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GeekNights 071002 - The Burning Wheel
Tonight on GeekNights, we discuss our experiences jumping right into Burning Wheel. In the news, the Wiimote gets some protection, and Gabe Newell explains why Valve doesn’t make games for Mac.
Scott’s Thing - Married Gamer Decision Matrix
Rym’s Thing - Secret Fort
Comments
Consider that, when you get down to it, d20 combat really isn't THAT complicated; it just involves keeping track of some numbers, and not that many numbers most of the time. For most combats, you need to know your attack bonus for whatever weapon you're using, and how much you roll for damage. That's not information that you need to look up on the fly, since it doesn't change very often; you just write it down ahead of time and reference it when needed. When it undergoes a permanent change, just change the number on the paper and you're good.
The basic action is d20 is roll a die and add a number; the DM compares the total against a difficulty number and determines success or failure. Really, everything after that is just combat options.
Burning Wheel offers just as many combat options as D&D, and in some cases makes you pay a bit more attention to minutia (positioning tests, weapon length modifiers, weapon speeds, hit locations, the "scripting" thing...). However, since the system really isn't abstracted heavily, it makes more intuitive sense, so even while it's robust and complicated, you work through it faster than you do a d20 combat.
I guess it boils down to this: Burning Wheel combats are more "personal" fights, with a lot of attention paid to details, and a lot of focus on the specifics of one-on-one combat. The system is organic and intuitive, so it runs smoothly. D&D is designed to handle large multi-participant combats as efficiently as possible; as a result, personal fights are clunky and abstracted.
I'm not trying to be contentious, but I don't understand how more details results in smoother combat. Maybe some brief examples could help?
You don't say "I move 25' toward the door" or "I move forward 10' in order to shoot my bow." You say "I make for the door" or "I close and shoot." By removing any silly counting out of squares, you make the combat flow much more naturally.
I guess it boils down to this: Burning Wheel combats are more "personal" fights, with a lot of attention paid to details, and a lot of focus on the specifics of one-on-one combat. The system is organic and intuitive, so it runs smoothly. D&D is designed to handle large multi-participant combats as efficiently as possible; as a result, personal fights are clunky and abstracted.The thing is, D&D breaks down just as badly with large numbers of antagonists as it does with small numbers. A very large fight is just as clunky as a small one, and takes an enormous amount of time to resolve. Meanwhile, in a large-scale Burning Wheel fight, you'd probably simply zoom in to the localized few against few battles within the larger one, ignoring the rest except for role-playing purposes, or zoom out to a simple versus test to see which side was victorious.
The fact that Burning Wheel gives you simple ways to abstract large or annoying-to-manage conflicts into a single roll if you wish is one of its strongest points. A little D&D fight is the same as a big one, and takes just as much time regardless of how important to the story it is. You can zoom in or out in a Burning Wheel fight to match the importance, and thus always keep it interesting.
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The fact that Burning Wheel gives you simple ways to abstract large or annoying-to-manage conflicts into a single roll if you wish is one of its strongest points.These points are a bit more convincing.
However, I digress, and your point still stands. ;)
I'm going to make passing a test on the rules of Burning Wheel a prerequisite for entering my game...
3E really screwed up a lot of things in D&D and turned the system into a tabletop video game. What you are describing on the show sounds exactly like the way my group still plays AD&D.
I preferred 2E long after 3 came out, and I still do to a degree. Sadly, most people use 3, which is verymuch a miniatures game with some minor roleplaying stuff tacked on.
Also I got a bit inspired by that idea you guys gave about writing a story by burning some characters, and then just sort of working through it within the system. This idea intrigues me as a writer since you wouldn't know where it would go, or how it would end. It would certainly be an interesting experiment.
BW makes the actual fighting a lot more concrete and personal, whereas D&D abstracts the actual fighting with things like hit points and armor class. D&D makes it so that the actual actions you take while fighting someone, aside from tactical movement, wind up being part of an abstract fight; since hit points don't reflect actual physical damage, the things that are involved in determining hit point damage (to-hit, armor class, and weapon damage) are also abstracted to a degree. The concept of "levels" is an abstraction in much the same vein.
Burning Wheel makes sure that none of those actions in combat are abstracted; every swing of a sword counts, every wound counts, where you get wounded counts, etc. That part of the Fight! mechanics is far, far less abstracted than D&D, for good reason.
It goes back to the comment from the Luke Crane interview about the focus on choices and consequences. D&D combat focuses on the procedural crap and glosses over the actual action by abstracting it; BW reverses this problem by abstracting the tedious crap but making every part of an actual fight really count. This puts combat into the character's perspective and makes everything really count. In D&D, there are no real consequences during the course of a fight; the only real consequence is death, and otherwise you are 100% fine. BW makes you think about every swing and every hit.
I'm saying that both BW and D&D abstract things in combats; however, BW abstracts the boring stuff and makes concrete the awesome stuff, while the core D&D rules do the opposite. It separates the wheat from the chaff, as Scott is wont to say.
I still stand by my assertion that the Fight! mechanics won't work well for actually playing out a large combat; you pretty much have to abstract the larger battle around you and focus on just the main characters. Of course, that's how it should be, but if someone out there likes to roll for the 2000 individual archers in a fight, BW is not the system for them.
As for elves being more powerful than humans: so far as I can tell, "balance" between characters in Burning Wheel is not about how powerful they are, but about verisimilitude and how much time they get in the spotlight.
Also, I
We've been using the d20 system for about two months now, and they still get tripped up once in a while (e.g. - "What do I roll?"). Most of them never did tabletop role-playing before that.