I’ve been running a Burning Wheel game for the first time in years, and was reminded that swaths of the indie world might not know about this seminal work. I’ve written about it a ton, but here’s a one-stop overview.
(The) Burning Wheel
Okay yes, formally it has a “The” in the beginning. Absurdly underpriced rulebook and Codex available from BWHQ. If you find a PDF, it’s pirated and you should feel bad about having it.
Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel, nearly two decades old now (and its final revision edition appeared a decade ago! EDIT: Burning Wheel Gold Revised came out 2019, and made a few small but important changes to Gold, which came out in 2010), is still one of the most important indie games ever created. But as time goes by, its importance has changed. There’s a generation of indie gamers who started in PbtA and Fate and lyric games, and they have no use for its lessons. But for folks coming from an older, perhaps more conventional roleplaying background, Burning Wheel is still an indispensable bridge to the modern world of game design.
Here’s why Burning Wheel still matters. And … why it doesn’t.
Wheel 101
The current generation of indie gaming fans might not even know what the deal is with Burning Wheel. Here’s a quick recap of the game’s killer apps, and why it works.
Layered Complexity
You can play the core system of the game — simple die pool tests against either a value set by the GM or against other players’ rolls — and get most of the BW experience. And then you can add other systems as they come up: authoring NPCs into the fiction, tracking one’s finances without counting money, and so on. Get good at those elements and you can move on to several minigames that address melee, ranged combat, and verbal conflicts. It’s set up like layers of an onion — well, the hub, spokes and rim of the Wheel, formally speaking — and doesn’t leave anyone behind who doesn’t want the extra complexity.
A Tight, Consent-Oriented Transaction
There are three pillars to how BW’s transaction works:
((Radically) Transparent) Intent, Task, and Consequence: To do literally anything in the game, you need to make your intent — that is, the actual desired result of your efforts — abundantly clear to the table. You can’t play close to the vest, you can’t try to “beat” another player or the GM through fictional positioning trickery. Then, the GM tells you what task (skill) you need to roll to achieve that intent. Finally, the GM is obligated to tell you before you roll what the consequence of failure is. But get this: the player isn’t obligated to make that roll. They have to consent to it. The GM can always offer a different task, but can also change the difficulty and/or the consequence. It’s very clear, above-board negotiation. Lots of players get tripped up on this transparency mandate, and it’s Burning Wheel’s first and most powerful lesson.
Say Yes or Roll the Dice*: This is a philosophical and procedural stance that not every event in the game needs to be rolled off. The GM can just say yes to anything a character tries: not just the boring stuff, but great and exciting plays as well. This intersects with the game’s advancement system, which relies on actually using your abilities and skills, so sometimes you don’t want the GM to say yes. But it’s always there, demanding the GM aim the camera of uncertainty only at what is important. When you’re rolling, it means something important is happening. That’s a useful indicator to the players.
*EDIT: Okay, this has come up a couple times online! “Roll the Dice or Say Yes” is what appears in the book. It’s always appeared in the game this way. It’s formally called “Vincent’s Admonition,” named after a rule/philosophical stance in Vincent Baker‘s game Dogs in the Vineyard. The reverse order is a old cultural artifact, repeated often enough that I still forget sometimes. But giving credit where credit is due is rare enough in gaming, so let me set the record straight here as well. As a practical matter, the point here is that saying yes is a powerful focus tool (“roll the dice” is the default trad thing and, in my opinion, doesn’t really need to be repeated other than to clarify that saying yes or rolling dice is the decision point.)
Let it Ride: Another lesson that trips new folks up, players are prohibited from rerolling for different outcomes, until the situation that led to the roll materially changes. If you rolled to pick a lock and you missed, you can’t roll again: you just can’t unlock this one. This applies to GMs as well! They can’t demand new tests for things characters already accomplished. If your intent is to sneak into the castle, you’re not going to roll once for the tower guard, once for the dogs on patrol, and again for more guards in the courtyard. The scalability of intent is a tool BW GMs use to direct and focus play, along with Say Yes (above).
These three pillars work together in a tight, consistent and fair way. Everyone has to be clear about what they’re trying to accomplish, the GM has to decide whether the players need to roll at all, tell them what they’re risking before the roll, and then the outcome is final and unchangeable once it’s over. Depending on your background, that may sound like pretty typical play or it may sound radical and unfun. (The latter crowd is wrong.)
Player-Authored Incentives
The killer app of Burning Wheel is artha: three flavors of bonus points you earn and spend various ways. The entire cycle of the game comes down to using Beliefs, Instincts, Traits and their interplay to generate artha. It’s all carrots, no sticks, so every time the player engages, they’re complicit in their own story.
