potatocubed posted:

(And just to make my position clear, having read and played Burning Wheel, I hate it.)

Tsilkani posted:

Personally, I'd never drop a dime on something where all the game info isn't self contained in a pdf or epub or book. I don't want to have to rely on someone else continuing to care about their product for me to be able to use it. I have lost track of how many indie games I've found over the years that no longer exist because the website disappeared or the creator moved on or was forced out of the space. Having a separate tutorial or starter guide is good, but don't confine the actual game to a website.

CitizenKeen posted:

Personally, I don't want the setting. I want to run a big, sweeping post-apoc or supers-family game, the kind of sweeping epics I hear about from Burning Wheel. But I can't read Burning Wheel.

Kestral posted:

You definitely can read Burning Wheel; you don't want to read Burning Wheel, because it's challenging for you in ways that it isn't for some other folks, and the effort you perceive it to take to learn the system exceeds what you're willing to expend. And honestly, as harsh as that sentence sounds in text, I get it! People learn and absorb information in different ways, and maybe Burning Wheel's presentation isn't working for you in text. I know I'm more of a visual learner, and absorb some texts much better when heard than when read. So if the system genuinely does something you're interested in - and if "sweeping epics" with thoughtful mechanical crunch is what you're looking for then I can confirm that it does - maybe it's worth looking in to some Actual Plays and picking up the rules through immersion? Once you see them in action, it might reorient the text in ways that make it work for you simply as a reference manual.

The best Burning Wheel APs I'm familiar with are all Adam Koebel stuff, and while they are absolute master-classes in showcasing system to new players, I suspect they're off the table for most folks here. That said, I've heard excellent things about Inquisition of Blood, although I haven't listened to it myself.

CitizenKeen posted:

You are absolutely correct. I can't read Burning Wheel in the same way that I can't even. I tried twice and gave up, then played Torchbearer and loved it (for the most part, I absolutely loathed parts of it that I thought were poorly thought out), and I tried again and even knowing Torchbearer couldn't bear to read it. I suppose it is time to make my annual attempt.

ninjoatse.cx posted:

Having never played it myself, what did you hate?

CitizenKeen posted:

I love Legacy, but I want more crunch.

BlackIronHeart posted:

I have just the game for you!

potatocubed posted:

potatocubed posted:

• Caster supremacy. The stats that make a good wizard also make you strong in the combat and debate minigames too.
  
• A character built specifically for mechanical power is vastly more effective than one where you pick the options that sound cool or characterful.
  
• The skill list is bloated, simultaneously missing things that we wanted and having four different versions of blacksmithing.
  
• Sample skill obstacles are too high. Under stressful circumstances an average person has about a 50% chance of failing to draw a stick figure.
  
• Weapon damage is based on size, which in my case made it literally impossible for my dude to stab a guy to death with a knife. (Light wounds combine into moderate wounds but moderate ones didn't combine into anything worse.)
  
• Circles is a cool concept but in practice led to situations where we found a guy's shop but couldn't go back there because we didn't know him well enough.
  
• It's entirely possible to start with stats at 0 even though this breaks things. My character had Wealth 0 to start and later on I discovered that raising money by doing a job in your downtime is flat impossible. Can't remember if that's because you need at least Wealth 1 to work for a living or because that's just not an option at all.
  
• One of the characters was mortally wounded, and we pulled out every stop we had and burned a load of resources to save his life -- only for him to be out of the game anyway because it took six months for him to recover from his injuries.

My big criticism, though, is that the much-vaunted minigames suck. I was trying to play a talky character so I engaged with the debate minigame a lot, and it quickly became apparent that the optimal strategy is always Point-Point-Point. Nothing is more efficient at depleting your opponent's debate hit points, there are no effective countermeasures against it, and -- more broadly -- because there's no way of predicting your opponent's plays or sending false signals about your own plays, all of the fancy rock-paper-scissors stuff in the rest of the system is a mechanical trap. The combat minigame isn't quite as bad because the potential of your character getting killed (or being removed from the story because they're recovering from a wound) is usually worse than whatever you're going to lose from the debate, but it still has the signalling problem: you're just guessing what your opponents are going to do, so you can't outplay them, just get lucky. Or not.

potatocubed posted:

