A year and a half ago I ran a short three session campaign of Burning Wheel set in the 1000s in England. It was a blast. We mostly used the first 74 pages of rules and used Bloody Versus for combat. I had two players, and one of them had a small crew that were following them on their ship.
I’m just now getting back into Burning Wheel (I think about it quite regularly) and I remember having one question. I very easily see how a simple opposed test or the bloody versus rules can be used for a duel. But in a group combat situation where you have let’s say three individuals versus three individuals. If you want to allow loose fighting where two of them might gang up another, how do you manage that? I’m rusty on the rules but I remember it being a question of mine.
I’m not too interested in Fight!. Yet I’ve seen a few reports of people playing classical fantasy dungeon-crawling campaigns and I really scratch my head at how you’d handle typical encounters with Burning Wheel.
Sorry, but I’m expecting a lot of those campaigns are using Fight which handles this pretty well.
That said, the most straightfoward way is to have each person on each side go up against one counterpart. No one else can help because they’re busy fighting. In the case of Bloody Versus, you may have follow-up “rounds” where neither side hit and so another roll is required; in this case, any who HAD dispatched their opponents can jump in to help.
Or, you might handle it with one person from each side testing for their side and everyone else helping. The results apply to all losers.
The way my group has always handled group fights using BV is “one player rolls and the rest helps”. To be honest, I don’t even know how I would interpret the results doing parallel 1v1 in Bloody Versus. I guess it would be like Quincy said above: when one character defeats their opponent, they can move to help an ally.
I think your suggestions work well for a smaller group. Like let’s say three adventurers fighting a handful of goblins in a dungeon.
I’ve been toying with the rules since my first post and I’m now leaning towards using linked tests extensively.
My setting is early 11th century England. So imagine a warband of a dozen Danes fighting a similar amount of Saxon levies. I can’t see myself doing bloody versus and helping for each of them. Command and Tactics are suggestions in the Anthology to resolve such situation. But I’m thinking maybe using such skills as linked tests to give advantage and disadvantage to another skill test for the actual battle.
I’m thinking of keeping the Bloody Versus for duels amidst the battles. But now I’m looking at how to resolve just general fighting. A command roll to see how your troops fare against the other troop is fine. But it doesn’t convey your own glory from fighting and felling a few enemies.
In my last stint, I had two players. One of them was a Dane warrior, with a few men with him and his own ship. He was actually kind of independently, weaving his way between the Saxons and Danes.
The other player was some kind of Saxon peddler that found a symbiotic relationship with the first player, he helped him by speaking the Saxon language, negociating, knowing the christian ways, etc. In exchange he was able to travel around a lot and securely.
The example that comes to mind. In the first session, they were trying to recover lost goods that were thrown overboard by merchant trying to escaping assailants. They located the goods having floated to a nearby island. Once they got there, a group of Britons (like around eight men) had put them in their own ships. A battle ensued. I ackwardly used some Bloody Versus to rule that.
The two players, their few guys, versus the eight britons.
It’s been a while, so I don’t recall all the rulings I made. But I basically ran two bloody versus, once for each player as they battled once guy each. I purposefully made the number of fighters equal on each side. Then I quickly ran a few bloody versus on the side to grossly determine which side was winning. It worked. But I immediately realized how limited it was, and how I had no answer to what would happen if my player was fighting two enemies. Or what to do if I had a 15v15.
My suggestions is to see where/how the PCs can make a difference and go from there. Can their commanding presence turn the tide? Command test? Do they still need to face another obstacle? Go from there.