Beliefs are a terrific, very difficult tech: you state things your character deeply believes in and cares about, and ideally attach a goal or action to that. So things like “I deserve to be king, so I will murder my brother the heir.” Or you can go with a Belief without an action: “God guides my hand in all things.” It’s difficult, though, because you’re asking players to commit to what they care about. Surprisingly tricky! More advanced play means writing and updating Beliefs constantly to maximize the artha you earn from pursuing, completing or conflicting with other Beliefs.
Instincts are programmatic reactions your characters can always do. These macros started, I think, as a way to protect players from bad GMing: “Always have my sword ready,” for example, means the GM never gets to say “a-ha, you’re caught off-guard!” Instincts get more interesting when they’re potentially problematic and get your character in trouble. “Always have my sword ready” is not an awesome instinct when trying to bribe a city guard or seduce royalty, right? You’re never obligated to get yourself in trouble, but if you do, you gain artha.
Finally, traits are little descriptors you mostly don’t have much control over. You’re obligated to start with some traits via the character creation system (below), and you can buy some useful ones as well. Later, though, traits get voted onto your character based on how other players perceive your play. Neat, and occasionally aggravating if you’ve been signaling something you didn’t intend. It’s hard to be given “cowardly” by the other players when you think your character was just being very careful!
This authorship sinks its claws into the players when they commit to exactly what they’re doing to earn artha. Some of that will come from pursuing Beliefs, or letting your Instincts get you in trouble, or for allowing your Traits to send play off in new and surprising directions. The result is quite different from external XP or advancement schemes that involve hitting someone else’s marks to get your cookies.
Emergent Character Complexity
This is, I think, where Burning Wheel stands in stark contrast to PbtA style and many other indie games: every character is a complex, bespoke creation. There are no templates, no classes, no playbooks. Instead you’ve got lifepaths within settings, with constraints on how one progresses from path to path. The GM can fine-tune the focus of their game by restricting settings and setting the lifepath count (3 is good zero-to-hero, 7 is towering badass), but otherwise players have a lot of options. The downside is that there are no Burning Wheel pickup games.
The game also features a use-it-to-improve-it advancement system. In practice it’s fussy to track every roll, but it’s also a powerful incentive in its own right: If you know you’re just one high-level test away, you might just go for it and accept that you’ll (probably) fail the roll and invoke the consequence. Between advancement and artha earning, the players are constantly pulled toward making life hard on themselves now, so life will be easier in the future
Finally, the other players occasionally vote to give each other new traits. If you’ve been an ardent worshiper, you might pick up Faithful (the power to pray for miracles!) or if you’ve been mean to NPCs, you might end up with Jerk. Later, if you’re jerky to an NPC and that sends the fiction off in a surprising direction, you’ll get paid artha.
The interplay of lifepaths, BITs, advancement and trait voting means every character is mechanically and fictionally complex and unique. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything close in any other game.
Rewards Mastery
Because the game is meant to be gamed and optimized and worked, players can get good at it. This shows up most pointedly in its various minigames: Fight, Duel of Wits, and Range and Cover. Each of these involve scripting moves in advance, comparing, and watching chaos ensue. It generates delicious, genuinely dangerous uncertainty. It’s also the kind of thing you, the player, can get good at. You might have a middling-fair sword fighter but they’ll be spectacular in the hands of a skilled player.
Internal Tension Is Good, Actually
Last bit: Burning Wheel’s systems come together such that intraparty conflict becomes an important source of energy for the game. Rather than a well-lubricated “party” that exists only to defeat obstacles, a typical group of Burning Wheel characters will have drives and needs that conflict with one another. This makes for great adventure fiction. A typical best practice is for players to have some BITs aimed at one another, and others aimed outward at whatever the campaign premise currently is. The very clear, aboveboard transaction I described above ensures everyone’s on a level playing field when it comes to using the system to fight (each other, sometimes) for what they want.
You Should Still Play BW If…
Should you really still care about a decades-old game? Maybe! If:
You came from D&D
Or any conventional big-book RPG background, really: Cypher, Gumshoe, Savage Worlds, Storyteller, BRP, and so on. Burning Wheel argues most traditions of “trad” play are anywhere from unproductive to actually toxic, which is a point of contention (or aggravation) for folks who don’t like the game. They’re not wrong! The game has a strong underlying philosophy, and it continues to be best-in-class for teaching trad folks what is de rigueur in much indie-style play: radical transparency, strong authorial collaboration among everyone at the table and not just the GM, that uncertainty can be good, that consent is powerful.
But it is also not shy about telling you what’s wrong with trad play too: unlimited GM authority is toxic, planned adventures are boring, and intraparty conflict should be not only acceptable but encouraged. This aggressive tone, I think, also reveals rifts and dysfunctions that long-standing play groups may have not realized they harbor. I’ve heard so many stories of groups breaking up over BW — it’s a thing.
