Gaming Geeks Unite! DriveThru RPG Pakistan Flood Relief

It's the talk of the Interwebs - DriveThru RPG is offering a bundle of PDF products, the sale of which will go to support Doctors Without Borders and the victims of the recent massive Pakistan flood.

Just glancing down the list of products makes it clear that this is an unbelievable amount of gaming goodness for the listed price of $25.  Even if it wasn't philanthropy, it would be a hell of a deal.

This isn't just a load of inexpensive peripherals - there are plenty of full games like Contenders, Don't Rest Your Head, Dragon Warriors, Exalted Second Edition, Fear Itself, Hot War, Icons, Spycraft 2.0, Starblazer Adventures, Time and Temp, Wild Talents 2nd Edition...

A total value of $730 altogether.  For $25!

The Lumpley Games PDF Library

Ever wanted to main-line awesome directly into your veins?

It's never been this accessible before.

$25 for PDFs of Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard, kill puppies for satan, In a Wicked Age, Mechaton, and Poison'd.  That's...$4.17 per game.

Stop what you are doing and buy Vincent Baker's games.

Woo!

Thanks to gifts I've recently received, I am now the proud owner of:

In A Wicked Age

The Day After Ragnarok

Chronica Feudalis

Steampunk Musha

and the one I'm probably most excited about, Brennan Taylor's new game

How We Came to Live Here

Between them, I am prepared to be excited, humbled and inspired. With any luck, I can also convince some people to play with me!

Ashcan Review Part 1: How We Came to Live Here

I've been reading through Brennan Taylor's ashcan of How We Came to Live Here, which he has posted for download. This is fortunate, because this year conventions aren't happening, so I unfortunately won't be able to get any of these ashcans in person.

I have long been of the opinion, particularly after doing my undergraduate work in religious studies, that the vast majority of rpg magic systems are horrendously awful. Magic is basically nothing more than someone else's religion. So often, magic systems are put out there which are entirely devoid of color and particularity, or their color and particularity are completely arbitrary and uninteresting.

I thought of this persona rant while reading How We Came to Live Here because it is so incredibly strong in this area for a lot of reasons, the most important of which might be that the magic system he presents is not a magic system at all - it is a life system. Unbelieveable! That what amounts to "magic" would just be people's beliefs about how the world works and how they interact with that world and with each other! This is one of the only instances in fantasy in general, and in rpgs in particular, when the magic system has been anywhere near as interesting as the religions and occult practices here on planet Earth. ::Applause:: Like a good anthropologist, Taylor gives us an inside view of this culture which is different from, well, my culture at least, as well as his - an inside view which is affirmative. These things are true because they are true for the People. What you're sort of swept into is this holistic system of life that is presented, where supernatural and mundane things are all caught up in the same over-arching system.

In effect, I think, a good "magic system" is one where there is not any "magic" at all, if by "magic" you mean something separate from the life of a particular people at a particular time. It always bothers me when Elves and Orcs approach magic like Enlightenment philosophers, relegating everything to its hermetically-sealed category, casting spells that have no real meaning in their lives, which aren't based in anything important, which are essentially flashy-but-arbitrary shortcuts.

In contrast, the strength of HWCtLH in this regard comes from Brenna's stated goal of representing, faithfully, a fantasy setting that is based on a culture that is not his own - that of the southwest American natives whom he lived near growing up and whose beliefs and practices he also studied in college. He describes his game as a king of fantasy setting for the Anasazi people rather than for northern Europeans. I think it is this change in viewpoint that enables him to make this excellent presentation of a "magic system" that is actually interesting and evocative, even compelling.

I will try to put together a playtest of this game. Right now, I'm jealously trying to finish Parsec so that I can move on with the lessons I've learned from my first foray into rpg publishing, and I'm also running a Spirit of Eberron game, but hopefully I can put something together so that I can give him some more concrete feedback on this game.

I can't speak about the mechanics of the game so far - they seem like they'll work on paper, but I'll have to put that playtest together to actually figure them out. But I'm loving reading this book for its own sake, which hasn't happened in a long time for me when it comes to rpg books. You can really tell that this is a labor of love, something that Taylor feels passionate about. It shows through even in his relatively simple, straightforward text. I look forward to test-driving it.

