Say you’re in a situation where you suddenly find yourself in need of a whole bunch of kit, as will sometimes happen when you move into a new life role.
For instance, you’re sorta-suddenly in need of a rouncey (Ob 4), a decent sword or axe or mace (Ob 3), and some mail and a suitable helm (also Ob 3).
Seems like rolling Resources a bunch in order wouldn’t really be the Burning Wheel way. Is it better to just combine these disparate things into 1-2 tests, kinda like with the “Buying in Bulk” rule?
I think that with that it would probably be just an ob4 test, or maybe a 5 for all of them. Because it says somewhere that the difference between buying 1 sword and 10 swords is a ob 3 -> ob 4. So I think the ob 4, would sort of just dominate the difficulty of the test.
I guess it depends on your campaign, but in BW each of those things is supposed to be a valuable, hard to find item. Tossing it all into one test could nuke the Resources obstacle system.
Is it an issue of test-shopping (“I could roll these three Ob 3 tests or I could wrangle them into this one Ob 5 test”)? Making artha and calls-on more powerful by consolidating rolls, advancing Resources easier, choosing combinations that give you more favorable failure results on tax dice? Yeah, I can see that…
So what should I do instead? Space a couple of Resources tests out over the course of a session, I suppose?
It does indeed depend on your campaign. As a GM, if the goal is simply to gear up and move on, I wouldn’t have you roll. You’d just have the stuff at Ye Olde Kmart.
Burning Wheel is written such that walking around looking for a Sword is sort of like going into a grocery store and asking if anyone wants to sell you a machine gun. There’s something significant there and a possible opportunity to create conflict if its appropriate for the campaign.