I set The Flanders Panel aside to read the Burning Wheel fantasy RPG books, so I’d have a clue when we made characters for the new game. By necessity, this is as much, if not more, a review of the system itself as a review of the book stylistically.

When we bought Burning Wheel at origins last year, it was sold as a two book set for $15 – quite a bargain for RPG books, even small ones like these. Afterward, we went by the author’s booth where he was running demos of the combat system.

BW is a dice pool and target number system (like White Wolf’s Storyteller system). The die is d6 and the target number is nominally 4, but can go up as a result of injury or other factors, and can go down for some creature types or as the result of magic. 3 dice is average or slightly below for a human.

So, basic task resolution is successes rolled compared to some obstacle. Fairly standard stuff there. There are two aspects of BW that really make it stand out: the combat system and the character generation system. Both are crunchy but innovative.

Chargen is accomplished by selecting a race and progressing the character-to-be through a series of lifepaths. The number of lifepaths for a playable character ranges from 4 to 8. Less than that and you won’tknow enough, more than that and you’ll fighting from behind a walker.

The lifepaths are grouped by setting (city, peasant, noble court, etc) and it is possible to jump from one setting to another if the lifepath just completed lists a lead to the new setting. At the end you will have a group of skills which you can (or must in some cases) by with skill points. Additional points are accumlated with which to by traits and resources (which can be people, things or spells).

Fortunately a handy sheet is available to walk you through the various steps. It takes a while and a little arithmetic, but it’s not too bad. I actually find it fun, but then I like creating characters.

The combat system was somewhat more complicated, but really quite revolutionary.

The high level unit of time in combat is the volley and there are three volleys per exchange. You get to act a number of times per exchange equal to your reflex stat, and the actions have to be divided as evenly as possible betweent he three volleys. This means that you might have more than one action per volley.

The interesting twist here is that you script out all of the actions in an exchange before anything actually happens – and there are a who slew of actions to choose from: strike, great strick, block, feint, counterstrike, get inside, lock, throw, and a few others (especially if one of the participants knows a martial art). The interplay of these actions influences one’s strategy greatly, as you might expect.

Another interesing twist is how damage is handled. Damage is not subtracted from a health/hit point pool as it is in most games. Instead wounds are accumulated and their effect is more and more debilitating. When penalties reduce one of your stats to zero you are incapicitated (unconcious if it’s a mental stat, or otherwise unable to move if it’s a physical one). Character’s can be killed outright by an effect that does enough damage, or can also bleed to death as a result of several traumatic (but not outright mortal) wounds.

Magic. In the first two books there are two kinds of magic: faith-based (and oh how I hate how Bush has all but co-opted that term) and sorcery. Both are basically treated as skills mechanically. So, you can fail (sometimes drastically) at casting a spell – this is not DnD, that’s for sure.

In the upcoming Magic Burner there are rules for summoning (which I’ve partially read) and magical abstraction (which I haven’t). Summoning is a dicey things, spirits don’t like it and will tend to try to exact a little revenge for being used, particularly if you break the pact you make with them.

We haven’t actually played per se yet, and I expect things will be a bit rough the first few times we have to break out the game mechanics (which would be the case regardless of the game). But I exepct we’ll become familiar quickly enough.

I’m curious to see if the detail of the combat system slows things down much. Combat is pretty deadly in DW, so that may offset things some.

Stylistically, I like the way the books are written; organizationally, I was frustated at times. For example, it’s not clear in the lifepaths whether some ‘skills’ listed are actually traits. This is complicated by the fact that skills who’s effect is obvious aren’t listed.

Two places where the books themselves stand out are the low incidence typos, grammatical errors and mispellings, and the presence of a fairly detailed index. Both these points are ones where the vast majority of RPGs do quite poorly (and this is being polite in some cases).

So, all in all, I like the system and it’s presentation, though the former more than the latter. I’d definitely recommend this system for someone looking for a fantasy RPG system (and some people have adapted the system to other low-tech settings). It’s a refreshing change from DnD and its imitators, and frankly a better system than probably 80% of them.