This was Part 1 - Part 2 will come when, and if, I get to run the game. Even if I don't, I'll probably have more to say about how I think it'll work when dice hit table...

The Keys to a Great Game...

...are great players, preparation and buy-in.

This realization comes from three sources - listening to a lot of actual play recordings, the end of our Heroes of Karia Vitalus campaign Friday, and trying to run a D&D game for 7 middle-schoolers Saturday.

Actual Play Recordings

I've been surprised with, in honesty, how boring some of these recordings have been. Part of the problem is that indie games tend to be pickup games, so you're listening to people who have very little investment in the story or in their characters, and who possibly have not played together before. But even when I listen to an established group playing, there just isn't much there a lot of the time.

I think that this is because of a lack of buy-in. If you've just picked up a story game, very little preparation has gone into things - and it shows. A lot of story games are powerful ways to produce story now (whatever that is, I still probably don't get it) but they do this at the expense of preparation, or story before. It means that the story you're creating is just being pulled out of thin air, and even with a great system that churns out conflicts, it is still a story out of thin air. It lacks depth and interconnectivity.

And then there are these pauses as dice are rolled to find out what happens next. The dice rattle on the table, and then someone starts interpreting what's happened. Its almost like the dice are playing the game with themselves, and the players are translating. Its really weird to listen to, being someone who mostly plays "traditional" games.

(In experience, Mortal Coil can avoid this problem to a degree because the players create the world and the rules that govern magic together, meaning once they've done this, they've bought into the setting to some degree already. There are probably other indie games that address this in some way, but I think the point still stands.)

Heroes of Karia Vitalus

Holy shit this was a good game, a good campaign, that ended with a bang. There are a lot of reasons it was so good, but I can narrow them down to good players and incredible buy-in. You can have a good GM and a good storyline and still have a game fall sort of flat, but good players, perhaps more accurately, a good group overall, will make magic out of any kind of garbage they pick up.

I'm going to talk more about Karia in the future, but I wanted to mention the buy-in. Half of the 100+ NPCs were made by the players in the game. Loads of scenes and conflicts and stories were created entirely by the players. A lot of this happened on the Heroes of Karia Vitalus blog, and more of it happened in-game.

A weakness of most story games, I think, is that this depth of buy-in is impossible if you just sat down to play with maybe a sentence of story worked out ahead of time. This limits how good the game will be, in my opinion. To be powerful, a story has to be nestled in a system of stories, in a larger story that contains it. It has to be part of what I think I'll call a storysystem of interlocking characters, scenes, conflicts, history and future, breadth and depth. No way around it - this kind of storysystem requires preparation.

You might be able to get around this requirement if you are playing in an established setting that everyone is familiar with, but I still think it would take preparation to connect your story with the larger setting-story. And even if it doesn't, because you're in an established setting, a lot of the preparation work has been done for you.

D&D Game for Middle-Schoolers

In this case, all I really had going for me was preparation. They buy-in was close to nil and the players varied from enthusiastic to completely unfamiliar with D&D. Even the ones who said they'd played before looked blankly at me when I said things like "make an attack roll" or "make a Reflex save".

This was a great example of system mattering a lot. Knowing that I didn't have a strong group of players and had no buy-in to start with, it would have been a great situation for a story game. I'm thinking The Prince's Kingdom, for example - but I was brought in to run D&D, so that's what I had to do. (I had a lot of experiences that night of D&D's rules actively killing the fun).

Part of having great players is having a strong group template and social contract at the table. We had a group template of sorts - I pre-created characters who all had relationships with each other and had different pieces of a mystery/puzzle that the game revolved around. But there was no social contract. The players were all there with completely different agendas and modes of play and priorities.

I'd love to have been able to watch them play D&D on their own before I ran a game, but I had to come in blind, so even my preparation, the only strength I had, didn't get me very far because you have to know the players you are preparing for.

