Nine-year-old notes about The Burning Wheel

Opening up Facebook this morning, I found a "Facebook Memory" from nine years ago in which I shared my reaction to having read The Burning Wheel. I'm glad I read it, but the odds that I would ever find it again on Facebook are pretty low, so I am copying the post here.

I finished reading The Burning Wheel, and it is a very interesting system. I hope to play a game of it someday, but even without playing, it was enlightening to read about this cult-favorite system. Thinking back on it, I think the most important piece is one of the most mundane elements, but something that can be brought into many interactive storytelling scenarios. When a player wants to act, he must identify his intent first, and only afterward to identify his task. The intent is the goal, the intended outcome, the reason for doing anything, and it ties into the systems' articulation of Beliefs. The task, then, is what the player actually does, and it is the task that is tested with dice and rules.

I can imagine how this would help a table of friends understand who the other characters are. In many settings, I have seen (or engaged in) players describing only what players are doing, but not why. The result is that other players have to guess at motives, infer what characters are about. This is the nature of social reality outside of the game, and it takes time to get to know people and their motives and beliefs. By making these explicit in the game, we model the idea that characters can get to know each other, and that we players are separate from them. That is, the players can get on with telling a good story because they understand more than just what is in their own character's head.

This works into another Burning Wheel rule, which is that the outcome of any die roll is articulated prior to the roll's being made. Hindsight is golden, but this strikes me as an essential rule for handling characters' social skills. Just as "hit the target with my sword" is the (potentially unstated) effect of succeeding at an attack roll, there should be a similar established context before a social roll. For example, "If you succeed, you convince the Duke to lend you his magic sword." Getting that explicit means that appropriate situation modifiers can be established. This, too, ties into BW's "Let it ride" rule, which says that once the dice have been cast, there's no do-overs in the same situation, whether it's social or combat. If you didn't convince the Duke, you didn't convince him---tell an interesting story about it and move on.

I have not played this RPG in the intervening nine years.