Burning Wheel Postmortem

It's been a while since I brought gaming into this blog. So I think it's about time. My regular gaming group has been trying a bunch of systems recently. Trying to find the ones we really like. After a successful session at MACE and listening to some podcasts about it, I decided to give Burning Wheel a try. After dropping about 75 bucks on books, we played a game this semester.

Pros:
So the system has some definite pluses. It's pretty realistic, which is a plus and a minus. For people who like that in a game, it's pretty hard to say "But shouldn't my x do y against z?" It's also got some great storytelling aspects. I've mentioned beliefs & instincts before, in my character post. While these are really useful in setting the stage for a story, there's more to it and we'll revisit it later. It also has brought up some interesting questions about failure, which I'm going to be bringing more into my other games. This was probably one of the biggest wins for getting involved in this game. Their ideas with skill chains is also really interesting, and has brought a good twist for a story to bear. Some of the stuff in the magic book is also pretty cool, and merits further investigation.

One of the more interesting parts of the system is character creation. You basically write your characters history through the creation process. They also use a system of Traits that let you really customize your character, and define what he/she's like. All interesting ideas, but it seriously limits the setting because of the amount of work to transfer these.

Cons:
So despite some of the good points, there were some issues. We had a really hard time sorting out beliefs and instincts. While they are good for narrowing in on a character, getting them into play is pretty hard. Maybe we need more experience writing them, I'm fully willing to believe that. However, it's a steep learning curve, and that just wasn't what we were prepared for as a group.

The other main problem, I already alluded to, was the crunchiness of the system. Lots of die rolls to resolve things. Many of the rules are "optional", in a sense, but most of the players got lost in the shuffle. Again, I'm sure we weren't doing things completely right, but the learning curve was just steeper than we expected. The core mechanic is straightforward, but you miss out on a lot of the setting that way. For instance, adding something as simple as Armor to the game adds a whole level of complexity to the fight mechanics, even without the full scripting.

Conclusions
So it's a nice system, and I got something out of trying to learn it. But the learning curve was steeper than we were willing to commit at the time, so I think I have to save it. Maybe in a few years I'll find a group willing to try again, but for now we'll keep digging our heels into World of Darkness, and exploring a few other systems. We're about to dig into the Fate system, for Dresden, and a few others high on the todo list. Should be an interesting year.