Burning Wheel General

How do you get people to want to play this game?

I cant get my friends interested, there only experience is 3.5 and 3.PF shit.

also I'm the anon from the other thread with the packing up board game / Dark souls one shot.

>>49761120
You don't start a general for a game that's so rarely even mentioned on this board, you /v/ reject.

Generals are for big games that are so popoular that they have dozens of threads about them every day, so it's easier to group them all into one General thread.

>>49761193
Fuck you, we need a way to find the others. We tiny few need a beacon to travel towards.

>>49761190
Well, my friends were nice enough to compromise with me and try it out, because one of them knew it pretty well and reccomended it.
I'd say talk them into letting you run a one-shot of it and then seeing where it goes from there.
>>49761193
Good point. My reasoning behind making the general was that any discussion of Burning wheel is so scattered that it's basically pointless, so making a general might attract some people out of the woodwork who know about the system.

File: 1281407315282.jpg (47KB, 290x272px) Image search: [Google]

47KB, 290x272px

Present and accounted for.

>>49761190
I found it completely impossible get others to play the game, until I start telling people in other groups stories about it. It's a long, slow, but not boring if done right, process.

It's worked for about two of them but I'm waiting on a third to get things really going.

Then lets share some fun stories so we have shit to tell people to get them interested?

I've only had luck playing it on roll20. Thankfully the players on roll20 who actually want to play Burning Wheel are a cut above the stereotypical roll20 player and the games I've had through it have been decent.

>>49761120
>What campaigns are you running?
Currently running a game set in orc lands as a side-story to an arc my group just wrapped up which I was a player in. A great warchief is trying to unite the orcs and other fell beasts, and my players are working for him while secretly trying to take his position to themselves. Also four sessions in and they're already plotting to kill each other as well.

>What characters are you playing?
Currently just GMing, but my character in in the 'main story' is a (becoming less and less) sheltered princess, who has kick-ass social skills, resources, and circles, but kinda shit everything else. Over the last arc she just barely managed to open sword thanks to lessons from the rest of the party.

>Have any ideas for campaigns you want to run?
In browsing the forums I've found a number of half-completed western mods in the archives. I've just started trying to compile what's there into something actually workable since I think BW would be a nice fit for the genre if you get the weapons and LPs worked out.

What version do people think is best to use and play with?

The only version I have managed to get a PDF version of is the revised edition.
So far everything is perfect except for how crazy effective Armor is.

>>49761320
Alright.

>First session of Duchy Verdorben, the one official module for Burning Wheel
>Setup: A village in the Duchy is plagued by famine and poor harvests, and there are rumors of a demon afoot
>The PCs are sent in by the lord to investigate
>One player made a Dwarven blacksmith who was captured as a POW and then escaped, and the other made a huntress and tracker
>Start by introducing the Mayor of the village
>Players instantly guess something isn't right by the way the Mayor talks about the village
>Duel of Wits to get it out of him, players win with a medium compromise
>It turns out that the village has abandoned the One True God™ and has fallen back into worshipping Tawaret, a pagan fertility goddess
>The Mayor suspects Tawaret has sent the demon onto the town for not fully appreciating her
>Asks players to spend the night in his house, one obliges, one sleeps on the top keeping watch for any suspicious activity
>P2 sees movement near the village longhouse
>Checks it out, turns out to be cultists gathering to come to a decision about what must be done with the interlopers
>PCs try to ambush, fuck up on stealth (Dwarf is wearing armor)
> Cultists are confronted, their leader is a rival blacksmith the dwarf bought as a hateful relationship (he views the dwarf as competition)
>When suddenly a bear demon attacks
>PCs skirmish, wound it, it flees into the woods
>Using her tracking skills, the huntress finds the bear
>Climactic battle in its' lair

>>49761443
Armor is for the most part historical, a sword does not do much against plate mail, but a good axe or mace can cut or smash through it given a little luck.

