Am I Doing This Wrong?

Burning Wheel Character Burner
9

I should expand upon what I’ve given you since there is a lot more than “kill the Orcs”. The Orcs didn’t actually slaughter the livestock; it was the Knight Captain. The reason being that in a skirmish in the past, when the knight captain’s son was squiring, the Orcs cursed the captain’s son with Lycanthropy. This is a ruse to motivate the kingdom into going to war with them for payback.

It goes a little deeper. The Knight Captain killed one the knights of his personal retinue because he discovered the truth and was going to take it public. The players, depending on the relationships/circles they take, could discover this and investigate.

All that is known publicly about his son’s condition is that he’s ill. Priests have tried to cure his condition in the past, but failed. Of course, there is a handsome reward for anyone who successfully cures him.

Due to his son’s condition, the Knight Captain and his son leave the city once a month. The captain actually chains his son up in an old well during the full moon to keep him from killing. Of course, rumors have sprung up around his mysterious disappearance. Some say he drowns his sorrow in small taverns around the kingdom; others think he is bedding whores to that one births a healthy, strong son. Of course, no one knows the truth.

I think I have enough here to get players interested from plenty of different angles. I guess my problem is pitching it, because I don’t want to dumb it down but I don’t want to reveal too much. The fun of this game will be picking through all the wrong information, which the players beliefs are based upon.

10

Wow. How are you going to make the players have a stake in that? All the awesome stuff is already set in stone and the coolest characters are NPCs. I think you’ve taken it too far and planning most of the campaign on red herrings doesn’t sound too fun.

Again, why are the characters going to care about the Knight Captain or his ill son? I still think you should bring it down to a smaller scope. Put it in the village. Make it the lone Knight’s son that has the illness. Encourage the PCs to either take a relationship with the Knight or his son. This will guarantee a desire to help.

The Knight can use the slaughtered livestock as a ruse to go after the Orc clan that cursed the boy. He might reveal this during the hunt. A belief might spring up that if the Orc Servant of Blood can be captured, the curse can be removed. No one knows that the curse is lycanthropy. Perhaps, take it to frakkin’ 11 and make two of the PCs the Knight and his son. How to keep it hidden from the other PCs? What happens when they find that Servant and he reveals their secret? That’s epic stuff, right there.

After the hunt, the successful party comes back to a village that’s been under siege from a horrific beast. (Or if the son is a PC, the slaying start soon after their triumphant return.) Friends or family members of the PCs have been torn apart. The town begs you to hunt it down and slay it. Instant motivation to pick up the trail and write new Beliefs. Maybe the village priest knows the answer, too.

I believe it to be a mistake to take this any larger than such a setting. Making it a kingdom-wide problem from the get-go is problematic as it seems completely overwhelming to an individual. Such a setting calls for companies and battles, politics and alliances. There’s no reason you couldn’t build up to that point, of course. But such is the stuff of years-long campaigns, which BW excels at.

Again, I think it will hurt the game if you allow players to write Beliefs about things that are untrue. Beliefs craft the story. The story doesn’t craft beliefs. If you pull the rug out from underneath the players in this fashion repeatedly, they will get frustrated and sour. I’ve seen it. It’s unfun. Keep the players empowered and be collaborative.

11

I think BW is not about the players trying to find out your secret plot. It’s a character driven game. They are the protagonist in a story that you can’t anticipate. If I were one of your players, I would expect you to tell me all this you have just said here (and talk a lot about it, so we can change anything that I don’t like it). And perhaps I would choose to play the Knight Captain, or his son, or his son’s girlfriend (or boyfriend or whatever). Because they seem to be the real protagonist in this situation.

12

There’s a reciprocity at work in Burning Wheel. The players make Beliefs about the situation and the GM makes the Situation about their Beliefs. I would suggest that the energy spent thinking up and then revealing all that awesome stuff about the Captain and his son is better spent focusing on the awesome that the players bring to the table and working to make their stories epic.

13

This thread should be read by all newbies (like me).
It’s really illuminating.

14

ideas like ‘the knight is a lycanthrope’ or his son is, etc. are fine idea coming from the GM, but in BW, we try not to front-load situations with red herrings like that. these ideas are good, and you should keep them in your repertoire as a GM for failure complications.

for example - a character (a page or soldier aspiring to be knight’s squire perhaps) makes a circles test to contact the knight. he fails miserably. as the GM, you invoke the enmity clause, yet give the character everything he wants from the knight. you’ve created an interesting situation out of a player failure, and really raised the dramatic tension. the player knows you have something up your sleeve because of his failure (the knight - his idol - is a lycanthrope), but maybe the player doesn’t know what yet. the character, though, has succeeded in making steps towards his goal.

though the story might be exactly the same as you’d imagined it if you front loaded the knight-as-lycanthrope storyline, there is a subtle difference. the player agrees to the failure consequences (in this case enmity clause) before he roles the dice, and your lycanthrope storyline is a result of that dice role, as opposed to a result of what in other games people term as GM railroading.

