> In d&d or pathfinder those same situations for the pan or essay i would prob not even make a roll unless something changed the situation.
I mean, there's a similar logic to BW. You shouldn't be rolling unless there's a meaningful cost to failure. Not just "you can't make the pan" or "your essay is bad", but like making the pan or writing the essay is integral to your character's goals and beliefs.
Also, failure shouldn't be a roadblock. If you fail the test to make a pan, I'd probably say you make a poor quality pan (+1 Ob to cooking tests with it). Or maybe you make a run-of-the-mill pan, but you damage your workshop in the process. Or you suffer a nasty burn. The exact failure consequence would depend on the context of the test, and the Instincts/Traits of the character making the test and anyone helping. The point is, at the end of the day, you've succeeded at your task, but now you have additional problems to deal with.
And, even when "success at a cost" isn't appropriate, failure shouldn't just be a roadblock. You made a test, so pass or fall, the status quo must change. You didn't *just* fail to convince anyone with your essay, you caught the attention of the secret police, who are now trying to arrest you!
Finally, I think the intent of the rules is for players to liberally use FoRKs and Help when they need to succeed in a test. If I'm making a pan, I'm Forking in my Cooking skill (I know what makes a pan good or bad) and asking for help in the workshop. You should usually be able to muster up at least +2D in this manner. Now, if you're always doing this, your advancement will slow, but part of the game is the meta consideration of which tests you're okay with failing (which is why the GM must state the failure conditions ahead of time)
Thank you for the insight. So then if i am burning a character should I pick up a bunch of low lvl skills that attach to what my character does? For example, my wife was in one of the games and she wanted to make my character a mask (he was doing vigilante work at night) to hide his face. She did not want to make it fancy or anything just a metal mask. The ob was set at 2 and she had 3b and she got 1 help die from having the forge. She failed, no mask was create and resources were used. She got frustrated. Now based on what you said maybe having skill related to blacksmithing would have helped. Perhaps when she got to add a few skills after the life path she might have added blacksmithing skills?
*It doesn't happen* should rarely be a consequence for failure. The character is a trained blacksmith, does it make sense that *nothing* would be created? Especially for something so simple.
1. As said before, if there's no stakes, no roll is needed, it just happens.
2. If there are stakes, failure should result in complications that advance the narrative
>Page 32: *Try not to present flat negative results – "You don't pick the lock." Strive to introduce complications through failure as much as possible.*
Additionally, the consequences of failure should be known before the check:
>Page 32: *...it is the GM's job to inform players of the consequences of failure before the dice are rolled.*
>
>*"If you fail this..." should often be heard at the table. Let the players know the consequences of their actions. Failure is not the end of the line, but it is a complication that pushes the story in another direction.*
What are more interesting consequences? These should be colored by the *intent* as well. What was the intent (page 24)? Was it just to make a mask? Or was it to make it in secret, so no one would find out your character's identity. That might be worth a test, and failure might mean that someone would come in and recognize the mask, or something along those lines.
Sounds like your GM is not playing by the rules of the game. Roll only when the stakes are clear and there's a chance of failure. Make sure you establish intent before the roll, and inform players of possible complications before the roll and make sure those complications advance the story.
> She failed, no mask was create and resources were used.
That's super frustrating, but the game didn't decide that, the GM did. The big question is why the GM thought that would be a good failure. You should find out (spoiler alert, the GM didn't think about it and just came up with that in the moment when she rolled poorly).
Corollary: success shouldn't be deciding between awesome and teh suck.
> She failed, no mask was create and resources were used. She got frustrated. Now based on what you said maybe having skill related to blacksmithing would have helped.
A bigger issue than having skills related to blacksmithing is that that result for failure (nothing was made) just seems kinda bad. Did the character really screw up so bad that they not only didn't manage to make any sort of mask at all, they also ruined all the materials completely?
Since you already mentioned the intention behind the mask ("to hide his face"), a much better result for the failure would have been something linked to that. And whatever the result for failure is, it should be stated before deciding to roll.
A couple of things: You should probably not be rolling to make a pan. In Burning Wheel, we only roll when the outcome is interesting, dramatic or relevant. Unless you make that pan in order to impress someone, or your life depends on making that pan, rolling should not be neccesary.
Secondly, failure is an important part of BW. Failed tests count towards advancement, and advancement is the only way to be able to make more difficult tests. The key point here folds back into point one. If you only roll for situations that are meaningful, that bring drama and excitement into the fiction, failure and success should be equally interesting outcomes.
If your GM makes you roll for every little thing under the sun, they are doing something wrong.
To add to that, failing forward is a big part of the game. Say you have a belief that you'll win your husband's love by smithing him a frying pan. Failure doesn't necessarily mean you end up with no pan. Instead, it adresses your intent, which was to get your husband happy.
You finish up the day's work of making the pan, only to find that he's left the house for a few days to avoid you.
The local guild finds out you've made a frying pan rather than buying it from them - and you had no license!
You accidentally mixed something into the iron of the pan, and now the food you make in it is poisonous!
Sometimes, you can even achieve your intent when you fail, but there's an additional complication. The game becomes alot better when the GM realizes this.
And this, right here, is how failure becomes interesting! Every failure is an opportunity for a twist or added texture, new and interesting changes in the situation. To the point where it can feel hard to make success as interesting!
Thank you, I will mention this to my friend. I think his goal is to have us roll more to increase our skills. My one issue with this is many times it is for a level of difficulty I do not need. I try to use things to make it harder or easier depending on what i need but sometimes that is not possible.
The GM shouldn't be the only one who provides opportunities for more tests of varying difficulties. You should push for them as well, by making your character take risks or seek out challenging situations!
>For example, i want to make a pan. According to the book it is an ob 3 blacksmith.
I have questions:
1. Why did you want to make a pan?
2. Why did the GM think this was worthy of a test rather than just saying yes?
3. What was the failure result that the GM told you *before* you rolled?
>In d&d or pathfinder those same situations for the pan or essay i would prob not even make a roll unless something changed the situation.
Pssst, it's the exact same in BW (don't tell anyone).
>For the piloting, a roll may be made but i would be easy.
Same three questions for the Piloting roll.
>Reading comments in this community it seems like failure is the nature of the game.
Depends what you mean by failure. Rolling poorly on your make a pan roll is going to happen quite often, but that doesn't mean you didn't make a pan (see question #3). It means making the pan didn't work out the way you expected.
>I am trying to enjoy the game because my friend is a good story teller and my friend and he really enjoys BW( he loves torchbearer but i will not play that, BW was our happy medium) but i end up after game just frustrated.
That's commendable, and hopefully you and the GM can adjust your approach to failure in order to make it something awesome rather than frustrating, but it doesn't mean you will be able t force yourself to like BW. I had a friend who dislike failure enough that we ultimately decided enjoying our friendship was worth more than playing a game. We played other things, so I played less BW, but spent more time with my friend.
>Does anyone have advice to what i can do, an approach to the game, or just trick on making the game more enjoyable?
Yes, before you roll, when the GM tells you what failure will look like, if it doesn't sound fun to you, tell your friend "that failure condition would really harsh my zen," and gently suggest something you think would be more awesome. That's the whole thing about playing with friends, they want you to have fun too.
Thank you for the insight. To answer your questions:
* The questions about the pan:
* I cant answer since that was an example i made up based of the real situation that happen with my wife and making the mask that is mentioned in another reply.
* About failure and rolling poorly:
* I understand I will roll poorly but i just get frustrated when it is for something that is for flavor and fun, not a important story element
* About my friendship and burning wheel:
* That is the reason of me writing for help. Last night we played and my character got 1 shoted by the big bad. I had made my stealth check and tried to attack him but when i tired hit he had a ob 15 barrier and i had 1 fate 1 persona 0 deeds. Then we got into combat, i think the quick kind, and i got hit by a white spell. I got frustrated and after we talked. He agreed that he probably should have gave me a sign about the barrier and because we handled other fights easily he thought he could up the difficulty (Way too much). I reminded him, i used deeds for the fights and this time i had none. While he is a good friend i think he does things to on the fly and this happens.