The books are available on Luke Crane's website, otherwise, I'd suggest looking on 4shared for a Gold pdf.

>>49761411
>Orc Warchief Politicking
Sounds really fun. It would be interesting to see the role of Wrath in that campaign, as well as the special Orc magic system.

>>49761190
I got Gold recently along with the Codex and showed it to a friend who was as rpg starved as i and he devoured the character burner and recluted people to play.
Thus i know have a weekly BW table.

>>49761516
Do you know if the gold edition contains a magic burner? it seems like its impossible to find digitally.

>>49761599
The gold edition contains the Character Burner and all of the basic rules. To find the monster burner, adventure burner, and magic burner all at a reduced price, get the codex.

>>49761554
They literally killed all their Servants of the Dark Blood in their clan because their Dark Elf always is the one guy who wants to do something special thought they were a threat to her position and the Goblin just hated them because his cousin had worked with them before he drove him out of the clan.

>>49761120
>Inaugural Edition
How about, you know, you tell us what the hell Burning Wheel actually is? It doesn't seem that popular and an actual OP might draw new posters.

>>49761647
NICE
On the subject of dark elves, I really like the way Burning Wheel handles them. Instead of setting up a race of evil monsters that has rife opportunities for Drizzt clones, they make them into just Elves that have fallen and must live with their Strife. I love it, I think it would create a lot of good moments

>>49761819
I'm probably not the best to do so, but I'll take a crack at it.

Burning Wheel is a tabletop RPG with a focus on emergent narrative. The game has mechanisms for players to generate beneficial and detrimental facts about the world, and the story revolves around each character pursuing three beliefs, which can change session by session. These give a form of XP/Fate points for accomplishing or working towards.

Skills and abilities improve through use, and dice are only rolled when there's risk involved / it's relevant to the story. (You can't spam your Sword skill like in Morrowind to improve it)

Skills can synergise with one another so long as it's reasonable that they do so. Noble-Wise forks into Persuade when speaking with a noble, as you're appealing to his desire to expand his landholdings, for instance. This is fun as you can use obscure skills to get an edge in the game. There's a lot of creative uses a farmer can bend the skill Dirt-wise to.

>>49761190
3.pf should be ideal target to try the system. Most of the actual crunch is the character creation and customization, so it's more of a barrier to other games that are not so rules heavy.

>>49761819
Burning Wheel is a crunchy narrative system that where being an interesting and flawed character is better than being a specialist. It has great encounter rules, a very historical feel, and runs smooth once started.

The high barrier of entry is the problem, as there are a lot of rules and most of it around building a character to even play. Then you need a good storyteller to GM the game which is not easy to find either.

>>49762032
This is a really good summary of the core of Burning Wheel. I'd add that there are several semi-optional conflict resolution systems that are complex and intuitive and add quite a bit of fun.
>Fight is for melee combat
>Range and Cover is for ranged combat and skirmishing
>Duel of Wits is for social conflict

>>49762182
The good thing about them is that they're entirely optional, and if it's not an important conflict one generally just lets a single skill or ability roll decide it. They're great for climactic scenes.

http://www5.zippyshare.com/v/bZuR9ycE/file.html

Here's the books, including magic and adventure burner.

Attention BW graybeards: I'm currently working my way through the source and character burner, trying to get a feel for the rules myself so I can guide players through at a later date. What would you say BW does worst - things that might be clunky or slow or inconsistent-feeling? I want to know what to look out for and pay attention to.

>>49762202
>The good thing about them is that they're entirely optional
This. The first 75ish pages, the hub and spokes, are all you REALLY need to run the game*, and really, you shouldn't even be touching the Rim (where all those complex sub-systems live) until you've got down the first part of the game. The books even tell you this, but a lot of people think they need to include all of them right away, all the time, and the game is overwhelming when you try to do it all at once.

*This does not include MAKING characters if you are not using pre-gens, but the book walks you through the process fairly well and you can do that on a first reading.

