Simple & Bloody vs DOW/Fight Tests

I ran a short four session demo of BW for our group. It was set in Harn, and was, to be honest, the best four sessions I have ever GM’d. I’ve played BW before, but the experience of running a game was - profound. It just gelled with what both what I wanted, and also rocked the players hard. I’ve never had three straight weeks in a row (we usually game every other week or even once a month). They were begging for more.

My challenge, however, was with DOW and Fight. No one wanted to dig that deep, and preferred straight tests. I am sure we would have gotten to one eventually, but the they felt that going to these subsystems would have slowed down the action (and fun). They way things were going, we could have easily run 10+ sessions with out pulling out the sheets. And it wasn’t so much that the stakes weren’t high, it was just that they didn’t want to slow the pacing down. They were all happy with the straight rolls and moving forward with the consequences. I felt bad about not diving into the subsystems, but ultimately went with the flow.

I was wondering if others had the same experience?

Mark

From anecdotal reading others do this. It’s fine! The only thing to watch out for is an overabundance of artha; the detailed conflict systems are great ways to burn off a lot of artha at once, and in their absence there can be stockpiling. Give out less artha or require more tough tests if it seems like there’s too much artha in your game, and otherwise you’re fine.

You definitely don’t need to pull them out for every argument or fight and we definitely recommend sticking with the core while everyone gets their feet under them with regard to the system. But I will say this: They are extremely worthwhile and once you get over the learning curve, they’re actually very fast and intuitive. Consider pulling them out for the big climax, when the players really care about the outcome and beliefs are on the line.

Just wondering : how do you manage conflicts between characters without DoW?

Thanks for the feedback, guys. @Benoit. Although tensions were building, most of the big conflict was not within the party through four sessions.

Without DoW it’s handled either with a simple Versus test or, more often, by the old-fashioned player vs. player argument of other games. My group tends to avoid intra-party heavy conflict, though, and we don’t use a lot of PC vs. PC DoW anyway.

But so many of my favorite BW moments have been PC vs PC DoWs.