Rules/Agenda Disconnect

[Charlie]

(I apologize in advance if this is in the wrong forum; feel free to move it if you feel that it fits somewhere else)

Hey folks,

It's been a little while since I've been on these boards, but a discussion came up in my BW group that really got me thinking about how a lot of the different rule subsets in BW interact. By 'rule subsets', I mean Circles, Fight!, DoW, Steel, Emotional Attributes, Sorcery, or Resources. All of these obviously use the same basic mechanic, but have pretty widely divergent rules quirks and oddities depending on the particular roll you are making. This has created a problem for me, which I will expand on in a moment.

First, a bit about my group. We have all played RPGs for a long time, most of us having been brought up on DnD 2nd edition, and all of us playing 3/3.5 in its various incarnations. A few of us have played a lot of White Wolf games, and we all have some experience with other popular 'main-stream' systems like Shadowrun, GURPS, among others. We started playing Burning Wheel last summer, and we all own the books. At most, we probably have around 10-15 sessions under our belts, all of which I have been the GM.

The disconnect I (and some of my players) am having are where some of these rule subsets deviate from one another. Here are a few examples:

-Perceptions tests are open-ended, but other stats are not. Why?

-When recording Steel advances, you reference a table with a bunch of example situations and record a test based on that constructed obstacle in instances where a Steel roll wasn't needed. Why can't Steel simply be tested like any other skill?

-Training times are widely different and varied. Is this necessary, and why?

-Emotional attributes all work quite a bit differently.

-Why can't failed resources rolls count as a test?

-Despite very detailed rules for being injured in combat, there are little to no indicators of the effects of injury for other situations based on skill-checks and such. Are potential injuries negotiated before hand, an example case where someone is going to make a Climb test to get a cliff-side?

-Another huge disconnect we are experiencing is with the Fight! mechanics. Obviously, they were designed with a certain level of gritty realism in mind. Fights are dangerous, and it is certainly reflected in the rules. I assumed that this was the author's intent. However, I have found the Fights to become really drawn-out attrition-fests, especially in the cases of heavily armored foes. By the end of it, it seems people are just rolling dice to whittle down each other's armor, hoping to get past their opponent's before the enemy gets a lucky shot in.

Things get especially clunky during Fights with tons of combatants, and it's become clear to me that the system isn't really designed with these in mind. This is kind of a disappointment, because it only allows for very small-scale encounters. Once ten people are involved, Fight bogs down A LOT, not to mention all of the distance and positioning abstraction you need to take care of.

Another issue are positioning tests. Positioning tests alone have modifiers for weapon length, speed, reflexes, etc. When you have a room full of combatants positioning against each other, this can become quite complicated. An easy solution would be group positioning tests, but then many of these modifiers become voided for good or ill for the players. This leads me to a HUGE disconnect: Fights should be dangerous and gritty, which is what all of these modifiers are there to reflect (correct me if I'm wrong), BUT you are encouraged to abstract certain situations to 'make things work' more smoothly. In situations where character death (or grievous injury) is a very real and present danger, it seems odd that somethings just need to be 'hand-waved'.

Finally, there is the compounded difficulty of all of the modifiers during a fight. You need to worry about injury, lighting, terrain, positioning advantage or disadvantage. With a failed roll here or there, it can be very difficult to be able to do anything. If someone has a light and a superficial wound, they are pretty well-screwed (especially if they fail a Steel test).

I don't think that this is necessarily a design flaw (for many, the system does exactly what they want it to), but it seems like in every other part of Burning Wheel, failure is meant to be fun and create interesting narrative complications. In Fight!, failure can often translate into a long and drawn on trading of failed rolls (when both combatants are injured). To me, it doesn't seem nearly as cinematic or exciting.

(end rant about fight)

I guess what I am getting at is that I feel that the rule core and philosophy or Burning Wheel are so solid, but all of the small rules nuances in other areas really bog down the experience. I question whether having 300+ pages of rules is even necessary for this system to achieve its design goals.