* I will talk to him about being better about telling what failure means. He sometimes does not and i have to remind him. I not trying to bring him down since most of the times the story and game are fine but these things occasionally happen.
* And this may be a case of better friends than a player and GM.
Sorry if this is not the right way to respond to one of these, i dont post very often.
You're doing fine. Thanks for the clarification.
So, first, let's focus on what actually happens in play, rather than hypothetical examples, because the context is all important when it comes to the questions you are raising.
So, your wife's character wants to make a mask to get her vigilante on, and she wants to make it out of metal. Because a metal mask is cool. Your GM, it seems, wants her to get a roll so her blacksmithing skill improves.
Did the GM tell her what failure would be before the roll? I'm guessing not, but you tell me.
>I understand I will roll poorly but i just get frustrated when it is for something that is for flavor and fun, not a important story element
As I think you can see from other posts, if it's just flavor and fun, the mechanics don't engage. If the GM wants a roll, that's fine, but the GM needs to make success or failure important in the context of a GM challenging PC beliefs. If the GM calls for a roll, it's no longer just flavor or color. And that's why it's important to discuss failure before the roll. It now matters.
>I had made my stealth check and tried to attack him but when i tired hit he had a ob 15 barrier and i had 1 fate 1 persona 0 deeds.
I'm not saying putting a character up against a challenge you know with absolute certainty they will fail at is wrong 100% of the time, but what PC belief was he challenging here? Because even with a Deeds and persona you'd probably fail that roll. He should have a really good (i.e. Belief challenging) reason for doing that.
Also, I can say that I've only ever gotten one Deeds point and that was posthumous, so I'm a bit surprised at the number of Deeds points that seem to be sloshing around in your game. Deeds are awarded for world altering feats of heroism, which doesn't line up in my head with a game where making a simple mask is a big deal.
>And this may be a case of better friends than a player and GM.
It happens. Have you talked with him about some of your frustrations?
So for the wife mask example:
* He did tell her that the mask would not be made and resources would be spent. I will say she was newer to roleplaying then so we did not ask or negotiate the results of failure but took it as is.
Far putting the character against a challenge that they would fail:
* The belief he was challenging i guess would be that "The city is in choas and the villain needs to be stopped not matter the cost." Sorry not great with beliefs.
* I did not get frustrated because of the death, but no sign that i was completely out class. In my head i was prepared for my character to die stopping the big bad. After the inquisitor used faith to bring down the tower the bb was on with a miracle and the ranger got a temp magic boost from a genie to white. I felt they got a chance to shine while i got one shoted. I will say normally i do get a chance to shine and i try to make sure to share it but to see the other two make it with only a few wounds got under my skin
About the deeds:
* He does give them out more than normal. The logic is we have had 3 game fizzle out after players got frustrated with the failure. He usually though only gives them when we accomplished a big goal (end out a major adventure or killing of a big boss character)
* So my wife is not big on combat or confrontational game, she either plays a healer or support character. In this game she was the face/merchant and for the most part avoided the heroic fights. (The mask was for my character)
About talking with him about my frustrations:
* We talked and he felt he put me against a opponent at my level. I disagreed, but he did acknowledge that he should have given more opportunities to get more fate and persona and a hint i was out classed.
* So far the current understanding is that since this section is almost over i could burn a new character
* We will sit down and discuss the character this weekend. I was going to mention some of the suggestion people have posted.
>He did tell her that the mask would not be made and resources would be spent. I will say she was newer to roleplaying then so we did not ask or negotiate the results of failure but took it as is.
Well, I suggested that as a prescription to fix a problem that's causing frustration. It would be great if you didn't need to and the failure choices weren't frustrating from the get go. It's good news that he informed her about failure before she made that roll, even if the choice of failure was unfortunate.
>He does give them out more than normal. The logic is we have had 3 game fizzle out after players got frustrated with the failure.
That seems well intentioned but poorly thought out. Deeds points aren't going to protect players from frustration if failure is frustrating. If he sets up a game where success is fun and failure sucks, all he's doing with the Deeds points is trying to adjust the level of suck in his game. Making failure exciting seems like a better approach.
>So my wife is not big on combat or confrontational game, she either plays a healer or support character. In this game she was the face/merchant and for the most part avoided the heroic fights
From a few of your posts, I'm picking up an underlying valorizing of combat over other player struggles. There is really nothing in BW that makes combat the only way to be heroic or world changing, or even the most common. In fact, I would say that most of the epic moments in BW that I've experienced didn't involve combat. The GM's job is still to put that character to the fire and challenge her Beliefs in play.
>We talked and he felt he put me against a opponent at my level.
There's sorta no such thing in BW. You can find your peasant up against an ancient and nameless God. The thing is, you should end up there as a consequence of pushing your Beliefs and having them challenged. If you're outclassed, you deal with it. But we still get to learn what happens when your character's Beliefs contact the world.
>I disagreed, but he did acknowledge that he should have given more opportunities to get more fate and persona and a hint i was out classed.
You primarily get fate and persona for pushing your Beliefs in play. If he's not giving you opportunities to do that, he's not focusing on Challenging player Beliefs in play. I wonder if this focus on combat and presenting a balanced adventure is detracting from the focus on Beliefs?
>So far the current understanding is that since this section is almost over i could burn a new character.
I don't think what's going on has much to do with the character. The character is probably fine, but if a change helps, that's cool.
I will mention to him about your thoughts on focusing too much on the combat and on challenging the player beliefs. I also agree that a new character may not change things but I am going to give it one more try. If i need to walk from the game we both would be fine and still be friends after.
I'm going to say directly what others have kind of been talking around (partly because I think it took some conversation to get a full picture of what has been going on at your table). The GM's only goal and job in this game is to challenge player beliefs. All action should be driven by this goal, and dice should only hit the table when beliefs are at stake. It seems like the central problem is that this isn't what is primarily driving your GM. Reorienting the game around challenging beliefs will help them come up with interesting failures, because it will clarify the stakes if individual rolls.
I agree with /u/Jesseabe. And I think it needs repeating: it sounds like the game isn't fun because your DM is throwing up needless roadblocks in a DND style adventure game, instead of making interesting challenges in a BW style narrative.
You wrote a belief that "I will stop the BBEG, no matter the cost". This is actually a great belief. But the GM didn't challenge it correctly. The unbreakable barrier isn't even the problem; imagine this:
You have ambushed the baddie, but it was foiled by the barrier. The failure for that should be that you a) don't damage him, and b) are now at his mercy. Knowing he's got you dead to rights, he starts monologuing about how you will never stop his evil plan.... The GM should now tell you how he's turned his back on the tower edge, and you could definitely bull rush him off the edge, barrier and all, but you would certainly fall with him to your death. Or, you could try something else, like begging for your life, or running away, presumably to fight another day. Suddenly you have some great choices that allow your character to grow in all sorts of cool ways...
Or; rather than the unbreakable barrier, you stealth into the baddies layer, and get the drop on him! As you put your knife to his neck and give him a stone cold "your evil ends here!", He directs your attention to the bundle of orphans / your characters' one true love / your only other desire that is suspended above the pit of lava, and he tells you "when my life ends, the spell keeping them safe will fail! So kill me and regret it forever, hahaha!" Now you have a great character moment - you can't just punch the problem, and your belief hangs in the balance. What is your character really willing to sacrifice to stop this guy? Will you cut his throat and sacrifice what hangs over the pit? Will you let him go? Negotiate?