In Conclusion (for now)

Great players: who like to make the game more fun for each other, who move from stance to stance easily as the game allows, who know the system and who have a strong group template and social contract at the table

Preparation: the night's story is connected to a storysystem that has a past, a future, breadth and depth before the game even begins. This doesn't have to be all the GM's job, but it needs to be there

Buy-in: there need to be ways that the players are invested in their characters and in the setting as well. It has to matter to them what happens and why. They should be participating in creating the story and the storysystem together as the game progresses - people buy into stories involving characters and situations they helped create. I prefer, in this case, if the dice serve the players, rather than the other way around...

I can already see I'll need to unpack this in the future, but this was just on my mind.

A Dearth of Middle-Earth

I remember playing ICE's old game, Middle-Earth Roleplaying, or MERP, and trying to make it fit into the style and feel of the books. Rolemaster wasn't a system that lent itself to "Tolkienian" adventure, really, but it did a slightly better job than D&D, and the book was well-researched. The supplements and modues were also well done for the time. It was a good example of when setting fits even though rules don't.

I remember my deep disappointment with Decipher's Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game. It also was an example of well-done setting material combined with a blatant D&D/D20 ripoff as far as the system was concerned. So, again, you have a mediocre/unsuited system dressed in Tolkienian drag.

For a while I was following Song of Arda, an attempt at a free Middle-Earth RPG that was available online for a few years. It has since disappeared before being completed, because it was an attempt at representing the feel of the books through system, rather than just setting description.

Burning Wheel is clearly based on Middle-Earth...in some ways. But it still leans toward the generalized medieval fantasy RPG - which is fine, because it isn't liscenced or anything, and it does a hell of a better job than ICE or Decipher did system-wise. The problem with BW is that if you want a rules-lite system, this ain't it. Also, you still have to adapt it for Middle-Earth, and making new lifepaths for your characters is a time-consuming process. (Much of the work has been done by others on their boards, but still...)

This is probably a problem I'll just have to solve myself. Now that I've thought about it, its going to be in there, along with all of these other designs floating around. Hopefully it won't distract me. If I do come up with anything, I'll probably just distribute it for free online. We'll see.

What would you want to see in a game system designed for Middle-Earth?

A Problem With Story Games

Maybe someone in the Story Games community (not necessarily just the one 'Story Games' forum, but overall) will read this at some point and want to address it. Who knows? And bear in mind that in taking on this topic :

1) I'm talking about something I know comparatively little about

2) I have a funny feeling I'll provoke someone (but that's Ok, just look at my theology blog)

What I mean when I talk about Story Games is actually exemplified by the forum of the same name, which I have a link to on this site but you can also find here. The way I understand it is that Story Games are about Story Now, which needs a little explaining.

There are three ways one might talk about the kind of story that results when we play a game with the goal of story in mind. The first is Story Before, which is one traditional stance where the GM or DM or whomever comes up with a story, works it out ahead of time, and then invites the players to participate in it. The story is already there, it is just being fleshed out, perhaps. At one extreme is something like a video game, where the story is literally laid out for you, and at the other is perhaps a GM or DM who is good at improvising, who has an idea of where things are going and who the major players are but is open to other directions in that framework.

The second is Story After. This also happens a lot, particularly in games that I run, because I tend to like "sandbox" style games where I set up a situation, or a bunch of interlocking situations, drop the players into it and see what happens. Story After essentially means that at the end of a game or session, we look back and say "look at the story that we made!" Maybe someone writes up the session as a story, or someone keeps a game journal. In two current games, one I ran and one I'm in, there is a shared blog that the players and GM have for just this purpose.

Story Now means that the story happens during the game, that the game itself might take on self-conscious story structure elements to it, and the game mechanics guide and develop the narrative, which wasn't worked out before-hand and isn't just something that becomes apparent after the fact.

As I said above, Story Games are concerned with creating Story Now. And I think this is very cool, but it also has a weakness in my limited experience that especially came up in a conversation with a friend recently.