Do I need pages and pages of complications for Circles to make it work? Not really; one small chart would be fine.

Does injury treatment and recovery need a whole matrix devoted to widely varying difficulties depending on skill used, and whether treatment is succeeded and recovery is failed, or vice versa, or something else? I don't think so.

All of that being said, I really do love this game. The focus on intent and beliefs are revolutionary for my gaming group, and we are all still amazed at what we are capable of achieving in a single session, despite when some of the rules bog us down. I guess I am just musing about some of the design decisions, and I would like to hear anyone else's thoughts or solutions to any of the above problems.

Sorry if this came off as terrible unorganized or rantish. Hopefully this discussion will be somewhat productive :)

[GreedyAlgorithm]

-Despite very detailed rules for being injured in combat, there are little to no indicators of the effects of injury for other situations based on skill-checks and such. Are potential injuries negotiated before hand, an example case where someone is going to make a Climb test to get a cliff-side?
IMO there are very detailed rules for degrees to which you can get injured, and very explicit rules for which degree of injury you will sustain in various situations in combat, and harder-to-find guidelines for out-of-combat degrees of injury. Check out Throw (Fight! maneuver) and the Materials chapter. But yes, in a random situation like "I just got caught in a burning building and barely escaped, how badly am I burnt?" mostly degree of injury is negotiated or set by the GM.


-Another huge disconnect we are experiencing is with the Fight! mechanics. Obviously, they were designed with a certain level of gritty realism in mind. Fights are dangerous, and it is certainly reflected in the rules. I assumed that this was the author's intent. However, I have found the Fights to become really drawn-out attrition-fests, especially in the cases of heavily armored foes. By the end of it, it seems people are just rolling dice to whittle down each other's armor, hoping to get past their opponent's before the enemy gets a lucky shot in.

Things get especially clunky during Fights with tons of combatants, and it's become clear to me that the system isn't really designed with these in mind. This is kind of a disappointment, because it only allows for very small-scale encounters. Once ten people are involved, Fight bogs down A LOT, not to mention all of the distance and positioning abstraction you need to take care of.

Another issue are positioning tests. Positioning tests alone have modifiers for weapon length, speed, reflexes, etc. When you have a room full of combatants positioning against each other, this can become quite complicated. An easy solution would be group positioning tests, but then many of these modifiers become voided for good or ill for the players. This leads me to a HUGE disconnect: Fights should be dangerous and gritty, which is what all of these modifiers are there to reflect (correct me if I'm wrong), BUT you are encouraged to abstract certain situations to 'make things work' more smoothly. In situations where character death (or grievous injury) is a very real and present danger, it seems odd that somethings just need to be 'hand-waved'.

Finally, there is the compounded difficulty of all of the modifiers during a fight. You need to worry about injury, lighting, terrain, positioning advantage or disadvantage. With a failed roll here or there, it can be very difficult to be able to do anything. If someone has a light and a superficial wound, they are pretty well-screwed (especially if they fail a Steel test).

I don't think that this is necessarily a design flaw (for many, the system does exactly what they want it to), but it seems like in every other part of Burning Wheel, failure is meant to be fun and create interesting narrative complications. In Fight!, failure can often translate into a long and drawn on trading of failed rolls (when both combatants are injured). To me, it doesn't seem nearly as cinematic or exciting.
a) Get a spear or axe or something and Great Strike. Quit using your sword against plate mail. Even 6D will fail in a hit or two against Ob 4.

b) I've heard claims that lots of combatants are quite doable, but haven't tried it myself, so I'll let others speak to that one. I believe there are threads on that scattered around.

c) If it's too much to keep track of, only one person (or side if it's obvious) gets each Positioning bonus. In fact I think it's written in the rules somewhere that only one person gets it even if it's not too much to keep track of.

d) If both combatants are injured and everyone thinks the Fight! will be drawn out and boring, you should both script Withdraw or just agree to back off and lick your wounds. Or back off and resolve the rest with a Bloody Versus. :) If you're paranoid about character death, allow Complications.