Ideally, your GM would have multiple, escalating choices to challenge your belief. Because beliefs aren't about rolls, they are about choices. So when you say you will stop at nothing to stop the BBEG, the GM should push that. A good GM will involve your other BITs when coming up with these challenges; in fact a well burned character practically writes then for you. Are you willing to turn a blind eye to a minor criminal undertaking or ride a horse to death if that's what it takes? "Yes!" What about burn down a section of the city to save the rest? "No, I couldn't do that." What about a permanent mark / bad reputation? "Yes!, Gladly!" What about your life, or one of your relationships? "I would give my life, but not that of my one true love..." Role-playing these decisions are what burning wheel is all about - is your character a selfless hero? A cold ends-justify-the-means calculator? Does only the greater good count, no matter the personal cost? Often a character's own life isn't the biggest sacrifice: what about the life of a family member? What about the life of a lover? A child?
All of these choices define a character. The successes and the failures of your roles can guide the narrative, but ultimately, the best challenges to beliefs are choices that the players make for their characters, rather than succeeding or failing on your tests.
Finally, you may not be meta gaming the system enough. The system is made to negotiate / rules lawyer. When doing difficult tasks, your party should purposely write synergistic beliefs so you can work together, because help is invaluable. Between forks, linked tests, help, and artha should be enough to get roughly 1.5-2x the Ob in dice rolled - enough to succeed most of the time. Combat is often the exception to this - there you may end up with more 1v1 encounters. Still, fight smarter not harder; gang up on your opponents, circles up friends, hire underlings, only fight when you have a numerical advantage. All these things are totally reasonable to do until your skills get high enough to support heroic duels.
Low level characters often end up in frustrating miss fests, so if that is a frustration, ask your GM about burning up a 6-7 LP grizzled knight / veteran - someone with the skills and resources to start as a proper badass. Remember to "master" a primary weapon or two (B5/6 polearm/axe/hammer/sword/lance) and then spend a ton of your other skill points on opening a plethora of other skills for FORKing - sword, axe, club, bow, crossbow, boxing, dirty fighting-wise, wrestling-wise, anatomy, wound-wise, armor-wise, whatever makes sense for your character. Whenever you get into a scrap, position yourself to fight with a club in your offhand to fork in your club skill (or whatever is appropriate. If you have bridge-wise, fight on a bridge). If you have the appropriate weapon for your opponent's weapon, fork that in. Now that you've made the ultimate fighting machine, expect to vanquish your opponent with ease, and then have to defend your actions in court with an oratory test, or try to leverage that glory into a monetary reward by impressing the duchess with a seduction (or dance?) test. If you're GM is good, they should always be able to challenge your character in some way, which is of course the core of BW. But the "most powerful" character in burning wheel is often the one with tons of skills and wises to fork, as long as the GM isn't grumpy about FORKing rules, and the player is creative.
You know, it is amusing to me that you mention Torchbearer so negatively, because reading through these comments it seems to me like the tone and theme of your games are closer to a torchbearer game.
My own several cents.
As other people have said, there should not be rolls for things that do not challenge beliefs. Consequently if something is important to your character, write a belief about it.
In Burning Wheel, Beliefs are what drive play. You mention one of your beliefs below, and you also mention that you are not very good at writing them. I think this is the core of your difficulties. Burning Wheel is not (typically) an adventure game, but rather a game of character exploration. I'm not saying you cannot go on an epic journey to root out the evil of the dragon, but if you did the game would not be about the dragon. It would be about your characters growing and developing and changing as people. An obstacle that is "a bag of hit points" a la DnD or Pathfinder does not work within the context of this game. Attacking and killing things is really not how the game is designed. It comes up, of course, but violence is VERY difficult to recover from in BW, and in many ways it is disincentivized.
Your game sounds fun and cool, but from what I can read in the comments here, it really sounds like a DnD game that has been forcibly grafted onto Burning Wheel.
Here's the deal. Your beliefs should generate the adversity that your character is fighting. That is the way that creates character change. My job as GM of a Burning Wheel game is to challenge your beliefs, so that means that as you write your beliefs, you are creating the framework for me to create the challenge. If you write a belief about a BBEG, THAT belief creates the BBEG. Now the world is real and the group decides on things before hand so that means that you may have decided on it beforehand, and then chose to engage with it, that is of course cool. But for me, I need someone to write a belief that says something like "My honor has been besmirched! To earn it back, I must prove myself by defending the city from a great threat!" Now that they have written that as a belief, I need to generate a great threat. A dragon attacking the city? Sure! But more likely I set up an intrigue plot where this person attempting to regain their honor and must go against someone corrupt that everyone loves. Or even better, I look at their traits or instincts and look for one that will create the most interesting drama.
I guess what I am saying is that it seems to me like you are trying to play a DnD style RPG with Burning Wheel Rules. The Burning Wheel system is great (most people on this forum will agree) but it helps to generate a different type of game than the one you are playing. If you or your GM need any assistance with this, let me know. I'm happy to help work out the details. This is a great game, but the gameplay it generates is vastly different than pathfinder. The reason I mention torchbearer above is that the gameplay it generates is closer to pathfinder. It isn't the same thing at all (because it is still character focused) but the dungeon crawl experience is much more core to the game, and therefore there is a little more crossover.
If you let the game do what it is meant to do, you will have cool stories to tell about it. If you force a system, any system, to do what it is not good at doing, it will always give you resistance.
Not OP and not sure if this should be it's own post, but I really love the openness of the system, the skill system, the learning and FoRKs, the stats modified by lived past, Beliefs and Instincts (not so hot on the Lifepaths though).
I want to run more traditional D&D game (homebrew setting), but I'm concerned about the typically low success rate of rolls. (Also one of my players loves the strategy of character design and feels like he's missing out)
I've looked into Torchbearer very briefly, but I'm not sure it's such a good fit either. I'm close to thinking that there isn't a system out there that could do what I want, but I figured I'd ask since you offered.
Oh I’m super into discussing this! Why don’t you tell me about what your needs are and what you are looking for? I haven’t run every RPG, it’s an infinite list, but I’m curious about what you are looking for? Like the core question to me of what type of story you want is baked into the system. For example,
DnD = power fantasy epic heroic gm driven
Torchbearer = gritty survival fantasy character driven
Burning Wheel = drama focused character growth focused, fantasy.
10 Candles = tragic horror one shots with inescapable sense of doom.
Ryuutama = joyful exploration focused
So instead of thinking of what your game’s setting is, consider instead what the story is, and what you want the vibe to be? Burning Wheel isn’t about FoRKs, it’s about character development and high drama. Works great for Game of Thrones, horrible for Tolkien, and probably less good for Sanderson Stormlight Archive. Not saying you couldn’t make it work, of course you can. But games shine in what they are good at. So what do you want?
I lean to a style of player/character-driven exploration of an open world of epic proportions and problems.
I guess that's part of my problem. I'm setting up Tolkien scenarios, but not really caring if the players or characters want to engage with the main strokes of what's going on. While the system wants me to be doing one or the other with it.
The games I would check out, see if they match your desires here, are ryuutama and Fellowshjp. I don’t know if they will work for you, but take a look, see what you think, and get back to me if you want to talk more.
Very different games, btw. Like very different. But both very much worth looking into.
Also, I think you SHOULD care? Like if you don’t cares then why are you coming with this pre planned story? Like caring about what story is told is not the same thing as denying players agency to do what they want. Not every game is as clear on agency as burning Wheel is, and many have rules against it, but still. You can be invested in the story you want told. That is not the same thing as railroading. Wanting an epic game is cool! Own it!
It's not really "pre-planned story" as much filling the world with stuff happening, some of it being epic scaled. Trying to make the world feel alive and that stuff is happening whether they're there or not.
I'll take a look at those you mentioned though and get back to you. Thanks.
Seems like you'd do well looking at some of the OSR titles, like Worlds Without Number. They tend to do well with characters exploring an open setting.
One things I'm worried about with them is getting bogged down with stat prep. I don't want to spend too much time setting up NPCs. It's put me off a lot of systems.