My big criticism, though, is that the much-vaunted minigames suck. I was trying to play a talky character so I engaged with the debate minigame a lot, and it quickly became apparent that the optimal strategy is always Point-Point-Point. Nothing is more efficient at depleting your opponent's debate hit points, there are no effective countermeasures against it, and -- more broadly -- because there's no way of predicting your opponent's plays or sending false signals about your own plays, all of the fancy rock-paper-scissors stuff in the rest of the system is a mechanical trap. The combat minigame isn't quite as bad because the potential of your character getting killed (or being removed from the story because they're recovering from a wound) is usually worse than whatever you're going to lose from the debate, but it still has the signalling problem: you're just guessing what your opponents are going to do, so you can't outplay them, just get lucky. Or not.

potatocubed posted:

My big criticism, though, is that the much-vaunted minigames suck. I was trying to play a talky character so I engaged with the debate minigame a lot, and it quickly became apparent that the optimal strategy is always Point-Point-Point. Nothing is more efficient at depleting your opponent's debate hit points, there are no effective countermeasures against it, and -- more broadly -- because there's no way of predicting your opponent's plays or sending false signals about your own plays, all of the fancy rock-paper-scissors stuff in the rest of the system is a mechanical trap.

Mirage posted:

It's possible to run D&D in an Apocalypse World-ly fashion, where the players have story autonomy and there's more options in encounters than stabbing monsters for XP. You have to house-rule huge chunks of it, though.

My current DM is pretty good about awarding XP for avoiding combat at approximately the same rate as completing it; talking our way out of an extremely precarious encounter with a dragon, for example, netted us some big points. Solving problems and getting past traps also gets us XP bonuses about equal to fighting monsters that would hurt us the same amount if we had failed. We level up more quickly this way, but that's a feature, not a bug. It also keeps us role-playing.

Combine that approach with something like Fellowship's Long Journey mechanic, where the players create their own obstacles to overcome, and you can make overworld travel fun again (if the DM doesn't mind players creating new details within their carefully crafted game universe).

Toshimo posted:

Honestly, PC XP is almost completely vestigial in D&D at this point. Their Organized Play doesn't use it. Their recent 1st-party adventure books don't really use it. I can't remember the last game I've seen in the wild that used it. It's just milestones now, in other words, "You level up when the DM says you do".

Toshimo posted:

Honestly, PC XP is almost completely vestigial in D&D at this point. Their Organized Play doesn't use it. Their recent 1st-party adventure books don't really use it. I can't remember the last game I've seen in the wild that used it. It's just milestones now, in other words, "You level up when the DM says you do".

hyphz posted:

I do have to give a deep sigh to the Pathfinder AP which uses milestone levelling but also awards the PCs bonus XP for certain tasks. Since the bonus XP isn't anywhere near enough to reach the milestone level early it's basically meaningless. Nice.

Toshimo posted:

Honestly, PC XP is almost completely vestigial in D&D at this point. Their Organized Play doesn't use it. Their recent 1st-party adventure books don't really use it. I can't remember the last game I've seen in the wild that used it. It's just milestones now, in other words, "You level up when the DM says you do".

potatocubed posted:

Well, this was about 10 years ago and I've since given away my books so you're not going to get chapter and verse on this stuff, but here's what I remember:
[...]

quote:

My big criticism, though, is that the much-vaunted minigames suck. I was trying to play a talky character so I engaged with the debate minigame a lot, and it quickly became apparent that the optimal strategy is always Point-Point-Point. Nothing is more efficient at depleting your opponent's debate hit points, there are no effective countermeasures against it, and -- more broadly -- because there's no way of predicting your opponent's plays or sending false signals about your own plays, all of the fancy rock-paper-scissors stuff in the rest of the system is a mechanical trap. The combat minigame isn't quite as bad because the potential of your character getting killed (or being removed from the story because they're recovering from a wound) is usually worse than whatever you're going to lose from the debate, but it still has the signalling problem: you're just guessing what your opponents are going to do, so you can't outplay them, just get lucky. Or not.

Kestral posted:

One thing I can't just let go, though, is this:

"Point-Point-Point is the only viable strategy in Duel of Wits" is how you can tell someone hasn't understood the text. In fairness, this specific point (heh) comes up a lot, because Burning Wheel is a game you're expected to play in 30+ session campaigns, and the issues with P-P-P Forever are most clearly visible a long campaign where you can see the consequences of your actions stack up over time and make you wonder how the hell you got there.