[xenomouse]

I share some of your general concerns. I feel confident in saying that the inconsistencies you noticed have been tested thoroughly, and when trying to make a gritty, realistic-as-it-can-be adventure game, they do make a bit of sense (perception, steel, resources, treatment, etc).

I'll just say that you should integrate the more complex stuff of BW at your own pace. Remember that there are many degrees of complexity between a simple Bloody Versus test and an all-out Fight!. Finding a balance that fits your group is your responsibility as the GM. The most important stuff in the game is the BITs. Circles, resources, Duels of Wits, and Fight! just give you interesting things to do with those BITs.

By the way, if you want to see Resource and Circles tests in an audiovisual medium, check out the Al Pacino / Jeremy Irons version of Merchant of Venice. That story is driven by a failed Resource check. ;)

[Charlie]

Thanks for your replies!

Here are mine:




a) Get a spear or axe or something and Great Strike. Quit using your sword against plate mail. Even 6D will fail in a hit or two against Ob 4.

Of course there is a solution to this circumstance, but obviously not everyone is going to be carrying around spears and axes. Against monsters with natural armor you still run into problems.


c) If it's too much to keep track of, only one person (or side if it's obvious) gets each Positioning bonus. In fact I think it's written in the rules somewhere that only one person gets it even if it's not too much to keep track of.

Huh. I didn't see where it listed that. I'll have to check again.


d) If both combatants are injured and everyone thinks the Fight! will be drawn out and boring, you should both script Withdraw or just agree to back off and lick your wounds. Or back off and resolve the rest with a Bloody Versus. If you're paranoid about character death, allow Complications.

I think this really hits one of the main issues. Personally, I feel that you should have to make this adjustment mid-game if the mechanic isn't working. If you are going to eventually have to go back to the bloody versus test because the Fight! mechanics aren't working, then not only have you just wasted a lot of time using Fight!, but it shows that there might be something problematic about them to begin with.

This is where the problem arises. On the one hand, you have this very tactical combat system, but on the other, you have to rely on abstraction and 'fudging it' in order to get the desired results. This seems like an inherent conflict of purpose to me.


I share some of your general concerns. I feel confident in saying that the inconsistencies you noticed have been tested thoroughly, and when trying to make a gritty, realistic-as-it-can-be adventure game, they do make a bit of sense (perception, steel, resources, treatment, etc).

But is a realistic-as-can-be adventure game the goal? I certainly don't get that impression. It seems that the discrepancies between the different areas you named aren't always that intuitive. Like I asked earlier, why is perception open-ended, and no other stat test? Or why don't failed resources count towards advancement? It's those idiosyncracies that seem to detract from the coherency of the system as a whole, and I am curious as to why there are so many.


I'll just say that you should integrate the more complex stuff of BW at your own pace. Remember that there are many degrees of complexity between a simple Bloody Versus test and an all-out Fight!. Finding a balance that fits your group is your responsibility as the GM. The most important stuff in the game is the BITs. Circles, resources, Duels of Wits, and Fight! just give you interesting things to do with those BITs.

I agree that there is definitely a learning curve. And the BITs mechanics are, for the most part, solid.

I am interested to here more responses, this is helpful.

[pseudoidiot]

Also, if you find yourself doing a lot of Fights, everyone should really be asking if it's important enough for Fight or not. If it isn't hitting on anyone's BITs, there's definitely no need to break out the scripting sheets. And, even when it is hitting some BITs, that still doesn't mean it's time to go into Fight! Always remember to ask "is this important enough to put my character's life on the line?" If it's not, then just use Bloody Versus or Say Yes.

[Jaroslav]

Here are a couple of thoughts:

If I swing a sword at a dude and miss, I might still learn a little bit about swinging a sword and be better at it next time. If I try to buy a horse and I can't afford it, that doesn't make me any more likely to be wealthier the next time I try to buy a horse.

