Hello everyone,
My long standing group are taking an extended break from the Pendragon Great Campaign, GMed by a friend, and I have sold them on at least trying a phase of a BE campaign. I became aware of BE by stumbling across this very forum last Christmas, which inspired me to pitch the game to our group of Burning newbies - so thanks and kudos to all here.
I GMed a very rules-light Fires Over Omac for them, and as as a ‘one-off’ game it was only a moderate success, in that the players had a lack of engagement with the situation at hand, and getting used to setting scenes and the economy led the players to over-plan and waffle, rather than get stuck in. The buzz I wanted didn’t materialise, though this stemmed from the pretty natural disorientation of being handed a pregened character and being dumped in media res.
All players however bought into playing BE in our session post-mortem, and got a sense of how the game should be played. The main hook to them was that through world-burning etc, they would have input into all the greater situaton and context, thus squishing the disorientation problem that had arisen in the demo - so as an ‘in’ to further play, Omac was invaluable.
We are a group of five, and I’ll be heading up the Vaylen side. Gamed on and off for 10+ years together over a variety of games (mainly D&D, Cthulhu, Pendragon, Shadowrun, Ars Magica, though I threw some Inspectres and DitV at them recently as BE gateway drugs). We’ll have to work on the group dynamic, in terms of listening to each other and funking-up the micro while keeping the macro always in mind, but I reckon most of that comes down to me in driving the pace and the relationship characters.
We have done a world-burning session - good stuff, though our background really came together as we aproached character-burning (especially deciding relationship characters). We’re about 70% done - finalising Beliefs and NPCs will let me attend to my GMFoNs, and then we should be good to go. We’ll be playing an Infiltration phase.
The above is just an intro in case I need to pitch a lot of queries your way in future 
I do have two specific questions though, which are :
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In interstitials mainly involving ‘my’ characters, should I always try to have a player temprarily adopt one of the protagonists ? This seems like a good idea for the dynamic and unexpected (as long as they keep to Beliefs etc), though I’ld appreciate any advice hard-won by experienced BE GMs.
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Do rolls instigated by Instincts count for skill / stat advancement ?
Apologies if these are covered in a previous thread, and thanks for your time,
John