>>49762476
A thing that sets off my autism. Shade advancement is inbalanced. If you shade advance a skill its determinant ability isn't advanced, whereas if you create a character at the start with a grey shaded ability, all the stemming skills are also grey shaded. I'm of the opinion if you actually manage to grey shade in game, the ability and the other stem skills should advance as well.

>>49762476
There's also the matter of Perception checks needing to be successful in order to count towards advancement. It was like that in previous editions, but to counterbalance it all Perception checks rerolled on a 6. In Gold that doesn't happen. Luke Crane's reason for this is that in his personal games Perception is rolled most often so something needed to be done to reduce its advancement speed (This has not been the case in my games at all). I'd have it so that perception is rerolled on six, or just make it like the other abilities and advance on failure as well.

>>49761120
>What campaigns are you running?
We are in our third session of a campaign i'm running in wich the PCs are part of a duke's council. The duke died and the crown is now in his young and incompetent son. Besides that a revolution took place in an important city where a group of alchemist have taken control; also there's an upcoming war getting close. The main Situation is that the PCs must help (or not) the new duke deal with the problems and a lot of counts that want the duchy for themselves. Very Game of thrones-esque.

So far so good. Me and my players seem to like the system, but some of them struggle with its complexity. One of my players ran mousguard for us, I thougth that the transition would be smoother but the games have very different aproaches even if one is based on the other.

>>49761443
>So far everything is perfect except for how crazy effective Armor is
This. We tried a practice Fight! with a sword and a 4D armor vs a spear and a short spear with a 3D armor with a shield. Only a superficial wound until the sixth volley when the sword guy conected a Great Strike.

>>49762202
I have an issue with this: It's true the the sub systems are optional but I've read in the forum that the intent is to introduce them as soon and as often as possible without forcing them. Obviouly you first need to learn the basics pretty well before. I've seen many groups delaying the use of the sub systems until well advance in the campaign, and only using them a couple of times. My problem is: how can a scene be climatic when the players and GM have never/barely used the sub-systems and have to go through the rules each time?

>>49762888
> My problem is: how can a scene be climatic when the players and GM have never/barely used the sub-systems and have to go through the rules each time?

I made cards of all the combat manuevers with a short description of how it works. Players choose their three manuevers and put them face down, then it's revealed sequentially. Not much need to look up the rules except for some fine technicalities.

>>49762476
I would say resources and circles mechanics. The idea of having an abstract way of representing a character financial fluidity and the capacity to summon a NPC from nowhere can be confusing to some players.
Also warn them about the character creation process and the bookkeepen in game

>>49762933
Can you upload them somewhere please?

>>49763021
I don't have the edited version. Basically I just took these and threw in a summarised description for each entry.

http://hammerand.com/goldenh/rpg/

>>49761193
This

"Generals" are cancer

>>49763108

How is it any different than just making a thread saying "Let's talk about Burning Wheel"?

Lay down on the autism, man.

>>49762391
That doesn't appear to be the full magic burner.

Why is it impossible to find!

>>49763188

He's probably got PTSD from other boards where "general" means "waifus and shitposting."

/tg/ generals are more of a functional thing. If I decide I want to look at magic supplements for old D&D, I can go straight to the OSR general and look through the files they've got in their archive, and ask folks in the thread what's a good one to pick up. That's just handy!

>>49761819
It's a bullshit system created by the guy in charge of 'curating' game projects at Kickstarter, a position he's abused in order to get away with flagrant violations of Kickstarter policy on his own projects. Which is unsurprising, given he's spent the last fifteen years being a massive douchebag.

>>49762556
of course stat tests are much harder to come by than skill tests

>>49763249
Oh, I didn't actually check that, the name said magic burner, and I figured the abstractions was the 'preview' they gave out.. Here it is:

https://mega.nz/#!HwggXKiA!M5v1QuNAPfYeMw8yNKAwRlrGBV7j_UfqrPD2IiJgI20

>>49764691
I know someone who would literally suck my dick for this file.

