r/BurningWheel • u/inostranetsember • Aug 02 '26
Why is BW your game? Looking for positivity!
Comrades! Help me feel the positivity about BW!
I’m a long-time BW GM (best game I EVER ran was Burning Empires, full-stop; been chasing that high ever since) but haven’t run BW in some years. Anyway, I made the mistake of watching BW reviews today, which were…negative. You know the usual complaints: complex, fiddly, convoluted, weird terms for already known things, etc etc. My question - what makes this game special anyway? What makes you keep coming back? Are those things actually issues or just naysayers saying nay?
I ask because the reviews got me down a little, and I want to focus on this game for a while and run it for my group, but…negative thoughts being negative actions, in a sense. So what make this your game?
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u/No_Solid1035 Aug 02 '26
Because BW is by far the best TTRPG for running a player-driven sandbox, and my favorite type of campaign to run is a player-driven sandbox.
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u/CrazedCreator Aug 02 '26
It makes physical violence one option of many and doesn't put and extra to it than really the others. You have a single standard test, a bloody test (3 rolls) or fight! for cinematic duels. And that's a good thing! There's just as many rules for diplomatic resolutions.
This keeps the story going instead of taking a 1 minute in game battle and making it 3 hours in real time. You declare and resolve and continue on.
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u/Square_Tangerine_659 Aug 02 '26
What if you want combat for its own sake? The fight system sounds so fun and it feels like a waste to almost never use it
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u/Nicolas_Fleming Aug 03 '26
Somewhere on the burning wheel forums there is document called burning thaco that has a chapter of how to make combat not too deadly. Using shoddier weapons, finding herbs to help with healing and so on. That said you simply do not get the same pace as in DnD where you can afford 5-6 fights in a day, here you have it more like 1 per a day or 3.
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u/CrazedCreator Aug 03 '26
You can extend a flight scene with multiple tests. Nothing with with that. I did a whole fight scene in the woods with a chase with strange magics from my setting and it took like 5 tests. It's just not a tactical system like DnD. It's a narrative system.
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u/Square_Tangerine_659 Aug 03 '26
Who says it has to be a narrative system when there’s a tactical engine right there?
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u/cultureStress Aug 03 '26
Either play a different game or change the rules for wound recovery, I guess?
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u/Sanjwise Aug 03 '26
If you can handle BE, BW would be a breeze. It’s a wicked game. Screw the people who don’t like it. They are being lazy.
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u/D34N2 Aug 03 '26
Everybody complains about how crunchy the rules are, but I always found it far less complicated than D&D. I think people mainly complain because BW puts a lot of the heavy lifting work on the players, whereas most games place all the responsibility on the GM's shoulders. This is a game that appeals to creative players who want to experience a solidly narrative story that they have a certain degree of control over. It's not going to be for everyone, but it's a perfect game for the right audience. To date, some of the best campaigns of my life have been Burning Wheel.
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u/cultureStress Aug 03 '26
Honestly, I think BW is comparable to PBTA in terms of rules load on the players. Or rather, all the complex rules things that are player facing are very much opt-in.
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u/D34N2 Aug 03 '26
The skill advancement tracking alone is far more involved than anything PbtA has, and is very much hands on and mandatory. It’s the one feature that I see the most people complain about, yet also the one killer feature that a lot of people really love.
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u/Dave_Higgins Thinker Aug 03 '26
The thing that made me love BW in the first place, is that non-combat challenges are treated equally with combat challenges.
Having achieved a post-graduate degree in law then spent decades in the field, I have solid evidence that convincing someone of something (whether with logic or charisma) often isn't a trivial thing; yet most roleplaying systems have pages and pages on modelling violent interactions but reduce social conflict to a single "persuasion" test—or even have nuanced mechanics for modelling a character's ability for fighting but allow characters to be convincing based on the player's social ability.
Whereas BW provides mechanics that actually model trials, debates, and other social interactions as the complex shifting things they are.
One of the things that made me love BW more is perhaps the converse of that: in addition to not just handwaving the complexity of certain types of action, BW (and it's not unique to BW) gets rid of testing for the sake of it; to an extent, it's a necessary balance in a system where things advance by doing, but it also means characters can just do the day-to-day stuff and focus on the epic/tragic/&c. rather than have the session pause for a test where success and failure don't have a meaningful consequence.