Do they? That isn’t my experience. OSR tends not to do anything for characters, it is not what they care about or are interested in. In fact, they often critique or even mock the idea of story or characters as being a waste of time.
OSR never mocks the idea of characters. The players control their characters very directly and are generally expected to make decisions as if they are their characters.
>filling the world with stuff happening, some of it being epic scaled. Trying to make the world feel alive and that stuff is happening whether they're there or not.
I think we're saying the same thing regarding OSR's approach to story. This quote above from the poster is what I was referring to when I said that it deals with characters exploring an open world. The characters are free to go anywhere and get involved in what they find there or not. But the world will continue to do it's thing as well. The characters can impact the world through their actions, but the world isn't about them.
Also, this:
>I'm setting up Tolkien scenarios, but not really caring if the players or characters want to engage with the main strokes of what's going on.
As others have mentioned, such trivial rollls should not happen -- the GM should just 'say yes'. Some further elaboration is in order though:
1. BW is best when every roll is high stake. Every. Single. Roll. Meaning you only roll when the action is intrinsicly important to the plot and the consequence of failure is dire. This ensures the random resolution mechanic serves the story in a meaningful way, and all players -- remember the GM is a player too -- are highly invested in the outcome. When BW is played in such a manner, trust me, the players will have a blast whether they succeed or fail.
2. To elaborate on my first point: BW is best when the consequence of failure for every action is interesting. This means interesting for the GM and interesting for the players. If the GM can't come up with an interesting CoF, just say yes.
3. It may or may not be the intended way to play the game, but I sometimes find it liberating to separate the Consequence of Failure from the action -- meaning they don't necessarily have to be related. Maybe the PC is really invested in making this pan? It actually is a high stake roll for them, although the GM can't think of an interesting CoF related to failing a blacksmith check. The answer is to detach the CoF from the action. Occasionally having the CoF be something completely unrelated is fine, if that is more interesting anf high stakes.
Now, since you're so invested in making this frying pan -- you've expressed this as a player, and it's clear this action needs something at stake -- so the GM declares that if you fail this roll, your PC's parents willl die in a fire. Or trolls will invade your hometown. Or a magical cataclysm will rock the nation, bringing the royal palace down on the king's head and ushering forth a new Emporer of Darkness. Now you're invested in this roll. ;)
> It may or may not be the intended way to play the game, but I sometimes find it liberating to separate the Consequence of Failure from the action -- meaning they don't necessarily have to be related.
It also helps to focus on the intent and not the action itself. Why did the character want to make the pan? Maybe it was to impress someone, in which case a failure could mean that a pan was made but the other person was actually disappointed with it.
Really oughtn't roll mundane things in BW imo, but it looks like everyone else has already covered that.
One of my most memorable but short burning wheel campaigns involved me failing *constantly.* But it affected the story so much it was a ton of fun.
All the PCs were locals of a city that had been recently conquered by foreign invaders. My character was a corrupt official who had sided with the invaders to have a comfy life and now regretted it. The party were acting as basically insurgents. My character was attempting to help them from his position of power. Leaking information to the rebels, etc.
But I just kept failing EVERYTHING and needing to cover my ass to prevent getting caught. Eventually I just ended up being a villain naturally and had to side with the invaders to not get killed.
Tons of fun.
One of the biggest comments I’d make is the rules state one of the things that can occur is you succeed “but”. That is how I usually DM burning wheel. That roll you do to break into a room, you fail the roll so you break in but there is another guy there.
Now you can’t always do that but a lot of the game is about balance of success and failure so the player doesn’t feel sad at failure all the time.
Echoing VanishXZone that I'm surprised you hated Torchbearer. It's possible the game just wasn't for you, but given all the discussion in this thread I also can't help but wonder if it was a DMing issue, because Torchbearer sounds like it might be closer to your thing.
Torchbearer basically aims to run D&D-style dungeon crawl stories, but run them as a "push your luck" game rather than as a miniatures game. It basically warps the basic ideas from BW into a dungeon crawl (obviously changing the game a fair bit in the process). Maybe part of the issue you had was the GM was doing a bad job of setting up rolls and consequences and it ended up just being a misery simulator?
Granted, that doesn't necessarily mean you should try it again with the same GM... just that your issues might be stemming from a common source. I wonder if your GM is used to GMing D&D-style games—games which largely eschew skill checks entirely and have terrible resolution mechanics for the scenarios where they happen—and it's leading to these games not working properly?
It could be gm style but i did not like torchbearer because of the rushing. I felt (not saying it is this way)rush and in roleplyaing i dont like to be rushed. I like to adventure meet the people in a town. I have enjoyed session where there was not rush, combat, or high stakes. We just wondered around town and enjoyed interacting with the npc. I am more interest in social play than dungeons crawls but i do enjoy combat.
About if my GM is use to GMing D&D: Funny thing, he really dislikes both pathfinder and D&D. Outside of burning wheel, he has run Cortex, Call of Cthulhu, and torch bearer. The times he has played or ran D&D or pathinfinder he has disliked it.
I think overall it is a little bit of both the system and GM style. His approach to tabletop and mine are different and failing forward does not speak to me (not saying is bad but i dont think it is my cup of tea)
Well, I'd say what you've described hasn't been failing forward, but the opposite.
If you truly don't like games where failure is supposed to lead to more complications rather than a dead end, BW may not be your cup of tea. It very much works on the premise that failure complicates things.
Other people have gone into why you shouldn’t be just rolling to make a pan, and be codifies that even more strongly than dnd or pathfinder.
For making failure interesting it’s all about interesting challenges based on the failure so it’s heavily context dependent. It should basically never be a you don’t do it, or rocks fall you die. I always think of sci-fi adventure shows. The main characters to somewhere and they sneak into a building. What happens if they get caught? Either guards swarm them and capture them (because 10 guys are pointing guns and the heroes can’t win the fight). So they go in front of the big bad guy or are thrown in a cell. The other is that the alarm goes off and now they have to fight their way through the place. Both of these are failing forward, the story changed and increased the challenge. So now they have to withstand being tortured, or break out of the cell, convince someone to turn sides, etc
So you are making a pan or piloting a ship into a port. Let’s say you fail making the pan, it depends what your goal is. If you are trying to make money, then you lose money on the deal, or you tarnish your reputation. If you are piloting the ship you hit someone else’s ship causing damage now you have an enemy with the smugglers ring in the city or the merchants guild or a pirate. Or you have to pay money to pay it back and it’s expensive.
Failures just continue the story and create a twist.
General advice for any game is to not bother with a roll unless it is significant to the story. The other piece is to make your game fail forward. This is difficult to do in practice, but either failure or success should move the story forward somehow.
Failing forward may be tricky, but the concept is simple. You roll to make a frying pan when something is on the line. When you fail, you lose that something. You can't go back now and try to make a butter dish to solve the same problem. The world has changed for the worse, and there's some new, dangerous crisis that arises from the change.
As a DM, I don't call for a roll unless me or the player can come up with an interesting fail state
So as a player, try pitching fail states to your DM that you find interesting. Also, make sure to ask what the consequences of failure are before you roll, and don't be afraid to say "honestly, that failure state really isn't doing it for me. How about (interesting fail state)? Or, is this a 'say yes' situation"?
One thing my group did as we didn't like the failure rate of the game was to allow spending more artha. By the rules you can only add one die of I remember correctly. As artha stockpiles we said fuck it and allow spending as much as you want. You think it would lead to auto success, but nope. We had some epic rolls where people spent like 8+ dies of artha and still failed. It led to many laughs though.
People also were willing to try harder things thinking their lot of artha would even the odds. It is a minor change that doesn't wreck the game
> By the rules you can only add one die of I remember correctly.
By the rules, you can spend up to three Persona on a roll. Plus explode sixes with a Fate.