When you are going to Story Now, that means that no one comes in with a plan of what is going to happen. This could mean that things devolve into a random assortment of events and scenes that don't connect to each other. Kind of like the game where you tell a story where each person adds a sentence, and the story goes around and around. You might come up with a great story that way, but you also might come up with crap.

One way that I think a lot of Story Games try to get around this is to more carefully define what their game is about. For example, if I play D&D, I've bought into a genre, and I've bought into a lot of rules and conventions and so on, but the story might be anything. It might be about breaking out of a prison, or about defending a city, or about political intrigue. Granted, D&D is a combat game, but not everyone uses it for that. Or take While Wolf's games - you buy into a genre but not into a specific kind of story.

In contrast, with a Story Game, the game is not only tools to create a story, but it also tells you a lot more of what that story will be, and includes mechanics for that kind of story and not others. Rather than pick on a particular game, I'll given an example. One game might be called Prison Break. So when you play this game, you know that your Story Now will be about breaking out of a prison. If you want your game to be about Machiavellian politics, no dice. If you want a game about breaking out of prison, chances are this is a fantastic option. To me, Story Games are focused in this way.

The reason this is a problem, for me, is twofold.

1) I'm used to a completely different model of games. For example, the first game I ever bought and ran was Mythus by Gary Gygax. I used that rules-set to run games for about three years or so - using just the one book to run and play in all kinds of games. Granted, none were Story Now, but that's a lot of mileage, and I've since used other systems, D&D/D20, GURPS, White Wolf's games and so on, in a similar way.

2) I'm broke. So let's say that now I want to run a game that's about bronze-age competition between Greek heroes. Next I want to run a game that's about competition in academia that involves an insect somehow. After that, a friend wants to run...whatever else. I can do all of this with one Story Before/Story After system, but if I want the Story Now experience, each of these games will need its own system.

Like I said, this isn't a big problem, but its something that has come up - if nothing else, then because there are a lot of games that I want to buy, but can't afford them, motivating me to focus on systems that can be used a lot of ways and developing house rules for them.

Or designing my own games, though I don't really see any of them as Story Games.

So, in short, I get what is cool about them, and maybe what I really need is someone to run a Story Game for me and convert me so I can drink the Kool-Aid. For now, though, Story Now seems like it is interesting...and a barrier as well.

Steal Away Jordan

Steal Away Jordan, as far as I know, first debuted at GenCon 2007 this summer. The impression I've gotten is that if you talked to anyone who is at all interested in Indie games who attended GenCon, they'll have said something about Steal Away Jordan, which is currently available from Indie Press Revolution.

It is a game by Julia Ellingboe. The tagline is "Stories from America's Peculiar Institution" - yes, the game is about American slavery. In the game, you play the part of a slave in the American South. Your main attribute is your worth - your die-pool for use in conflicts in the game is based on your economic worth to your owners. Things like your name and what you do for a living seem to be determined by the GM - which seems like the right mechanic for a game about what happens when you have no freedom.

Right now I'm listening to an actual play presentation being done by The Game Master Show podcast from GenCon, with the writer/creator of the game running a demo of the system for one of the Show's members. The dice-mechanic involves rolling d6's equal to your worth in a conflict, where 1's count as a -1 and where any two dice that total 7 (without 1's that is - 4 and 3 or 5 and 2) count as +1. Whoever has the highest total wins the conflict and gets to describe what happens.

As you can imagine, things just get worse and worse. And worse. Julia is actually pretty gentle about the way the game functions, which is probably important, given how horrible the situations it describes are. The game ends with the only PC jumping off of a wagon on the way to her new home (where she was sold to) and trying to run and being shot in the back. The player got to narrate how she died when the die dictated that it would happen.

Then something really interesting happens. The player's husband comes over to the table and talks about how uncomfortable this makes him, the idea of playing a slave in a game. The game has led to this interesting and candid conversation about racial issues in our country. Julia handles it really well, and has a great chance to talk about overcoming stereotypes. In fact, the discussion of the game and the issues it brings up takes longer than playing the actual game. Fascinating.

Come to think of it, I think this is what the game is really about. Julia says "this is our history". And that's the truth.

