 The Burning Wheel. Is anyone here? I'm just curious, where's your hands if you've heard of the Burning Wheel? Oh, no, okay. Alright. Zero. This is the game. It's THE game. We have a little bit of time. Short story time. So, many of you have probably had that sort of the feminine mystique, but it's the gamer mystique. That you're playing D&D with your friends. Not having a good time at that point, cause combat's in a six hour, and you don't really have an input in the combat. And you know that guy, right? There's always that guy who tries to make his own, his hack on D&D, or he makes his own role for himself. Guys, I fixed D&D. We used the 30s instead of the 20s. Yeah, he never fixes it. Never fixes it. And if you go to a game and convention, especially smaller game and conventions, those guys have tables everywhere. They're trying to come and play my game. Come play my game, please. You gotta avoid those people like Grim Death. So, I was at this convention in New Jersey called UberCon. I went by myself, and I'm walking around. One of those guys grabbed me, and the next thing I know, I'm sitting at his table, ready for some misery. And the game was actually really cool. I'd never seen anything like it before. So, I was playing D&D under the philosophy of, yeah, all games are the same bullshit as D&D. I gotta play something, right? I'm not gonna play one of those weird hacks these weirdos made, right? Everyone knows D&D. We're sticking with it. So, I come back, like, you gotta come to this con if that weird guy's in there again. We're gonna play his game. Yeah, listen. I don't trust any weird guy's game. It probably is awful. I think you only need to play so you can make fun of me later. So, we go back and we play D&D. Well, you know, I have a note. You don't knock it if you haven't tried it at policy, right? It's like, I haven't tried Australia. I didn't form an opinion on it until now. That was ominous. So, we also grab our friend Pete, who played Mustafa bin Mustafa. And we all go back. This is before he was Mustafa bin Mustafa, by the way. So, we get there, and we're ready to play this game. And the guy, Lou Crane, who made this game, hands us three character sheets, and goes away, and says, I'm gonna go to the bathroom, I'll be right back, and you play. So, wait. We're looking at our character sheets. So, you have a picture of the character sheet? I don't have a picture of the character sheet. Okay, so at the top of the burning wheel character sheet, the first thing, the first thing in the character sheet is beliefs and instincts, three of each. And it pretty much says on my character sheet, you are the human thief. You need to get money, or else the mafia boss is gonna chop off your feet. I think it was arms. It doesn't matter. Hands, something. He was gonna chop something off, and I didn't want that to happen. I'm putting the elephant, because that's what I do on that count. I'm one of those people. I love nothing more than just the four hours role-playing high-eleven court bullshit. So, I'm reading the L sheet, and it's like, that dwarf's family abandoned that sword, and they will not get it back ever, your uncle, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I look at Pete, who hasn't even looked at his character sheet. Who's the dwarf? And I'm like, you don't deserve that sword. We don't know the rules of this game. All we read is the little belief section on the character sheet. We don't know how to play this game. We don't even know what kind of dice we need. So he looks at me, he looks at his character sheet, and goes, looks back at me, and says, your father betrayed my father. He starts getting pretty heated, and Lou Crane, we realize he's back. So we stop, we're like, okay, we're ready to start. And he says, oh, proceed. The game tricked us into role-playing just from the character sheet. Oh, and by the way, that shit isn't just like flavor takes. There's rules about that stuff. There are so many things. We don't have time to get into every aspect of Burning Wheel. Burning Wheel is like, it's a big book, right? Most of these other games we've told you about, except maybe Mouse Garden, which is sort of Burning Wheel based, are little tiny books, right? Like little tiny mice. Yeah, Burning Wheel is a big book. About half of it is just a character like life pads and things for making characters, but it's still big. You need to be hardcore to learn all the roles in Burning Wheel. I don't even know all the roles of Burning Wheel, right? But you can play with just pages one through 75 and ignore the rest. So here we're going to go through a bunch of the kind of core mechanics of this game that are interesting and that you might find enlightening. Yeah, and the other reason we use this game is because it's one we're most familiar with. This is the one we play every other week. And also because a lot of these mechanics that are in Burning Wheel, it's sort of a collection of all the good things from all the indie RPGs. I mean, if we want to sit here for days just talking about indie RPGs, like this thousands of them, but this one really grabs like sort of like the best of out of everything. So item number one, Trace. You play the D&D game when you write down my character is 6.8. His eyes, he's an elf. His eyes are, I guess, purple with gold flecks. I guess that's the popular elf eye color. Does that ever matter? No, it never matters. You could make it matter in the sort of, you know, make up your own rules way, but there's nothing in the book that makes that matter. So in this game, you can say your character's Harry. It doesn't mean anything. If you buy the trait Harry. Which costs a point. Your character is Harry. He exemplifies Harry. If it ever matters in the game, Harry is now a mechanic for him. So you write Harry on your character sheet. Anything in your character sheet matters in the game. So you're sitting there and it's like, you want to make a disguise as a gorilla, right? And I'm like, it says Harry in my character sheet. I want an advantage die. And the GM is like, yeah, you're Harry. There's a plus one to disguise skill tests. I'm, because you're Harry. So suddenly you're forced, you don't have that many points to spend on this stuff. Suddenly instead of