wanna try this i see someone say its unplayable garbage. Then i see someone say its the most innovative greatest rpg ever and the cycle repeats. No one ever really explains why. The base game seems rules lite level simple, and the add ons dont seem like they add much as far as fun factor goes. But ive heard it described that an orc can use their hatred stat modifier to chop down trees and that seems like the kind of thing im looking for. Does this game give you reason to chop down trees though.
I don't get it either. It's literally a simple dice pool system where only the number of successes matter and that's it. The more complicated elements are just referring to a table to determine difficulty.
Things that are good
>Battle of Wits is a really fun way to handle social conflict, almost no system has a better system for social situations than "roll persuade" or Hillfolk's solution of "you get what you want about 1/3 of the time".
>Wises are a great way to handle knowledge. Doesn't make sense that only one person in your party is ever consulted for specific information because they're the intmonkey. Warrior might be bladewise.
>FoRK is good! Encourages you to think about your traits
>Unabashed unbalanced races. Doesn't try to numbers game everything. It's okay to be asymmetrical.
>Method for advancement is based on actually using your skills - makes players excited to test; makes the GM think more carefully about what they'll call a roll for, no more of this "roll athletics to walk upstairs" crap.
I recommend you try out Mouseguard if you want a more legible Burning Wheel
Second poster, I wasn't implying it was bad at all. I actually like the skill system a lot, but I don't understand the complaints about it being over-complicated. GURPS is overcomplicated. Even D&D rules are less intuitive than Burning Wheel's.
>ctrl+f "battle of wits"
>0 results
>saw someone else refer to it as "duel of wits"
>0 results
So what's it actually called?
It's Duel of Wits, I haven't had the opportunity to play Burning Wheel since pre-COVID so it has been 5 years. You probably won't get a lot of results in general searching stuff from Burning Wheel though, I remember back when I was learning to play there was one (1) youtube video and it wasn't even a tutorial, just someone's gaming group. And while you can get the PDF from share sites, it's not OCR so it's a pdf but you can't ctrl+f it. Gold edition p388.
There's a full ocr of the latest version of burning wheel on t dot me slash TheAmberRoom
You liar
Ah. I had the wrong version then.
Did you try actually playing it?
Your last question is very important. Burning Wheel is in fact the kind of game where tearing down trees might matter a lot. If you are playing a campaign where orcs have moved into human or elven turf tearing up trees could have major ramifications. If your elf party member ticks you off you may tear down some trees to get back at the hippie. In Burning Wheel the players write down their priorities and goals as Beliefs and that is what rewards the Artha metacurrency you need to succeed. So pissing off your elven party member can actually get you a tangible reward. The GM's job is to challenge those Beliefs through direct obstacles or otherwise. So if your orc has a belief to chop down the stinking forest and start up a new orc camp the GM is obligated to put up some resistance. Maybe another orc clan arrives with a claim. Maybe that rival clan includes the orc from your backstory that years ago in an extremely rare (for orcs) act of kindness saved your life. What do you do?
The result of this is that campaigns can and often are very personal affairs for the characters. I've run a campaign where gods were coming back to life and sending the PCs out on quests and another campaign for just one player where he was a plumber trying to get rich by any means necessary. Really the kinds of things you will be doing and need to roll for are determined by the campaign situation and the characters' Beliefs about that situation. One of the tensest rolls I have seen in a game was in my first Burning Wheel campaign. A PC had to roll Beginner's Luck Ditch-Digging to bury the body of an abusive drunk butthole he had just murdered. Ditch-Digging is almost a comical skill to include in an RPG, but in that moment it was crucial to the character to hide the body. He failed the roll which meant he didn't get his intent, the grave was shallow and the next day's rain revealed its presence to the townsfolk and the PC was put on trial.
Players need to buy into the game and concept. If they sit around expecting to be spoon-fed everything its going to fall apart
I doubt anyone is going to try to polish Burning Wheel as it is, but I've been writing my own system which draws from Burning Wheel and pulls the bits of it I really like into a more approachable d20 Nu-SR game. Belief-driven play especially.
Some things I do think are over the top though. Counting tests taken per skill isn't something I'm excited about, and the 'plan your three actions in a fight' is something only a person who's never thrown a punch could come up with.
Counting tests is annoying at first but comes with an amazing sense of progression when you finally advance. One of my players advanced his Mace skill on his first missed attack of a big fight and it is one of his favorite RPG moments. The scripted combat isn't particularly "realistic" but it also promotes some actual strategy for the player and creates chaotic situations. It could be argued that the standard "my turn your turn" combat of RPGs really fails to capture the chaos of battle which the fight mechanics in BW provide. It is also something you really only busy out for boss fights or similar, not something you use every time a skirmish breaks out.
Simplifying BW is a bit of a pipe dream for me, but every time I think of changing something about it I feel like it loses something special.
Interesting, do share anon.
Isn't if from the dude who made Sorcerer? Good game that's awfully pretentious and painful to read through
It's also from the dude who was Kickstarter's Head of Games earning 500k+ a year until he tried to revive his ultra-SJW-who-accidentally-did-robot-rape-in-a-livestream-game friend's career by sneaking him into a KS project.
>ultra-SJW-who-accidentally-did-robot-rape-in-a-livestream-game
Let's be honest, that shit was fricking stupid even if it happened to an sjw that more than likely did it to someone else.
Adam Koebel's career could have survived it. Hell, it wouldn't have happened in the first place if he had followed his own (largely good) GM advice and you, know, just not done that creepy shit, grinning and chuckling and going on and on with it as the players all stared at him in obvious horror. I mean, what the frick?
Even then, if he had apologized sincerely right away he might have been fine. But no, it took the butthole nearly a week to post a snotty "I'm sorry you can't handle how awesome I am" non-apology, and then other people who knew him started to say "yeah, you know what? H's always been kind of an butthole, with a real bad habit of crossing other people's boundaries" and at that point people just said "nah, frick him."
(And frick him for betraying Steven and Neil, those guys are sweet and lovable, and far better DMs)
To be fair, the player in question was playing an android, and played up that they wanted to explore being in a world that viewed them as a machine, while perceiving the self as a person. In that context, the action made sense, particularly as it was hardly sexual - it was the robot being put in a state of elated helplessness without their will. Had Koebel not called it an 'orgasm switch' he would have probably been fine, and any semi-reasonable player wouldn't have considered it in any way sexual.
But this is why you don't play with people who believe the greatest value one can bring to the world is seeking reason to be offended.
>it was hardly sexual
I did not get that impression at all, and neither did any of the folks playing it, and Koebel's defense on the spot of "hey, robots need lovin' too" kinda shoots your argument full of holes. The "joke" of the whole scene was that the mechanic was one of them robosexuals who was basically molesting the robot dude that he was repairing. It was a poor joke, and a good DM would have noticed the looks on everybody's faces and dropped it, and instead he kept on pushing it on them because he's an utter douche.
Your last line sounds like Koebel's self-pitying bullshit, are you sure you're not him?
I`m making an improved version bro, don`t worry. Just wait like a full year because I sleep one day a week and my brain only functions after I sleep
Cant you shorten a couple months tho?
I'll see what I can do for you bub, but I can't promise anything
Hopefully we can find you then.
If you stopped spamming about your homebrew in every single thread and instead went on to finish it, you would already have a finished product by now.
This.
>inb4 we dont hear about him anymore
>inb4 we forget about his existence
>inb4 we miss when he posts