Hey, if you can make it work for you, great. I’m not sure it’s going to be BW anymore, but no one’s paying you to play BW. Take what you like, and if you get a working system it’s a win. I also have reservations about what you’re trying to do and think it might not end up being the game for me, but it’s also quite literally not a game for me. It’s for you and your group. Have fun!
I appreciate the well wishes, but I can’t help but wonder… all we’re changing is using Lifepaths as suggestions/guides/templates, but otherwise customized, removing Resources, and changing the setting (races + magic + not-medieval-standard-fantasy). Do you really feel that these changes make the game no longer BW?
Any change that alters or removes basic core concepts or rules of a game changes the way that game is played. It doesn’t matter if it’s BWG, D&D, or Tiddly Winks, it’s not the same game once the rules have changed, but it doesn’t have to be either.
Your group is working up a home brew game using concepts that will hopefully work well for you.
It is a massive undertaking, and I wish you luck.
Perhaps if you continue playing one or more of your current BWG games with RaW you may have another epic campaign to cherish as much as the one you’ve been playing in, though it may take a while. But then, didn’t the Pathfinder game take a few years too?
I think you’re changing enough that it’s not BW, but look at Burning Empires or Mouse Guard. They clearly share a lineage and an engine, but they’re not the same game. Your variant will probably hew closer to the original. That’s not good or bad, that’s just what you’re doing.
Burning Wheel is fundamentally a game about making hard decisions. This starts at character creation. Life paths are there to constrain your options, forcing you to think long and hard about what really is important to the concept, and what is just fluff that seems cool, but could be dropped. This is a feature, not a bug. Treating life paths as “suggeststions” means that you aren’t getting the full Burning Wheel experience.
+1.
BW embraces the “creativity fueled by constraints” idea and that may be hard to accept.
When I see “free-form play” I’m worried, maybe it was mainly to bypass d20 task resolution system which is really a pain as written, but I guess it was more than that.
I’m also worried about how much the OP seems to clings to a character, BW is dangerous to characters, not because it kills them, but because it changes them.
I’ve GMed a LARP where I saw so many players resisting with all their heart to character’s development, and I get a similar feeling here, but I may be wrong.
You know, I disagree. The BWHQ style, and a very common style from what I see, is hardball BW where you play to break characters and see what emerges from the wreckage. That’s fine and interesting and fun, but it is not the only way to play. You need hard choices, and characters need to develop, but they don’t need to develop by losing everything they are. You can explore and expand a character who remains completely true to herself. Yes, in BW that should still have some pain, but it can also be perfectly workable.
If the character isn’t that well-defined, i.e. as RAW : concept in a few words + life paths, you get some space to make choices as a player to define the character in play.
The problem I saw very often is that the character is already well-defined before play, so there is not much space to explore beside changes.
But yeah, there is a difference between a high-concept sim. mindset (aka “role-playing”) and explicitly choosing to make the BITS evolve in a way that reinforce the original concept…
You don’t have to break a character to challenge them, and character growth evolves from role-playing your character. If you don’t have a firm grasp on your character concept you have a much harder time playing that roll, just as it is difficult to play in a game that doesn’t have a firm concept behind it (setting, plot, ect.) sure, the storyline evolves from the characters B.I.T.'s and the actions they take, but the characters themselves are brought about (Burned) to interact within the world and with each other.
Concept is King.
“Concept is King” seems strange to me. Not all characters will change enough that the original concept doesn’t fit anymore, but it is certainly a possibility.
I always use “role-playing” pejoratively, i.e. players that try/pretend to determine how their characters act only from the established fiction.
To me, Roll Playing is a positive thing, and it’s pretty cut and dry too.
You make decisions based upon what you think your character would do in accordance with the skills and knowledge at his command.
No secret rolls or GM screens in BWG. Everyone knows the intents and consequences before the dice are rolled just as your character would have a fair idea of what could go wrong with his plan.
You react (hopefully in character) to the results of those rolls, moving the story along with the game.
But I fear we have gone far astray of the original post so I’ll say no more here.
What I love most about my character Kiara is how much she has changed, how much she will continue to change.
What I love most about Burning Wheel is how much it facilitates that change.
Everything in Burning Wheel feels like it’s designed to represent who the character is, and what they’re striving for. Everything can be lost, anything can be gained, according to how the character evolves.
I like playing young, idiot (foolish, inexperienced, etc) characters with lots of room to grow. I generally prefer to play characters with as few experiences as is possible to fit the concept, to see how those experiences manifest and change them.
This character, Kiara, started as an incredibly foolish, hotheaded sorceress, who couldn’t hold her tongue to save her life. Her “soul,” if you will, is unchanged, but little else is the same. She no longer angers easily - she’s seen enough that it takes a lot to ruffle her feathers. She has killed, despite her love of life, and just recently, she killed enemies when she theoretically could have spared them. This has shaken her to the core. She has broken and pulled herself together time and time again. These are just a few of the many changes she’s known over these years of play.