For the people reading this who haven't played BW, the idea behind Duel of Wits is that each player - not character, but player - sets their stakes in the upcoming social conflict: "If I win, you do X." You can't make someone change their mind, but you can make them reluctantly do something, and the consequences of the Duel are binding on the players.

Usually these stakes are tied to one of your character's Beliefs, which tend to be a combination of something you believe and something you'll do ("It is better to die free than live under the Shadow, I will raise this valley in rebellion"). These are far and away the most important things on your character sheet: they're what you derive a lot of advancement from, and pursuing them gives the meta-currencies that let you fiddle with your dice rolls. They're also things that you, as a player, are interested in and want to pursue in-game, and for Duel of Wits in particular, this is important.

Each side in DoW has what amount to social HP, called disposition. When your disposition goes to zero, you lose the duel. But Duels of Wits aren't all-or-nothing: as your disposition goes down, you'll be forced to make compromises on your stakes even if you win, and those compromises are explicitly, in-the-text meant to hurt. Being forced to make a major compromise should "feel like losing," according to the text, and actual play bears this out. This feeling gets compounded because you're probably going to have to compromise one or more of those Beliefs, the ones that you as a player are personally invested in and trying to advance.

This is where the Point-spamming strategy starts to run into trouble: P-P-P is all-offense, no-defense, and while it gives you a good chance of winning against an equally skilled opponent, you're almost certainly going to have to compromise heavily. Duel of Wits aren't a win/lose binary, they're a continuum of outcomes, and when you go in guns blazing with nothing but Points, most of those outcomes are that the Point player pays a heavy price and ends up wondering whether they should have done it differently.

That said, P-P-P and its cousin Dismiss-Hesitate-Dismiss have their place: namely, when the duel is wildly uneven. If you hilariously outgun someone and you can blow their disposition away before they're able to score meaningful hits on you, go for it. Likewise, if you're arguing against someone you don't have much chance of success against, the correct strategy is to gun for a compromise instead of total victory: they're going to get what they want, but you're going to make it hurt and get something for yourself, too.

Kestral posted:

This is where the Point-spamming strategy starts to run into trouble: P-P-P is all-offense, no-defense, and while it gives you a good chance of winning against an equally skilled opponent, you're almost certainly going to have to compromise heavily. Duel of Wits aren't a win/lose binary, they're a continuum of outcomes, and when you go in guns blazing with nothing but Points, most of those outcomes are that the Point player pays a heavy price and ends up wondering whether they should have done it differently.

That said, P-P-P and its cousin Dismiss-Hesitate-Dismiss have their place: namely, when the duel is wildly uneven. If you hilariously outgun someone and you can blow their disposition away before they're able to score meaningful hits on you, go for it. Likewise, if you're arguing against someone you don't have much chance of success against, the correct strategy is to gun for a compromise instead of total victory: they're going to get what they want, but you're going to make it hurt and get something for yourself, too.

CitizenKeen posted:

So this kind of segues into something I've been noodling on a lot.

I've made the most progress I've ever made in BW (about a hundred pages last night), and the bones are good. I'm beginning to see why it's so beloved.

It's also kind of a dead game to me. With no SRD, no licensing, no nothing, it's kind of just a dead avenue to pursue unless you're really motivated and (ugh) willing to work with the owner of the IP.

Especially because a lot of people who seem to love it seem to love most of it.

I've noticed a lot of "Forged Near the Dark" games lately; games that are clearly inspired by but are not under the umbrella of Forged in the Dark. Sometimes the authors have noted that the game is mostly FitD, but they don't want to mislead consumers.

Games like Relic, Wildsea, and LUMEN. I really like these games that are willing to draw from something but not be completely beholden to it.

Anyway, just perseverating on how I wish Burning Wheel were more hackable.

Coolness Averted posted:

I hadn't played Burning Wheel, but yeah I recall from other conversations mostly here the Dismiss-Hesitate-Dismiss critique before, but hadn't heard point spam as a critique. I was wondering if it was just a game people soured on in the decade or so since Burning Wheel was a tg darling.

Jimbozig posted:

PPP may be all offense no defense, but scripting defense against someone who scripts PPP with equal dice is just losing. Every time you try to defend against their points, you lose ground. Rolling fewer successes than them loses you disposition. Rolling more successes just blocks them while gaining you nothing. (Obfuscate can cost them one of their next round's successes if you roll extra successes, but that doesn't help.)

