There was a recent incident with a streaming tabletop role playing gaming (TTRPG) actual play (AP) show where boundaries were crossed. In the video announcement about the cancellation of the show, they kept referencing how Safety Tools were not in place, and how they will be implementing Safety Tools moving forward. This is indeed a great step forward, but I want to talk a little further about Safety and Consent in TTRPGs and how play culture is extremely important. A safety tool is a good step in the right direction, but it is only a step, not the be-all end-all.
But first…
Play Culture
Your game is different from my game, which is different from someone else’s game. Even if we are “playing by the same rules.” This might be because different people have different interpretations of the same written rules. It might be because we have different backgrounds,played different systems in the past, and bring different preconceived understandings to these “same rules”. Some of how you play one game system will be very similar to how you play a different game system.
If you play with more than one group of people, those assumptions and “how you play” will likely be different for each group of people. Whether that’s multiple regular “home” games with different people or game systems, a game at a local store, company-sponsored league play, a gaming convention, an online game, or a game for a streaming or recorded show with an audience. Each of these different groups/settings/contexts will have a different set of assumptions and ways that you play — they each have a different play culture. Play culture is all the assumptions, expectations, habits, and rules we bring to the game session. It drastically affects how we interact with the rules and other players. It’s a phrase that helps us understand why your experiences and my experiences are different even though we are playing with the “same rules”.
Safety Tools
A safety tool is something we use to help keep us safer. To prevent or reduce harm. One common misconception I often see with TTRPG safety tools, is the idea that they will PREVENT harm, when in reality most of them are reducing harm. A seat belt is a safety tool. When you get in a car crash, you still get in a crash. You might be banged up, but hopefully you’re more or less okay. Hopefully that seat belt, that safety tool you used, helped mitigate some of the harm you could have received.
There are a lot of safety tools. The TTRPG Safety Toolkit is a resource created by Kienna Shaw and Lauren Bryant-Monk. The TTRPG Safety Toolkit is a compilation of safety tools that have been designed by members of the tabletop roleplaying games community for use by players and GMs at the table. You can find it at bit.ly/ttrpgsafetytoolkit.
Culture of Safety
Safety tools are great, but they are only useful if they can actually get used. Seat belts are great at reducing harm from car crashes. But there are still people out there who don’t use them. I would bet that most people can imagine how hard it might be to get a fidgety seven year old who’s never worn a seat belt to put one on. How do you get that child to use one? Create a culture where it becomes commonplace and everyone always puts the seat belt on, no matter what. The car doesn’t start moving until all the seat belts are on.
The first time you use a safety tool in an TTRPG, it might be awkward it might be comfortable, or it might be somewhere in between. That is okay. Keep at it, keep trying. Maybe that particular safety tool isn’t working for you. Try another one, or several. I typically use 5+ different safety tools in my games.
For example, there is one incredibly simple underutilized and understated safety tool that I first experienced at Games on Demand at Origins Game Fair (a large tabletop gaming convention held annually in Columbus, OH). I don’t know who created it or what it’s called, but I think of it as the “Safety Welcome.” It is basically a statement used to preface play, and the wording is something like this: “I’m so glad to have you all here. We are incredibly lucky, because all of us here care more about each other, our health, our well being, and our safety more than any fictional story we’ll create together in the next couple of hours.” It’s not much, just a couple of sentences, but it starts to set the tone and the culture at that table that we, the people, come first. It starts to create that culture of safety, where we can always fall back to caring for each other.
Getting Started
One comment I see when someone brings up safety tools is, “You don’t need a tool for that, just talk to your players”. That’s great! It sounds like you might have a play culture that has already embraced safety where each of the people are more important than the shared story. Keep at it!
But for me, that hasn’t always been the case. I have been in plenty of game sessions where something happened and I wish I had a way to address it and bring it up, but I didn’t. Now if you can bring up when you feel uncomfortable in front of a group of people, open yourself up and be vulnerable, good for you! I am Japanese American, and I grew up in a culture where I was expected to be passive, to be deferential, to be quiet, to not make waves, to be the model minority. Speaking up about something that was bothering me wasn’t something I was used to doing, nor was it something I was expected to do.
The first safety tool I was introduced to was the X-Card, and to me, it was revolutionary. I had no idea that there could be something that gave me permission to speak up, to do something I had culturally been trained not to do, but wanted to.
Maybe YOU don’t need a safety tool, because you can just speak up for yourself. Maybe I don’t necessarily NEED one for myself now. Maybe, with a culture of safety, I can just speak up and have a conversation with people.
BUT, I am always on the lookout for old me. The person who didn’t have the experience, the training, the confidence, the ability to speak up for themselves. And besides, even if I don’t “need” one for myself, I’ve grown accustomed to them, and I find it WAY easier to use safety tools than to not have them present.
