There are photos from GenCon taken by Dro and Tim from a couple of the games I was in (Burning Wheel and Burning Empires). The Burning Wheel game was one of the highlights of my RPGing career. The Burning Wheel guys (Luke, Thor, Dro) were super-nice and really made us feel welcome at GenCon, going out of their way to include us in stuff. Thanks, guys!

If you look closely, you can see my two favorite event tickets, too: (1) Luke Crane’s “Fires Over Omac” Burning Empires session and (2) Luke Crane’s “Inheritance” Burning Wheel session. Tim and I both are playing in both sessions, and we’re really looking forward to the Luke Crane Experience ™.

P.S. GenCon people: your website SUUUCCKKKSSSSS!! Seriously. Hire some serious usability experts next year to redesign the information in your site, not just tart it up.

There IS a sort of assumption in roleplaying that killing is just something that PCs do. It’s rarely — if ever — questioned and even then it’s usually in something like a horror game where the PCs are “regular” people. It’s not always something that you need or want to worry about, sometimes when playing an RPG it IS just about killing things and taking their stuff. But, sometimes it’s about more than that.

In our current BW game (desert people working to overthrow the evil sorceror king dictators and restore the rightful prince to the throne of their oppressed and enslaved people), I’ve been searching for something to back up my character’s Belief about whether or not he’s evil (really quick: he used to be a membe of one of the sorceror king’s elite assassin/spy cadre, but saw the light and is now working to overthrow the sorceror kings).

The Belief is “I have done evil things, but I am not evil.” Yeah, I know it sucks. I’m still working on that Belief, because it doen’t really convey what I’m after — which is a way to externalize (through the mechanics of the game) an internal struggle, specifically, whether it’s possible for Khasid to turn to the good side after a terrible life and a career as a killer. He has to come to terms with the fact that he needs to put those skills to use to fight for good instead of for evil. Can he take the same actions — though for different reasons — and consider himself “good” now? Is it the act or the intent that defines “good” or “evil”? Or is there some grey area?

Those are the internal things that I have this character struggling with. I don’t know that it IS possible to deal with that explicitly in-game without some whining and moaning via “pure roleplay” (something I’m not always very good at). But BW makes me want to be a little more serious and examine things a little deeper than some other RPGs that I’ve played (Note to Martin: I won’t specifically slag D&D here!).

Luke’s post has inspired some good discussion (on the BW forum and amongst my group via email) about the role of combat in RPGs and specifically of Fight! (the BW combat system) in BW. I’m not sure I agree with his contention that “[t]he mechanics in Fight (and Armor and Injury) are about one thing — killing and surviving an attempt on your (character’s) life. Burning Wheel — the entire game — is about this struggle.” I think he better expresses it in this quote a little later in that post:

The implicit objective in every Fight is survival — humiliation and murder are sister satellite goals — but it is your very life that’s on the line in these conflicts. Will you die for what you believe in?… The game is not about random murder. It’s about being forced into this situation by your Beliefs — right or wrong! — and laying your life on the line.

I think we flirt with that state in our BW game. We can definitely feel it when we’re there — and especially when we’re not. And Luke’s right: when you’re in that state, the game just burns.

It’s been one of the best games I’ve EVER played in (in 25 years of off-and-on roleplaying), though it hasn’t been a completely smooth ride. I’d like to point out some of the things we’ve done right and some that we’ve done — and continue to do — wrong.

The first is: in a player-driven game the players have to freakin’ DO SOMETHING.

Seems like a no-brainer, huh? My Wife would call it a B.F.O. — a Blinding Flash of the Obvious. But, it’s not, especially for players who grew up playing old school RPGs like D&D. We’re used to reacting, not ACTING. We’re used to the GM presenting us with a situation and then us figuring out how to react to it. BW isn’t like that. The action should stem right from the players’ Beliefs and should be OBVIOUS.

Now, we really did a good thing when we started this game. We sat down as a group at the table and hammered out the game world from scratch as a group. EVERYONE had input, and everyone riffed off of everyone else’s ideas. It was a great session. We proceeded to create some great characters out of that first session. But, I think we made a mistake with the Beliefs.

Our game was purposely designed to be short term and have some pretty obvious goals. Briefly: our group are trying to overthrow oppressive occupying tyranny. One of the characters is the legendary rightful heir to the usurped throne, and the rest of us are all focused on getting him to that position. The game is pretty epic in scope (though we’re struggling with the pulp concept and the gritty feel of BW — more on that in a later post). The problem is that so are our Beliefs.

In a recent thread about Beliefs on the BW Forums, Luke Crane (creator of BW) said:

[Y]our Beliefs are passable and playable. The third one gets resolved in the first session, the second one shortly thereafter and the first gets teased out over time — as the other two change and color just what you will do to achieve your primary goal.

And a little bell went off in my head: Beliefs can (and should) vary in scope. They can change (and should) during the course of play.

The GM in this game and I discussed this very thing in our usual post-session breakdown. We were disappointed with how the action (didn’t) went during the session. One of the reasons we seized upon is that our Beliefs are too big, too long-range. They don’t have much immediacy about them, so it’s hard to play on those beliefs down in the dirt of the actual events of the game when the Beliefs are floating way up in the sky above all the time. We need to bring those Beliefs down to where the game’s being played.

