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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:That just sounds really stupid. St. Augustine, talking about St. Ambrose posted:When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud. And for centuries people were writing poo poo without spaces or punctuation:  And yes, people would actually read things like that regularly. And yes, it seems really stupid to us today. At the time, it was all perfectly sensible!
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Oct 2, 2014 01:42
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Played munchkin 3 times last weekend. Had never played before. Each game took about half an hour. I can see that if they took hours they'd lose their charm, but they didn't. How long are you guys taking to take your turns? It doesn't seem possible to screw somebody THAT many turns in a row while still leaving them in a position to screw you back. Or maybe it's different with more players? We just had 3 players.
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Oct 2, 2014 16:27
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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. I'm going to completely disagree with the posters above me and say that from what you've posted it sounds like you are the perfect audience to try it out. Three problem I've had with BW is simply that it turns some people off, and when that person is one of the regulars in your group, well... Guess you're playing something else. The game is not busted at all, but it totally assumes you know about failing forward and trusts you as a GM not to describe the expert marksman missing the barn door. If the expert rolls his 6 dice and manages to get no successes, then come up with some other twist that involves him failing to get his intent even though he obviously was capable of making the shot. Maybe somebody bumped him or somebody cheated him or whatever. There are lots of failed rolls, but when the GM is on the ball, that can be a big positive. And also most newbies forget to use the rules for working patiently or carefully and make the game harder by that omission. New players also lack the system mastery to marshal all available dice from helping, linked tests, etc. I will admit that starting characters have poo poo-all for wealth. I guess you'd better go make your fortune!
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Oct 28, 2014 23:49
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Comrade Gorbash posted: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. That doesn't match up with my experience at all. My BW games had a good mix of successes and failures. Taking the time to do a thing carefully when you don't have any time pressure isn't scrimping, it's just using the rules. Many of the rolls are opposed, so it's not like the NPCs have skills any better than the PCs - you should have even odds on those even if you don't bother to try to work as a team or anything. Same goes for all the extended conflicts. But what it really sounds like is that your GM had trouble setting obstacles. With a starting skill of 4 for one of your better skills, you get one die from somewhere (between helping, working carefully, related knowledge, and spending Artha, if you can't find just one extra die then you are not even trying to play the game. Might as well whine about 4e because all you did was melee basic and it was no fun.) So you're rolling 5 dice. Most of the obstacles should be routine (80% chance of success) or difficult (50% chance). Those seem reasonable. If you are trying something that is "extremely difficult" for somebody skilled to do, then your odds are about 20%. And you can always improve those odds if you're willing to spend your points. If you use your weaker skills, either find more dice from somewhere, spend some of the points you have, or just be happy with your challenging test towards advancement and see what the GM has in store for you. Also, the skills and obstacles in Mouse Guard are the exact same as in Burning Wheel. To say that BW is a broken fail-fest and in the same breath recommend Mouse Guard is utter nonsense. Complain about how resources are fiddly and complain about the super-specific skills if you want to say that MG is better than BW because MG actually addressed those issues. I'm a huge fan of both games and I have experience with both and the session that had the most failing for the players was a Mouse Guard session, not BW. It was still fun, even though several townsfolk were killed launching an assault on a Beaver dam and one of the guardmice was eaten by a fox. I also wanted to talk about Torchbearer. Torchbearer is based on Mouse Guard's system, so if you don't think Mouse Guard has enough crunch then I don't know if Torchbearer would go any better for you. Basically the game is just Mouse Guard with a D&D skin and pages upon pages of random tables. I don't know if you think pages and pages of random tables is a pro or a con, but it is what you'll find. Some people love em, some people hate em.
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Oct 29, 2014 05:29
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Doodmons posted:From what you've said here, that was probably true. What can I say, it was everyone's first time playing BW. Yeah, and nobody can deny that the system has a steep learning curve. My first time turned out a bit rough in a totally different way. One of my players didn't really believe that other characters should be able to use social skills to convince him to do anything. Well, if we are playing "The Sword" and we can't get him to buy in to the social PvP aspect, then things aren't going to go great for that scenario. He was fine when we played a game without that PvP stuff later. But then my friends are a bit weird. Everyone here was a bit mystified when I came back to report that they all hated Dread. They like crunchier games, what can I say.
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Oct 29, 2014 13:55
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