How is the GM intended to interact with the game?

Magistrate, I believe that would be a Linked Test. I liked Linked Tests! But remember, before your player picks up dice to make a roll, they need to declare Intent and Task - and they have to be reasonable relative to what the character knows/would do.

So before the player character is aware of the assassin - even if the player is aware of the assassin - is, I believe, an inappropriate time to kick off a linked test.

But, at the point at which the assassin kicks in the door, poisoned dagger held menacingly in hand, the player can declare an intent and task that can be resolved by a linked test. Here’s some possibilities:

A)
The Intent is “I want to keep Roger from getting hit by the dagger! I shove him below the table”
Could be resolved by a single test to shove Roger down below the table, or more complicated,
B)
The intent is “I want to protect Roger! I kick his chair out from under him and throw my mug at the assassin to distract him”
Could be resolved by a linked test, first Power to kick out the chair and then maybe Thrown Weapon to aim the mug right. At the end of the linked test you know the cumulative result of your efforts to keep Roger from getting stuck with the wrong end of the dagger.
C)
The intent is “I nee to get Roger out of this tavern and to safety! First I need to slow down the Assassin, then I need to get him out of the tavern, then I need to find a place to hide.”
Could be resolved by a linked test, first maybe Thrown Weapon again to toss a mug in the Assassin’s face, then Speed (perhaps at a penalty if Roger is slow), then Inconspicuous or whatever is appropriate.

I think that Linked Tests are a great way for player and GM to collaborate on the direction the story takes. At first pass, we’ve got a relatively static situation. It’s do or die right here in the tavern. Will Roger take a poisoned dagger to the chest right now or will he not? But the player could take that scenario and turn it into a chase scene, or an all-out tavern brawl, depending on how they declare their Intent and Task. Roger could end up poisoned either way. The narration after the fact, if you go the escape route but fail in the end, could be that Roger takes a hit from the poisoned dagger on the way out, but you end up escaping anyways, and now you’re trying to find a way to heal the poisoned wound while the assassin is still at large… Or maybe you get away scott free, but end up in bigger trouble because you flee headlong into a vicious gang’s territory…

Generally, it’s fine. The problem here is failing to detect the assassin means you’re surprised when an undetected assassin suddenly appears. Classic time for a steel test to see how long you hesitate.

Now, let’s say you detect the assassin instead. You might roll assassin-wise to try to figure out where the attack will likely come from, so you’re in position. That’s a great linked test.

So to put it another way (sorry for joining late), we could say …

OTHER GAMES
GM: Okay guys, roll Notice/Perception/Whatever.
Players: Natural 2 / one success / 11%
GM: Too bad … a dagger flies across the room and plugs your wife. She dies. You’re all surprised and can’t act.
Players: Oh no! Our wife!

BURNING WHEEL
GM: Okay guys, this is all happening off-camera, so you’re not aware of it yet … but as we speak, an assassin is getting into position to plug your wife with a dagger. What are you doing when it all goes down?
Players: I’m looking for a song on iTunes / I’m getting a glass of milk / I’m in the bathroom [accompanied by lots of nervous shifting in chairs and compulsive snacking, like when you’re watching a movie and you know the killer’s behind the door but the dumb cheerleader doesn’t and no matter how loud you yell at the screen you know she’s going to open it anyway]
GM: Okay, roll Notice/Perception/Whatever. Jimmy, +2 to your roll because the assassin’s hiding in the fridge.
Players: Natural 2 / one success / 11%
GM: Too bad … Jimmy, where were you on that?
Jimmy: I dunno, boss.
GM: Lenny, +2 to react, since the computer you’re on is facing the kitchen and you’re between the assassin and your wife.
Lenny: Natural 100% successes!!
GM: Sweet! You jump in front of the dagger. It stings, but you take it like a man.
Players: Yay! We saved our wife!

Would this be on the mark?

Not really. The game doesn’t require you to setup your own disadvantage like that. You don’t usually decide what you’re doing after the GM tells you what’s at stake. You say what you’re attempting and the GM tells you what the risk is if you fail and you decide if the risk is worth it and how hard you’re going to push.

Erm, I’d say no.