15

At this point I’m considering scrapping it. This was an old D&D adventure I used to run and it made sense because in that world, adventurers are few and far between. Due to the more historical-based feel of BW, I can see why any number of more competent people would pursue this before 4-lifepath characters.

So, to back up, if I just pitched the general feeling of my world and asked my players what they would like to do, is that a better starting point? I really do want my games to be more character driven, so this seems like a better way to accomplish that.

16

I really think you’ve the core of a fine campaign here, so scrapping it seems unnecessary. You just need to make it personal.

But if you are going to back up, you’ll need more than just a general feeling for the players. You need a conflict or situation to bring to the table. Nothing more than a 3-sentence elevator pitch, really. Having a setting in mind is fine, but keep the details untold. Maybe a few names on an imagined map? Long-term campaigns can be broad in scope and light in depth when starting out. Adventures spanning only a few sessions need to be much more well-defined right from the get-go. I’m going to assume you want to go for the long-term campaign.

“Hey guys, I’ve got this campaign idea. There’s this kingdom that being raided by orcs. Your village was the latest to suffer an attack. A knight wants to enlist you into his service to track them down.”

“The Dwarf Empire fell apart ages ago when the High King disappeared and his citadel was lost from memory. But now, a book appears that promises to reveal the throne’s location. Who wants to go?”

“You’re part of a new colony that’s escaping an evil land. You’ll have to make friendly with the natives, while stopping your tormentors from following you to this place of hope.”

Then the players consider this and revise it. This goes back and forth until everyone has contributed and put some sort of stake into the idea.

Let them name the village. Let them name the kingdom. Let them list all the important NPCs, especially if they work them into their starting Beliefs. Let them name the Orc clan. Let them describe the terrain around the area. Decide with them why there is conflict? Resources? Ancient Grudge? Demon commanding them? A knight covering up some terrible secret?

Here’s the golden rule, really: The players’ ideas are just as good as the GM’s. That’s why BW doesn’t have any official setting. Your ideas are just as good as Luke’s and he respects that. As a GM, you just need to supply the catalyst to get them thinking - to get you all thinking. Let them inspire you and you them. When you’re finished, the story is something you all made and have a stake in. This will guarantee interest and motivation. It’s such a sweet breath of fresh air, I tells ya.

And the time to stop brainstorming is when you’ve established that initial situation. In your case, it’s that first raid. You can keep all that other stuff in the back of your head.

17

In our current game here’s what was established before the first session.

The setting is Dark Sun, everything in the original boxed set is canon. So, established setting with tons of detail.
Were a group of dissidents out to destroy a sorcerer king.

Heres what wasn’t established: everything else.

18

Nice. When the setting is already established and well-known like Dark Sun, starting a campaign can be very quick! You can skip a LOT of the collaborative process as everyone is already in agreement. And if someone doesn’t know what Dark Sun is, stab them in the eye and find a new player!

19

Here’s the campaign pitch for the game we’re currently playing although a little background first. We’ve played 2 story arcs in this same setting which was we took a map of blackmoor and use it for convenient landforms and names of locations.

So the pitch was “You’re a peasant who recently found out you’re the bastard son of a lord who died with no legitimate issue. Congratulations you’re a lord. You have a year to figure out how to pay your taxes.”

20

In my Burning Wheel game, I originally had everything planned out, too. It’s an easy temptation for a storyteller, and every GM wants to tell a story.

On the advice of Luke and others, I ended up pretty much chopping the situation in half, leaving players to determine the direction of the story by their motivations. I had them create their own culture and work out a short-term group goal. Then I unleashed them on the situation.

The hardest part (for me) is eliciting player participation. My players mostly view themselves as uncreative or don’t like the setting-creation (or even character-creation, sometimes) process. So I established more NPCs for them to hang relationships on than I would like, and more of a detailed Situation than I likely would have with players more keen to play the Burning way. (They’re creative, they just don’t know it. I’m working on them.) So if your players need a little help, the creative balance may tilt more back towards you. But make sure it tilts only as much as is necessary.