What I want is to capture her soul, where she is right now, so she can continue her journey. She aims to change the world, but she’s not coming out unscathed.
“Creativity through constraints” is something we like - we just want a little liberty with who we put through this process. I fully and completely acknowledge this wouldn’t work with many players - a lot of people want to play gods of some kind or another, as if it reflects well on them that their imaginary character can kill other imaginary characters in one hit.
The issue is that the lifepaths are highly setting specific, and highly uniform. All guards are drunks - what if that doesn’t match the world we’re in? What if I want to play someone who’s been raised by drunks and has sworn off alcohol forever? Does that mean he can’t be a guard? Couldn’t I just switch “drunk” for “lonely,” since apparently all of the other guards are drunks?
Even with that aside, the lifepaths are simply not functional in a different setting. Adjusting them to fit the setting is imperative - else you’ll be constrained to the one setting.
For me, for our group, “role playing” is both a positive (since we like it) and a playstyle. A friend of ours never speaks in character, jokes about irrelevant stuff at the table, just wants to roll dice, kill stuff, and level. DnD is great for him. We call that style “dice slingers.” Our main group, we don’t care about being the most powerful, the wealthiest, whatever. We want to explore new souls, new lives, new worlds. We want to bend those worlds to the goal of whatever characters we’re playing.
I’ve gotten a lot of mixed response on these forums, and a great deal of insight. I’ve even been repeatedly told that Burning Wheel may not be a good game for us, despite the fact that we’ve been playing it for months and loving it. Just removing resources and changing setting stuff, now that the damage thing is sorted out. It’s mostly RAW, and it’s been fantastic.
I am absolutely loving Burning Wheel - at least, its engine and philosophy - and looking forward to all the stories we’ll tell.
By “constraints”, I was trying to explain that BW is very different from “free-form” play, not because it is rule-heavy, but because the rules are strong and there is no so-called “rule 0” to bend them at the GM’s whim.
It is quite hard to create lifepath for a different setting, and the default implicit setting is IMHO is my biggest problem with the game, because it has a huge influence on the lifepaths, but it is not defined enough to be used as is.
Most of the traits like Drunk are characters traits, you have a lot of leeway on how to use them or not in play, minimaly it means that other peoples expect guards to be drunkards (in the implicit setting).
The one thing about Resources that I find hard to accept from players coming from other games is tax recovery (get a job) and the implicit setting makes it harder IMHO.
Talking “In character” can certainly add to the game, but some people are not as good as others to do it and it certainly don’t make them bad players. However, the more profound issue about “role-playing” is what people who"role-plays" usually call “meta-gaming”, i.e. taking decisions about what the characters are doing from a player’s point of view, which is something BW not only emphasizes, but makes fun to do (e.g. how advancement work).
Hah! If you think that’s metagaming, you should check out DnD 4th Edition!
But on a more serious note, I’m pretty sure that the advancement system doesn’t encourage meta-gaming. You roleplay, and you get tests based on what skill your rolled. Unless the players are hunting for certain tests (which the books specifically say you shouldn’t let them do) I don’t find that to be an issue.
Please clarify what you mean about the advancement system if possible. I feel like I’m missing something here.
You are confusing two things. The kinds of test the book warns you agains’t are the one that doesn’t move the story forward, some of them can be transformed into practice, the others deserve a yes/no.
The kind of test you want to see in play, are the one where the players have to be creative enough to bring in play the situation they need to get the missing test. Btw, you can find on the forum some examples of this coming from BWHQ.
According to more traditional games, that’s not “role-play”, it’s “meta-gaming”, but in BW calling it “meta-gaming” is a bit strange because it’s part of the game.
What are the two things that I am confusing?
I (personally) think we are interpreting the rules differently here. It seems that you would find this to be a form of metagaming, assuming it is the players who want to try and “level” a certain skill by trying to find space for it in play. I however, have found this to be mostly something a character does to improve at a skill by doing things that will enable him to practice it. The motive here, whether it is to actually roleplay or to simply increase skills, is what makes the action Meta-Gaming or Roleplaying.
So now I think I understand what you mean. Again, correct me if I’m wrong.
The test hunting that can be shoehorned into practice or no test at all and the test as a reward for creativity. Both, according to traditional “role-players”, are a form of meta-gaming, because they are player-driven and not character driven.
The difference is that the later has a lot more chance to move the story forward in interesting ways than the former.
So, by encouraging players to play the advancement “meta-game”, you encourage them to be more creative and push the story in unforseen directions, and that’s a good thing.
Ok? Um, never mentioned the second one at all in that post?
That’s what I inferred from “advancement system doesn’t encourage meta-gaming”. See my edit above.
¯_(ツ)_/¯