How many players are in your game? How does it work out?
Right now my group has six players, and we’ve had a few five player sessions. With more players it seems like there’s lots more opportunities for help dice to come out, hitting larger die pools, which is a great boon in conflicts.
But since grind ticks away every four turns, unless there is a conflict, you may not get to directly act each phase, and therefore have trouble accumulating checks.
However, since everyone sticks together and the system really encourages helping, I don’t feel that there’s a screen-time problem, the way that games like Apocalypse World tend to get even at five players.
How about your games? Do you have any tales of many players or few players? What’s your preferred player range?
We played a nice long and quite terrifying session with four players on Sunday. We started Fresh and full of gear and ended on a cliff-hanger note, backed against the wall with many conditions.
I think 3-5 is optimal. I think 2 and 6 are the upper and lower limits. I think at 7 you’re playing some other game and at 1 you’re playing Burning Wheel.
I´m playing with 5 players, sometimes (more often than not) 4.
Three of them are going back to their hometowns for summer vacation and I´m prepparing a dungeon for the remaining two (that will start with new characters).
I’ve played with 1 player for a few sessions and then with 3 players for a couple. I’ve posted about my single player sessions before, and it works pretty well. I wouldn’t say it’s just Burning Wheel, you still have the Grind, Equipment, and Light rules to contend with. I can’t even say that I preferred the 3 player sessions, I think the system works pretty well for both group sizes.
2 players; it was pretty brutal, though the GM eased up on us a bit to compensate. Very, very tight, though–we had an awesome dynamic between the two of us. Adventuring buds!
Yeah, I think that’s what it comes down to. Things are more brutal with fewer players, but they’re also more intense and allow for a more engaged experience. Though I suppose that’s a fairly obvious statement