That said, this did all start from the proposal “let’s play a game of intrigue in the world of Dune! Sound like fun?”

21

Yeah, I’m with Kublai. Don’t scrap all that thought. Make it immediate. Make it personal. Make it village / home and hearth. Pitch the situation for 3 or even 2 lifepath village characters. Throw it out there with the orc raids and lycanthropy and work with the players to develop their stake in the drama (and they MUST have a stake). If they bite and they want to riff of that initial situation then you’ve got game. Go hell for leather and create NPCs / locations / relationships together as a group. Otherwise you may just have to pare it back a little till you hook the players interest. If the group isn’t psyched to play out a situation then the game will peter out more often than not.

So if you go completely fresh, with the burgeoning excitement of creating a new setting with the players, hang on to your ideas, or the things you really liked about your old campaign world, just don’t set them in stone. Introduce them as what ifs or maybes, play off the ideas the other players bring to the table, keep those NPCs and plot hooks up your sleeve as failed roll complications or consequences or situational antagonism.

Good luck, and let us know if there are other game pitches you might like as springboards? The forum collective has a lot of really cool suggestions, just check out the AP threads!

22

We haven’t burned the characters yet, but I think this is the current state of our situation.

The players like the idea of having a month’s long festival, but they’re not too keen on the near ice-age winter. I think I can still make this work though. My idea is that the kingdom in which the festival takes place is one of the warmer areas of the world, and the ice and snow receding allows travelers from across the globe to come and participate.

They may actually try to start a guild/organization of some sort. One idea that they seem to like is to run a brewery/tavern and try and it get it recognized as the official ale of the festival. I like this idea a lot as I can threaten their supply line as their crops could be at stake, which would tie into the original adventure I had in mind. Of course, they’re also competing against other brewers, which means they need to have lots of social interaction with various members of the community getting them to carry their goods, which is a better starting point.

I also know this is just a way of gaining resources and power. If they go the tavern route, they may very well be running a thieves guild by the end of all this, which sounds like a lot of fun.

23

If the other players aren’t interested in the ice age, why are you insisting on this exception? That, in my experience, is indicative of “doing it wrong.” It’s fair for individuals to compromise in order to have a situation everyone’s bought into, but this seems like you’re blatantly ignoring their desires.

24

It’s only one player who’s specifically objected. I think it makes more sense to have 100 days of festivities and celebrations around the harvest with this kind of climate. Otherwise, why would the celebration last an entire summer? I suppose I could have my players answer this question, but that’s a pretty hard thing to explain without changing the scope of the game.

Also, I don’t think the game is going to last beyond the scope of the festival, so why is this “doing it wrong” when it’s most likely not going to impact the game in ways it would if my players were say, trekking across miles of tundra with little food or protection against the elements?

25

You said “they’re not too keen,” but if only one player objected, this is probably a fine compromise. Also, from the amount of information you posted on the first couple pages of this discussion, it seemed like you all were settling in for the long haul. If it’s only a short campaign centered on the festival, it’s likely that the bigger picture won’t heavily influence what happens during the sessions. My mistake.

26

Just pitch the idea to the players rather than deciding. Let them into this decision. They like the month long festival? Cool, say “hey. How about if you’re in a village that’s in a warming trend. The ice and snow have receded and trade is resuming…” I bet they grab onto that and run with it, suggesting details from their own imaginations, which should also be considered as a group.

27

Have you watched the TV show from 2000 called 'Lock Stock and…"? It sounds a lot like the ideas your player’s were throwing back at you, plus it lets you keep your ideas for antogonism up your sleeve. All it needs is an initial situation to kick the action off with. something the players have to act about RIGHT NOW.

A group of friends run The Lock, a pub. Each episode focuses on them attempting a different business venture and the comedy of errors that ensues The local gangland boss is normally caught up in the trouble the lads cause. All episode titles begin with “Lock, Stock… and”, followed by a title phrase to describe the content of the episode. This is a play on the title of the movie Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels - But you could easily adapt that premise to your game, with each PC belief resolution being an episode (or session).

Make sure their beleifs are plugged into this initial situation, and encourage them to take an enemy relationship and in chargen as instant antagonists, and write a belief around these relationships! Ooooh, I do like the idea of a Fantasy Pub meets Guy Ritchie vibe. So cool.

28

That’s what i just discoverded a few weeks ago after reeding a lot’s of thread (and this one) and i’m prety exited of GM’ing my first game of BW.
It is sometimes complexe to explain when new players are around the table, but when you get it, as you’ve said: it is very illuminating.

Yoan