At the risk of getting so completely Forgie that the site implodes, has anyone played Burning Wheel or any of its incarnations? I saw a setting book for it at Half-Price the other day that I picked up (about medieval Japan) but it isn't self-contained; you need the base game to play. I wanted to get some feedback on the system before dropping the coin, so let's hear it.

I also have the Mouse Guard game which, while I've read it, that was a few months back and the memory is the first thing to go as you get older. I understand it is a fairly heavily modified version of the rules anyway, so it might not be a decent source of information.

WK,
  I bought the original BW book from a player on RPG.net.
  I have not been able to get very far with it. The writing style was hard for me to grasp. I think a combination of a sort of personal writing style and an attempt at "cuteness" or snarkiness made it hard for me to follow the rules. Little things like, when you roll a dice and it comes up 1, 2 or 3, it is a failure, we will call those dice traitors. Just derails the whole conversation for me.
  I have tried on three separate occasions to read it and just gave up after 20 or so pages.

  I have heard good things about it. the lifepath system looks interesting and the fact that the rules for representing and promoting your chosen faction are baked into the rules is fascinating to me. but the writing style is just too much for me.

  An 0n-line friend of mine is eager to GM, so maybe I will see if I can get him to run it and I can see what the rules are actually like.

  I know it is not super helpful, but I do hope this post helped at least some...

I found the snarkiness mostly helpful in terms of learning how stuff works.

I've gotten through the Rim (the basic rules that are all that's required to play) and some of the Character Buiilder, and it seems like a pretty cool game with a fairly simple core.  The Spokes (the more complicated subsystems/minigames) I have not gotten through, and they seem pretty dense, although not much worse than any "modern" mainstream RPG.  

I haven't been able to playtest it, yet, but once I finish getting through the rest of the core I'm probably going to run a demo scenario for my group to see how it handles in play.

Mechanically and ideologically speaking, this is a love it or hate it game.  You're either going to love it's ideas or you're going to hate it, since it's very much Luke's game and he's present throughout making sure the proper way to play is made clear.

I owned it for a few months.

I got sucked in by all the hype on RPG.net and made a trade for it...it is so dense and overdone that it did less to inspire me to play RPGs than any game I've read other than MAYBE Heroes Unlimited.  Just...just...yeah.

It's okay. I wrote a review for it on RPGnet. As others have mentioned, it has a Lifepath system. It also has scripted combat, which is interesting, if not my cup of tea.

Seanchai

There were a lot of interesting ideas in there.

It was quite complicated though and the author's writing style left my nose gushing blood after about sixty pages.

I might play it given the opportunity, but I'd never be able to run the thing.

Burning Wheel is an interesting game.  Like Riddle of Steel it is basically a Forge-based traditional RPG, although BW uses more Forge conventions.

Main Points...
-Lifepath system is good, could have been great with more detail on some of the abilities.  The races of Middle-Earth style Elves, Orcs and Dwarves are awesome.

-"Duel of Wits" social combat system makes sense, but with any minigame, it can detract from in-character perspective.

-"Fight" combat system manages to include a detailed tactical range system that doesn't need minis.  Unfortunately, it is a scripted combat.  You come up with a plan and then try to execute it.  Of course the old adage "every fighter has a plan until he gets hit" is evident here as developments can render some of your actions non-applicable.

-Character Mechanics. Beliefs, Instincts, Traits.  You want to see how people use them here.

-Style. The rules are written conversationally, with rants and important points getting their own symbol to flag them.  Reading the book and the BW forums, you'll see that like most Forge games, the special mechanics were designed to influence bad behavior, in this case, the disfunctional behavior of a group of New York guys who argue like every day is Jerry Springer's birthday.

-Pretentiousness.  The whole Burning Wheel thing (spoke hub, spark, Character Burner, World Burner etc) create some kind of arcane language that makes losers think the game is bigger then it really is, as evidenced by this post on RPG.net.

Quote from: AnyaTheBlue on RPG.netLuke Crane is a genius.

I don't say that lightly.

Unfortunately, I think he has one of the typical problems geniuses have: he has trouble communicating with people who aren't geniuses.

The Burning Wheel is two things. It is a game system, and it is a setting. The Monster Burner tries to make this explicit -- with these tools, and the Tolkien-inspired setting as an example, you can make the game you want! Monsters are characters! Robot lifepaths? Go to town! Psychic powers? It's all there, in potential, waiting to be chiseled out.