Since all of us at the table suffer from Abused D&D Player Syndrome (ADPS?) and tend to re-act instead of act, we NEED some gritty Beliefs to chase. Because our existing Beliefs are sorta large and amorphous, we’re having trouble doing things that seem to focus on the Beliefs. We’re not powerful enough as a group to directly challenge the Sorceror Kings, but each one of us has a Belief akin to “Malik is the rightful king, and I will restore him to his throne or die trying.” While that’s an okay Belief in the big scheme, it doesn’t give me anything to do RIGHT NOW, and BW should almost always be about the RIGHT NOW.

So, I think I’m going to mention this to the other players (or just point them here) and see if we can re-write at least one of our Beliefs by the next session that will give us and the GM something to bite down on in the next session.

I’m a half-assed follower of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. GTD is focused on “Next Actions.” A Next Action is the next physical (more or less — maybe call it “tangible”) step that needs to be done in order to accomplish something on your to-do list (it’s a little more complex than that, but not really). I think a BW character will benefit from having at least one Belief slot occupied by a Belief that’s a “Next Action.” When a scene is completed and the player is wondering what to do next, the player should be able to look down at the character’s Beliefs and go, “Oh yeah, time to do THAT!” Once that Belief is addressed (if it’s something that can be “done”), it gets replaced with another, equally action-oriented, Belief that will keep things moving.

A player will be racking up the Artha if she follows a system something like that for her character’s Beliefs.

Comments?

But, I’ve been playing pretty regularly then (if not blogging), and I’ve got some things I’d like to write about. I hope to have one up later tonight and maybe another in a day or two with at least a couple more to follow.

See you soon…

From the outset, I wanted to put a few artificial limits on the game. The most important of those is that I wanted to plan for a short game, only 4-5 sessions. Part of it is that I wanted to approach this game as a sort of training run for GMing BW since I’m new to GMing it. Also, we have one player in the group who’s a total BW newbie and doesn’t have much experience playing any games outside of D&D and other d20 games. Also, I have RPG ADD something fierce, and I didn’t want to set my sights on a longer game that would fizzle like my recently-ended D&D campaign.

We were also coming off two weeks starting Tim’s Riddle of Steel game — a “world/character burning” session, then the first session of play — which we’ve been having a blast with. So, the bar for a more narrativist and more player-driven style of play was set high.

So we sat down at the table to get started pitching ideas for a world and a story. The first few ideas fizzled without really catching on, but slowly ideas started to stick:

• a “party” composed of one member of each major “good” race (an acknowledged total “Fellowship of the Rings” ripoff)
• renewed conflict between the orcs/trolls/monsters and the “good” races
• a magical barrier that needs to be fixed in order to keep the monsters out (apparently a rip from The Elfstones of Shannara, which I’ve never read)

Not a very inspiring start, but that’s where things went. We ended up with a story that runs more or less (in capsule form) like this:

A thousand years ago, the good races (humans, elves, dwarves, roden?) banded together and used their combined might to push the forces of evil into another dimension. Centuries of fat times ensued. However, without a common enemy to unite against, the races drifted apart. Infighting broke out between races and within races. Now, petty squabbling and politics is the rule of the day.

The portal to the other dimension was sealed with a magical device, an orrey. As long as the orrey runs, the portal stays shut. The orrey is showing signs of slowing. Legend has it that the designers intended the orrey to have to be restarted every thousand years, and it would require the races to come together in peace to do so. The PCs are the representatives from each race. None of the races are really taking the legends at full value and sending their best and brightest.

Boring, right? We didn’t get very far into Beliefs during the session, and I was a little discouraged (and not the only one) as we left the session and during most of this past week.

Thursday, Tim sent me his character, Osric, is the human representative, a minor nobleman who volunteers to go on the mission to restore the orrey in order to amass power and influence to regain his ancestral lands from the corrupt archbishop who has seized most of it under false pretenses. Just reading through Tim’s character, I could see seven or eight conflicts to throw at him that will absolutely ROCK at the table. I can’t WAIT to burn up the archbishop!

A bunch of different BW threads with really good advice point out that the world will come out of the characters’ BITRs, and Tim’s Osric is a great example. You could build an entire game around just the information in his character’s description on the BW forum. The sorta lame world we built at the table ISN’T the point in this game, it’s just backdrop. What matters is the BITRs full of conflict that Tim created. When we add in the other characters’ BITRs, we should be firing on all cylinders.

I think the most imporant thing I’ve learned from this process so far is that BW is ALL ABOUT the Beliefs. In a recent entertaining interview, Luke Crane (BW’s creator) said this in attempting to sum up what BW is all about:

[The Burning Wheel] is about beliefs and convictions and the consequences of holding those beliefs and convictions.

That is the best one-line summary of BW I’ve yet seen. And I think THAT is what I have to focus on to make this game pop. It’s the Beliefs, stupid!