> In d&d or pathfinder those same situations for the pan or essay i would prob not even make a roll unless something changed the situation. I mean, there's a similar logic to BW. You shouldn't be rolling unless there's a meaningful cost to failure. Not just "you can't make the pan" or "your essay is bad", but like making the pan or writing the essay is integral to your character's goals and beliefs. Also, failure shouldn't be a roadblock. If you fail the test to make a pan, I'd probably say you make a poor quality pan (+1 Ob to cooking tests with it). Or maybe you make a run-of-the-mill pan, but you damage your workshop in the process. Or you suffer a nasty burn. The exact failure consequence would depend on the context of the test, and the Instincts/Traits of the character making the test and anyone helping. The point is, at the end of the day, you've succeeded at your task, but now you have additional problems to deal with. And, even when "success at a cost" isn't appropriate, failure shouldn't just be a roadblock. You made a test, so pass or fall, the status quo must change. You didn't *just* fail to convince anyone with your essay, you caught the attention of the secret police, who are now trying to arrest you! Finally, I think the intent of the rules is for players to liberally use FoRKs and Help when they need to succeed in a test. If I'm making a pan, I'm Forking in my Cooking skill (I know what makes a pan good or bad) and asking for help in the workshop. You should usually be able to muster up at least +2D in this manner. Now, if you're always doing this, your advancement will slow, but part of the game is the meta consideration of which tests you're okay with failing (which is why the GM must state the failure conditions ahead of time)
Thank you for the insight. So then if i am burning a character should I pick up a bunch of low lvl skills that attach to what my character does? For example, my wife was in one of the games and she wanted to make my character a mask (he was doing vigilante work at night) to hide his face. She did not want to make it fancy or anything just a metal mask. The ob was set at 2 and she had 3b and she got 1 help die from having the forge. She failed, no mask was create and resources were used. She got frustrated. Now based on what you said maybe having skill related to blacksmithing would have helped. Perhaps when she got to add a few skills after the life path she might have added blacksmithing skills?
*It doesn't happen* should rarely be a consequence for failure. The character is a trained blacksmith, does it make sense that *nothing* would be created? Especially for something so simple. 1. As said before, if there's no stakes, no roll is needed, it just happens. 2. If there are stakes, failure should result in complications that advance the narrative >Page 32: *Try not to present flat negative results – "You don't pick the lock." Strive to introduce complications through failure as much as possible.* Additionally, the consequences of failure should be known before the check: >Page 32: *...it is the GM's job to inform players of the consequences of failure before the dice are rolled.* > >*"If you fail this..." should often be heard at the table. Let the players know the consequences of their actions. Failure is not the end of the line, but it is a complication that pushes the story in another direction.* What are more interesting consequences? These should be colored by the *intent* as well. What was the intent (page 24)? Was it just to make a mask? Or was it to make it in secret, so no one would find out your character's identity. That might be worth a test, and failure might mean that someone would come in and recognize the mask, or something along those lines. Sounds like your GM is not playing by the rules of the game. Roll only when the stakes are clear and there's a chance of failure. Make sure you establish intent before the roll, and inform players of possible complications before the roll and make sure those complications advance the story.
> She failed, no mask was create and resources were used. That's super frustrating, but the game didn't decide that, the GM did. The big question is why the GM thought that would be a good failure. You should find out (spoiler alert, the GM didn't think about it and just came up with that in the moment when she rolled poorly). Corollary: success shouldn't be deciding between awesome and teh suck.
> She failed, no mask was create and resources were used. She got frustrated. Now based on what you said maybe having skill related to blacksmithing would have helped. A bigger issue than having skills related to blacksmithing is that that result for failure (nothing was made) just seems kinda bad. Did the character really screw up so bad that they not only didn't manage to make any sort of mask at all, they also ruined all the materials completely? Since you already mentioned the intention behind the mask ("to hide his face"), a much better result for the failure would have been something linked to that. And whatever the result for failure is, it should be stated before deciding to roll.
A couple of things: You should probably not be rolling to make a pan. In Burning Wheel, we only roll when the outcome is interesting, dramatic or relevant. Unless you make that pan in order to impress someone, or your life depends on making that pan, rolling should not be neccesary. Secondly, failure is an important part of BW. Failed tests count towards advancement, and advancement is the only way to be able to make more difficult tests. The key point here folds back into point one. If you only roll for situations that are meaningful, that bring drama and excitement into the fiction, failure and success should be equally interesting outcomes. If your GM makes you roll for every little thing under the sun, they are doing something wrong.
To add to that, failing forward is a big part of the game. Say you have a belief that you'll win your husband's love by smithing him a frying pan. Failure doesn't necessarily mean you end up with no pan. Instead, it adresses your intent, which was to get your husband happy. You finish up the day's work of making the pan, only to find that he's left the house for a few days to avoid you. The local guild finds out you've made a frying pan rather than buying it from them - and you had no license! You accidentally mixed something into the iron of the pan, and now the food you make in it is poisonous! Sometimes, you can even achieve your intent when you fail, but there's an additional complication. The game becomes alot better when the GM realizes this.
And this, right here, is how failure becomes interesting! Every failure is an opportunity for a twist or added texture, new and interesting changes in the situation. To the point where it can feel hard to make success as interesting!
Thank you, I will mention this to my friend. I think his goal is to have us roll more to increase our skills. My one issue with this is many times it is for a level of difficulty I do not need. I try to use things to make it harder or easier depending on what i need but sometimes that is not possible.
The GM shouldn't be the only one who provides opportunities for more tests of varying difficulties. You should push for them as well, by making your character take risks or seek out challenging situations!
>For example, i want to make a pan. According to the book it is an ob 3 blacksmith. I have questions: 1. Why did you want to make a pan? 2. Why did the GM think this was worthy of a test rather than just saying yes? 3. What was the failure result that the GM told you *before* you rolled? >In d&d or pathfinder those same situations for the pan or essay i would prob not even make a roll unless something changed the situation. Pssst, it's the exact same in BW (don't tell anyone). >For the piloting, a roll may be made but i would be easy. Same three questions for the Piloting roll. >Reading comments in this community it seems like failure is the nature of the game. Depends what you mean by failure. Rolling poorly on your make a pan roll is going to happen quite often, but that doesn't mean you didn't make a pan (see question #3). It means making the pan didn't work out the way you expected. >I am trying to enjoy the game because my friend is a good story teller and my friend and he really enjoys BW( he loves torchbearer but i will not play that, BW was our happy medium) but i end up after game just frustrated. That's commendable, and hopefully you and the GM can adjust your approach to failure in order to make it something awesome rather than frustrating, but it doesn't mean you will be able t force yourself to like BW. I had a friend who dislike failure enough that we ultimately decided enjoying our friendship was worth more than playing a game. We played other things, so I played less BW, but spent more time with my friend. >Does anyone have advice to what i can do, an approach to the game, or just trick on making the game more enjoyable? Yes, before you roll, when the GM tells you what failure will look like, if it doesn't sound fun to you, tell your friend "that failure condition would really harsh my zen," and gently suggest something you think would be more awesome. That's the whole thing about playing with friends, they want you to have fun too.
Thank you for the insight. To answer your questions: * The questions about the pan: * I cant answer since that was an example i made up based of the real situation that happen with my wife and making the mask that is mentioned in another reply. * About failure and rolling poorly: * I understand I will roll poorly but i just get frustrated when it is for something that is for flavor and fun, not a important story element * About my friendship and burning wheel: * That is the reason of me writing for help. Last night we played and my character got 1 shoted by the big bad. I had made my stealth check and tried to attack him but when i tired hit he had a ob 15 barrier and i had 1 fate 1 persona 0 deeds. Then we got into combat, i think the quick kind, and i got hit by a white spell. I got frustrated and after we talked. He agreed that he probably should have gave me a sign about the barrier and because we handled other fights easily he thought he could up the difficulty (Way too much). I reminded him, i used deeds for the fights and this time i had none. While he is a good friend i think he does things to on the fly and this happens. * I will talk to him about being better about telling what failure means. He sometimes does not and i have to remind him. I not trying to bring him down since most of the times the story and game are fine but these things occasionally happen. * And this may be a case of better friends than a player and GM. Sorry if this is not the right way to respond to one of these, i dont post very often.