You want to understand current (non-OSR) fantasy
Burning Wheel tech shows up in all kinds of places. Mutant: Year Zero and The One Ring in the trindie world, The Veil and Ironsworn for a couple PbtA examples, Blades in the Dark and the entire FItD family as well. BW popularized Beliefs, Say Yes, Let It Ride, use-to-advance, and lots of other ideas. Don’t know about you but I find it easier to understand and interpret game designs when I can see the underlying values.
You want to understand adventure fiction
The absolute best part of Burning Wheel, for me, is that it beautifully models a popular and game-able kind of fiction: the character-driven adventure yarn. The BIT system is for characters who know what they want and will stop at nothing to get it. It does reactive play less well, and programmed “adventures” not at all. “Going on an adventure” without anything driving that for the character will mean no artha earned, which ultimately means slow or no advancement.
But Don’t Bother If…
Ten years is many lifetimes in game design. I wouldn’t recommend the game any more if:
You’re a committed storygame nerd
If you come from a tradition of GMless/GMful play, lyric games, solo games, PbtA/BOB, or larp, and have no intention of engaging with trindie games, Burning Wheel might not have much to offer. It’s orders of magnitude more complex than any of these kinds of games, the learning curve is intense, and even a quick game demands more investment than picking up a playbook and answering some questions. The game has a huge social and psychic footprint and that doesn’t work for everyone.
Complex economies are work
If the idea of tracking multiple economies that can be spent in multiple ways doesn’t thrill you, you might not dig the game part of this game. Same with tracking each roll you make for advancement, and evaluating when you’re close enough to advancing something to warrant an unwinnable roll. The game rewards mastery but it also demands it.
You love to hack
The lifepath system is murderously difficult to hack. Individual entries need to be balanced along like six criteria, settings need to be balanced against one another, and combinations need to be exciting, interesting and sensible. It’s so hard that the next generation of Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, uses a simple questionnaire instead.
You think player mastery feels weird
Player mastery can feel weird! In some places, BW protects you: your character can be a much more skilled and persuasive speaker than you, for example, because of how the Duel of Wits minigame plays out. This is a notorious blind spot in most trad games that rely on the actual players to talk things out, which can lead to more skilled and persuasive players getting what they want in a way that doesn’t represent their dumb, unpersuasive characters. But it can also get weird on the combat side, where players can be so good at scripting their fights that they win more often than their unskilled, clumsy characters normally would.
The Rest Of the Family
Final bit to catch everyone up! The Burning Wheel family of games includes:
Burning Empires: a very specific sci-fi adaptation, featuring comic-book-like play that closely models the Iron Empires comics by Christopher Moeller. It’s more compact in some ways, more complex in others. Most notably, BE features a tight economy of scenes for each character and the players are in semi-competition with a semi-impartial GM. The competitiveness is touchy and hard to pull off well, but produces some powerful play juice.
Inheritance: this is a mostly-freeform larp-ish game about Viking families gathered to argue over the inheritance of a recently deceased patriarch. It’s a preprogrammed scenario, and procedural uncertainty is reduced to cards that explain who wins in the event of violence. But it’s highly replayable because Beliefs drive play as hard as in the original. Good luck finding a copy, though: Keep an eye on eBay.
Mouse Guard: this variant, another comic adaptation, features simplified character creation (questions instead of lifepaths), simplified scripting (multiple versions of the same basic minigame, each with their own special takes “weapons” and such), simpler but still use-based advancement, and more focused artha generation (one Belief, one Instinct, one Goal). It’s quite a lot easier to hack, which is a big deal. But it’s also not (quite) Burning Wheel. I’m not sure you’d get the same trad-fixing lessons playing Mouse Guard: it’s not constantly telling you you’re doing it wrong.
Torchbearer: huge breakout success, based on Mouse Guard but evolved well beyond it. This is BWHQ’s love letter to B/X D&D, viewed through the Burning Wheel lens. There are some neat tricks that expand on its Mouse Guard roots: the GM is encouraged to just “say yes” to folks who come up with a “good idea,” rather than forcing them to grind through their supplies. “The Grind” is probably Torchbearer’s most notable feature: every roll burns down light, food and so on. A new edition is about to become available.
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Still my favorite RPG. And there’s nothing like Burning Empires in my book.
? Great writeup of my favorite game system(s): Burning Wheel ?☸️
Summarizing:
pioneer in transparency, character goals, “say yes”, “let it ride”, and “use-based improvement”
emergent story, character, & setting complexity
unique, character-driven play
minigames
rewards mastery
One of the things that makes Burning Wheel system(s) so satisfying for long-term play is that it satisfies the “keep learning and tweaking” urge without resorting to the standard “get more numbers” or “get more splatbooks” approaches. It’s more about mastery, emergence, tuning.
I don’t write enough about things I come across in the blogosphere.
Go check out DIY & Dragons’s Advice from the Blogosphere 2020 . Anne created a wonderful index of what gaming posts she found interesting and useful in 2020.
Today, two things crossed my
RSS ?
feed reader.