My Setup
As alluded earlier, I use 5+ safety tools on the regular, all for different reasons. I figured I’d go through my setup to show how I try to have a whole culture of safety, not just a single tool.
The Pitch & CATS (Concept, Aim, Tone, Subject matter)
For me, safety starts at the ideation phase — what game system are we playing? What kind of content can we expect from this game system and the scenario, what are the player characters likely to be expected to do, what type of situations will they get into? What kind of tone are we going for? What subjects might come up?
I really like playing games where everyone is enthusiastic about the game system, the scenario, and the story we’ll be telling together. If someone doesn’t want to play teenagers, especially sexually active teenagers, Monsterhearts is probably a poor choice of game system.
Lines & Veils
I typically use a Google Doc set to where anyone with the link can edit. I send this out a week, or more, before the first session. That way everyone, at their leisure, can edit the document anonymously (with the setting “anyone can edit,” you can edit the document anonymously). We can even ask questions and clarifications ahead of time.
I love doing this ahead of time, so when we get to the first session, we all have an idea of things we are just not including in the game at all (Lines), and stuff that we will allude to or Fade to black on (Veils).
Safety Welcome
As mentioned before, I welcome everyone and stress that we, the people, are more important than any collective story we tell together.
Open Door Policy
The Safety Welcome typically rolls right into the Open Door policy, where I tell people that they can get up and leave for any reason at any time. Maybe they need to answer the phone, go to the bathroom, get a snack, just stretch their legs, whatever reason. Their comfort and needs are important and they can do what they need to do, even if that action is to leave the game and not come back. I ask that, if they are able to, to let me know if and when they are coming back, I appreciate it, but it is by no means required. I typically play online, so sometimes the internet and technology just makes things harder, so sometimes you can’t communicate, whether that is for technical or non-technical reasons. I will handle the absence as best I can, but it’s on me, the facilitator or GM, not them. That communication is a courtesy, not a requirement.
X-Card
I introduce the X-Card (http://tinyurl.com/x-card-rpg) by John Stavropoulos (https://twitter.com/JStav_) during all my sessions. This is the primary tool I use for triaging incidents during game sessions. There are other tools that can be used in place of this, like Script Change (http://briebeau.itch.io/script-change) by Beau Sheldon (https://twitter.com/ThoughtyGames). I personally use the X-Card, but will happily switch to other tools if other players want. I like the X-Card, because for me the default assumption is that you don’t have to talk about the content being removed, but you can if you want.
I like to remind people that the X-Card does not have to be used JUST for problematic content. I give the example of, “Hey can we not use Y name, it’s my Z, and I’ll just get confused.”
I also take this opportunity to circle back and explain how the Lines & Veils document we started is a living document, and how when we X things out we can update the Lines & Veils document to reflect our new shared understanding.
Asking for Consent
During play, if I want to introduce something that I think could be problematic, or needs buy-in from others, I ask (out of character). For example, “Hey X, I think it would be interesting if our two characters were dating, does that sound interesting to you too?”, or “Hey I would like to have a rivalry with someone, is that interesting to anyone?”
Culture of Safety vs. Safety Tools
I use a lot of safety tools. I think they are useful and valuable. I want them in all my games going forward. I won’t willingly get rid of them. I might swap out one for a different one, but I would like to have something. But that variability in the particulars is all based on a culture of safety. The baseline, that we, as people are more important than the fiction or game we are playing. For me, you can put any specific tool on top, but you NEED that strong base.
With any of the safety tools designed during play, I am basically doing a similar thing but with different details.
- Assess. How do you recognize something has or is going wrong?
- Act. What are you going to do right now in the moment to mitigate further harm from occurring?
- Plan. How has what happened going to change your actions or the story going forward?
This thought process is happening for me, no matter the details of which safety tool we are using. Whether I need to say, “X that”, “Cut”, “Brake”, “Pause”, “WTF is going on here?” I am trying to assess what is happening, making sure I can act, then discuss and plan what to do based on what has happened.
Any one safety tool or set of tools isn’t going to stop harm from happening. Hopefully they can help mitigate how much harm occurs. To me, it is necessary to start from a strong base, a base of a culture of safety and consent.