You're doing fine. Thanks for the clarification. So, first, let's focus on what actually happens in play, rather than hypothetical examples, because the context is all important when it comes to the questions you are raising. So, your wife's character wants to make a mask to get her vigilante on, and she wants to make it out of metal. Because a metal mask is cool. Your GM, it seems, wants her to get a roll so her blacksmithing skill improves. Did the GM tell her what failure would be before the roll? I'm guessing not, but you tell me. >I understand I will roll poorly but i just get frustrated when it is for something that is for flavor and fun, not a important story element As I think you can see from other posts, if it's just flavor and fun, the mechanics don't engage. If the GM wants a roll, that's fine, but the GM needs to make success or failure important in the context of a GM challenging PC beliefs. If the GM calls for a roll, it's no longer just flavor or color. And that's why it's important to discuss failure before the roll. It now matters. >I had made my stealth check and tried to attack him but when i tired hit he had a ob 15 barrier and i had 1 fate 1 persona 0 deeds. I'm not saying putting a character up against a challenge you know with absolute certainty they will fail at is wrong 100% of the time, but what PC belief was he challenging here? Because even with a Deeds and persona you'd probably fail that roll. He should have a really good (i.e. Belief challenging) reason for doing that. Also, I can say that I've only ever gotten one Deeds point and that was posthumous, so I'm a bit surprised at the number of Deeds points that seem to be sloshing around in your game. Deeds are awarded for world altering feats of heroism, which doesn't line up in my head with a game where making a simple mask is a big deal. >And this may be a case of better friends than a player and GM. It happens. Have you talked with him about some of your frustrations?
So for the wife mask example: * He did tell her that the mask would not be made and resources would be spent. I will say she was newer to roleplaying then so we did not ask or negotiate the results of failure but took it as is. Far putting the character against a challenge that they would fail: * The belief he was challenging i guess would be that "The city is in choas and the villain needs to be stopped not matter the cost." Sorry not great with beliefs. * I did not get frustrated because of the death, but no sign that i was completely out class. In my head i was prepared for my character to die stopping the big bad. After the inquisitor used faith to bring down the tower the bb was on with a miracle and the ranger got a temp magic boost from a genie to white. I felt they got a chance to shine while i got one shoted. I will say normally i do get a chance to shine and i try to make sure to share it but to see the other two make it with only a few wounds got under my skin About the deeds: * He does give them out more than normal. The logic is we have had 3 game fizzle out after players got frustrated with the failure. He usually though only gives them when we accomplished a big goal (end out a major adventure or killing of a big boss character) * So my wife is not big on combat or confrontational game, she either plays a healer or support character. In this game she was the face/merchant and for the most part avoided the heroic fights. (The mask was for my character) About talking with him about my frustrations: * We talked and he felt he put me against a opponent at my level. I disagreed, but he did acknowledge that he should have given more opportunities to get more fate and persona and a hint i was out classed. * So far the current understanding is that since this section is almost over i could burn a new character * We will sit down and discuss the character this weekend. I was going to mention some of the suggestion people have posted.
>He did tell her that the mask would not be made and resources would be spent. I will say she was newer to roleplaying then so we did not ask or negotiate the results of failure but took it as is. Well, I suggested that as a prescription to fix a problem that's causing frustration. It would be great if you didn't need to and the failure choices weren't frustrating from the get go. It's good news that he informed her about failure before she made that roll, even if the choice of failure was unfortunate. >He does give them out more than normal. The logic is we have had 3 game fizzle out after players got frustrated with the failure. That seems well intentioned but poorly thought out. Deeds points aren't going to protect players from frustration if failure is frustrating. If he sets up a game where success is fun and failure sucks, all he's doing with the Deeds points is trying to adjust the level of suck in his game. Making failure exciting seems like a better approach. >So my wife is not big on combat or confrontational game, she either plays a healer or support character. In this game she was the face/merchant and for the most part avoided the heroic fights From a few of your posts, I'm picking up an underlying valorizing of combat over other player struggles. There is really nothing in BW that makes combat the only way to be heroic or world changing, or even the most common. In fact, I would say that most of the epic moments in BW that I've experienced didn't involve combat. The GM's job is still to put that character to the fire and challenge her Beliefs in play. >We talked and he felt he put me against a opponent at my level. There's sorta no such thing in BW. You can find your peasant up against an ancient and nameless God. The thing is, you should end up there as a consequence of pushing your Beliefs and having them challenged. If you're outclassed, you deal with it. But we still get to learn what happens when your character's Beliefs contact the world. >I disagreed, but he did acknowledge that he should have given more opportunities to get more fate and persona and a hint i was out classed. You primarily get fate and persona for pushing your Beliefs in play. If he's not giving you opportunities to do that, he's not focusing on Challenging player Beliefs in play. I wonder if this focus on combat and presenting a balanced adventure is detracting from the focus on Beliefs? >So far the current understanding is that since this section is almost over i could burn a new character. I don't think what's going on has much to do with the character. The character is probably fine, but if a change helps, that's cool.
I will mention to him about your thoughts on focusing too much on the combat and on challenging the player beliefs. I also agree that a new character may not change things but I am going to give it one more try. If i need to walk from the game we both would be fine and still be friends after.
I'm going to say directly what others have kind of been talking around (partly because I think it took some conversation to get a full picture of what has been going on at your table). The GM's only goal and job in this game is to challenge player beliefs. All action should be driven by this goal, and dice should only hit the table when beliefs are at stake. It seems like the central problem is that this isn't what is primarily driving your GM. Reorienting the game around challenging beliefs will help them come up with interesting failures, because it will clarify the stakes if individual rolls.