I now use the Elfeed: Emacs Web Feed Reader. I that my text-based work space includes my RSS feeds. It means that I only read my feeds when I’m at my computer. Which means it’s far easier to remember to take notes or capture posts.
Fellow Hugo-naut
What follows is Bryce Wray’s account of updating their Eleventy
SSG ?
ecosystem. That process and further reflection lead to their return to
Hugo ?
.
This hits me in the feels. With my limited time, I’d rather write blog posts or poems or maybe add a new section to my Site Map.
Or add to the list of Consulting Services I Provide.
I also want to minimize the time I spend on dependency management and maintenance. In other words, I can’t even imagine using a
SSG
that relies on a technology notorious for dependency entropy.
I want my tools to better help me do the things I enjoy; not demand that I burn my time on their sacrificial altar so that I may bask in the résumé building privilege of working with that tool.
I also see a connection to my On Plain Old Boring HTML: And The Hubris of Disruption; That is consider how your technology choices will be self-disruptive.
I’ve been employed as a software developer for 22 years. I’ve seen a lot of trends and marvel at the accelerating pace of dependency entropy. Eroding dependencies always come at a heavy cost of long-term maintenance.
Someone pointed me to Decoding the Innovation Delusion, Nurturing the Maintenance Mindset; it helped contextualize that innovation can come from maintaining something and seeing it in a different way. That’s how I’ve started feeling about my blog; I love maintaining it and using it as a place to work through my thinking.
In other words, if you want to own something, means you need to understand the depreciation schedule of that which you own.
I own my blog; I love my blog. And I want to create the conditions in which its most easy for me to own my blog for now, and (what I hope to be) the decades to come.
Burning Wheel
Some 11 or so years ago, on my first reading, I fell in love with Burning Wheel Revised. I saw the complex yet accessible inner workings of systems that challenged my assumptions about role-playing games.
Recently, I wrote up two takes on creating a character for a Burning Wheel Gold
game.
First, Burning Warhammer: The Captain and the Witch (Character Creation) and then Burning Warhammer: The Captain and the Witch (Alternate Character Creation).
I spent time describing some of my choices in crafting my character.
Burning Wheel Gold
is the system I continue to revisit. I often pull out the two lavish tomes, and read a chapter or two.
That would be Burning Wheel Gold
and Burning Wheel Codex
.
Why? Because the system architecture of
BWG ?
fascinates me. I love the tools of transparency and player agency. Player’s encode, in their character’s BITs ?
, how their character is looking to grow and advance.
This transparency equips the
GM ?
(and other players) to challenge the character.
In other words, if you don’t want a fighting and stabbing game, then write your
BITs
accordingly; avoid instincts related to physical violence; write beliefs that aren’t about conquest but perhaps collaboration.
In one game, our group’s beliefs revolved around delivering our sisters wedding cake. And it worked.
What’s fascinating is Luke Crane and BWHQ ?
have continued to iterate on the fundamental systems that are Burning Wheel.
You can see it in Torchbearer
and Mouse Guard RPG
; Each system different yet with very similar fundamental systems. In fact, Luke Crane’s innovations come through the very process of using and maintaining Burning Wheel.
A Connecting Thread
I’m going to go into a bit of how I see these posts inter-relate; and why they blend together.
Burning Wheel Gold
is a complicated game; but according to the author it’s in its final forms. No expected upstream entropy.
Though I’m eager for the alluded to Creature Codex.
Hugo
is software that has minimal dependencies. It does complicated things, but it’s single file binary let’s you build your site.
Hugo
’s compactness speaks to its finite nature; though not its final form.
Hugo’s under continual development, and in the years since adopting, I’ve experienced only a couple breaking changes.
Both Hugo and Burning Wheel Gold
have a great set of “get started now” tools and documentation, and both also reward investing time in system mastery.
I’ve written several Hugo Shortcodes to help improve the site’s general utility and improve it’s consistency.
Anytime I revisit my blog and do some technical maintenance, Hugo keeps it easy (because it doesn’t make you manage it’s upstream dependency graph). Instead you engage with Hugo through it’s tight interface.
When I go back to a Burning Wheel Gold
game, the
BITs
and character logs help re-orient me to the state of the game. Even if I don’t have a session report, I can look at those two artifacts and orient where things are at and launch into a new session.
Maybe using some Strategies for Cold Opens of Impromptu Games.
This is also one of the reasons I write Session Reports; those ledgers help me jump back into the game I love.
I Digress
I also think about Dungeons and Dragons: Fifth Edition
The once 400 pound Gorilla has bulked up and again dominates the public perception of what is an RPG.
; it’s likely that in next couple of years
WotC ?
will be releasing what they might once have called 6th Edition.
Yes, I can keep playing
5E ?
but they’re introducing some potential upstream chaos that will certainly disrupt the
D&D ?
experience.
Or they might continue with the continuous refinements in
D&D
that seek to the game, or add new player options.