>>49764389
He's also one of the biggest condescending assholes in the business. Reading his books makes you clamor for the respectful, reasonable tone of motherfucking John Wick.

>EVERYONE ELSE IN THIS GODDAMN INDUSTRY IS DOING THINGS WRONG, NOW LET ME TELL YOU WHY I AM A GENIUS

>>49764663
Yeah, but for me it's more about the extremely large amount of Artha you'd have spent just to grey shift a skill. Anyway it's not difficult to get ability tests (Difficult and challenging ones are a bit harder to get), just use a skill you don't have.

>>49764389
Do you know of any articles detailing Luke Crane's fuckery? I've heard plenty bad about him but I've not seen any of it firsthand, beyond his unreasonable hatred of all things pdf.

>>49764691
>Dolphins.7z
[worry intensifies]

>>49765049
DO IT
O

I
T

>>49765337
confirmed trustworthy, DW

save dawheel
bumpda thred

>>49761443
>So far everything is perfect except for how crazy effective Armor is.
With lots of armor it's best to go around it by using other tools than just strike.
Push armored opponent down, lock them and forcefully remove their helmet.

Does anyone know if the new Codex is worth getting if I have the old monster, magic and adventure burners?

>>49767642
Well i got all the books from revised and the Codex and it seems to me that a great chunk of it is about running a better Wheel game, it certainly has magic segments and "new" lifepaths but i think that the advise alone is worth a lot.

>>49767925
Advice is mostly copied from the AdBu

>>49767642
Ish. There are a fair number of fixes and improvements from the older books and overall the stuff in there has had a bit of refinement and certainly plays nicer with BWG.
But nothing in there is truly new.

>>49768475
I guess I get Codex at some point, but right now I'm not in rush.

>>49768497
Good, because the first print one had some issues with the gold ink they used for the cover fading practically the moment someone touched it, and so you can't get it until they fix that issue.

>>49765315

[crickets chirping]

If there is interest, especially with folks who have been wanting to try Burning Wheel, I can run hochen on Roll20 for a group tomorrow evening (or a week tomorrow if a day proves too short notice).

File: Character Burner.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

1B, 486x500px

>>49769533

I had a guy from reddit run me and some others through that, it was a lot of fun. I recommend anyone whose remotely interested should sign up and play.


I spent way too fucking long in Acrobat making the character burner sheet form fillable, so hopefully some of you can get some use from it.

>>49769808
There are just online character burners that kinda skip the tedium.

File: Fillable Character Sheet - Gold.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

1B, 486x500px

>>49769838

Sure there are, doesn't mean everyone wants to use them. I don't find character creation tedious, it's one of my favorite aspects. Having a more useful Burner sheet doesn't stop people from using online character generators.

>>49769533
Make sure to use the pregen characters, or if you make new ones, have them integrated into the setting via the relationships mechanic.
New players often don't realize how important relationships can be to the story and how helpful they can be to the GM.

>>49761120
I've taken a leaf from the /5eg/ thread and set up a discord for this general at https://discord.gg/UHQADzf

>>49770681
>First thread
>Already setting up an off site circlejerk
wew lad

>>49770260
Yeah, the plan is/was to use the pregens, I like how they act as a little workshop for beliefs /relationships.

>>49772391
The pregens are also really balanced skill-wise for the starting adventure, and every person has their time to shine.

>>49767622
Great Strike also works, as I recall it gives +1 to VA (armor piercing).

>>49775234
Sure. Though against really heavy armor, with weapon with no initial VA that +1 doesn't mean so much.
You can also hit the armor until it breaks, but that's slow method and longer you take more chances you give to your opponent to fuck you up.

In many ways Burning Wheel is a game of "who gets the first proper hit in".

>>49763723
/pfg/ is the containment general for waifus. The rest are in thinly veiled cheesecake threads, or complaining about people not like boobplate threads.

It helps that there are just not many people into things that are not D&D and even D&D has been split into two crowds with most of the bad crowd clinging to Pathfinder.

