Role-playing games are becoming increasingly popular. For most people, that means learning Dungeons and Dragons. Most people stick with DnD, unaware of the array of alternatives. One in particular has caught my eye, one that I'd like to share with you: The Burning Wheel.

Overview

The Burning Wheel is a difficult game that heavily prioritises roleplay over combat. It has a similar fantasty setting to DnD, with a drastically different rule set.

Beliefs, Instincts and Traits (BITs)

These three elements are the heart of your character, and for me they're also the heart of Burning Wheel. Your characters must have real goals and ambitions, and the game will directly reward you for working towards them.

Beliefs

You must decide on your character's top three priorities. For example, the belief "I am the true king of this land" doesn't make it true but gives your character a burning desire to de-throne the king. These are also indications to the GM of how you'd like to play the game. Typically, you'll be rewarded every session that you contribute directly to one of your beliefs. You may also change your beliefs to signal character growth.

Instincts

Your Instincts are pre-programmed reactions and behaviours, like "If surprised, I draw my sword", or "I will always protect children". Usually stemming from your Beliefs, these Instincts are useful mechanical shortcuts in the game as well as storytelling. In the first example, the GM usually can't claim that your character is unarmed.

Of course, you can choose to ignore or disable your instinct if the situation calls for it, but if you choose to follow it and that gets you in trouble somehow, the game rewards you (more on that later).

Traits

Traits are the most prominent aspects of your character. They are the things that make them unique. There are three kinds of Traits: Character Traits, which are unique aspects of your appearance or personality; Call-On Traits, which allow you to gain an advantage once per session in certain situations; and Die Traits, which give you a flat bonus for something.

Artha

In Burning Wheel, you are rewarded for role playing your character according to the character's BITs. This is the other half of what makes Burning Wheel great for me. You earn these points at the end of the game, then you can spend them on improving future rolls or permanently upgrading aspects of your character.

There are three types of Artha: Fate, which is by role play towards one of your character's Beliefs, using your Instincts, or even by being the funniest; Persona, which offers larger benefits for various types of contributions to the game or by completing one of your character's main goals; and Deeds, which are rare and require great sacrifice or accomplishment to obtain.

Artha and BITs work together to push the player to tell stories, fight for their character's beliefs, and help their friends to have fun.

Comparison with Dnd

Roleplay and Storytelling

Burning Wheel is heavily focused on mechanics that support, encourage, and reward roleplaying your character and their aspirations. In contrast, DnD has almost zero mechanics that DIRECTLY interact with roleplay. DnD's existing mechanics almost entirely support combat, with some room for skill checks.

In Burning Wheel, character creation is its own minigame. You build a backstory by "buying" various connected lifepaths that add skills, traits and flavour to your character. In contrast, in DnD the backstory is entirely managed by the player with only the most basic details (race, class, etc) coming from the game itself.

The game has some built-in rules and recommendations that encourage good gameplay and storytelling. For example, the "Let it Ride" rule forbids you from making the exact some roll twice. This prevents the party from getting bogged down, encourages you to think about a problem creatively (you can make a brand new roll if you're approaching the problem from a new angle), and instructs the GM to always move the narrative forward (the GM is forbidden from saying "nothing happens", they must move the story forward during failure, or maybe you even succeed but with some consequence). In contrast, DnD provides no such rules, and the quality of your session depends entirely on the skill and experience of your GM and the players.

Combat

DnD is very clearly a combat game with storytelling - you're given a robust set of rules for moving around the battlefield, attacking, using weapons, and casting spells. Then outside of combat, you use a smaller set of rules - your skills and stats - to help with roleplay.

The majority of rules in Burning Wheel are for interacting with the world and other characters, but there is also a separate combat system as well. Three combat systems, in fact.

"Bloody Versus" is a simple system of opposing rolls. "Range and Cover" is a system entirely dedicated to combat with bows (or guns). "Fight!" is a blow-by-blow system where two opponents take turns using actions like Strike, Block, Avoid, Charge, or Push. These systems all tell their own story, but they are all a difficult and significant departure from DnD and similar systems.

Difficulty

Burning Wheel characters level up one skill at a time. This is more complex than DnD and may not appeal to all players, but it directly rewards you for using the skill that you're levelling.

The game is highly complex. Some elements of the rules, like combat, will turn off many potential players. For more casual players, I'd suggest substituting these rules with ones from another game. For more experienced players, I recommend trying to rules as written.

DnD is much more approachable. The rules are much easier to learn, and the smaller number of rules overall makes it easier to homebrew your own.

Characters in BW are very squishy. The game is intended to be more difficult, more raw. This will come down to your preference but at first, most DnD players will find their characters less strong and less capable than they're used to.

Summary

I was inspired by Burning Wheel. I greatly enjoyed parts of it, especially the "Beliefs, Instincts and Traits" and "Artha" systems. I'd like the chance to try "Range and Cover", as "Fight!" is best saved for dramatic mano-a-mano combat. If I ran a campaign of my own, I'd stick to Dungeons and Dragons, but in the future I'd like to either run a Burning Wheel campaign, or more likely find ways to take my favourite bits and include them in the DnD framework.