Bleck
Balancing a social game for the emergent conditions of a game group is a fools errand.
Conclusion
All of this is to say: Reflect on the things you love, the disruptions to which they’re vulnerable, and adjust accordingly. Life is change, don’t needlessly introduce more points of vulnerable to change.
Also, enjoy the process of maintenance. Creating this is fun but nurturing something is more rewarding.
‘Eow’ for ‘End Of Week’. Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 7. For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
You may find yourself reading my stuff and wondering what the heck I’m talking about. Indiegames/storygames (see, jargon!) and the adjunct communities are rich in their own weird language. This jargon exists to either flag you as an “insider,” exclude you as an “outsider,” or ideally, provide shorthand so we can get on with our conversation.
I’m allowing comments! I may swing back through and update the glossary based on that feedback. Please think hard about whether you’re looking for clarity or if you just want me to defer to some different authority on meanings. Definition fights are the literal worst so let’s please not start.
So without further ado, this is a glossary specific to the Indie Game Reading Club. My usage may differ from others who use the same or similar language! I’ll be filling in definitions as I have time and inclination.
Affordance: an invitation to do something in the game. Mechanical affordances are things like skills and moves: if these exist, they’re an explicit invitation to use that skill or make that move. In freeform games, they might look like “try to answer these questions through play” elements on character sheets. Best practice affordances are things like directions on how to prep (categories of Fronts in PbtA games for example), or what to aim for as a player. Setting affordances set expectations of how the world works and give permission to the players to pursue certain things: characters go hunting for sinners in Dogs in the Vineyard, so that affordance is there to let the players know it’s okay to judge folks on their sinfulness. I feel like affordances can be connected conceptually to alibi, below.
Agency: the authority a player has, or feels they have, to assert their input on the shared fiction of the game. Conventional roleplaying games expect players to have agency over the feelings and actions of their characters. On the flip side, this expectation is commonly messed with in indiegames and, more broadly, unconventional games. I think agency is a really common place where modern game designers experiment: new or unexpected agency expectations, or taking conventional agency away to invoke certain genre tropes or emotional reactions.
Alibi: the permission a game, play community, or scene grants players to act outside mainstream conventions. D&D provide an alibi to straight up murder other intelligent creatures due to alignment differences or expedience. Apocalypse World provides an alibi to seek out transactional sex. I think one of the most powerful things about roleplaying games across the spectrum is that they all provide alibis to do (play-act) stuff we cannot do in our lives. See also magic circle, below.
Aspects: little explicit nuggets of fictional description used in games like Fate and Cortex Plus. I usually see Aspects deployed as index cards with a specific detail, either placed by a player via mechanical or procedural means, or mandated by fictional positioning. So like: “slippery floor” might be a tactical kind of aspect in a room or “your reputation precedes you” might be a social kind of aspect. Neat way to make elements of the fiction shared, explicit and important.
Author (Authorial, Authority): Lots of ideas wrapped up in the general concept that a player is acting to influence the shared fiction. Some of this is tied into stance (see below), where a player takes an active hand in shaping areas of the shared game fiction they have authority, alibi, and affordance to influence. I’m usually more concerned with authority than authorship if this word ever makes it into my essays. That is, who is and is not expected and allowed to touch certain details of any particular game.
Bang: An urgent crisis that demands a reaction from a character. That reaction is an expression of the character’s makeup and priorities. The important bit is that the GM goes into it without any intended outcome or mandated reaction. Ron Edwards went into tons of detail about Bangs in his Narrativism essay.
Big Model: Sprawling theory of how tabletop RPGs work. Interesting, flawed, produced a generation of interesting games that have evolved into, frankly, much better games. I don’t think I ever directly refer to it but it’s here because it comes up in discourse elsewhere. Here’s a decent breakdown that doesn’t take a year to read.
BITs: Beliefs, Instincts and Traits, three kinds of flags established in The Burning Wheel.
Bleed
Broken Stair (see also Safety, etc.)
Character Monogamy
Coercion
Conventional (see Trad)
Conversation
Creative Agenda (see also Big Model)
Cult of the GM
Debrief
Decision Space
Designer Not Included: a poorly written but well designed game will almost certainly work beautifully when the designer is running it. Take the designer away, though, and bad writing can kill an otherwise good game. I use this phrase when I find a good game that needs the designer to finish explaining how it works: best practices, workarounds, or examples usually.
Diegetic: Roughly, “inside the fiction” of the game. A decision made diegetically means the character is responding to in-fiction events (rather than outside-the-fiction stuff like leveraging a mechanism, spending a token, whatever).
Economic Cycle/Reward Cycle
Emergence/Emergent Behavior
Embodiment
Facilitate: Very broadly this overlaps with “GMing” or “MCing” but can really include anyone whose job is to explain rules and help the event go. That doesn’t have to be a player invested with a convention set of GM responsibilities! Freeform and GMless games frequently need a facilitator.
