Fireside Chat with Fate of the Norns Crew

[Gnosego (Quincy)]

@luke

We play RAW

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.

@luke

We play by the rules, books in hand.

I know.

@luke

At HQ, we play all our games BW or BE as “tight”.

To add to:

@luke

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.

As someone who buys your games, I like that you guys play your games RAW; it should encourage you to make rules worth buying!

@luke

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.

This description of process is aces. Just delightful. Thanks very much.

@luke

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.

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.”