The basics of resolution in BW are…

Intent & Task
When you roll the dice, you both state an action and what you hope to accomplish. The point of this is to make sure your action is actually bringing you closer to what you wanted to accomplish, not what the other players think you may have wanted (this is IIEE in old Forge terms, if that helps). In Burning Wheel, both fictional positioning and the limitations of your abilities are an important part of the story’s structure, so the GM and the group as a whole also make sure that fictional cause-and-effect you suggest makes sense. No “I roll Sword to climb up the wizard’s tower… with my sword.”

Consequences on every roll (I don’t remember whether the book has a pithy name for this)
Before we make a roll, we communicate about what it actually means when that test succeeds or fails. So you’re not surprised when failing Persuasion means the king kicks you out of court for being an annoying fool, for instance. The other reason to do this is to make sure that there are some consequences to failing a roll. As the GM, you don’t necessarily need to use each and every roll to dig the pit deeper and deeper for the PCs – indeed, often it’s good to let them get part of their intent anyway, at a cost! – but the actions they undertake should involve real risk and consequence. “Nothing happens” isn’t a good use of the mechanics (it’ll come up a bit in extended conflicts, but the single tests really shouldn’t work this way).

Let It Ride
The point of this rule is to make the success & failure consequences actually stick. The GM can’t keep asking for the same test until you fail. Ditto you can’t keep retrying the same thing over and over again until you succeed. It’s part of the “every roll matters” concept.

So, okay, what about all this noticing-things business? The BW books follow the general modern-day trend of treating “You don’t know anything! Be confused and unable to interact with whatever the thing is while I roll dice behind my screen!” as unproductive and uninteresting. The way the other mechanics work – everyone rolling in the open, clear communication about what rolls are for and what the outcomes are – makes it nonsensical to do the “Roll to see if I tell you what’s going on!” thing. “Roll to see if you notice” is still viable.

Okay, just to focus this example down a bit. Let’s use Lenny, the wife and the assassin. Burning Wheel three ways:

GM: Lenny, what is your character doing?
Lenny: I’m looking for a song on iTunes.
GM: Okay, roll your Observation versus my assassin’s Stealthy plus an advantage die because you’re staring into a bright screen with music playing. If you succeed, you notice a figure glide by the doorway in time to act. If you fail, you’ll find your wife’s body lying on the bed with a dagger in her eye.

  1. GM: Lenny, as you walk into your the apartment an assassin is outside getting into position to plug your wife with a dagger. Make an Observation v Stealthy roll, failure will mean that you’ll notice her dead body at some point in the evening. You can tell us when.

GM: Lenny, what is your character doing?
Lenny: I’m looking for a song on iTunes.
GM: Okay, later that night you go to bed and find your wife’s body with a dagger stuck in her eye. What do you do?

Or, you can set it up differently for a different Test:

2.a. GM: Lenny, as you walk into the apartment you see an assassin dangling on a rope outside the window. You wife turns to greet you just as the killer pulls back his arm and you see a the glint of steel as he throws the dagger at her. What do you do?
Lenny: Can I knock her aside?
GM: You’re too far away, but you could jump in front of the blade. It would be a Speed test v. his B4 Throwing.

“Failure Complicates the Matter (Page 31).”

Observation is a tricky one. You’ve got to get the player to describe the character observing actively for a threat.

GM: There is something or someone in your house that shouldn’t be there. How would you go about finding out about this?
Player: I’d be keeping alert, I’d survey each room starting with where I think my wife would be.
GM: That sounds like Observation, this is versus test against my guy’s B4 stealthy! And if you fail your wife will find him first.

Some players are a little more skeptical about this approach, they want to know what’s triggered them to action. In this case I invent some kind of suspicion raiser. (It requires some buy in from the player playing the assassin if it’s not you. But if there’s conflict between players like that you’ve got to handle it through rolls using task and intent like the book says.)

GM: There is something or someone in your house that shouldn’t be there. How would you go about finding out about this?
Player: How do I know about this? I don’t have an observant instinct or anything.
GM: You notice that one of the windows in the house has no condensation on it.
Player: I call out to warn my wife!
GM: What are you trying to achieve?
Player: She’ll be alert to danger.
GM: So will the intruder.
Player: Okay, maybe not, if it is a dangerous person, they’re probably more than a match for her… I’ll search the rooms.

It’s also worth noting that you’d rarely have everyone roll the same thing. If you’re trying to catch an assassin, it’s likely that only one player rolls Observation (though others might provide helping dice, as they’re also observing in the fiction). And if the observation fails, it’s reasonable to have the consequence be a death.