Clearly, this is a game that deals directly with very uncomfortable topics. According to the creator, one of the things she intended with the game was for Americans to be able to deal with each other and with the history of slavery. She sees slavery as something that has hurt everyone in this country, that has caused nothing but pain, and one way to deal with this pain is to do so through a game.

I think this is an interesting idea, one I've encountered before and one I've given some thought to myself. It is possible to deal with things in a game that we don't feel able to deal with otherwise. I've even tried this in games - its just the sort of person I am. I think important stories talk about things that we deal with in life in some way. The game has to have teeth now and then. The story has to strike home. Not all the time - this is an Escape after all! - but sometimes you have to dig because it makes the experience better overall, and sometimes you get the chance to deal with things in a new way.

On the other hand, you can design a game like Steal Away Jordan, where the point of the game is this kind of process. It is a teaching game, in a sense. Another example that comes to mind is The Prince's Kingdom. Sale of the game goes to support the American Friends Service Committee and the game is a way to deal with issues of violence and nonviolence and justice with children - while also having fun of course. I'm sure there are others I'm not aware of.

I doubt games like this will take off and replace Dungeons and Dragons as the gaming lingua franca, but I found Steal Away Jordan really fascinating to think about.

High School Drama

Last night I was treated to my first game of High School Drama! by Shifting Skies. It was quite a treat. I can see why it was nominated for the Origens Award. I'm surprised it didn't get it.

High School Drama! is a competitive card game for 2-5 players. When you open the box you find a series of different card decks, a score board, and a variety of colored tokens. The art on the cards is bright and fun. The quotes on each character card range from entertaining to laugh-out-loud funny. Overall the designers have captured the mystique of every American High School cliche and distilled it into a highly amusing little game.

To play High School Drama! each player chooses a character card to represent themselves. Each card has certain stats, but I recommend you choose a role you would find enjoyable to play rather than the character with the biggest advantage. Your goal in representing this character will be to collect the most Yearbook Signatures by the end of Senior Year. You do this by hooking up with other students and organizations in the High School and building bonds with them which you can trade in later for signatures. Meanwhile everyone else is trying to build bonds faster and better than you and going around stabbing each other in the back, spreading rumors, and making fellow student's lives hell. Winning is a combination of strategy, luck of the draw, and not becoming a target of other player's wrath.

The stats each student has deserve a little mention because they are very clever. Each student has a rating in "Cool", "Cruel", and "Heart". These represent exactly what they sound like. In addition, each student has a background color which tells you what category they belong to: Athlete, Popular, Geek, or Artsy. Some students and organizations are divided meaning they belong to two of these categories and relate well to either. In order to hook up with another student or organization you must have a "Cool" rating at least equal to the target. If you are both the same color (ie: both athletes or both geeks) your "Cool" rating is considered double. You can build on that bond adding tokens to represent how strongly those two students are connected up to the sum of both card's "Heart" ratings. Increasing bonds is important because the other players will be trying to break up your relationships. You can only negatively impact a relationship that has a bond strength equal to or less than your "Cruel" rating. So the higher the "Cool" the easier it is to make friends. The higher the "Heart" the stronger those relationships will be. The higher the "Cruel" the more ability you have to break other people up. As you can imagine some people are cool, but shallow. Others are sensitive and vicious. Others are a balance of all three.

The mechanics of this game are extremely simple. It takes no time to learn and the gameplay itself is straightforward. This is both a strength and a weakness. It means that HSD is a great game for mixed groups and non-serious gamers, but it also means that the novelty of the game might wear thin after repeated sessions. The game could be improved by the addition of a slightly more complex, more in-depth strategy ruleset for advanced gamers.

However, the real fun of this game is not in the rules. The most fun will be had by people who get into playing their characters and are willing to narrate their actions turning the whole game into one long string of he's going out with her, but she's secretly lusting after him, and that clique is ostracizing this person because they hang out with that guy and so on. Memorable moments from our game last night include Emo Boy discovering that it is fun to sell out and joining a pretty successful pop band; a Japanese exchange student ping pong champion getting involved in a threesome with the Head Cheerleader and the Quarterback; the head of the Yearbook Committee wielding sinister influence to ostracize L33t Haxor from her friends...