But lots of people look at it, see the shadowy shapes of greatness, and have a hard time actually pulling it out.

Luke, being a genius, noticed this. That's why Burning Empires is shaped the way it is. It's still Burning Wheel, but it's got this extra structural bit -- the Infection mechanics -- which provide some extra focus. It's like Luke is saying, "See, here's another example, with some more detail! Here you go. Do you get it now?"

And, again, some people are confused.

Mouse Guard is the most recent iteration of this conversation. And, finally, lots more people 'get it' than have up till now. And 'it' has nothing to do with anthropomorphic mice.

Unfortunately, there are still rather a lot of people saying 'Hell, why would I want to play this? It's got mice in it!" As someone very old (in gaming terms), this just reminds me of RuneQuest and Ducks, but there you go. Luke isn't the first person to have this kind of problem.

Anyway -- my point: Burning Wheel, Burning Empires, and Mouse Guard are not different games. They are different examples of the same game.

And they rock. (IMHO)

Then again, all games have whackjobs, this one just seems inclined to create cultists.

All in all, a good game.  The character mechanics manage to be central to the game yet don't give me that metagame itch.  The Duel of Wits and scripted combat are well implemented, but like Seanchai said, not really my cup of tea.

Go to the Burning Wiki and check out the downloads page, they show sample chapters.

Like PaladinCA, I could probably play this thing, but could never run it.

I really liked it at first, but the more I read, the more confused I got. By the time I got to Artha and the three different kinds of experience points or what have you I was hopelessly lost.

I might run a game of it someday just to see if I can, but unless something really clicks with me on a re-read I don't think it's really for me.

I found the writing obtuse, and the game poorly explained. It has neat bits. But honestly? They don't focus on the neat bits which make it unique. (The handling of the races, for example in my books were pretty glossed over--and that seemed like a neat bit they ignored.)

 Mechanically it reads as too complex for me, it might not play that way but its explanations sucked. I also loath scripted combat. No one plans their moves in complete absence of information. You may have seconds to act, but you can read some of a person's cues and use that to act or react. So scripted combat runs into the problem of planning for something blind, and not being able to face a semblance of a living foe.

Yeah, that's one thing that's really got me scratching my head - scripted combat? Seems to me like that's just novelty for the sake of novelty, but not having seen it in action, I'm not really sure how it would play out.

All I know about it is that it comes up repeatedly in those "tell me about an rpg.net darling that really disappointed you," threads.

Apparently it doesn't live up to the hype.

Cheers,
-E.

I like Burning Wheel a lot. I love in general, the core mechanic, of picking up a handful of dice and counting successes. There are many little bits that interact with each other nicely, like FoRK dice from other skills, or helping dice from other characters. I love the way Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits drive play. I love Lifepath character generation. I love the way the skill progression mechanics create characters that slowly grow and develop organically. I love the way Artha (a kind of hero or drama points to affect dice rolls) interacts with play. I think the scripted combat works because it comes in such short bursts, and the disconnect between making a plan and seeing the way it hits the road make for a bit of frantic desperation in combat that can be fun. However, I do find combat, and several other bits (wounds and healing, run and cover) to be needlessly baroque. We've played around with replacing Fight! with the conflict mechanic from Mouseguard, with mixed success.

Well, let me ask this - is Mouseguard (which I have) easier to understand while retaining some of what you like about Burning Wheel? Is it "broad" enough to use as a system itself, or is it pretty specific to the MG setting?

So far the trend seems to be negative, but the positives sound interesting enough to balance it out... guess I might just have to get a copy and read it.

You're also posting on, you know, this site.  A lot of people here don't seem to like crunchy rules systems, let alone ones with any relation (small or not) to the Forge.

However, I think Mouse Guard is a little more clear and easily understood, and in terms of "editions" of the BW, it's one of the more generally well-received.

If you want to do standard high-fantasy with MG, I'm not sure if you've heard of Realm Guard, but it offers a neat way to hack MG for Middle-Earth in the 4th Age, letting you play as rangers.

It's hard to say without knowing what you specifically intend to do. I don't know as much about Mouseguard--I've only played it a couple of times, and don't own it. I do know that it has a much more structured approach to adventure progression and scene-framing, and its conflict-resolution system is much looser and more abstract than BW various mini-games. It has been well-received as very easy to pick up and play, and there are a number of hacks which replace the default setting with something else.

Mouseguard: Hacks and Expansions