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Whatever floats your boat I guess, but that entire previous post there is basically a laundry list of the kinds of things I wish RPGs would get over.
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Oct 5, 2014 22:49
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The only real major difference between how FFG does the 40k and Star Wars RPGs vs how other companies did similar games is that instead of a bunch of splat books, they have a small number of supplements and sell multiple versions of the core book. On the one hand this means if you only want to play Space Marines you just need to buy the one book and not shell out for a separate corebook. On the other hand it means if you do want to play Space Marines AND Inquisitors, you're spending extra money to repurchase material you already have with the two corebooks. I'm honestly not sure whether either model is really superior.
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Oct 8, 2014 17:07
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Impermanent posted:Hey I've just been gifted a copy of the Burning Wheel. Does this play as well as it reads? (amazingly.) Short answer: no. Long answer: Ratpick covers it pretty well. Burning Wheel is unique in that it essentially starts from the same conceptual idea of RPGs as a storygame, but has as much complexity and sub-systems as old school designs. It's very fiddly and very complex. Those can be good things, but it's a lot to take in, particularly since its storygame like foundation means the systems tend to work very differently than most crunch heavy games. Additionally, it's designed in a way that you really can't use every single subsystem and option at the same time. It's not that they don't work or that they don't work well together, but there's so many of them that it becomes impossibly unwieldy. Think Rolemaster, but because of how the systems work it's not easily condensed to a set of reference tables. That isn't a problem once you get a hang of how things do work, but it can trip you up as you're learning the game. Be prepared to spend some time twiddling with the dials Rapick mentioned to get it where you want it. Another note is that the world is very low fantasy and has an unabashedly Tolkienesque approach to character races. Elves are just flat out better at the beginning, for example, but humans tend to be more adaptable and advance a bit quicker. This is baked in pretty deeply for the ruleset so it's worth keeping in mind. Characters just aren't built for big epic post-Tolkien high fantasy adventures, especially not right out of the box. Adventuring in Burning Wheel tends to be much more how Bilbo describes it in the Hobbit - "Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things!" Now, that might all sound good if you're looking for a system with depth and complexity. The low fantasy aspect is very much a game style preference question too. To be honest while I present these issues as cautions, they're not why I say Burning Wheel doesn't play as awesomely as it reads. The issue I have with Burning Wheel is that it's kind of boring and obtuse. There are a ton of skills and they're written to be rather exclusive despite having really minor differences, and you don't get enough points to actually have a comprehensive background in any particular job. For example, there are different skills for rowing and sailing and navigation and tying knots and commanding a ship. There are ways to adjust the skill list sure, and the game is designed to let you improve skills by doing them so not having a skill doesn't mean you can't get it, but it still feels a bit off. Worse is that in several cases there are lists of qualities, skills, etc that don't actually have descriptions. Just names. On some level this is okay, because the idea is they should be self explanatory and malleable, but it doesn't really work. Some of them are actually pretty drat obscure, and the way they get used is specific enough that at least a little description is necessary to make it work. Worse, some of the ones with description do extra things for you. Additionally, you tend to fail a LOT early on. This helps you improve your skills but can be kind of frustrating. The issue here is that it doesn't jibe well with the backgrounding that goes into character creation. You have a character with a history... who generally sucks at the things you supposedly have been doing for your life before becoming an adventurer. It's not like ApocWorld where you are, from the start, really good at some things. It's also a really hard book to reference at the table. BW can be a really rewarding experience and some of the concepts are downright mind-blowing once you get a handle on them, particularly if you're used to traditional RPG design (less so if you're playing a lot of modern indie games), but it is a twelve year old game and has it's share of warts. Its also got very specific vision of how to play. You can adjust the details, but it's not a game that you can hack - in fact, it's less hackable than something like D&D. It tends to break badly if you mess with things too much. Personally, if you like what you see and want to play D&D style games with it, I'd suggest checking out Torchbearer. EDIT: Rereading what I said, I was more negative than I meant to be. I am a big fan of Burning Wheel as a concept. It isn't a game that meets the needs of what I want when I play an RPG, but not because it's poorly designed. For the most it accomplishes what it sets out to do, and there's definitely an audience for that. And even if you don't like playing it or even much like how it does things, BW is definitely useful as an inspiration for design. I do have specific mechanical issues with it, and I think even for someone who wants what BW is selling the learning curve and the character development curve mean you have to put in too much time before it actually starts becoming fun. I once likened it to Final Fantasy XIII in that regard, and I stick by that analogy. Particularly because despite it's issues, I played the hell out of FFXIII and enjoyed it still. But it's not immediate, out of the box amazement. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 21:15
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Impermanent posted:Ok, Would your assessment change if I told you that I and my fellow players regularly play big, meaty boardgames like Mage Knight, the 'Gric, and Twilight Struggle? Systems mastery is not usually an issue for us. Not really. While I personally prefer RPGs that aren't that complex in their rules, I do really enjoy those kinds of boardgames as well. I wouldn't go as far to say it's completely broken as potatocubed did, but the core argument is correct: the issues with BW are baked into the game in a way that getting more familiar with it will never totally solve. Impermanent posted:Additionally - torchbearer also looks very intersting (and more supported/modern.) Is there anything it specifically does well? Is there anything missing from it that burning wheel offers? I have also been reading the Mouse Guard RPG, which just isn't light enough to be dungeon world level for me while also not being involved enough mechanically to give me the meaty experience I want. Mouse Guard is probably the cleanest implementation of the BW concepts, and it gets a lot more involved than it appears on first blush. It brings fewer mechanics into play on a per action and per session level, but there's a tremendous amount of depth to the game. Additionally, as I mentioned there's just no real way to bring all of the BW mechanics into one campaign without getting buried in them, so the MG isn't as "light" comparatively as it seems. It's more that MG isn't tune-able the way BW can be. You can really only use MG to play MG, so if you aren't looking for that it won't work. Torchbearer has a couple of specific differences. First of all, it's a game specifically designed to do dungeon crawling, old school D&D type adventures. BW can do those but not well - it's really designed for a slower pace. It also cleans up a lot of the extraneous systems from BW that didn't get much use, and cut out of the fat in others, if only because TB has the advantage of a decade of lessons-learned from BW to draw on.
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Oct 29, 2014 00:20
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Doodmons posted:I dunno dude, I get what you mean but I feel like if the GM has to constantly throw the players a bone and twist the narrative to explain why these professional adventurers are retarded shitfarmers mechanically, and the players have to search and scrimp for all the bonuses they can get just to be effective, there's something wrong with the game. I really want to like BW and I want to give it a second chance, but that first game was such a negative experience all around I'm not sure I can convince the GM to run it again - and he's the one who bought Burning Wheel, Magic Burner and Monster Burner in the first place. Yeah, it's not an issue of "they fail at even basic tasks" because as Ratpick pointed out, there's the "Say Yes or Roll the Dice" rule. It's that you have to stretch that rule to the breaking point because, especially at the start, you're more likely to fail than pass anything you do have to roll for. And even all that scrimping and searching only gets to you to a reasonable likelihood of success.
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Oct 29, 2014 01:34
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