If two actual dudes in armor were swinging at each other with swords and bouncing off of each other's armor, what would they do? Maybe taking a second to assess the terrain for an advantage? Or, what about throwing the sword to the ground and tackling the other guy? I think a GM should be well acquainted with all of the options in Fight!, so that, if your players just script "strike, strike, strike" you can take it upon yourself to do something crazy with the NPC.

[luke]

Thanks for all the questions and answers!

I'd like to chime in and say that the game is about fighting and believing -- fighting for what your believing. And by "fighting" I mean bashing each other in the face with steel.

-L

[Z-Dog]

"Like I asked earlier, why is perception open-ended, and no other stat test? Or why don't failed resources count towards advancement?"

perception: sometimes you need to know how well you did...it's open ended because you can really, really do well sometimes

failed resources not counting: to keep that element of risk...otherwise people just keep pushing resources tests regardless to "up" their stat

Fight! being an armor slugfest: yes, guys with a lot of armor are going to pound on each other...try it without armor: yikes!

too complicated with two many people in a Fight!:

I've heard two responses to this one:

1. It's not that complicated. Keep playing. Eventually, you'll eat/sleep/dream the rules so well the big fights will be easy.

2. Keep the combats smaller, simpler. Why are there 10 guys fighting 10 guys? Isn't it enough to do combat with 1 super badass Orc?

Note: everything above is just stuff I've gleaned from reading the boards here for a year or so. Everything you're raising has been raised before. Trying looking through some of the old threads. There's lots of good suggestions.

you've had 10-15 games and everyone owns the books? I'm so jealous!

[xenomouse]

For steel, you get tests from seeing crap that would make you panic or somehow lose control of your body. When your character sees someone die, there's no bones about it, it affects him. Only test steel if it would be important that he might not be able to pull himself together in the following moments. Whether or not your dude panics, he's seen some messed up stuff that will harden him up.

[Fuseboy]

I've played a similar number of sessions I've had similar thoughts myself. This came up in our last session, and Mark expressed that he liked the frills; I think he feels it gives the game some character. :-)

It seems like an elegant basic idea, with a series of tweaks that improve the play experience. When you've played a thousand sessions, I imagine you don't even perceive them any more, but early on they seem like arbitrary exceptions. (I can still remember the Battletech old tech weapon stats, and what good does that do me?)

I think some of it is organizational. Organizing the Fight! penalties by severity of is kinda weird - the penalty is the answer, not the question. And a few weeks ago I spent several hours with the recovery chapter; it seems to be written almost inside-out.

On the subject of Perception and Resources advancement, my guess is that it's less about realism than about curtailing abuse. You can, for example, learn wises by failing - not realistic, but fun for the game - and wises don't get tested directly super-often.

Resources tests are easy to lobby for without it seeming cheesy since in a poor society, having an assets like a sword or a horse is significant in a way that lifting a rock (c.f. Power) isn't. So going around buying a few things means you either get a bunch of tests, or you get the stuff. If you go around lifting rocks, the GM can say yes without there being strange side effects. But perhaps with interesting enough consequences for failed tests (e.g. accused of trying to swindle, or gaining infamous reputations as a mooch), it wouldn't matter a lot.

My guess is the 'only successful tests count' marker for Perception came about from a GM calling for Perception tests a lot; it makes sense for the whole party to help, so there'd be a lot of those going around. Given that there's only two mental stats, that might be unbalancing.

(On that subject, I've always thought that it would make sense to split out a Social stat from Will, and possibly a Wit or Learning stat from Perception.)

[Z-Dog]

what fuseboy said

[luke]

On the other hand, Burning Wheel was carefully built to provide the right game play experience. All of the mechanics are there for a reason -- they provide points of contact and the proper feel for the game.

Do they all work perfectly? No. But the majority of them click along like clockwork.
-L

[jchokey]

Hey Charlie:

It sounds like me and my group are kind of similar to yours--- in terms of time playing and number of sessions under our belt.