The thing about Tim’s character, though (as he points out in that thread on the BW forum) is that — as written — he doesn’t have much to do with the campaign world.

The problem [NOTE: Tim and I and a couple of the other players in our group talked about this some last night, so I'm not saying anything here about the game that I haven't already said to the other players, and they're aware of the blog] isn’t that Tim’s character isn’t a good character with good Beliefs but that the campaign concept we came up with was two things:

1. Boring as all fuck, and
2. NOT ABOUT THE CHARACTERS’ BELIEFS.

It’s all about the Beliefs, baby.

I’m currently (after that session and some reflection) of the opinion that the best way to come up with a BW campaign world is to START with basic character concepts (just descriptions — no Lifepaths, really) and BELIEFS. It’s through developing the characters’ Beliefs that you come up with a compelling and powerful (and FUN!) game world to play in.

What Tim whipped up for his character is FAR more interesting and ENGAGING than what we did at the table, because we made the usual mistake: we started world-building (at least we did it more or less as a group — that’s a big step for a lot of groups) but we missed the important thing about BW: Beliefs.

So, we’ve got some re-thinking to do about this game before it kicks off.

Another side point. I mentioned above that the world we created is boring. Who cares? The pseudo-medieval world that Tim cooked up in his backstory and Beliefs is pretty boring on paper, too, but his character is fully charged with potential conflict. THAT is the interesting part!

I feel like hanging my head out the window and shouting “EUREKA!”

Seriously. That and “Luke Crane is a genius,” but I bet he’s getting tired of hearing that.

More soon on this developing situation…

1. One player expressed a desire to play it “stock” (elves, dwarves, orcs, etc. in a Tolkien-esque gritty fantasy setting) and the others (including myself) were totally down with that. After the TRoS game’s sorta wacky setting (think “Arabian Nights”-ish with Gothic/Roman Sorceror King fascist/racist overloads — but totally kickass!), I think I’ll be happy with something more “usual,” anyway, but who knows until we get at the table and start letting the ideas fly. We’ll see how it goes Friday night; and
2. I said I’d like to come up with an idea that has a pretty set end-game and that we can get through in 4-5 sessions. Short, sweet, hit it and get out. In my experience, knowing that things don’t really have the option of lasting for that mythical open-ended “campaign” frees the players — especially those conditioned by years of D&D and its careful resource management — to do some BIG, powerful stuff from the get go. That’s the theory, anyway.

With the game kicking off this coming weekend, I’ll be spending a lot more time thinking about BW and therefore a lot more time post about it here. I’ll have the “usual” sort of posts coming as well as Actual Play posts from the game itself. I may do those over at The Burning Wheel forums but I’ll link to them from here and probably expound a little on them as well. I should have at least one BW post up before Friday’s session.

So, needless to say, I’ve got other priorities right this second other than blogging. I know some people are waiting on the edge of their seats for the next installment of 30 Days of Burning Wheel, but it might be a few days before I finish any of the several pieces I’ve started. [EDIT: I meant that last sentence to be at least mildly amusing (since I'm sure NO ONE is actually waiting on the edge of his seat!), but I can see how that got buried under the otherwise grave tone of the post. Sorry about that.] I’ll get back to it as soon as I can, though. Thanks. And remember to lock your car doors at all times, people.

It’s perhaps most indicative of games, groups, or sessions where players tend toward director or author stance, and it probably comes up more often in narrativist sorts of games and groups, but the player advocacy of Burning Wheel is one of its most appealing aspects for me. I very much like this quote from the beginning of the book:

Burning Wheel is played by people sitting around a table in a group — face to face with your friends. It is, inherently, a social game. The players interact with one another to come to decisions and have the characters undertake actions. [p.13]

That, in many ways, sums up the approach quite succinctly, for me, as it openly endorses the sort of out-of-character discussion and manipulation of story that is most often described as “metagaming” but it does so in a way that brings about supercharged conflict, which is a blast for the players who are looking to create a great story at the table.

A Burning Wheel example: the Duel of Wits mechanic (the “verbal warfare” mechanic) is openly and explicitly about resolving conflicts between PLAYERS. To wit:

“The Duel of Wits is an extended conflict mechanic used to resolve debat and argument in the game (and at the table). [p.95]

Players (or a player and the GM) come to a significant disagreement in the game. The GM stops play, and asks if the players wish to resolve it with a Duel of Wits. [p.107]

There’s still a huge roleplaying aspect to the DoW mechanic in that you have to construct/write and deliver your argument, but the conflict established for the characters is there because the players (including the GM) put them in that situation.

Burning Wheel specifically — and explicitly — addresses the concerns of the PLAYERS, and not the characters, and I heartily approve its approach. There are roleplayers who would cry “That’s metagaming! Metagaming is like cheating!” My response to them is: “Feh!” The PLAYERS are the actual PEOPLE at the table. THEY are the ones to whom it is important whether they’re having fun or not. For me, the most important consideration at the roleplaying table is “Are we having fun?” And the shortest path to roleplaying fun for me is to take some interesting characters with supercharged BITs and throw them in situations bursting at the seams with conflict. BW has the system mechanics to really back up and reward that sort of play.