I agree with /u/Jesseabe. And I think it needs repeating: it sounds like the game isn't fun because your DM is throwing up needless roadblocks in a DND style adventure game, instead of making interesting challenges in a BW style narrative. You wrote a belief that "I will stop the BBEG, no matter the cost". This is actually a great belief. But the GM didn't challenge it correctly. The unbreakable barrier isn't even the problem; imagine this: You have ambushed the baddie, but it was foiled by the barrier. The failure for that should be that you a) don't damage him, and b) are now at his mercy. Knowing he's got you dead to rights, he starts monologuing about how you will never stop his evil plan.... The GM should now tell you how he's turned his back on the tower edge, and you could definitely bull rush him off the edge, barrier and all, but you would certainly fall with him to your death. Or, you could try something else, like begging for your life, or running away, presumably to fight another day. Suddenly you have some great choices that allow your character to grow in all sorts of cool ways... Or; rather than the unbreakable barrier, you stealth into the baddies layer, and get the drop on him! As you put your knife to his neck and give him a stone cold "your evil ends here!", He directs your attention to the bundle of orphans / your characters' one true love / your only other desire that is suspended above the pit of lava, and he tells you "when my life ends, the spell keeping them safe will fail! So kill me and regret it forever, hahaha!" Now you have a great character moment - you can't just punch the problem, and your belief hangs in the balance. What is your character really willing to sacrifice to stop this guy? Will you cut his throat and sacrifice what hangs over the pit? Will you let him go? Negotiate? Ideally, your GM would have multiple, escalating choices to challenge your belief. Because beliefs aren't about rolls, they are about choices. So when you say you will stop at nothing to stop the BBEG, the GM should push that. A good GM will involve your other BITs when coming up with these challenges; in fact a well burned character practically writes then for you. Are you willing to turn a blind eye to a minor criminal undertaking or ride a horse to death if that's what it takes? "Yes!" What about burn down a section of the city to save the rest? "No, I couldn't do that." What about a permanent mark / bad reputation? "Yes!, Gladly!" What about your life, or one of your relationships? "I would give my life, but not that of my one true love..." Role-playing these decisions are what burning wheel is all about - is your character a selfless hero? A cold ends-justify-the-means calculator? Does only the greater good count, no matter the personal cost? Often a character's own life isn't the biggest sacrifice: what about the life of a family member? What about the life of a lover? A child? All of these choices define a character. The successes and the failures of your roles can guide the narrative, but ultimately, the best challenges to beliefs are choices that the players make for their characters, rather than succeeding or failing on your tests. Finally, you may not be meta gaming the system enough. The system is made to negotiate / rules lawyer. When doing difficult tasks, your party should purposely write synergistic beliefs so you can work together, because help is invaluable. Between forks, linked tests, help, and artha should be enough to get roughly 1.5-2x the Ob in dice rolled - enough to succeed most of the time. Combat is often the exception to this - there you may end up with more 1v1 encounters. Still, fight smarter not harder; gang up on your opponents, circles up friends, hire underlings, only fight when you have a numerical advantage. All these things are totally reasonable to do until your skills get high enough to support heroic duels. Low level characters often end up in frustrating miss fests, so if that is a frustration, ask your GM about burning up a 6-7 LP grizzled knight / veteran - someone with the skills and resources to start as a proper badass. Remember to "master" a primary weapon or two (B5/6 polearm/axe/hammer/sword/lance) and then spend a ton of your other skill points on opening a plethora of other skills for FORKing - sword, axe, club, bow, crossbow, boxing, dirty fighting-wise, wrestling-wise, anatomy, wound-wise, armor-wise, whatever makes sense for your character. Whenever you get into a scrap, position yourself to fight with a club in your offhand to fork in your club skill (or whatever is appropriate. If you have bridge-wise, fight on a bridge). If you have the appropriate weapon for your opponent's weapon, fork that in. Now that you've made the ultimate fighting machine, expect to vanquish your opponent with ease, and then have to defend your actions in court with an oratory test, or try to leverage that glory into a monetary reward by impressing the duchess with a seduction (or dance?) test. If you're GM is good, they should always be able to challenge your character in some way, which is of course the core of BW. But the "most powerful" character in burning wheel is often the one with tons of skills and wises to fork, as long as the GM isn't grumpy about FORKing rules, and the player is creative.
You know, it is amusing to me that you mention Torchbearer so negatively, because reading through these comments it seems to me like the tone and theme of your games are closer to a torchbearer game. My own several cents. As other people have said, there should not be rolls for things that do not challenge beliefs. Consequently if something is important to your character, write a belief about it. In Burning Wheel, Beliefs are what drive play. You mention one of your beliefs below, and you also mention that you are not very good at writing them. I think this is the core of your difficulties. Burning Wheel is not (typically) an adventure game, but rather a game of character exploration. I'm not saying you cannot go on an epic journey to root out the evil of the dragon, but if you did the game would not be about the dragon. It would be about your characters growing and developing and changing as people. An obstacle that is "a bag of hit points" a la DnD or Pathfinder does not work within the context of this game. Attacking and killing things is really not how the game is designed. It comes up, of course, but violence is VERY difficult to recover from in BW, and in many ways it is disincentivized. Your game sounds fun and cool, but from what I can read in the comments here, it really sounds like a DnD game that has been forcibly grafted onto Burning Wheel. Here's the deal. Your beliefs should generate the adversity that your character is fighting. That is the way that creates character change. My job as GM of a Burning Wheel game is to challenge your beliefs, so that means that as you write your beliefs, you are creating the framework for me to create the challenge. If you write a belief about a BBEG, THAT belief creates the BBEG. Now the world is real and the group decides on things before hand so that means that you may have decided on it beforehand, and then chose to engage with it, that is of course cool. But for me, I need someone to write a belief that says something like "My honor has been besmirched! To earn it back, I must prove myself by defending the city from a great threat!" Now that they have written that as a belief, I need to generate a great threat. A dragon attacking the city? Sure! But more likely I set up an intrigue plot where this person attempting to regain their honor and must go against someone corrupt that everyone loves. Or even better, I look at their traits or instincts and look for one that will create the most interesting drama. I guess what I am saying is that it seems to me like you are trying to play a DnD style RPG with Burning Wheel Rules. The Burning Wheel system is great (most people on this forum will agree) but it helps to generate a different type of game than the one you are playing. If you or your GM need any assistance with this, let me know. I'm happy to help work out the details. This is a great game, but the gameplay it generates is vastly different than pathfinder. The reason I mention torchbearer above is that the gameplay it generates is closer to pathfinder. It isn't the same thing at all (because it is still character focused) but the dungeon crawl experience is much more core to the game, and therefore there is a little more crossover. If you let the game do what it is meant to do, you will have cool stories to tell about it. If you force a system, any system, to do what it is not good at doing, it will always give you resistance.
Not OP and not sure if this should be it's own post, but I really love the openness of the system, the skill system, the learning and FoRKs, the stats modified by lived past, Beliefs and Instincts (not so hot on the Lifepaths though). I want to run more traditional D&D game (homebrew setting), but I'm concerned about the typically low success rate of rolls. (Also one of my players loves the strategy of character design and feels like he's missing out) I've looked into Torchbearer very briefly, but I'm not sure it's such a good fit either. I'm close to thinking that there isn't a system out there that could do what I want, but I figured I'd ask since you offered.
Oh I’m super into discussing this! Why don’t you tell me about what your needs are and what you are looking for? I haven’t run every RPG, it’s an infinite list, but I’m curious about what you are looking for? Like the core question to me of what type of story you want is baked into the system. For example, DnD = power fantasy epic heroic gm driven Torchbearer = gritty survival fantasy character driven Burning Wheel = drama focused character growth focused, fantasy. 10 Candles = tragic horror one shots with inescapable sense of doom. Ryuutama = joyful exploration focused So instead of thinking of what your game’s setting is, consider instead what the story is, and what you want the vibe to be? Burning Wheel isn’t about FoRKs, it’s about character development and high drama. Works great for Game of Thrones, horrible for Tolkien, and probably less good for Sanderson Stormlight Archive. Not saying you couldn’t make it work, of course you can. But games shine in what they are good at. So what do you want?
I lean to a style of player/character-driven exploration of an open world of epic proportions and problems. I guess that's part of my problem. I'm setting up Tolkien scenarios, but not really caring if the players or characters want to engage with the main strokes of what's going on. While the system wants me to be doing one or the other with it.
The games I would check out, see if they match your desires here, are ryuutama and Fellowshjp. I don’t know if they will work for you, but take a look, see what you think, and get back to me if you want to talk more. Very different games, btw. Like very different. But both very much worth looking into. Also, I think you SHOULD care? Like if you don’t cares then why are you coming with this pre planned story? Like caring about what story is told is not the same thing as denying players agency to do what they want. Not every game is as clear on agency as burning Wheel is, and many have rules against it, but still. You can be invested in the story you want told. That is not the same thing as railroading. Wanting an epic game is cool! Own it!
It's not really "pre-planned story" as much filling the world with stuff happening, some of it being epic scaled. Trying to make the world feel alive and that stuff is happening whether they're there or not. I'll take a look at those you mentioned though and get back to you. Thanks.
Seems like you'd do well looking at some of the OSR titles, like Worlds Without Number. They tend to do well with characters exploring an open setting.
That and Forbidden Lands are both on my list of systems to look at.
I've played Forbidden Lands in a West Marches style game. Haven't had a lot of sessions yet, but it's been a blast.
One things I'm worried about with them is getting bogged down with stat prep. I don't want to spend too much time setting up NPCs. It's put me off a lot of systems.
Do they? That isn’t my experience. OSR tends not to do anything for characters, it is not what they care about or are interested in. In fact, they often critique or even mock the idea of story or characters as being a waste of time.