There are also times with no roll. Sometimes that’s Say Yes, but sometimes that’s “there’s nothing to roll anyway.” If the player decides to call out to warn his wife, it’s absurd to roll for his shouting or his wife’s hearing. But that also opens the door to the GM moving things forwards as well. Maybe his wife can hide. Maybe the assassin knows he’s been spotted and stabs her immediately. The point is, the player has taken action, so now the GM can as well.

Extending the Say Yes, however, if the player wants to call out a warning so that his wife can protect herself, there’s an intent (protection) and a task (shouting). The task can’t be rolled. The GM can Say Yes, and the wife is saved, or… well, you can say no, but I wouldn’t. If you’ve set up an opportunity to call out a warning, let it be called out, or make it clear that the intent was invalid (for example, the character notices the signs of an assassin too late; by the time he got home his wife was already dead).

Ultimately I think BW is less rigid, and more flexible, than this thread is making it seem. There’s room to play multiple ways even within the general best practices of BWHQ.

I gave four possible examples. How flexible do I need to be? :wink:

Six examples, and they’d better each include full-color diagrams. Flowcharts are highly recommended as well.

Yes!! Flowcharts!!

Okay, I think I may have misrepresented what I was trying to say earlier, but this:

… sums it up nicely. The characters may not have a clue, but it’s in the better interests of the story if the players do. It’s almost giving them the ability to “script out” the scene before it happens—“wouldn’t it be cooler if X went down while we were Y instead of Z?” So you deliberately set yourself up for Y, because there’s a greater dramatic opportunity in making that choice than in simply “showing up” and letting the dice fall. I’m talking not talking about “setting up your own disadvantage,” I’m talking about staging.

That’s something you’re bringing to BW from outside. It’s cool if you want to do that, but BW relies on task and intent pretty heavily, rather than players taking hold of the narrative. There are a lot of other games that do that much better. Fate comes to mind as a game where players can suggest directions for the overall narrative pretty easily.

Yeah, framing scenes is generally the GM’s prerogative in BW, not the players’. Though the GM could quite reasonably go “So, it’s later that same evening, what do you do?”

To me, BW is:

  • A “trad” game where characters’ motivations are always in the spotlight, there’s no filler stuff during a session, and illusionism is considered downright obscene.
  • An “indie” game that puts hard constraints on fictional statements based on the characters’ actual talents and tools, so you can’t just wave a problem away through some kind of ambiguous narrative force.
    Like, both of those together, at once.

That’s what informs how I GM and what I expect from a GM.

That’s a helpful way of thinking about it Alex.

At this point, as the OP I feel like my initial questions have been answered, although if people want to keep discussing this I’m not going to complain. The answer seems to be that BW doesn’t define this, and we’ve seen a fair number of different viewpoints on what techniques the GM is meant to use to challenge the PC’s BITs, how he or she is meant to interact with the fiction.*

So my follow up question is “why?”. Presumably Luke Crane and others have a particular way that they play. Is the reason that they have not defined it in the rules because they don’t think that’s the important part - they consider BW to be anything that has BITs and the goals of telling stories through challenging them (and all the other things I’m missing out here) plus the extensive fictional constraints of the mechanics of the skills etc.

Or is it because they have a strong view on this but have chosen not to communicate it through the rules for e.g. brevity reasons, or because they are not sure how to?

Or is it because they have a strong view, but that was communicated in earlier books than the Gold Edition and by now there is a cultural expectation of play-style and so explicit rules aren’t needed?

Either way, I can go and play BW, but I’d feel a lot more confident, and I feel the game would be a lot easier to get the hang of, if this stuff was explicitly stated.

  • If I have misunderstood, and one of you feels like the viewpoint you put forwards was the “official” way to play, as defined by the rules, please correct me on this point.

I don’t know the game that well, but I’m gonna take a stab at a couple of these points … mostly to help myself understand it better …

This seems most likely, because …

Or is it because they have a strong view on this but have chosen not to communicate it through the rules for e.g. brevity reasons, or because they are not sure how to?

… if they had a strong view, then brevity would be a non-issue. They’d take as many pages as they need to explain it thoroughly, because it IS important to the game. Likewise, insecurity about how to explain it would be a non-issue—they wouldn’t publish the book until they’d found a way, or even several different ways.