Others have addressed some of your points already, but I'd like to share with you some of my thoughts on some of our points. (I'm not going to attempt to cover them all.)




-Perceptions tests are open-ended, but other stats are not. Why?

I don't pretend to know *why*. I'm not sure whether it's supposed to be a 'reality-modeling' thing, or simply a 'system-balance' thing, or something else. But, it seems to work just fine in practice in our group. At first, it's true, it's a bit tough having to remember that perception is different... but I can't think of any situation where it's produced really silly/skewed results.


-When recording Steel advances, you reference a table with a bunch of example situations and record a test based on that constructed obstacle in instances where a Steel roll wasn't needed. Why can't Steel simply be tested like any other skill?

Actually, you *do* record Steel tests like a normal skill. It's just that you are almost always testing against your hesitation as the obstacle when you test Steel... so you're (almost) always getting the same type of test. The purpose of the steel situational tests is to enable you get to get routine/difficult/challenging tests that you wouldn't normally be able to get just by testing against hesitation. So, it' a system/advancement balance thing.

Also, I think it's a reasonable 'reality modeling thing' too. I mean... you see something really creepy/strange/horrific/violent. You keep seeing those, you'll gradually get more inured.



-Training times are widely different and varied. Is this necessary, and why?


I'm not sure about 'necessary', but I don't think they seem unreasonable. I mean, the idea that it might take one month of practice to get better at 'ditch-digging, but it might take a year to get a 'sorcery' test seems sensible to me.



-Emotional attributes all work quite a bit differently.

Yeah, they do. I think that's what makes them kind of cool. They each have their own flavor-- similar, but not 100% identical.


-Why can't failed resources rolls count as a test?

I imagine one purpose is to slow down the advancement of Resources. It may also be a modeling thing to represent the fact that if you weren't able to actually muster the money/loans/trust etc.... and you weren't able to actually buy what you wanted, you're not really going to be any wealthier-- or perceived as any wealthier-- than when you started.

Again, it seems to work well in practice, in our group so far.


-Despite very detailed rules for being injured in combat, there are little to no indicators of the effects of injury for other situations based on skill-checks and such. Are potential injuries negotiated before hand, an example case where someone is going to make a Climb test to get a cliff-side?

Yeah, that's the idea.


However, I have found the Fights to become really drawn-out attrition-fests, especially in the cases of heavily armored foes. By the end of it, it seems people are just rolling dice to whittle down each other's armor, hoping to get past their opponent's before the enemy gets a lucky shot in.

With two heavily armored foes, sure. But between two lightly armored individuals or groups, I've found that fights go quite fast. I don't know that we've had one that's gone more than 2 exchanges yet-- 3 at the very most.

If you do have two heavily armored foes-- well, that's what you get for giving two characters that much armor! :) Seriously, Armor is powerful in BW.... but it's not invunerable. As others have pointed out, there are weapons with high VA factors (maces!) and great strikes that can bypass armor quite effectively much of the time.

Also, don't rule out the possibility of trying other techniques of fighting someone in armor. Knock them down (push) and then try to wrestle them helpless (lock). You may be able to incapacitate someone quite effectively without even using a weapon!



Things get especially clunky during Fights with tons of combatants, and it's become clear to me that the system isn't really designed with these in mind. This is kind of a disappointment, because it only allows for very small-scale encounters. Once ten people are involved, Fight bogs down A LOT, not to mention all of the distance and positioning abstraction you need to take care of.

Fight! is ideally designed for one-on-one combat. But we have successfully ran several small skirmish encounters (e.g. three on four, six on three, etc.) that seemed to go fine. A few moments of minor 'clunkiness' but it worked. As others have noted, one way you can handle this is to just to 'group' positioning-- each side positions on its own. Also, if PCs or NPCs coordinate scripting actions, they can 'help' each other on actions.

Alternately. Or, you can treat the combat as 3-4 different 1-on-1 or 2-on-1 encounters occuring simultaneously. When one is finished, just have the man/woman standing do another positoning test. That may also be an approach that solves some of your concerns about positioning tests.