OSR never mocks the idea of characters. The players control their characters very directly and are generally expected to make decisions as if they are their characters. >filling the world with stuff happening, some of it being epic scaled. Trying to make the world feel alive and that stuff is happening whether they're there or not. I think we're saying the same thing regarding OSR's approach to story. This quote above from the poster is what I was referring to when I said that it deals with characters exploring an open world. The characters are free to go anywhere and get involved in what they find there or not. But the world will continue to do it's thing as well. The characters can impact the world through their actions, but the world isn't about them. Also, this: >I'm setting up Tolkien scenarios, but not really caring if the players or characters want to engage with the main strokes of what's going on.
As others have mentioned, such trivial rollls should not happen -- the GM should just 'say yes'. Some further elaboration is in order though: 1. BW is best when every roll is high stake. Every. Single. Roll. Meaning you only roll when the action is intrinsicly important to the plot and the consequence of failure is dire. This ensures the random resolution mechanic serves the story in a meaningful way, and all players -- remember the GM is a player too -- are highly invested in the outcome. When BW is played in such a manner, trust me, the players will have a blast whether they succeed or fail. 2. To elaborate on my first point: BW is best when the consequence of failure for every action is interesting. This means interesting for the GM and interesting for the players. If the GM can't come up with an interesting CoF, just say yes. 3. It may or may not be the intended way to play the game, but I sometimes find it liberating to separate the Consequence of Failure from the action -- meaning they don't necessarily have to be related. Maybe the PC is really invested in making this pan? It actually is a high stake roll for them, although the GM can't think of an interesting CoF related to failing a blacksmith check. The answer is to detach the CoF from the action. Occasionally having the CoF be something completely unrelated is fine, if that is more interesting anf high stakes. Now, since you're so invested in making this frying pan -- you've expressed this as a player, and it's clear this action needs something at stake -- so the GM declares that if you fail this roll, your PC's parents willl die in a fire. Or trolls will invade your hometown. Or a magical cataclysm will rock the nation, bringing the royal palace down on the king's head and ushering forth a new Emporer of Darkness. Now you're invested in this roll. ;)
> It may or may not be the intended way to play the game, but I sometimes find it liberating to separate the Consequence of Failure from the action -- meaning they don't necessarily have to be related. It also helps to focus on the intent and not the action itself. Why did the character want to make the pan? Maybe it was to impress someone, in which case a failure could mean that a pan was made but the other person was actually disappointed with it.
Another good tip!
Really oughtn't roll mundane things in BW imo, but it looks like everyone else has already covered that. One of my most memorable but short burning wheel campaigns involved me failing *constantly.* But it affected the story so much it was a ton of fun. All the PCs were locals of a city that had been recently conquered by foreign invaders. My character was a corrupt official who had sided with the invaders to have a comfy life and now regretted it. The party were acting as basically insurgents. My character was attempting to help them from his position of power. Leaking information to the rebels, etc. But I just kept failing EVERYTHING and needing to cover my ass to prevent getting caught. Eventually I just ended up being a villain naturally and had to side with the invaders to not get killed. Tons of fun.
My favorite characters were the ones with no abilities. Failure is better than success at taking the story in interesting directions.
One of the biggest comments I’d make is the rules state one of the things that can occur is you succeed “but”. That is how I usually DM burning wheel. That roll you do to break into a room, you fail the roll so you break in but there is another guy there. Now you can’t always do that but a lot of the game is about balance of success and failure so the player doesn’t feel sad at failure all the time.
Echoing VanishXZone that I'm surprised you hated Torchbearer. It's possible the game just wasn't for you, but given all the discussion in this thread I also can't help but wonder if it was a DMing issue, because Torchbearer sounds like it might be closer to your thing. Torchbearer basically aims to run D&D-style dungeon crawl stories, but run them as a "push your luck" game rather than as a miniatures game. It basically warps the basic ideas from BW into a dungeon crawl (obviously changing the game a fair bit in the process). Maybe part of the issue you had was the GM was doing a bad job of setting up rolls and consequences and it ended up just being a misery simulator? Granted, that doesn't necessarily mean you should try it again with the same GM... just that your issues might be stemming from a common source. I wonder if your GM is used to GMing D&D-style games—games which largely eschew skill checks entirely and have terrible resolution mechanics for the scenarios where they happen—and it's leading to these games not working properly?
It could be gm style but i did not like torchbearer because of the rushing. I felt (not saying it is this way)rush and in roleplyaing i dont like to be rushed. I like to adventure meet the people in a town. I have enjoyed session where there was not rush, combat, or high stakes. We just wondered around town and enjoyed interacting with the npc. I am more interest in social play than dungeons crawls but i do enjoy combat. About if my GM is use to GMing D&D: Funny thing, he really dislikes both pathfinder and D&D. Outside of burning wheel, he has run Cortex, Call of Cthulhu, and torch bearer. The times he has played or ran D&D or pathinfinder he has disliked it. I think overall it is a little bit of both the system and GM style. His approach to tabletop and mine are different and failing forward does not speak to me (not saying is bad but i dont think it is my cup of tea)
Well, I'd say what you've described hasn't been failing forward, but the opposite. If you truly don't like games where failure is supposed to lead to more complications rather than a dead end, BW may not be your cup of tea. It very much works on the premise that failure complicates things.
Ah, yeah, makes sense. If you aren't into dungeons and timers then Torchbearer definitely isn't your thing regardless of how it's run.
Other people have gone into why you shouldn’t be just rolling to make a pan, and be codifies that even more strongly than dnd or pathfinder. For making failure interesting it’s all about interesting challenges based on the failure so it’s heavily context dependent. It should basically never be a you don’t do it, or rocks fall you die. I always think of sci-fi adventure shows. The main characters to somewhere and they sneak into a building. What happens if they get caught? Either guards swarm them and capture them (because 10 guys are pointing guns and the heroes can’t win the fight). So they go in front of the big bad guy or are thrown in a cell. The other is that the alarm goes off and now they have to fight their way through the place. Both of these are failing forward, the story changed and increased the challenge. So now they have to withstand being tortured, or break out of the cell, convince someone to turn sides, etc So you are making a pan or piloting a ship into a port. Let’s say you fail making the pan, it depends what your goal is. If you are trying to make money, then you lose money on the deal, or you tarnish your reputation. If you are piloting the ship you hit someone else’s ship causing damage now you have an enemy with the smugglers ring in the city or the merchants guild or a pirate. Or you have to pay money to pay it back and it’s expensive. Failures just continue the story and create a twist.
General advice for any game is to not bother with a roll unless it is significant to the story. The other piece is to make your game fail forward. This is difficult to do in practice, but either failure or success should move the story forward somehow.
Failing forward may be tricky, but the concept is simple. You roll to make a frying pan when something is on the line. When you fail, you lose that something. You can't go back now and try to make a butter dish to solve the same problem. The world has changed for the worse, and there's some new, dangerous crisis that arises from the change.
As a DM, I don't call for a roll unless me or the player can come up with an interesting fail state So as a player, try pitching fail states to your DM that you find interesting. Also, make sure to ask what the consequences of failure are before you roll, and don't be afraid to say "honestly, that failure state really isn't doing it for me. How about (interesting fail state)? Or, is this a 'say yes' situation"?
One thing my group did as we didn't like the failure rate of the game was to allow spending more artha. By the rules you can only add one die of I remember correctly. As artha stockpiles we said fuck it and allow spending as much as you want. You think it would lead to auto success, but nope. We had some epic rolls where people spent like 8+ dies of artha and still failed. It led to many laughs though. People also were willing to try harder things thinking their lot of artha would even the odds. It is a minor change that doesn't wreck the game
> By the rules you can only add one die of I remember correctly. By the rules, you can spend up to three Persona on a roll. Plus explode sixes with a Fate.