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| Yeah that’s right: Revised |
Burning Wheel, at its best, is a game of raw aggression. You make your Beliefs and then the GM hacks at them in a frenzy that more than casually resembles sharks around a bleeding seal. If I got stuck on a deserted island and you asked me to pick one game, it would come down to Burning Wheel and mine own baby, Crescendo, and I don’t even know how that decision would go down. I would cry either way.
What the Hell Is Burning Wheel?
Great question! Burning Wheel is a low-fantasy TTRPG, where you play characters who are driven by their Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits (BITs). You are rewarded for causing trouble with these BITs with Artha, which influence your dice rolls.
Beliefs are proactive statements of how you approach the world, which might include short-term goals. You get Artha for causing trouble on behalf of Beliefs and acting against them.
My father still has good in him. I will convince him of this.
My sister is our last hope.
Ben lied to me. I can never trust him again.
Instincts are reactions to specific circumstances. You gain Artha for acting on Instincts when it would get you in trouble.
Always Force-choke physical threats.
When socially confronted, do not back down.
Always protect family.
Traits are passive facts about you. Some of your Traits can net you Artha for acting on them in an entertaining manner.
Angry, Eloquent, Cautious
Now, in the Revised edition, you gain Artha immediately, by the GM. Later editions, like Gold and Gold Revised, move this reward to the end of the session. This is a mistake we'll get to in a bit, trying to address a much larger problem about Burning Wheel that we're going to address with this post!
This combination of BITs and Artha is a perfect storm of perfectly paced aggression. The GM is constantly after your BITs, you're trying to get Artha without getting totally screwed over, and when this game works it works, and nothing else compares, not even close.
Not even Crescendo, mine own baby which is the godson of Burning Wheel... but that's for another day. Crescendo is doing something different.
But
I haven’t seriously played Burning Wheel in five years.
Now, part of that is because I have been working my ass off on Crescendo. I have done more research and playtesting and soul searching on this one game than others would put into a dozen games. So that takes up time and brain space.
But Burning Wheel has some really severe flaws: ambiguous game set up, Wises, janky Artha rewards, Instincts, and “optional” rules that aren’t actually optional. As usual, I'm going to handle the concerns, It's my blog, cry about it in the comments!
"Optional" Rules
The Duel of Wits, Fight!, and Range and Cover are some of the most innovative mechanics ever devised. It's best to describe these mechanics are rock/paper/scissors/Spock/GUN on steroids: players pick out a number of actions (usually three) privately, and then reveal them, one at a time, and compare to everyone else in the conflict. There's this huge and beautiful chart that honestly makes my pupils engorge and all sorts of other unseemly things happen.
But.
People do not use these mechanics, by and large. Usually they're having to use them against the GM. Put a pin in this, we're getting back to it.
The real issue is that Burning Wheel is designed to use these "optional" rules, and if you don't use them... your Artha piles up, and then you get Artha bloat. This is a very common problem with Burning Wheel. And without the extended conflict mechanics, this problem goes from occasional to "Dear God I have way too much Artha", and the reward loop of the game, the thing it does so well, dies.
Instincts
Instincts were covered above. The problem is that the design of the game makes it difficult to actually challenge Instincts. You're essentially begging the GM to hit you with specific situations... except the GM has to focus on two other Instincts and three Beliefs... and that's just for one player. Given how flexible and rich the Beliefs are, Instincts have a bad habit of going to the wayside (there's a reason why Crescendo drops them).
Janky Artha Rewards
Burning Wheel's initial design was for immediate Artha rewards when you act upon your BITs. Up until Revised, this created a dynamic conversation. If you have too much Artha, the GM can ignore you, because you're in a real conversation with the participants at the table. Burning Wheel Gold changed this reward to waiting until the end of the session to hand out Artha. This makes the flow of the game work better, because the GM can't be the sole architect of the bullshit coming at players and watching Artha rewards. You can't do both, trust me, not long term.
Wises
Wises are skills that a player can roll to force a fact into the fiction. This is great in theory, but it collapses the setting into a Schroedinger's Setting, making it difficult for players to rely upon the setting, and potentially making the GM skittish about introducing facts.
Ambiguous Game Set Up
This is the big one. There is no real game set up. No, there isn't, don't leave your comment. The GM has no guidance on how to set up the fictional situation that will spark the players into making Beliefs.
And this brillitant game is missing one sentence, that would change everything:
Players can always challenge each other better than any GM.
And it is possible to engineer this.
Enter Boot Hill
On an initial look, the 2nd edition of Boot Hill should not be in this conversation. It's a d percentile game. Burning Wheel is a d6 dice pool.
But you know what it does say you should do?
Have the GM design the opening situation. Have the players issue orders, week to week And then forbid sessions of play when the players aren't directly in conflict.
These simple rules completely redefine Burning Wheel Revised. Suddenly, players are unable to play unless they go after each other... and if the GM wrote a tight initial situation, where the characters he made up are in direct conflict, the players merely have to show up.
And the thing is that the Burning Wheel Revised has a metric ton of pre-gen'd characters! The GM barely has to do any work! He just grabs some pregens from the books and writes some BITs. He then winds up, lets go, and then spends his sessions principally rewarding loud and proud behavior as it starts conflict. Sure, the GM is going to sometimes need to present some challenges aside from whatever the players are doing. But that won't be the focus.
Those optional mechanics? I notice that players like using them against each other, not the GM. This is because the power differential is too great to use such a mechanic with a GM. With other players? Man, it's like crack.
And if the GM doesn't want to go pregen, but kitbash? Burning Wheel Revised provides the best tools to do it out of all the Burning Wheel versions. The Monster and Magic Burners may be expensive, but Crane really breaks the math down, and provides actual tools that I can personally vouch for. You can very easily draw up a bunch of stuff with confidence.
Conclusion
The truth is, Burning Wheel Revised is a masterpiece hidden inside a game that sometimes fights against itself. Its core loop—aggressive Beliefs, immediate Artha, and those glorious, baroque conflict systems—is one of the best things roleplaying has ever produced. But the ambiguous setup, the optional-but-not-really rules, and the tendency for everything to collapse into GM-vs-players slog have kept it from reaching its full potential for too many groups.
The fix is simpler than we think: steal from Boot Hill.
Let the GM craft one sharp opening situation loaded with conflicting interests. Hand out pregenerated characters with pre-written (or quickly customized) BITs that put the players at each other's throats from minute one. Then declare: No session happens unless the players are directly pursuing conflicting goals. The GM's job shifts from "invent endless opposition" to "facilitate, adjudicate, and reward the glorious chaos that erupts."
Suddenly the Duel of Wits and Fight! stop being scary optional modules and become the main event. Artha flows naturally from real stakes. Instincts matter because other players will exploit them. The table becomes a arena of raw aggression—the very thing Burning Wheel always promised.
I haven't seriously played Burning Wheel in five years. But reading this back, I realize I'm not done with it. I'm just done with the default way people run it.
If you're a BW fan who's been frustrated, try the Boot Hill Setup. Run it hard and mean. You might rediscover why this game, at its best, has no equal.
And if it still doesn't click? Well… that's why I'm building Crescendo.
But trust me, I will always play both.
