The Gaming Den

I've heard this game system being mentioned in a few different places and I want the wise opinions of those denizens better versed in its mechanics, setting and style.

I haven't played Burning Wheel yet, but I have the core books. I'm a fan of the weapon length system, where it's relative: you close to your attack range, or retreat out of range. It makes it possible for a guy wielding a shank-brush to actually get within the spear's "useless range."

The die-rolling mechanic is cool, too. Everything is in d6, and you roll more or less depending on the score. You have "shades" of dice, and your success number depends on the shade. If I remember correctly, black shade is a 4 or higher, gray shade is a 3 or higher, and white shade is a 2 or higher.

You "level up" by using skills that you're not good at. You have to do a bunch of routine rolls, some moderately difficult ones, and a couple very tough rolls to "level up."

Those are the things I can remember at the moment without actually having the books in front of me.

I have not perused it's mechanics completely, but there were some nice looking aspects of it. It's a dice-and-hits skill based game and I'm told it does LotR style fantasy well. It also seems to be written in a way that the story is more cooperative, giving more power and meaning to successful player rolls.

From what I understand of it, the skill advancement mechanic rewards attempting tasks as much as actually succeeding at them. It uses a beliefs system instead of a retarded alignment system that allows characters to gain extra dice for tasks directly relevant to their beliefs. No HP really, but combat has a few options to limit or increase the lethality of it. There were also a couple of bugs in it that I don't remember, but nothing particularly bad. It has a decent social combat mechanic that you can play player versus player to resolve table arguments (assuming people agree to the terms) that I attempted to port to d20 (it's posted in IMOI along with the link to the source if you're interested). Sadly I have no idea if the magic system is worth a damn.

The Burning Wheel races are extremely Tolkienian, which could be a plus or minus depending on your tastes.

Burning Empires specifies a campaign where the PCs participate in a human-run planet being invaded by alien brain-worms, either on offense, defense, or both. The system where each side has plot hitpoints and when you reduce the other side's to 0, you've won that phase of invasion is pretty cool. The characters start out nicely badass as well.

In general there is little to no attempt to balance characters. The same number of lifepaths can make you a dwarf Prince, loaded with swag; or a human slave prostitute, loaded with VD. Elves are better than you.

The Black/Grey/White shade thing where target numbers switch is largely ignorable. Generally, you lose out on 5 dice at your current shade to shift up to the next one. What would you rather have, 7 dice that hit on 4s or 2 dice that hit on 3s?

The artha mechanic where there are three kinds of drama points which each do different things and there are different ways to get each of them is kind of cool, but I prefer the simpler and more unified Fate setup for that sort of thing.

In all, it's a mostly workable sort of skill-based system, but I don't think it's a particular stand-out in any way.

I'd like to try Burning Wheel, but I seem to remember combat being a bit weird, with scripts and stuff. I like to describe my actions, sure, but it seemed like you'd have wasted your time a lot, if people didn't cooperate...

Yeah, I think it was declare actions, then the other guy reacts and does his thing.