Finally, there is the compounded difficulty of all of the modifiers during a fight. You need to worry about injury, lighting, terrain, positioning advantage or disadvantage. With a failed roll here or there, it can be very difficult to be able to do anything. If someone has a light and a superficial wound, they are pretty well-screwed (especially if they fail a Steel test).

Yeah, they are (especially if they've failed that test!). That should make for faster combat, no? :)


In Fight!, failure can often translate into a long and drawn on trading of failed rolls (when both combatants are injured). To me, it doesn't seem nearly as cinematic or exciting.

It's kind of funny... this was my experience with the game system we always used to play (for medieval games) before trying out BW for our current campaigns: Harnmaster. Combats went on forever, because people just nickel-and-dimed each other. But in BW, our combats have tended to be very quick and decisive. The death 'spiral' would hit quickly-- and a single blow would often turn the whole direction of combat. I'm not saying that there haven't been *any* volleys where the results were, "OK, you miss... and he misses too". But more often than not, combats have been quite 'right-angled- in their decisiveness in our campaign. I don't know what to tell you here....

[Sempiternity]

You might also want to check out the Multiple Combats (http://www.burningwheel.org/wiki/index.php?title=Multiple_Combatants) page on the wiki, if you haven't already.

[zabieru]

You have a chance to notice anything. You don't have a chance to lift anything, or run at any speed. This is one reason Perception is open-ended. If Power or Speed was open-ended, it would be quite possible for a human to lift or outrun a horse. And by "quite possible" I mean that it is relatively likely that in any given population of 50 or so, there would be a person who has accomplished one of those feats (or the equivalent).

It also has to do with the specific situations in which Perception is tested. Look at those and see if you can come up with some other reasons why.

Note that this should NOT be taken as a suggestion to open-end any test in which there is a theoretical possibility of wild success even with a low exponent. Perception is open-ended for a number of reasons besides this one, and you should absolutely not open-end Sword tests because random flailing could, possibly, sometimes, defeat a master.

Overall, the Burning Wheel is very tightly integrated in kind of an odd way. There are a number of interlocking systems in the rules that don't operate according to broadly-applicable, universal rules that would work just the same if unplugged and dropped into a different interlocking system, but rather rely on being applied in this specific situation. That is to say, sometimes one set of rules protects the integrity of another set.

(The example that springs to mind is, in Burning Empires, the armor and Wound Tolerance rules. There is no rule forbidding Kerrn or Mukhadish (alien races) from wearing Iron (power armor), even though a maxed-stat Kerrn or Mukhadish in Iron could have a Mortal Wound tolerance that's off the scale. However, because of the way the lifepaths are laid out, that's actually impossible, so the interlocking of lifepaths, traits, armor, and tolerance rules forms a system that's consistent even though the armor and tolerance rules, if they were connected to a different lifepath and trait system, wouldn't be consistent.)

I encourage you to think in play. When you run into something that seems odd, ask "When would this come up" or "What would need to happen for this to be a problem" and "can that happen?" For instance, "When is Perception rolled?" "Why are those rolls open-ended" is a more fruitful question than "Why is Perception open-ended."

The other possibility is that, as with Fight!, the oddity that you're experiencing is intentional. Fight! models medieval combat, not D&D hit point attrition battles, and as such it's a bit different than you might expect from other games.

[quixoteles]

You say not everyone is carrying a sword around? I don't get that one, swords are awesome, no doubt, but if they were so great there wouldn't be any melee weapons used throughout history. No one in their right mind gets a sword permit, sharpened steel clubs are silly to place between you and a gun. Spears and axes are good at things and people use them for those things. Same thing with rockets versus sniper rifles. One of the things that always maddened me about D-n-D was that A spear, a sword, a halberd, all the weapons were mostly color, feats in 3rd fixed that a little, but I had to strategize building a 8-13 rules modification kit from 3-7 books before I could get nasty with it, and by the time I was excited about playing I was like 14th level.