Hello friends,
Thor and I did a video chat with Andrew and Aaron, creators of Fate of the Norns. You can check it out here.
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Nice, thanks for sharing.
That was a fun interview. Thanks. One thing that sort of came up that I’m often curious about is how much you folks experiment with your games while playing rather than playing them “straight”. Like how much is, “We’ve got these beautiful red and gold books and from them we will play our game,” vs, “We’ve got these beautiful red and gold books, and also the crazy super-conflict structure Luke’s cooked up where we play maneuvers to see if the alien worms are going to take over the planet.”
EDIT: You also might be able to use the I Am God (and similar) trait(s) as a model for that Reputations in the DoW option. A relevant 1D Reputation affords the character an additional Minor Compromise, etc. You might have that be a difference of Reputation dice that determines the level of appropriate Compromise: The King (3D) loses to his best general (2D), still gets a Minor Compromise.
You might have the Reputation difference reduce a Compromise level instead: The King (3D) beats his best general (2D), but loses half of his royal BoA in the process. He therefore owes the general a Compromise Minor Compromise.
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EDIT: You also might be able to use the I Am God (and similar) trait(s) as a model for that Reputations in the DoW option. A relevant 1D Reputation affords the character an additional Minor Compromise, etc. You might have that be a difference of Reputation dice that determines the level of appropriate Compromise: The King (3D) loses to his best general (2D), still gets a Minor Compromise.
You might have the Reputation difference reduce a Compromise level instead: The King (3D) beats his best general (2D), but loses half of his royal BoA in the process. He therefore owes the general a
CompromiseMinor Compromise.
Nice approach!
I was also thinking about something similar after watching the interview, but the only thing that had occurred to me was that the characters can add their reputation (when relevant) as advantage dice to the skill test to build their body of argument in a Duel of Wits.
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Yeah. Or even add it to their Will as a static bonus.
Or have the Reputation come into play after some tests have been made; let the Reputation dice restore your BoA the way that… The Cold trait – I think it is – does.
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We play RAW. In fact, it’s quite an important point of order at BWHQ that we play RAW since we’re often playing with one or more designers of moody dispositions. We’re so dedicated to the text that, when where have been moments when rules text feels open to interpretation, I recuse myself from the interpretation and let the players agree how they read the text. Because at that juncture, what I intended is useless. What is written is paramount. If we always went with my intent, then we’d be playing a game of “guess Luke’s mood” and that is no fun for anyone. Of course, in those moments, watching my poor writing turn a good game mechanic into bad has driven me to make many revisions over the years!
When we’re bolting on new systems, there’s always an uncomfortable moment when the mechanics are still too new and fragile to be adequately expressed as a rules document. We joke that these interstitial moments always kill a character. However, once I have a new system working and adequately expressed, I walk the playtesters through it and provide them with a rules document to reference. In practice, these playtest docs get rapidly iterated and so the crew doesn’t see them as canon, trusting me to iterate the design as necessary. Though they don’t refrain from giving full throated feedback if they run up against something they don’t like—which is usually once or twice a minute when we’re experimenting.
Once those systems are published, my group assimilates them into the RAW reference canon. Though in the case of revised rules, it can sometimes take a moment for our memory of the rules to catch up to current standards. We have multitudes of iterations in our skulls! Remember that you all have seen four major revisions, but the home crew has seen a dozen or more. Sometimes they reference rules from drafts of the game we experimented with before we published the game!
By way of example, when we were designing the systems in the Magic Burner, we played adventures and campaigns dedicated to testing the new forms of magic. We used that practice for each book that we did in the Revised era. For our ongoing campaigns, we add in new systems more slowly and in a limited capacity, so as not to destroy the feel of the campaign to date.
And as a final note, rules-as-written doesn’t cover lifepaths, skills or traits. We play Burning Wheel with a ton of custom additions to our games, as should you. These systems are meant to be endlessly expansive and customizable by anyone who cares to take a moment to sketch out new additions.
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Oh,
We make games we want to play and we play them as much as we can before releasing them. Corollary to that, we play by the rules we design, and design our rules to be used. A game cannot be experienced through reading it, and though our games often come in the form of books, they are no exception to this truism. We hope you play them.
Don’t worry.
I know.
To add to:
As someone who buys your games, I like that you guys play your games RAW; it should encourage you to make rules worth buying!
This description of process is aces. Just delightful. Thanks very much.
This is very close to what I was asking about! With all if the options in the Codex and the soon-coming Anthology, and all off the stuff that was on the wiki and old forums – a moment of silence for those fallen soldiers…
… – it seems like you all are always creating, testing, and tweaking new stuff. I’ve always felt the game was intended to be incredibly modular and customizable. Like each campaign invites burning on mechanical detail.
That was the topic: Not, “do you guys play by the rules,” but, “Do you guys often have new rules you play by in a given campaign.”
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Ah, I see. Yes, in that we add what we see as expansible while relying on the core rules to provide us all with common understanding (and fairness).
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Sick! I have this game but haven’t even cracked it open.
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I love the discussion about shipping costs of Mouse Guard and weight and density of the box.
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All the more reason the be excited for my copy of the Anthology to arrive! What with the new Lifepath Burner and all!
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Seems like the link no longer works.
Unfortunately, Twitch VODs are only saved for about 2 weeks unless the broadcaster is a Partner, in which case they’re saved for 2 months.
There’s a YouTube channel for them here, but it looks like they haven’t uploaded anything in about a month.
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