Fail forward: a procedural philosophy that says even failed rolls result in a change in the fiction. For example, in Apocalypse World, the MC makes a move when a player rolls a 6-. This is explicitly not a failure, but the player might not get what they want while the MC moves the fiction forward. Or in Burning Wheel (and later, games that borrow this idea, such as the Mutant: Year Zero engine), the GM always states the consequence of a failed roll before the roll is made. “Nothing happens” is the typical failure state of traditional games.
Feedbagging: when the players passively consume whatever a facilitator gives them. Marked with an indifference toward pursuing personal goals, embodying a role, or any kind of proactive effort.
Fiat
Fiction, The: All the make-believe stuff the players invent together, as well as the context in which all that stuff exists. So: “there is a dark, abandoned ruin atop the mountain” is in the fiction, as is “orcs have taken over the ruins” and “the human villagers below the mountain live in fear of orc attacks.” See also: Diegetic.
Fiction First (follow the fiction)
Fictional Positioning
Flag (narrative advancement/Ron/Nick Hopkins)
Forge, The: An early 21st century forum where designers and players pushed hard on most of the conventional wisdom surrounding RPGs at the end of the 20th century. Lots of sacred cows slaughtered, and lots of great ideas entered mainstream thinking about play and design. Much of the current “indie gaming” work is a direct result of debates and discussions at The Forge. The forums are still available to read through, but are closed to new submissions.
Forged in the Dark (FitD)
Fortune
Framing
Freeform
Fruitful Void: A topic, theme, or question that can’t be directly answered via a procedure, but procedures can help answer it. There’s no “defeat dungeon” skill/move in D&D because defeating dungeons is that game’s core activity. But you defeat dungeons via the affordances that address the conflicts and obstacles en route to that outcome.
Fruitless Void: Actual rules gaps that don’t orbit or point toward an interesting topic. Sometimes rules are just missing, and a game would be improved with them.
Games on Demand
GM-driven (see also Player-driven)
GM-facing
GMless/GMful
Grind
Handwavey
Holding Environment (Magpie internal language, from Mark Diaz Truman: term taken from a discipline of group mechanics study called Adaptive Leadership.)
Hx
Immersion (oh lord)
Incentive
Indiegame (ownership and distribution vs community vs play aesthetic)
Inside the fiction (see Diegetic)
Kicker
Killer App
Larp (LARP)
Lines and Veils
Lonely fun (a Forge term)
Magic Circle
Mechanical (see also Procedural)
Narrative Authority (see Author(ity))
Player: Whenever I say “player” I always mean to include the player handling facilitation, refereeing, “game mastering” and so on.
Player-facing
Player-driven (as opposed to GM plot/GM driven)
Positioning, Fictional
Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA)
Procedural
Railroading (as a pejorative)
R-Map (relationship map, see also situation map)
RAW (rules as written)
Roses & Thorns
Safety/Safety Tools (X Card, Flower, Script Change, etc.)
Sandbox
Say Yes (…or roll the dice/ Roll the Dice or Say Yes)
Scene Economy
Session 0 (where did that start? TBZ?)
Shadow Con: when you go to a gaming convention, I guarantee there’s at least one more (and usually several more) conventions happening in parallel. They’ve bought badges, they’re in the same hotel, but the participants barely participate in the actual banner event. Each shadow con usually revolves around a small group that fashion themselves something of a court: they’ve seen it all, they’ve gotten everything they can out of the mainstream event, and now they just want to set up private tables of games and private parties with their friends, and the convention is a convenient way to get them all into one place. If you get invited, do not turn down the opportunity! But also, definitely, do not remove your participation entirely from the main event. Gaming cons rely not only on your money but on your participation in events. If you’ve gotten the nod from shadow con royalty, it usually means you’re top-tier talent. The event needs your talents!
Shared Imaginary Space (SIS)
Situation (wrt Situation Map, see R-Map, Relationship Map)
Situation Map (smap)
Social Contract
Social Footprint
Sockets (Moyra)
Stance (Author, Actor, Audience, ??)
Storygame
Structured scenario (see also freeform, larp etc?)
Talky-talky (freeform, games w/o external uncertainty)
Trad/Conventional
Transaction, The
Transparency
Trindie (first from Lowell Francis)
Unplayable: when I say this, I mean the game is unplayable without X, where X = a supportive play culture that can explain the missing bits. Without additional support or a willingness to make stuff up, an unplayable game remains unplayable. Typically there are central procedures that are simply unexplained, e.g. when to roll dice, what happens when you roll them, how the GM is supposed to run the game, what happens in a session, or any explanation of how players are intended to engage with the procedures as presented. Lots of RPG art projects are unplayable ,but have gamelike materials associated with them and can be useful and even playable with additional support (playable rules of your choice, a culture of ongoing rulings, etc.)
