Roasting the Wheel

I had a hard time with The Burning Wheel.  I will be the first to personally admit that it, overall, was not at all my style.  This was mostly due to the huge amount of effort that needs to be put into learning the game and playing it properly, but also because my game group didn't play more than twice, so it wasn't given what most would consider a "fair shot".

I shake my head though, and wonder why we had so much trouble. Even our GM, who honestly likes the system, was getting jumbled around with the incredibly heavy rule-set and nonsensical jargon.

Jargon, by definition, are special words used to describe things that are hard for others to understand. And like a bad accent, The Burning Wheel is the pinnacle of RPG jargon, at least that I've personally experienced.  The only familiar words in the ridiculous 600 pages were "skill" and "points" (not necessarily together).  For example, "Speed" is what you'd normally consider "Agility", but it also represents "Strength" in TBW, which didn't click for me, since speed as a word does not naturally imply physical muscle.  It's unnecessarily confusing, when a word like "athleticism" would have made a better fit for the mechanical effect.  Beyond that, we were always asking questions like, "what's the mechanical difference between a connection and affiliation again?"

The trouble with trying to review the Burning Wheel, and analyze it for it's mechanics, is that there's so many individual mechanics.  But at the same time, there are so few things that seem to flow, fit together, or otherwise help me in understanding the next rule I needed to learn.

I love the idea of burning wheel, and when you read the plentiful amount of good reviews, it's easy to see what some people walk away from it with.  But the bar is too high.  I consider myself a fairly hardcore gamer (I read more rulebooks than I could ever possibly hope to play), and this is by far one of the hardest games to dig your way through.  And this is coming straight after my play of Fate of the Norns.

Worse, once you're actually in the game, the book keeping quickly gets out of hand, bogging down actual gameplay to a crawl.  There's functions, formulas, and definitions of every little thing, and because of it's progressive skill system, the game requires the players to be on the ball mechanically.  This completely distracts me from the immersion of the game; and it doesn't work for me as a way to get integrated with my character.   When I have to fight for my character's beliefs not only in the fiction, but mechanically as well, I feel detached from the meaning behind those beliefs.

Pace was a huge problem for me.  We got nowhere in our couple of sessions.  Sure, we explored a river, talked to NPCs in a town, and even did a little dungeon.  But that was 8 hours of painfully debating with the GM about each and every skill, trait, and resource we had, and then each skill, trait, and resources that our friends had that might help.  Then once a single action is resolved, we all do a couple minutes of bookkeeping as we compare the difficulty of the task to our dice used, skill levels, and related stats.  

I'm certain that characters will change dramatically over time, which is what the game is built to do. But that time is long.  We're talking real-life long, which, while I can't be a noble knight in real life, I can certainly be 90% of the other mundane characters this system pumps out.

The Burning Wheel does exactly what it sets out to do: match roleplaying with mechanics.  But that left a sour taste in my mouth, almost as if to suggest that I don't like my games mixed with my roleplaying...

Mind-boggling nonsense, is what I'd describe it as.