Overall I give this game a 3.5 out of 5 stars. It's solid and it offers up lots of laughs. It would be even better if it was a tad crunchier, but Shifting Skies has hit upon a great concept here. Afterall, among gamers, who wouldn't love to go back and redo high school, but this time as the one wrecking lives instead of as the one getting wrecked.

Mortal Coil Review

A few days ago I got to demo Mortal Coil, an indie game written by Brennan Taylor and illustrated throughout by Jennifer Rodgers. It is published by Galileo Games and is available through IPR.

Mortal Coil uses a simple token-based mechanic through which players and the GM manipulate the game world and their characers' actions using Action, Power, Magic and Passion Tokens.

What is most interesting about Mortal Coil, however, is that the game begins with the group creating the setting from scratch. The only set rule about setting that Mortal Coil insists upon is that magic always has a price (and I suppose, implicity, that there is magic to begin with).

When I ran the game at the local game store, I broke the session to two Acts. Act One involved introducing the system, creating the setting, creating characters, and answering questions about rules and whatnot. Then there would be a thirty-minute or so break, during which I would come up with a sessions' worth of material, followed by Act Two. Act Two would begin with the first scene and conflicts and go onward from there.

The setting-creation system functions according to consensus, and the result is what is called the Theme Document. The Theme Document contains all of the "facts" of the game the group has described thus far - it is everything agreed to about the game.

Later on, during play, you can actually add facts to the game, or modify existing facts, but you can't contradict a fact once it is written down.

This system of creating the Theme Document went much smoother than I had expected. Listening in, one of the owners of the store was intrigued, and dropped what he was doing to join the game. People built off of each others' ideas, and there were almost no situations where something got a flat "no".

Starting with a general Tone you move to Setting, defining the where and when and what of the game. Next you discuss what form the Supernatural will take in the game, followed by deciding the Magic Level (which determines some rules things like how many Magic Tokens you start with or how much it costs to replenish them). Finally, there is the Situation which brings the player-characters together, and some Villains are fleshed out. At this point, you can also go back and modify earlier parts of the Document if new ideas have come out.

A huge amount of stuff came out of this for the group I was working with (and for this process, the GM has no more power/say than any other player). Here's a bit of what we came up with for this game:

Tone: desperate, epic, hopeful, head-harvesting monsters (not really a "tone" but we liked it), oases

Setting: a group of displaced people from an advanced and utopian civilization arrive in a new world. For shorthand (since it was a one-off game) we called the civilization Atlantis and imagined it as somewhat similar, using what we called "mage-punk" magical technology to accomplish its goals, whereas teh new world would be teeming with overabundant life...and head-harvesting monsters of course.

The Supernatural: we decided that magic was classified by color, and had a cool discussion over what each color we chose - red, orange, yellow, green blue, purple - meant in the game.

Magic Level: we chose Moderate (I didn't have enough Tokens handy for "high", and "low" didn't make sense because we wanted magic to be as common as technology might be elsewhere)

Situation: the capacity to percieve and manipulate Purple magic is dying out of our civilization, and we need to return with genetic material so we can redevelop the recessive gene that enables this. We have been sent to this teeming continent becuase readings show that a great deal of Purple magic is availble there. We have been sent because we are misfits in our civilization, and because our brushes with Purple magic (which involved death, soul, and art, among other things) made us potentially sensitive. Essentially, Purple magic is taboo in our culture, but still necessary to have a continuing capacity for magic at all.

Villains: our own civilization and its secret machinations, other outcasts from our civilization that were here first, huge and dangerous plants and animals from this continent, head-harvesting monsters.

The game was awesome once we hit Act Two. One thing that Mortal Coil allows is the use of Power Tokens to take over GMing temporarily. I added to this the power to frame a new scene, so that any player can spend a Power Token to frame the next scene. This led to honestly amazing situations, at least for me. I like that in Mortal Coil the GM is limited - s/he has more Power Tokens than any one player, but the players can exert a huge amount of influence over what happens.

