Burning Wheel Light

[Chris Chinn]

A couple of my friends are thinking about doing a short rpg party - probably 4 hours, with the hopes of 2-3 groups playing simultaneously and doing 2-3 games.

That said, I've been craving some Burning Wheel, but also knowing that I'll need to get some full gameplay in 2 hours with complete newbies, here's the gameplan I'm going with:

1) Only the core rules, none of the extended stuff

2) Characters are simplified- 10 skills, BITs, Circles, Resources, Steel, and Health. We assume the rest of their stats are 4.

3) 2 Beliefs, 2 Instincts, 2 Traits. Enough to contrast with each other, not enough to force players to juggle too much.

4) Wound tolerances are all considered as if stats are 4, which means you can just pre-calculate damage levels on weapons ("Sword: Superficial/Midi/Mortal")

Anyone with BW experience have thoughts? Or anyone who has been intimidated by BW? I'll probably post links to character sheets once I knock those together.

Chris

[devp]

I've been a bit intimidated by BW, though I've played it successfully. Isn't it much lighter once you've past chargen?

[Chris Chinn]

Yeah, part of the intimidation is the massive character sheet which has tons of things which don't come into play, moment to moment, but rather, over the long term. Part of what I'm thinking works better for a one-shot is cutting all that out so the players can just navigate the stuff they're using.

Chris

[Chris Chinn]

So! I've put together some pregen characters using this plan of mine, and a ghetto character sheet using Open Office. I'd love for folks to look at these and tell me:

a) If you've never played Burning Wheel before, if these seem clean and readable enough

b) If you have played BW before, how you feel about these for intro'ing people into BW.

Links are here:
bankuei.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/captain-emara.pdf
bankuei.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/priestess-kevanta.pdf
bankuei.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/sar-henga.pdf
bankuei.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/sar-maryasi.pdf

Chris

[shreyas]

Never successfully played BW. This sheet is pretty appealing and digestible, with these notes:

I'd like "rolling dice" to tell me how to figure out how many dice I need, and possibly tell me what successes mean.

Fork and Artha are crazy words that don't make sense in context! I don't know what Resources / Circles / Steel mean! I would be inclined to completely bleach these sheets of all BW poo-brain vocabulary in favor of words whose meaning is related to the mechanic in question.

Finally, for a light variant, it strikes me as a little odd that there are two kinds of helper chips, particularly when one is strictly crappier than the other.

[Chris Chinn]

Yeah, I'm expecting to do a 10 minute explanation of situation + rules, and put the stuff I figured would be the more weird to remember stuff on the sheet.

I kept the BW words because I'm seeing it as an intro to BW. Folks who may eventually want to play full BW will have the same words to work with and see it's the same idea.

Design wise, one thing I think is really interesting about Fate vs. Persona is that while Persona is what you want to get as much as you can, Fate is sort of the 2nd place prize - it's definitely weaker, but if you're not up for getting Persona, you can reliably get Fate.

Tomorrow will involve me being swamped at work, so I don't think I'll have time to do any adjustments, so I'll consider this version 1.0.

Chris

[shreyas]

How'd it go?

[Chris Chinn]

When we laid out the selection of games, no one went for Burning Wheel. C'est la vie. I got to run Inspectres and play Golden Sky Stories, and another group ran Hot Guys Making Out.

Maybe next time!

Chris

[devp]

Clearly, more parties are necessary to get this tested out. (I wonder if this would be ideal for a NerdNYC Recess type event?)