Leaving Torchbearer Behind

Boy, this is not the post that I wanted to write. Nor was it something I expected to. But I will not be playing Torchbearer from here on out. Three things stick out to me: being told what to play, the advancement system, and The Grind. I've wrestled with these points for awhile, but I've found I can't compromise with them. This isn't me trash-talking Torchbearer. It's a fantastically designed game, with designers that I have a great deal of respect for. I'm just processing about a game that I wanted to like, but don't. If you do, please, have fun with it!

I am going to stick this paragraph right here to hopefully soften things. BWHQ games have a lot of extremely passionate supporters. I am one of them. And Torchbearer deserves it! I love how grounded and rooted the game can be. I like the incredibly gritty carrying system. Hell, I love it.  I love how they simplified conflicts while adding some additional stakes from Mouse Guard. I love the jokes that spring up around putting alcohol in your skin, because God knows you'll need to drink a little bit in real life from some of the bullshit that can happen to you.

But rules support conversations. And the conversations that come out of Torchbearer are not the ones I want to have.

I don't like very specific frameworks, by and large; I don't like being told what to care about. Torchbearer is about just exploring dungeons. Don't get me wrong, Torchbearer has a lot of variance and depth on characters! The new town variations are really cool, as are a number of the variant rules. That stuff looks interesting and I'm tempted to steal a lot of those structures for other games. 2e's instructions on building a dungeon are very well thought out; again, very stealable. But it is unabashedly a game about exploring dungeons. All the rest of those juicy mechanics is for dungeon exploration. And yes, that seems to trip off the "Don't tell me what to do!" instinct I have buried deep in my soul. Call it ornery, call it unreasonable, it is whatever it is.

I adore Burning Wheel's advancement system. There is a level of freedom to that system that, properly utilized, creates some really interesting puzzles. Since success and failure don't matter to the system, by and large, you're free to try all sorts of crazy things; you will get that stat or skill up. Torchbearer and Mouse Guard have another system, which I like a whole lot less. You instead have to get a number of successes and failures to improve your stats and skills.  I just... I don't like it as much. It's really that simple. There are things in Mouse Guard that make me put up with the system, but Torchbearer doesn't have the Player and GM turns going for it, which are simple and powerful ways of shifting narrative control. By proxy that means I don't like the Traits system all that much either; it's proven to be unintuitive to most of my players. Burning Wheel compensates its players by having a lot more rewards, meaning that the late game ramps up in power significantly as mastery of the system creates some truly impressive surges of power, a la temporary (and later permanent) shade-shifting. One could argue that tapping your Nature is similar, but I think it actually happens too frequently to be considered a rush of adrenaline you'll remember later. And I think those rushes of adrenaline are necessary to complex and difficult games like BWHQ's fair.

But the nail in the coffin is The Grind. I just can't do it. I like it when people roll. I like mechanics, I want them to generate mechanical inputs! I don't feel that with Torchbearer. Each and every roll gets you closer to earning punishing conditions, meaning that it's a downward spiral. Now, my players were learning to manage that situation and gauge when something was too risky and whatnot. And that was... interesting? But then they weren't advancing. Which then meant that they continued to get the crap kicked out of them.

Now, there's bound to be a number of people who adore Torchbearer who are going "YOU GOT IT ALL WRONG". You've already got a half dozen ways to tell me how to learn to adapt to the system. BWHQ games are meant to be taken on their own terms and all that.

That's fair.

I hear you.

I do this with Burning Wheel. And not very charitably at that.

But here's the thing. 

This is a game. And it's meant to be played over 20 or so sessions, which is a long time. If I'm going to invest that much time in even one campaign I have to be completely on board with the game. And that means little, irrational, things matter. I have to want to adapt. And I don't. Torchbearer is a great game and it deserves all the success it's gotten, and then some! I love that this game exists.

But it's not my game.

And that's okay.

All the best.