One thing that was unclear about the game was how exactly the GM spends her Power Tokens. I ended up spending them to frame scenes when the players didn't and to add complications to scenes as they came up - though I wasn't perfectly consistent with this because I was unclear on how it was indended to work.

Players and the GM are also able to spend Magic Tokens to change the way magic works in the setting. The person sitting to your left, however, has the power to define the cost of the change - remember, all magic has a price.

I don't want to drag this review out. Overall, I'd say that if you want a diceless, fast-resolution system that is heavy on narrative and improvisation, then Mortal Coil is an excellent choice.

I give the system 4 out of 5 stars - I loved it, but one or two things in the rules are unclear, and we found the conflict system had a little difficulty dealing with multiple simultaneous conflicts. Nothing we couldn't work around and still have a huge amount of fun, though, and I recommend it with a clear conscience.

Burning Wheel Review

To take a detour from game-design posts for a moment - I've been reading through Burning Wheel lately and have some reflections on it. Burning Wheel is one of the games to come out of the Indie game "revolution" that took place in recent years, when many new independent games came out to popular acclaim, including Dogs in the Vineyard, Mortal Coil, Artesia and Spirit of the Century, among many many others.

Basically, what happened is that years of theorizing about roleplaying games with things like GNS Theory intersected with the falling cost of self-publishing due to new and improving technologies. The result was an incredible profusion of indie games. One of these games was Luke Crane's Burning Wheel, and I caught the bug and picked it up recently.

I like the way that BW is written, first of all. It is in a very approachable style, and "flavor text" is only used to exemplify how a rules element might look in-game. Luke utilizes various voices, represented by little imp icons, to mark side-notes in reference to the rules, including reminders, admonitions and explanations.

BW is a very complex system, by far the most "crunchy" of the indie titles I'm familliar with. The system is a simple d6 system where d6's are rolled and 4-6 is a success, where 1-3 is a "traitor". Obstacles, or Obs, are set as the number of successes necessary. Rolls are written so that they are more rare than other systems - there is the Let It Ride rule, which I like, which says that a roll stands for a situation until something drastic changes. This is to prevent GMs from demanding multiple rolls for one task, and to prevent players from demanding new rolls every time they fail.

You have the usual Attributes (Power, Agility, Forte, Speed, Will, Perception) and Skills (a huge number of them for any imaginable situation) that are in almost every RPG. You also have some derived Attributes, such as Health and Steel (a character's ability to recover from fear or pain) and Reflexes.

Along with these, however, you have Emotional Attributes, one for each of the four main races that he discusses. Dwarves have Greed, Elves have Grief, Humans have Faith and Orcs have Hatred. These emotional attributes directly impact the game and also play into the race-specific kids of magic available to each of these races. I have to say, I really like this. It adds color and interest, and also reflects, in the case of Dwarves, Elves and Orcs, a Middle-Earth feel.

In BW you also have Instincts, Traits and Beliefs. Instincts are things that your character does without thinking - the are expressed as if-then statements, and are a way of taking out insurance for a character, as well as a good way to get into trouble. The common example is "draw my sword at the first sign of trouble" - problems arising from this are obvious, but it also protects your character from being taken unprepared most of the time.

Traits are interesting - the are descriptive, and some affect the rules. You have Character Traits, which just describe, Dice Traits, which add or take away dice in certain situations, and Call-on Traits, which allow rerolls in certain situations. Most interesting is the fact that 'negative' traits cost points, in stark contrast to systems like GURPS where you take Disadvantages to earn more character points. The reasoning behind this, I learned on the BW Forums, is that Trait cost reflects the attention that that trait will demand in the game, among other things. Negative traits are also great ways to get into trouble, and getting into trouble earns you Artha (see below).

Finally, Beliefs are what really drive your character. You start with at least three, and Luke recommends that the first one be about your past, the second one be about your future goals, and the third one tie you into the situation that the game is built around. Beliefs should be driving forces that are specific enough to be interesting, and they should have consequences built in whenever possible. They can be anything from "Never trust an Elf farther than you can toss him" to "I must prove I am the rightful king".

