Eric Minton
01-04-2006, 04:08 PM
So, we played our first session of Burning Wheel on Monday. It went well!
We started with about an hour of light role-play in which Conn’s confidence man recruited the rest of the group for his ‘monster hunting’ scheme. This was in no sense wasted time; my players like to take some time to ‘get into’ their characters, without pressure to learn too much system or deal with heavy issues right off the bat.
We only had one dice roll at this stage of the game, when Jon’s wizard cast Phantasmagoria to change his appearance so that no one would know he was leaving town. When he dropped the spell as soon as they left Vevelstad, I had a passing drover recognize him and greet him by name, just to see the look on Jon’s face. However, this contradicted the spirit of Jon’s intent, so there’ll be no lasting consequences. Maybe the drover died in a freak carting accident or something.
After picking a village for their first scam (which, I explained to them, would just happen to be the village I’d prepped, since I’d only prepped one – convenient!), they settled down to devise a Plan. This involved an illusionary troll, a bellows modified to make freakish troll noises, and an eviscerated sheep. Heath’s musician would go to the village and include a song about troll-hunting monster hunters in his repertoire, then hang about and encourage the locals to call in the monster-hunting cavalry. Eventually, the rest of our merry band would show up, vanquish an illusionary troll, and PROFIT!
Things didn’t quite go according to plan. Morgan’s ex-soldier was spotted making off with the sheep (she didn’t have Stealthy, so she needed a whopping 6 successes with Beginner’s Luck – not easy on 7 dice!), and while she wasn’t seen clearly enough to recognize later, the townsfolk now were talking about the troll's sheep-stealing manservant. :-) Meanwhile, Heath’s bard slept with the alderwoman’s daughter twice, the second time after learning who she was, and got kicked out of the village as a result! And they only realized at this late stage that killing an illusionary troll would have to be staged well away from the town so that no one could see what was going on in detail… but then, how could they prove that they’d done anything at all?
In the end, our heroes successfully carried off their scheme. They persuaded and intimidated the annoying kid and the local toughs into staying out of the way, because it wouldn’t do to have the locals involved in the fake fight. They carried torches on their way to the final confrontation (so the villagers would know where to look), and staged the battle on a clifftop, where they ‘fought’ a boulder enchanted to look like a troll, and eventually rolled the thing off the cliff into the fjord. Victory!
The villagers threw a small feast for the monster hunters, and rewarded them for their troubles with a few kegs of beer, a quantity of dried fish, and some nice copper cutlery. PROFIT! They also wound up bringing 14-year-old Gunnar (aka ‘the spaz’) along as an ‘apprentice monster hunter’, fully intending to kill him in cold blood if he spills the beans about the ‘secrets of the trade’. And as the session ended, Morgan’s character wandered off to check on the local troll cave, the ones whose legends they’d based their plans on in the first place…
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System-wise, we stuck strictly to the Hub of the Wheel. No combat, no Duel of Wits, no Resources or Circles. They depended on me to tell them what to roll and when to roll it, but I tried to explain how the rules worked each time so that they’d eventually internalize them. They liked the idea of marking off tests toward gaining or improving skills, though I handled all the numbers and charts. They also liked FoRKs and linked tests.
Even using only the Hub rules, we still had some system hiccups. We had very few uses of Helping dice because I had the impression that you could only Help using the exact same skill, and I thought that an action was two seconds instead of one; fortunately, these were insignificant and had no effect on play. More annoying was how long it took for some of the players to grasp that ‘Obstacle’ means ‘number of successes needed’ rather than ‘how high you need to roll on the die’. (“You got 7 successes on 8 dice? No, when I said ‘Obstacle 2’, I didn’t mean you got successes on a 2-6.”)
Right now, I’m handling Artha awards on my own, as no one else knows how Artha works well enough to know when to propose awards. I made sure that everyone got their first Fate point before anyone got a second one, so that no one would feel disgruntled and left out. By the end of the session, I think every character received 2-4 Fate points, but no Persona or Deeds points. They don’t know when to spend Artha either; until they’ve got the rules down, I’ll be suggesting opportune moments to spend it, like when the ex-soldier failed her linked Acting test in the troll ‘fight’, but had two 6s (which, rerolled with a Fate point, won her the test).
The biggest non-system issue lay in the splitting of the group, particularly since they'd agreed to keep Jon's wizard-tinkerer away from the village, which left Jon with nothing to do. I figure that this is something they can work out OoC. Hopefully the next plan will allow everyone to get in on the village action.
All in all, a successful session. The next couple of games will continue to be light and low on combat, giving my players time to get used to the rules, the setting and their characters. (And also giving me time to memorize more rules and to write up some setting material!)