Workshop (as a verb)
X Card (see Safety)
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I wrapped up a Burning Wheel 3-shot for MadJay Brown‘s birthday last week. I recommend it, by the way: running a bespoke game for a friend’s birthday is very satisfying! And it’s something I can afford, regardless of distance.
My takeaway is that years of PbtA play has altered my Burning Wheel style. Maybe for the better? I’m still deciding.
But first, some storytime.
How We Set Up
I wanted to get the game up and running fast but remote setting creation is collaborating in hard mode. And I had players in three different time zones. But my pal Judd Karlman at Daydreaming About Dragons has been doing these neat adventure prompt memes. Jay had reposted this one on Twitter with the comment, “I want to be a desperate necromancer!” We were off to the races.
Judd’s visual prompt. I suggested he do a whole book of these things.
After chewing on the meme’s elements a bit, I doodled up a … I’m not sure what to call it. A vibe document? In-character with lots of evocative setting bits, just to see what folks glommed onto. I didn’t have any specific conflicts laid out, just lots of implications. Kind of a Dark Age-Old West thing. With a little work we turned the meme and the doc into some solid setting and character ideas.
The setting outline:
A primitive fantasy setting in decline. There’s a big distant city just called “The City.” The game is set in “the hills,” filled with villages and settlements and ruins. I used Miro and a bunch of free vector art for the map.A strong implication that the decline was not from a golden fantasy age but from something much more advanced. Barely touched on it, not relevant other than for some interesting color when they walked around.It’s in the brutal libertarian apocalypse vein, with self-proclaimed “protectors” clawing their way to the top and taking control of towns. The City has just designated one of two protectors the Protector-General, and she’s come back from The City very weird.There are two magic systems from the Burning Wheel Codex in play: Spirit Binding and Summoning. Spirit Binding is legal and relied on by the Protectors in a weird codependent relationship: the Protector thugs need the Spirit Talkers to maintain control, and the Spirit Talkers grant their powers in return for being left out of their thuggery.Summoning, however, is strictly outlawed. There’s a demon-worshiping cult, and the Protector-General has orders from The City to hunt it down.The three characters are: Bratislav, the apprentice of a “spirit talker”; Troll, a nameless freak of nature with an uncertain past — basically a half-ogre; and Fen, a nervous ranger-problem solver outlaw who killed the Protector-General’s squire.
Export from my Miro board. I could have used any shared whiteboard tool, but I’ve been enjoying this one.
And the setup itself:
The apprentice’s spirit talker master has just died. The apprentice isn’t a spirit talker at all, is not Gifted, can’t do magic. But he is a member of the illegal summoning cult. Nobody knows that when we start.Troll was the dead spirit talker’s devoted companion. He’s a former freebooter; Troll’s former freebooter companion has become a Protector competing with the weirdo Protector-General to take over “protection” of the hillfolk.Fen thought he was being protected by the spirit talker in return for dealing with the nearby town, handling hunting, and shaking down the townfolk for protection payments. But now he’s looking for a new patron.
How it played out:
The whole game starts with the spirit talker dead at the hands of something inhuman. Bratislav assumes something went catastrophically wrong during a ritual they were performing in the tower’s basement. Since the spirit talker does Spirit Binding magic, the spirit of the basement was his secret weapon: it’s a source of knowledge of the world before it fell. Play started with Brat sitting on the steps down to the basement looking at his dead master’s body. No memory of how any of this happened, or even what the ritual was.Brat has the Possessed trait, so that’s fun. Easy to connect the dots.Troll’s first Belief is to kill his master’s murderer. Fen’s first Belief is to secure new protection. The rest of the beliefs are a tangle of obligations and loyalties, very claustrophobic setup.Brat decides he’s gonna try to pull off the con that he’s the “new spirit talker” using only his summoning, and demands respect from his companions (first Instinct). Then the Protector-General shows up, unaware of the spirit talker’s death, demanding he provide a promised bit of already-paid-for information about a ritual she needs to conduct at midnight on the Winter Equinox. Which is in 3 days. Brat does not have that information. Lies to her about the spirit talker being “gone for a while,” immediately contradicting his initial lies to Troll and Fen that “something went wrong and he’s recovering in the basement.” So yeah, Jay got to answer the “what kind of wizard will you become?” He got to become a fast-talking, one-step-ahead-of-the-authorities hustler.The 3-shot ended with Brat confessing to Fen, through an extraordinary series of rolls, that he killed the spirit talker. Troll overhears that and kills him! But Jay kept back 1 Persona to stay alive. There were some other wild shenanigans as well but most definitely more material for at least another 3-shot.
Now let’s talk about the other end of the telescope.
Through The Looking Glass
I’ve run a lot of Burning Wheel on and off for a decade. And then put it away. I felt like the game had taught me everything it was going to. For some folks, Burning Wheel fixes trad-style play. For others, it breaks trad play once and for all (because you can’t readily port its best practices into any other game). I was in the latter camp, and it opened indie gaming up for me. Honestly, the reason there is an Indie Game Reading Club at all is because of Burning Wheel.