Artha is a point currency used in the game. In short, you spend Artha to modify your rolls, making extraordinary success more likely. There are three kinds of Artha - Fate, Persona and Deeds, in order of how powerful they are.

Fate Artha are earned by roleplaying Beliefs and Instincts in a way that entertains and drives the story forward. This is where those negative Traits come in. Negative Traits are more likely to be entertaining and to drive the story forward than positive onces. Failure is almost always more interesting than success. With Traits, Fate Artha is earned only when use of the Trait moves the game in an unexpected direction. Fate Artha is also awarded for Humor - just making the group laugh. Finally and most rarely, Fate Artha is awarded for having the right skill at the right time to move the story forward.

Persona Artha are to reward general roleplaying. It is earned for Embodiment, when a player captures the mood at the table perfectly - great speeches, dire decisions and gruesome revenge to name a few examples. Moldbreaking is another way to earn Persona Artha - when a player roleplays her inner turmoil in-game when faced with a decision that violates her Beliefs, Instincts and Traits in some way. Players can nominate each other for this award. When a PC accomplishes Personal Goals, Persona Artha can also be rewarded. Finally a group's Workhorse and MVP can earn Personal points for being the ones who make it happen behind the scenes or for the one that really shines in a given session. These last two are generally voted on at the end of a storyline, and in BW the GM and players get one vote each in these instances.

Deeds Artha are awarded for accomplishing things far beyond the character's immediate goals. They are the most rare, powerful, and loosely defined. They seem appropriate at the end of a major story arc that was successfully concluded and that had wide impact beyond the PCs. Deeds Artha always comes with a cost or a sacrifice of some kind.

One final note - on character creation. BW uses a Lifepath system, where you create a character by going through their life as a series of experiences over time. For example, a PC might be Village Born, then a Troublemaking Kid, then an Apprentice, a Journeyman, then she gets Conscripted, and finally joins the standing army as a Military Sergeant. I like this system because it forces you to have a story for your character and because it covers failures and misfortune as well as success. Rather than have a particular point-amount for starting PCs, you have a number of Lifepaths, so that all of the PCs have similar amounts of life experience, though this experience will be very diverse.

In brief:

What I like about Burning Wheel:

1. It is driven by beliefs and characters are rewarded for both success and failure
2. Lifepaths force players to make concrete choices that result in the backbone of a story for a character's background
3. There is a vast diversity of skills, traits and other bits and pieces to make the game infinitely interesting
4. The rules reward player interaction, roleplaying, and getting into trouble
5. It has a very strong Tolkienian feel, though its limited because Luke couldn't afford to license the actual Middle-Earth property
6. Emotional Attributes are awesome

What I don't like about Burning Wheel:

1. I like more interesting dice mechanics. The d6's become essentially 50/50 coins that you toss in most cases, which leads to a less-interesting progression of probability
2. It will be very hard to get someone into this game if they aren't interested in a) lots of crunchy rules and b) lots of roleplaying and c) deadly, brutal combat
3. The Human magic system of Sorcery lacks flavor and interest. I'm still waiting for the Magic Burner supplement to come out to see if this is fixed
4. Specifically, the Fight! system is very complicated. Granted, its much more interesting than the D&D combat system for example, but its at least as complex
5. The Resources system is overall very intuitive, but I don't like that you still use points to purchase specific equipment. Why not let what you own come naturally from what lifepaths you chose?
6. Finally, as for the dice system, it seems that sometimes the game assumes that dice are equivalent to raised Obstacles, which just isn't the case statistically. It leads to a few absurd situations, opposed rolls that are impossible to win, etc.

Overall

I'm going to need to test-drive this baby and see how it handles. Lots of interesting things and a few things I like less. I imagine, with high player buy-in, it could be amazing. But then again, so can most games out there.

I give Burning Wheel 4 out of 5 stars - great concept, well-written, I like anything Tolkienian, but I could do with some rules changes.