I’m about to turn the Rime of the Frostmaiden D&D campaign into a Burning Wheel one, and thus heavily modifying the style of play. The setting inspired me and I need more BW as a GM.
Even though, as this is going to have more monsters than my other campaign in Harn (turned towards political intrigues), I was wondering how do you, experienced players, run boss fights. Do you turn straight to Fight! rules, or do you “break” the fight into scenes ? I haven’t found a proper answer on the forum but could be missing something.
For instance, there is this honey-maker using “vulture bees” inside a troll to have infinite honey (as the bees consume the troll, they produce honey, he regenerates, and the process goes all over again). The bees and troll are now one single entity with a couple of cool moves to use during a fight. I am not sure how to handle that as I would like it to be more memorable for the players to have something more than just a Bloody Versus.
Other than typical frenzy attacks, if you cut a limb or an arm or whatever organ of the troll, then there’s a swarm of bees attacking. Or the troll can secrete sticky honey and throw it to the attackers to slow them down, stick their arm on a wall or whatever feels cool in the moment.
I totally use a Fight!. Maybe a Range and Cover, depending on the conflict. I love the extended conflict system; if I don’t get at least one conflict in a session… The session has some work to do to make it up to me.
When the troll takes a Light Wound or greater, a swarm of bees flies from the wound to harass a PC, inflicting +1Ob on them.
You might jazz the bees up some by having each swarm be, like, a monster in its own right to engage the players; it can be good to even the teams some.
The troll can spend two actions in a Fight! to secrete the honey, which acts as a thrown weapon, but acts as a Lock instead of inflicting wounds 1, 2, or 3D Lock depending on a DoF.
I would do some work to set up Fight!s with this guy in interesting contexts. In D&D, you can kind of just walk into a baddy’s lair and roll initiative and expect combat to take over the session. I find BW works better in dynamic situations. Combats – even full on Fight!s – occupy less space in a chunk of session time, so it’s often wise to have other stuff going on.
You confirm what I suspected, thanks a lot for taking the time to answer
And yes, the reason why I’ve been kind of obsessed by BW is because of all that other stuff going on. Just prepping the campaign is very different - “Don’t prep plots” as the Alexandrian would say. I haven’t planned anything other than landmarks and a couple of NPCs, we’ll see how it goes after the session 0, which I intend to run as a mini game (namely, “Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Night Of This Cold Winter”).
Overall, I think i’m just afraid of drawing the full Fight! rules. I’ve used DoW a couple of times, it went quite well but I need to insist a bit more on the roleplaying part of each chosen action. I guess that Fight! isn’t that different.
It’s good stuff! Please let us here at the forums knkw how the game goes!
Fights are so good! They’re so fun! If you want to ease into it, I’d be happy to run some demo brawls for ya!
Man I honestly cringe almost everytime I see people talking about “prepping plots” online. Like, if you have a plot that will withstand the players’ actions… What does that say about what those actions are worth?
/Rant
Sorry, anyway. Do Not Let Us Die[…] looks fun, I hope y’all enjoy it!