writing out all this crap about your uncle, Kelvin Blackstab, you write down the parts of your character that matter the most. It's too easy to make a smorgasbord character in D&D. That you don't write out this big long history. You just put in the important bits and everything else will get filled in as you play. What matters more than my character's factor that is Harry. And I have to decide. And whichever one I pick, that's going to be in the game. It's on my character sheet. It matters. It can also come to bite you. It'd be like, oh, the boat's getting a little, you know, get a little water in that boat. And Ram, you're kind of fat. Oh, you're running out of food. And Ram, you're kind of fat. Just get back to my uncle, Kelvin Blackstab. In this game, you can spend 15 resource points and tell the Blackstab, this great, powerful wizard, is your goddamn uncle. Oh, he's a wizard, I thought he was me. He's a wizard. You can roll dice to make him appear. You go to the game as you say, Kelvin Blackstab happens to be at this end. He has to let you roll dice to make that happen. Yeah, it might be really hard to make that succeed, but the more points you put into it during character creation, the easier it'll be. Now, here's where you can see where this game is going. It cost 15 points for Kelvin Blackstab, the great wizard to be my uncle. 14 points for him to also hate me. Oh yeah, he's definitely at this end. Shit. It's really easy to make him show up at the end. One point easier, but... It's cheaper to bring people in that hate you than like you, but simultaneously, it's not that much cheaper because people who hate you are just as interesting as people who like you. Failure and success are equally interesting. How many of you, when you tell the story of a D&D game you played, you tell the story where you fucked up and the town got exploded? Yeah, freaking natural 20, you chopped the dragon's head off. Not an exciting story, right? Natural one is something horrible happened. That's the story that you tell, right? And Burning Wheel makes that happen every time because like Mouse Guard, every role matters. In D&D, you want to climb over the town wall to sneak in, right? Alright, I roll my D20. You roll your climb test, okay? You succeed or fail. If you succeed, you get into the town by climbing over the wall. If you fail, alright, you fail. Maybe the spalling damage, maybe... In this game, if you fail, failure matters. Failure scars your character. If you get stabbed with a sword, you might never walk again. There are two rules that make this happen. Rule number one is any failed role has a consequence. If there wasn't a consequence, you should have just said yes. It's called say yes or roll the dice. If a character wants to do something, climb over the wall. The GM either says yes, you climb over the wall. Continue, right? Or roll the dice, we're gonna find out. And if you succeed, you succeed. And if you fail, oh, do you fail? Something bad happens when you fail. It might not be immediate, right? But if something bad will happen for every failed role, there will be a consequence. And then usually another role to deal with the consequence, right? Rule number two, let it ride, right? D&D, I take 10, I take 20. Let it ride is like, no, you failed to climb over the wall. You may not try to climb over the wall again unless it's a completely different circumstance, right? Like you got a rope, or you... It's now daytime in the town, someone's helping you. Never again, the Game Master continuing to roll, making your role stealthy until you eventually fail. And he can do the thing he's been planning to do all along. Right, it's like you succeeded in your stealthy, you are now stealthy until the situation changes pretty significantly. You're just hit, period, end of story. Now we're only about five minutes left, so we're going to move a little more quickly. Three more really interesting mechanics. One, currency, buying stuff, that's a stat. I roll that just like everything else. Do I want to buy a sword? We'll roll some dice. Yes, I know I have a sword. Nope, I couldn't afford it. Oh, you couldn't afford it, by the way. You now have less money, you're taxed. Oh yeah, I spent all my money. Yeah, there are consequences to failing to buy something too. Advancement, you advance by failing. It's just like Final Fantasy III or Ultima IV. If you want to get good at sword, you've got to fail at rolling sword a bunch of times, and then sword gets harder. You have to fail at sword to make sword get better, just like the real world with practicing. There's actually practicing rules all the time. Three, there is a really interesting combat system that's really crunchy and it has this thing where you simultaneously script three actions that you reveal one by one. Yeah, I, you know, I slash and then ultimate slash, and then I set back, and then I guard. Yeah, well, I scripted, run away, run away, run away, whatever we did. There is an equally crunchy system for social conflict. I scripted a point, then a rebuttal, then an incite. I did incite, incite, dismiss. Your mom's a horde, your mom's a duck, get out of here. So suddenly, That's a really powerful attack. If there's that guy with the bolt stuck on his head, we want to talk about it. We roll literally the same number of dice as we want to kill the guy. And there's also tons and tons of skills to help with that arguing, right? My favorite of which is Ugly Truth, best skill in the game. But there's also persuasion, oratory, course persuasion, and a stentorious rhetoric, stentorious persuasion, stentorious violence. The stentorious ones are off of the dwarves, mostly. Burying wheel is the be all end all of everything we're talking about right here. So if I'm going to tell the story of my character here, I'm not going to talk about my strength stat. That's not interesting. And it turns out that that's the only part of my character that is character, that is story, who he knows, what he's done, where he's going, why he fights for what he fights for. That's it, and that whole character sheet, that's it. So trying to tell me this is a role-playing game, but what percentage of it has anything to do with role-playing? That percent, and most of that is a picture.