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The Burning Wheel

The Burning Wheel

Now that you have played it - what is your review for the Role-playing Game "The Burning Wheel"?

Wheel Burning The

Though in truth I have had few opportunities to play Burning Wheel (I've only played a handful of times), I do very much enjoy the game. I would love to play/run a Burning Wheel Play By Post but I'm not sure it really lends itself well to that this particular method of gaming. I like the gritty damage rules, combat is truly deadly and not something one can expect to walk away from without any scratches. When you get hurt in Burning Wheel, it really hurts. In many hit point based systems damage is exchanged an there is rarely any impact on the character until/unless they drop to zero or use some sort of variant rule, but in Burning Wheel the first hit can be devastating to your character.

Healing is also much more limited than what one would find in Dungeons & Dragons or similar systems, and natural healing takes a long time. The Fight! System is much more realistic, there is no initiative order; everything tends to happen all at once in a series of volleys and it does require some scripting that forces the player to use a little strategy and planning in a fight. Simply throwing blows one right after the other may be effective at times, but it could also be a good way to lose rather quickly.

The same is true for social conflict in Burning Wheel. I really appreciate the way Burning Wheel handles diplomacy and social conflict, again using scripting and a process of debate as opposed to a single "Diplomacy" Roll, and unless the conflict is decidedly one sided the mechanic forces some compromise and allows for a range of outcomes as opposed to simply win/lose.

That said, at well over five hundred pages, Burning Wheel is a pretty sizable tome that can have a bit of a learning curve to it. The system also doesn't really lend itself well to house rules and can be fairly inflexible. While I like the life path system that it uses for character creation and its skill based system that requires one actually use the skills to learn (And often fail) in order to "Advance," The system doesn't allow for situations in which your character should probably have certain knowledge about something based on their background, if they didn't obtain the skill or knowledge during character creation, they don't have it. Though you can use a skill untrained with beginner's luck the odds are pretty good that you will fail.

On the other hand failure in Burning Wheel creates complication which makes things more interesting and failure doesn't always mean the character didn't do what they were trying to do, but they suffer from some form of complication. Perhaps they pick the lock that they are trying to pick, but on the other side of the door is a guard.

A lot of concepts from Burning Wheel have found thier way into the games that I run. I use the "Let it ride" Often as well as the way Burning Wheel focuses on the character's intent when making rolls, again rather than a pass/fail scenario.