Because I’ve yet to see one that worked.
Because Burning Wheel is about living in a hard world in hard times with hard people. If you want to succeed, you have to commit all of your resources.
Six just made sense for the world. It’s not perfect, but six core stats gives the character a nice broad base of functionality and lets lots of skills grow organically from there. Three stat systems suck. Sorry Mouse Guard and Torchbearer! Given how frequently you test in BW, three core stats would advance too quickly. More than six core stats just becomes unwieldy.
20 dice is both too big of a conceptual range and too many dice to corral in one hand.
Two reasons: It gives BW a stealthy objective reality about what’s really scary. And we all think we are way more brave than we actually are. We all think we won’t shit our pants during that initial artillery bombardment, but most of us soil our undergarments. We all think we’d never surrender, but most of us surrender. Even Sir DeCoucy surrendered in the end.
Martial philosophies are nice until you’re fighting for your life against someone who doesn’t fight like you do. Real fighting is complete chaos and terror (unless you’re a psychopath, then it’s simply chaos). I wanted to nuke the myth of heroic fighting and reduce all fights into a world of unknowns. It’s telling that this system is universally reviled. Most people who love the game won’t touch the fighting system. Oh well!
No. We play by the rules, books in hand.
Because math is hard and that system is too simplistic and gameable and it’d reduce everyone to a formula. Those individual lifepaths with their little quirks are exciting. It’s fun to stroll down those paths and discover things you never knew about your character.
I wanted to create a game that reinforced the best of how we play at our table. I wanted a game that rewarded the stuff we liked and dropped the rest.
I would like to see folks dive in deep into Burning Wheel Gold and really play the hell out of it.
My house setting. We posted some lifepaths from it a few years ago. We’ve played a bunch of good games, there. And our Death of the Fire God campaign world was really fun. Mayuran’s Earthsea setting was great. We usually make up a setting for a campaign and play. I liked our Norman Sicily game a lot. But Rich and Thor were too delicate to live in that world of constant compromise and brutal combat!
I’ve long contested that your homebrew settings are better than anything I could ever give you. I’m only interested in settings if I really have something to say about the world and how it works. If you want reading material, there are a billion other setting books you can buy and flip through.
Um.
I like RPGs.
A lot.
A lot of RPGs a lot. Not like John Harper a lot. But maybe more than most.
AD&D
WEG Star Wars
Paranoia 1st Ed
Shadow Run 1st Ed
Pendragon
Basic D&D
Twilight 2000
Time Lords
Marvel Superheroes
With Great Power…
Dogs in the Vineyard
Apocalypse World
My Life with Master
Sorcerer
Inspectres
Lacuna
Kagematsu
Serial
I dunno. Stuff. I like well-designed games. Or I like poorly designed games that I can pull apart and tinker with. But mostly just well-designed games.