The Incident
The recent incident occurred during a live stream. In a Discord conversation, Jim Crocker (https://jimlikesgames.com) pointed out that, if they were not live, but were recording ahead of time and releasing a pre-recorded episode, a lot of the harm could have been mitigated. The act of recording ahead of time is a safety tool in the context of Actual Play content. While it doesn’t have a fancy name, and people don’t think of it often, pre-recording can be considered a safety tool. Had it been implemented, things would have played out very differently. The offending incident probably still would have happened, but the cast would have had time to talk about, debrief, and possibly retcon and re-record something different instead. The audience wouldn’t have been exposed to harm. The cast wouldn’t have been exposed to harm in front of an audience. The cast might have acted or experienced it entirely differently as it was happening, if there wasn’t a live audience watching with them. This is an extremely common practice in television. Even live TV is on a delay so they can quickly edit things if need be. Having it pre-recorded doesn’t excuse the action or the behavior, but it is a way to reduce harm and give the cast members more agency over the content that is presented to the audience
The announcement of the cancellation of the show talked heavily about how the show, and the network, didn’t have safety tools in place. It talked about how that was going to change moving forward. This to me is a great start, but just a start. Having a safety tool or a set of safety tools is great, and will likely help. But I think what is most needed is that the culture needs to shift. One where the people, the cast and the audience, are more important than the show.
Do I think Actual Play shows have to be pre-recorded and no longer live? No, I totally think you can do a live show that is “safe enough,” but there is a trade-off to doing it live. Pre-recording is just one of many safety tools that could have helped.
I do hope that safety tools become more prominent in streaming TTRPG shows. I would love to have seen that incident play out with multiple safety tools in place “on screen and live”. Imagine if the player had asked and gotten consent before introducing problematic content? Or if one of the other players who was visibly uncomfortable was able to stop the fiction and the cast could take action about the problematic content before resuming the fiction. That would have a much different broadcast. To me, a much more educational and useful broadcast. Yes, some harm may have happened still, but a lot would have been mitigated. It could have been a great demonstration of how safety tools can work to prioritize the safety, consent, and well being of people over the fiction. I think it would have been a better show.
In a more entertainment focused show, there is often tension between “the show must go on” and the wellbeing of the participants. The show culture can often prioritize seamless entertainment over the safety of the participants, whether that’s the cast or the audience. This obviously doesn’t have to be the case, and different shows can make different decisions, but I hope that more shows recognize it as a decision that needs to be made and make sure their actual play culture aligns with their values.
Many Actual Play shows are more entertainment first, actual play second. To me, this makes them more similar to “reality tv” with a lightly scripted structure or an improv show, than how my game sessions are actually done. I do wish there was another label to differentiate between these more entertainment focused shows and Actual Plays more similar to what typical game sessions actually look like.
Share this:
Discover more from The Indie Game Reading Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Hello readers! I haven’t mentioned that I run a Patreon in a while, so let’s talk about that for a minute (I promise I won’t do this more than once a quarter-or-so).
First things first: If you weren’t already aware, my Patreon is at https://patreon.com/igrc. And for those of you who do know, you might not realize or remember that I’ve got goals. After reviewing them recently, I brought down some of the targets because I’m eager to keep growing this thing.
The first goal, $200/mo, started my slow-but-steady tagging project. I’ve got a tag structure I’m happy with. Now I’m going through the whole site (hundreds of posts!) to patch up big holes left from when I pulled in my content from Plus. I’m going to build a page where I lay out the tag structure so you can start exploring by:
Titles (reviews and actual play)TechniquesCulture (events, online happenings, and so on)Philosophy (“theory” but I despise that term)Resources (cheat sheets, references of all kinds)
The second goal is $250 and we are so close. I’m at $235/mo (not really, not after Patreon takes its cut). But if I can get that next $15, I’m going to start paying guest writers, once a month at first, to offer up their personal expertise. I’ve hosted a couple already: Yoshi Creelman’s outstanding Safety and Consent piece from April, and Aaron Feild’s list of One-Shot Microgames. Those were both really fun, I think the readers enjoyed them, and it expanded the voice of the blog. Good stuff.
I want more of that! So I’m coming to you, Facebook followers of the Indie Game Reading Club, for help. Not just that last $15 I’m trying to scrape together, but also for writers and topics.
The thing I want to focus on is publishing writers with specific specializations. The two guest columns I’ve hosted so far were exactly that: Yoshi’s extensive research and experience into safety and consent, Aaron’s encyclopedic knowledge of sassy one-shots. So…what’s your specialization? What thing would you want to share with an audience?
Two final thoughts: One, even $1/mo support helps get me to the next goal. Two, I would not complain about overshooting that $15/mo target! I’ve got a $300/mo goal as well (it’s on the Patreon page). And if I find and curate good work, I’ll want to do it more often than once a month.
Thank you for your support!
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!Share this:FacebookRedditTwitterTumblrPinterestEmailLike this:Like Loading…
Related
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
revisionedition 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.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!Share this:FacebookRedditTwitterTumblrPinterestEmailLike this:Like Loading…
Related