>>49768812
I've heard the exact same thing said about Adam Koebel being a resident GM on roll20, and abusing that somehow.

Like Crane is like a pretentious Vincent Baker.

>>49775286
The Fight system necessitates tactical thinking and planning ahead, as I understand it.
Up against people in heavy mail? use axes, hammers, or maces.

Although you are right, armor is very helpful if you just go by the standard rules.

>>49775360

Yeah, and Vince Baker is a pretentious James Raggi, and James Raggi is a pretentious Monte Cook, and so on and so forth.
Some folks are just salty bitches on the internet, I guess.

>>49775360
From my knowledge of him (a good amount of his streamed Burning Wheel campaign) Koebel seems like an alright guy. I don't follow his social media, so I don't know about any drama outside of his games.

What exactly has he done? I'm genuinely curious.

>>49775513

Same thing as those other guys: somebody on the internet hates him for vague reasons that they can't back up with anything.

>>49769533
Posted a listing in the gamefinder thread >>49777481

Roll20 listing (in case gamefinder thread goes down before this one) is https://app.roll20.net/lfg/listing/59450/burning-wheel-the-trouble-in-hochen

>>49775513
Koebel is a normie. He has pink hair and doesn't treat his players like shit, so he's the antithesis of /tg/. He was mad once about a game that was written and marketed in poor taste, like other normies, which stirred up the autism fierce. Other than that, he's publicly supportive of gays, which stirs up the autism, and just generally popular, which is triggering around here.

Luke Crane really is smart as fuck when it comes to game design. He's also a bit unsociable. The former is threatening to /tg/ and the latter is an attack vector.

I've met both of them more than once. Decent dudes. Make good games. Total normies.

>>49762888
Read up on Duel of Wits man.
In my experience, if the players are smart, they'll try to solve things out through the Duel of Wits system. Really smart players will take a page from the book and have a lofty goal so they get what they want even in a compromise.

Aside from that, 1 on 1 fights can be resolved with a few Bloody Versus tests. Don't use the Fight system unless it's really dramatic and provides tension.

Rolled 5, 4, 6, 4 = 19 (4d6)

Rolling ugly truth, this thread is dead

Any scans of the Codex yet?

File: Burning Sands - Jihad.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

1B, 486x500px

>>49784708

Haven't seen one floating around.

Fucking awesome book though, need to get a new group together and utilize some of these new options.

>>49777742

Luke Crane just comes off as smug to me, thats about it. Not even like abnormally smug, just a normal amount. Guess people are just way to easily offended.

Adam seems like a fantastic GM, but Im pretty sure its his hard SJW that triggers people so much. He is an east vancouverite and that shit is super common there.

>>49784806
As someone who comes to /tg/ for its passion for games, more than I think any of you are tolerable, Adam is not a 'hard' SJW. If he was, he wouldn't have put up with eG inControl at all, let alone be friends with the guy. He's not even close to the hardest SJW in tabletop, let alone on Twitch.

Luke is just a nerd, and typical of needs, he comes off badly no matter what he says. In my interactions with him, he's self-deprecating and self-aware, but he's passionate as fuck about his games. And if he is smug, he deserves to be, because Burning Wheel is a work of art (whether or not it's actually fun to play).

>>49784708
No, but I have spent some time looking for some good scans of the Gold book and the ancillary Burners: https://mega.nz/#fm/8tByAZxb

(Contained is the Gold book and the Magic burner, will update as I find more books. There is no decryption key, just hit decrypt.)

File: The Burning Wheel - Mount Burner.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

1B, 486x500px

>>49785621

ok

>>49785756

I have pretty much everything they have released after a lot of searching. Here is Adventure Burner, Monster Burner and mount burner.

http://www13.zippyshare.com/v/RFDNJaK8/file.html

http://www13.zippyshare.com/v/FN7KvDGY/file.html

>>49788689
Thank you, now I have everything on the mega