Or is it because they have a strong view, but that was communicated in earlier books than the Gold Edition and by now there is a cultural expectation of play-style and so explicit rules aren’t needed?

… but this would alienate new adopters to the game, who haven’t read the previous editions. Each new edition of any game needs to be able to stand on its own, or it isn’t marketable. They’re still trying to make money here, after all.

Either way, I can go and play BW, but I’d feel a lot more confident, and I feel the game would be a lot easier to get the hang of, if this stuff was explicitly stated.

Going back to the first part, I think they HAVE defined the rules—to wit, the BIT system and how it challenges players. This seems to be BW’s allegory to the d20 Mechanic or Savage World’s FFF principle* or Paranoia’s “ignorance and fear”. It’s the game’s fundamental mechanic—if something doesn’t relate to BITs, it’s just commentary. As long as you can structure all your game-mastering decisions around the BIT principle, then no matter how many “rules” you break, you can’t play the game wrong.

(Interestingly enough, the d20 Mechanic is the only fundamental I can think of that actually hinges on die rolls. All the other games work on some storytelling or entertainment concept.)

Again, I don’t know BW that well. But I know gaming in the general sense, and this seems to be the thrust that sets BW apart from other games. So I would say, just do what makes sense to you, and do your best to relate everything to BITs. You’re the GM, after all. The book is a guideline; YOU make the rules.

  • FFF stands for “Fast! Furious! Fun!” All the rules and storytelling techniques in Savage Worlds are designed to push these tenets—so keep the action moving, roll the greatest amount of dice with the least amount of math, NEVER stop to check a rulebook, do lots of 'splosions, and break the rules as much as you need to to keep everyone engaged. If your game’s not FFF, you’re playing it wrong.

There are definitely wrong ways to play BW. Not ways that are wrongfun, but ways that will probably lead to less fun at your table because you’re not getting all you can out of the game. BW the book, and the forums, and the wiki are all full of good advice about how not to play that way.

Beyond that, there are lots of good ways to play. It depends on your tastes and your table. Some players prefer to take more agency and have more narrative control. That’s great! You can let players frame scenes if you like. They can get a lot of mileage out of using wises to create knowledge! Have BITs that define important parts of the world, and yes, worldbuilding should be very collaborative!

But if you’ve got a more traditional table, especially one new to BW, that can be scary. And even for veterans that’s not everyone’s preference. If your players prefer the top-down approach, it works great! Wises are used to ask GM questions, knowledge and facts are created by the GM and found through wises, and worldbuilding is essentially done by the GM and maybe approved or tweaked by players.

And so on. There are lots of sliders you can alter and still be playing good, BWHQ-approved BW.

Okay, just so I’m clear, the original question was:

So, when you say why, you mean why doesn’t text tell you if NPCs initiate their own actions? Because the examples after that were all about one NPC trying to kill another NPC, which is a rare edge case. The book is pretty clear that NPCs initiate actions in general.

The Role of the GM is to challenge and engage the players and get across the GM’s vision or theme.

More than any other player, the GM controls the flow and pacing of the game. His perspective grants him the power to hold off on one action, while another player moves forward so that that two pieces intersect dramatically at the table…He has the power to begin and end scenes, to present challenges and instigate conflicts.

I do think the book assumes that the reader has a pretty good idea what a GM generally does in RPGs, and it’s much of it is a reaction to those general practices. I book doesn’t dwell on GM proactiveness much, probably because when the game was first written the question of how proactive a GM should be would have been a strange one. GMs were assumed to be in total charge of the narrative in most roleplaying games. That was kind of the default assumption.

My question was less about specifically whether NPCs initiate their own actions, and more about how the GM in general interacts with the fiction. The example I chose was just one kind of thing to ask about - I didn’t really expect us to spin out into talking about the assassin so much.

Nevertheless, I guess that makes sense - you are saying that the reason that BW reads like a trad game text and doesn’t define a lot of this is because the BW is/was a trad game text, and just assumed all of this stuff. Since then roleplaying games have moved on and people do lots of things with BW (like players framing scenes, etc.) that the original author wouldn’t have thought of at the time - and that’s okay, and we can all enjoy using newer techniques with the game. Is that a reasonable summary of what you’ve just said James?