I wanted to get some specific clarification on dice that you roll from 6s on open-ended rolls and if they’re rerolled from a call-on.
This came up in an earlier thread, and Luke said: Fight Edge Case Questions:
I kind of get that; I get the idea that the intent is that the physical dice rolled are a convenience at the table and you’re supposed to be rerolling the 6s in a “legal fiction” sense.
The Luck sub-heading – BWGR (p.66) in the Artha chapter sort of suggests this, describing open-ended in a parenthetical as,
6s rerolled as new dice for additional successes.
But the Open-Ended Rolls heading in BWGR (p.16) says,
Certain rolls in Burning Wheel are described as “open-ended.” This means that any 6s rolled allow the player to pick up another die. If you hit your difficulty number or higher, it’s a success. If you don’t meet your difficulty number, the die is a traitor. If you roll a 6, it counts as a success and you get to roll another die!
There’s none of this, “You reroll the 6, but do it using a different die so that you’re not torturing yourself to keep track of these phantom successes,” legal fiction indicated. And failed dice are specifically called “traitors,” which seems to indicate they are “failed dice in the technical sense.”
The reason I’m revisiting this question is that the fellow who made the Arenji bot – an excellent dice roller for Discord that I use a lot – is trying to get this question answered for the bot at the moment. They’re looking on a/the Burning Wheel Discord server (the poor soul); I thought it might be helpful if I asked here.