Smoother Subsystem Transitions

Burning Wheel Subsystem Advice and Guidance
1

I was talking about what game we’d go with for our next campaign. When we discussed BW my friend said that he thought that entering a DoW or Fight always seemed very abrupt. He described it as leaving the current game to play a different one for a few minutes then coming back to the real game to see what had happened.

I think that we perhaps overused those systems early on, by now we have cut back significantly. In my early days of BW I saw Fight and DoW wits as the base from which to build everything else. Now I build from the core system concepts, Let it Ride, Task/Intent, Say Yes. Our gaming has been improved by this shift of perspective.

Assuming I’ll get the frequency of using the subsystems right, keeping it to climactic stuff, what can I do to smooth the transition into and out of these subsystems? I didn’t really notice this disjunction myself until last night’s conversation. Perhaps I should be reinforcing that all the core system concepts are still there when the subsystems are being used.

We’ve not played Gold yet. This feedback of from our experiences with Revised.

2

I think Fight in BWG has a section devoted to this. It basically says use a little narration to set up a versus test prior to a fight. The winner gets some kind of advantage at the beginning of the Fight (e.g. they have won the Engage). I don’t see why you couldn’t do this for Duel of Wits and Range & Cover too, provided you were clear what advantage the winner gets for a victory in the versus test. It would add a lot of narrative variety to different conflicts.