In most ways, Burning Wheel runs like any other trad game: the GM runs the world while the players manage their characters. Players roll to “do things” (with caveats about radical transparency, see last week’s piece for more on that). And so on. And like every trad game I can think of, the GM preps by assigning mechanical weight to their assets: stats, skills, spells, abilities, and so on. Top-tier NPCs get fully built out, incidental NPCs might just get eyeballed (3 to 5 dice, maybe an advantage die in situ). The GM is constrained by the same rules as the players and has the same affordances.
PbtA style games like Apocalypse World or Urban Shadows diverge from that style. Nearly all PbtA games really do run in a traditional way because AW is a deconstructed direct descendent of B/X D&D. But one very powerful way it’s different is that the facilitator doesn’t roll dice. They invent whatever they want, either in advance as part of their prep or resulting from making a move. But there’s nearly no mechanical weight to their inventions. It’s pure description and reasonable MC moves emerging from that description. You might eyeball how much damage an NPC does if it’s that kind of game. As often as not, though, “harm levels” aren’t even part of a PbtA game’s design.
That lack of mechanical documentation in PbtA games can be a showstopper for lots of gamers! I get it, I do. It can feel like cheating if you just make shit up on the spot. The whole system relies on trust, fairness and consistency in applying MC moves.
So that’s how I turned the telescope around. When I ran this Burning Wheel game I mostly just made shit up and made best guesses as to dice and systems as it became necessary. The result was a lot different than if I’d started from strict fidelity to what the game says is possible. Because starting there, with assumptions about what’s possible, would have left me feeling beholden to the rules (even while feeling more mechanically secure).
Choices Have Consequences
Just like literally every other system choice made by every game, there are upsides and downsides to PbtA-style Burning Wheel. After three sessions of this approach, here’s what I observed.
Upsides
I felt like I could run a much looser, more reactive game by improvising descriptive stuff. For example, a looming shadow guarded my demon summoning NPC wherever he went. If I’d started with a fully built out NPC I may have not thought of that imagery (bodyguarding is probably a “lesser corporeal” thing in the summoning rules, which would leave me thinking about literal, physical imps and such). At another point, a spirit talker was calling down a vicious weather attack on the characters. Is that something you can do with the Spirit Binding system? Maybe! Saved a ton of time on mechanical prep. This is a nontrivial benefit and one of my favorite things about running PbtA games. I did end up pre-writing at least one, and more often all three, Beliefs for every NPC I knew would be appearing. That all by itself did 90% of the creative lifting.
Downsides
I was never sure whether I could reconcile my inventions with The Rules. If it became important to deal with the lurking shadow demon, where would I have gone in the book to figure that out? No idea. I’d probably just improvise something again. Happily, the entire game devolves down to a very simple die-pool system wrapped up in a very clear negotiation ritual.Burning Wheel, to its credit, generates much of its interesting material out of the constraints of the system, and unexpected results when the GM is held to the same standards as the players (although GM authority in BW is, I think, virtually identical to the MC just making moves when it’s the GM Saying Yes to their own choices). Maybe I know the game well enough to have internalized those constraints? Doubtful. I have no idea what lifepaths the Protector NPCs might have had. And that could have made for more interesting, unexpected set of motivations.If I had broken the trust required to make this work, I think it’d have felt cheaty and unreliable to everyone involved. They may in fact feel that once they read this piece. Or they’ll wonder why I was such a stickler for strict by-the-book play in my past!
Conclusions
It was super interesting to combine the creative traditions of two such different games. I spent years wishing there were crunchier rules and constraints for MCs in Apocalypse World. And now I find myself wishing there was a fairer, more consistent way to improvise, PbtA-style, in Burning Wheel. Or at least engage with the rules text as a source of interesting creative constraints. I’m not sure how to convey that approach to other people. I’m not even sure I’d recommend it!
For our game, I ended up dipping into Burning Wheel’s formalism when I wanted an oracle-like input: what lifepaths could one actually use to produce a dangerous demon summoning NPC? What payments might a demon have demanded by the book for services I’ve narrated?
Our game came out great, honestly. Can’t wait to get back into it down the road, if we can remember where we left off. Nobody seemed to mind or probably even know where I had done the prep and where I was just making shit up. But we always had the fallback position of clearly and transparently negotiating rolls, and playing with folks who knew we weren’t there to screw each other over with legalistic arguments and aggressive dice-grubbing.
Kind of interesting how few rules you actually need when you stop being confrontational with each other. I’m sure the very thought of Burning Wheel World hurts both the Bakers’ and Crane’s heads!
Also: run birthday games for your friends. It’s like giving a gift to yourself. (Mine is October 18, so you still have time to plan something nice.)
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