MG and TB changed this a bit by allowing you to regain lost disposition, which helps.

It's only once you get lots of dice and can have a good chance of beating someone's Will with incite, or when your dice advantage is big enough that you can split them between attack and defense effectively with rebuttal that you actually gain something from scripting something other than PPP.

If you know a strategy that beats PPP with equal dice (aside from timing dismisses), just say it and I'll put it in my spreadsheet and see what happens over a few hundred trials. You even have the advantage of knowing what your opponent is scripting.

CitizenKeen posted:

So this kind of segues into something I've been noodling on a lot.

I've made the most progress I've ever made in BW (about a hundred pages last night), and the bones are good. I'm beginning to see why it's so beloved.

It's also kind of a dead game to me. With no SRD, no licensing, no nothing, it's kind of just a dead avenue to pursue unless you're really motivated and (ugh) willing to work with the owner of the IP.

Kestral posted:

Yeah, Burning Wheel is not a commercial endeavor for anyone but BWHQ, and it isn't meant to be. It's the passion project of like half a dozen people who are all RL friends, and they don't even seem to be in it for the money: there's no way they're making more than pennies per copy, given the pricetag of the corebook compared to the absurdly high production values of the books.

That said, is "dead game" a problem outside of the commercial angle? It's feature-complete for what it's trying to do, in the same way as a lot of indie games - or, hell, forums darling 4e for that matter.

Kestral posted:

Yeah, "PPP has is perfectly optimal" has always been a thing that floats around in BW discussion circles, so often in fact that it got pagecount devoted to debunking it in later supplements.

We've actually had literally this exact same conversation before, in the 2020 version of this exact thread. I keep trying to explain this point and I guess I'm doing a poor job of it, but I'll try one more time:

PPP is a great way to win a Duel of Wits. It's also a great way to get forced to take compromises, and compromises are supposed to hurt. If they don't hurt, you're doing something wrong. This should make you think carefully about whether PPP is the correct tactic to employ - sometimes it is, and often, it's too risky.

This is not something your spreadsheet can model. If that doesn't suffice, all I can do at this point is resort to argument from authority and say that I've played probably a literal order of magnitude more Burning Wheel than anyone else on SA, and I'm speaking from that experience.

Kestral posted:

Each side in DoW has what amount to social HP, called disposition. When your disposition goes to zero, you lose the duel. But Duels of Wits aren't all-or-nothing: as your disposition goes down, you'll be forced to make compromises on your stakes even if you win, and those compromises are explicitly, in-the-text meant to hurt. Being forced to make a major compromise should "feel like losing," according to the text, and actual play bears this out. This feeling gets compounded because you're probably going to have to compromise one or more of those Beliefs, the ones that you as a player are personally invested in and trying to advance.

Kestral posted:

PPP is a great way to win a Duel of Wits. It's also a great way to get forced to take compromises, and compromises are supposed to hurt. If they don't hurt, you're doing something wrong. This should make you think carefully about whether PPP is the correct tactic to employ - sometimes it is, and often, it's too risky.

Kestral posted:

Yeah, "PPP has is perfectly optimal" has always been a thing that floats around in BW discussion circles, so often in fact that it got pagecount devoted to debunking it in later supplements.

We've actually had literally this exact same conversation before, in the 2020 version of this exact thread. I keep trying to explain this point and I guess I'm doing a poor job of it, but I'll try one more time:

PPP is a great way to win a Duel of Wits. It's also a great way to get forced to take compromises, and compromises are supposed to hurt. If they don't hurt, you're doing something wrong. This should make you think carefully about whether PPP is the correct tactic to employ - sometimes it is, and often, it's too risky.

This is not something your spreadsheet can model. If that doesn't suffice, all I can do at this point is resort to argument from authority and say that I've played probably a literal order of magnitude more Burning Wheel than anyone else on SA, and I'm speaking from that experience.

neonchameleon posted:

I bounced off Burning Wheel myself but I've seen the effect in other systems where all out attack is the least risky strategy simply because, although you might take more damage per round because you neglect your defence the fact that you take your opponent out faster means that they have fewer opportunities to harm you and therefore you on average take less overall damage. @jimbozig is that what you are saying?