- Eric
We started with about an hour of light role-play in which Conn’s confidence man recruited the rest of the group for his ‘monster hunting’ scheme. This was in no sense wasted time; my players like to take some time to ‘get into’ their characters, without pressure to learn too much system or deal with heavy issues right off the bat.
We only had one dice roll at this stage of the game, when Jon’s wizard cast Phantasmagoria to change his appearance so that no one would know he was leaving town. When he dropped the spell as soon as they left Vevelstad, I had a passing drover recognize him and greet him by name, just to see the look on Jon’s face. However, this contradicted the spirit of Jon’s intent, so there’ll be no lasting consequences. Maybe the drover died in a freak carting accident or something.
After picking a village for their first scam (which, I explained to them, would just happen to be the village I’d prepped, since I’d only prepped one – convenient!), they settled down to devise a Plan. This involved an illusionary troll, a bellows modified to make freakish troll noises, and an eviscerated sheep. Heath’s musician would go to the village and include a song about troll-hunting monster hunters in his repertoire, then hang about and encourage the locals to call in the monster-hunting cavalry. Eventually, the rest of our merry band would show up, vanquish an illusionary troll, and PROFIT!
Things didn’t quite go according to plan. Morgan’s ex-soldier was spotted making off with the sheep (she didn’t have Stealthy, so she needed a whopping 6 successes with Beginner’s Luck – not easy on 7 dice!), and while she wasn’t seen clearly enough to recognize later, the townsfolk now were talking about the troll's sheep-stealing manservant. :-) Meanwhile, Heath’s bard slept with the alderwoman’s daughter twice, the second time after learning who she was, and got kicked out of the village as a result! And they only realized at this late stage that killing an illusionary troll would have to be staged well away from the town so that no one could see what was going on in detail… but then, how could they prove that they’d done anything at all?
In the end, our heroes successfully carried off their scheme. They persuaded and intimidated the annoying kid and the local toughs into staying out of the way, because it wouldn’t do to have the locals involved in the fake fight. They carried torches on their way to the final confrontation (so the villagers would know where to look), and staged the battle on a clifftop, where they ‘fought’ a boulder enchanted to look like a troll, and eventually rolled the thing off the cliff into the fjord. Victory!
The villagers threw a small feast for the monster hunters, and rewarded them for their troubles with a few kegs of beer, a quantity of dried fish, and some nice copper cutlery. PROFIT! They also wound up bringing 14-year-old Gunnar (aka ‘the spaz’) along as an ‘apprentice monster hunter’, fully intending to kill him in cold blood if he spills the beans about the ‘secrets of the trade’. And as the session ended, Morgan’s character wandered off to check on the local troll cave, the ones whose legends they’d based their plans on in the first place…
-----
System-wise, we stuck strictly to the Hub of the Wheel. No combat, no Duel of Wits, no Resources or Circles. They depended on me to tell them what to roll and when to roll it, but I tried to explain how the rules worked each time so that they’d eventually internalize them. They liked the idea of marking off tests toward gaining or improving skills, though I handled all the numbers and charts. They also liked FoRKs and linked tests.
Even using only the Hub rules, we still had some system hiccups. We had very few uses of Helping dice because I had the impression that you could only Help using the exact same skill, and I thought that an action was two seconds instead of one; fortunately, these were insignificant and had no effect on play. More annoying was how long it took for some of the players to grasp that ‘Obstacle’ means ‘number of successes needed’ rather than ‘how high you need to roll on the die’. (“You got 7 successes on 8 dice? No, when I said ‘Obstacle 2’, I didn’t mean you got successes on a 2-6.”)
Right now, I’m handling Artha awards on my own, as no one else knows how Artha works well enough to know when to propose awards. I made sure that everyone got their first Fate point before anyone got a second one, so that no one would feel disgruntled and left out. By the end of the session, I think every character received 2-4 Fate points, but no Persona or Deeds points. They don’t know when to spend Artha either; until they’ve got the rules down, I’ll be suggesting opportune moments to spend it, like when the ex-soldier failed her linked Acting test in the troll ‘fight’, but had two 6s (which, rerolled with a Fate point, won her the test).
The biggest non-system issue lay in the splitting of the group, particularly since they'd agreed to keep Jon's wizard-tinkerer away from the village, which left Jon with nothing to do. I figure that this is something they can work out OoC. Hopefully the next plan will allow everyone to get in on the village action.
All in all, a successful session. The next couple of games will continue to be light and low on combat, giving my players time to get used to the rules, the setting and their characters. (And also giving me time to memorize more rules and to write up some setting material!)
- Eric