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u/waaarp Aug 07 '26
What do you make of the duel of wits and planning 3 steps ahead despite it not entirely modelling reality?
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u/Farcical-Writ5392 Great Spider Aug 02 '26
I agree with many criticisms of the rulebook. The rules are solid. The book as a manual is imperfect and a little clunky, and the terminology like “traitor” is silly. The book does a pretty bad job of really explaining good beliefs, and without that BW fails easily.
The rules in terms of resolution are dead simple. C’mon. Establish intent and task, set Ob, roll dice based on a single stat. Fight, RaC, and DoW are more fiddly but fine… and you don’t need them unless you want them. There’s an element of player knowledge and skill required, more than many narrative-driven games, but less than D&D!
The rules have complexity in unusual places. Not in how to hit orcs with a sword but in when and how to roll dice and what failure means. It gamifies what’s often handwave or metagame in other games.
If you understand it (and it sounds like you, specifically, do) and if your players are on board and willing to do the work of system mastery to basically play the game and make advancement and BITs work, it all comes together like nothing else. It’s a drama machine. It’s a character study and character arc machine.
It’s not for everyone and it’s not a do-everything game or trying to. For that, try GURPs or Fate or d20 and see that their “everything” is always a particular flavor. BW is its own particular thing, and if you want that game it does it fantastically.
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u/dinlayansson Aug 02 '26
My BW campaign is starting its sixth year of bi-weekly sessions this fall, and in all those five years we've had one ranged fight and gone through about seven months of in-world time. The system is working well for us - making failures interesting and keeping the characters themselves front and center. Violence is perceived as so deadly it's being actively avoided, just like in real life. The characters get better at doing the stuff they actually do a lot. And learning to take the time to define what failure is going to look like before the roll is made has turned the few rolls we make into proper high stakes situations, every time. I'm a fan!
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u/cultureStress Aug 03 '26
Burning wheel is complex to run, but incredibly simple to play. With the possible exception of establishing beliefs, but good Burning Wheel Beliefs are basically SMART goals (specific, manageable, actionable, reasonable, time limited).
Use bloody versus and practical magic (or no magic) for your first twelve+ sessions.
The Artha loop is absolutely genius at exploiting the player's desire to mitigate risk (I want Artha points so my character can't die!!) to get them to take risks & roleplay confidently.
Circles and Wises gently introduce players to GM-ing (establishing stuff in the fiction to address the character's goals)
Character creation leaves you with a solid idea of who your character is and what they care about
Intent and task is such a good system it's become mainstream in the Indy RPG space. Same with roll dice or say yes. I think both of those came from Dogs in the Vineyard?
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u/VanishXZone Aug 03 '26
Burning Wheel is, to this day, the single ttrpg that inspires me the most. It is a game and a philosophy, and that philosophy is very different from many other ttrpgs. That is why so many people bounce off of it, the game requires you to think differently than many games, and while it can and will help you do that, it takes time or effort to get used to it. And the result of this, combined with the rulebook, is many people bounce off of it.
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u/WillBottomForBanana Aug 03 '26
Those complaints aren't strictly inaccurate, but all things that can be over come with practice. IDK, I guess it is like cooking. Some dishes are hella complicated, but the reason we make them is the results.
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u/elmago79 Aug 05 '26
9/10 of my best memories from roleplaying games have been Burning Wheel (or Burning Empires).
A 4 hour-session of BW gives me all the satisfaction that I get from a six-month D&D campaign.
IMHO the only thing the game really lacks right now are robust digital tools that could manage all the fiddly bits so that you could focus on playing your BITs and failing tests. But I don’t think there is a single game out there that can come as close to BW to make a living, breathing world and profound, complex characters.
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u/inostranetsember Aug 05 '26
That’s true! I generally get more “grounded” ideas when I start thinking in BW terms. It’s already made my game richer and I’m just in the planning/reading phase.
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u/ObservabilityWizard Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
Been playing and GMing nothing but BW (1 - 3 games per week) for the last 2 years. It's my favorite system now.
There's so much I can say but I'll keep it short: I have seen the Artha feedback loop turn even the most anxious players into confident roleplayers. I have seen players who used to swear by "I'm only interested in combat" having a blast playing characters without a single combat skill on their sheet.
Unfortunately the rulebook is the worst advocate for BW. You can't really know how magical this system is without playing it.