Burning Wheel

My two-word summary of Burning Wheel: too complicated.

The longer version:

Burning Wheel is a strange hybrid of Gamist and Narrativist approaches (I say cautiously, knowing that that taxonomy lies somewhere between outdated and obsolete). On the one hand, there are explicit rewards for roleplaying well, as judged by the entire group and not just the GM. GMs are advised to let actions automatically succeed when they don’t involve conflict, compromise, or crisis. Players are required to define their characters’ beliefs and philosophies, and are rewarded for playing according to them or in dramatic ways against them.

On the other hand, the book contains explicit instructions to resolve all conflicts with dice rolls rather than roleplaying, GM fiat, group consensus, or other story-centric methods. Although there are roleplaying rewards, nearly all permanent skill & stat improvements come from attempting challenging tasks, where dice, not drama, determine success or failure.

This focus on rolling is something the author is frank about wanting. There are tons of things to roll dice for — tons of different things, to be rolled on in different ways. It’s intentional, and I understand his goals, but the outcome is an overly-complicated set of rules. His stated intent is for the player to roll dice only when doing something important, but for lots of things to be important. In that light, making the game too simple would have made all that rolling repetitive, but the overall result of what he did instead seems more broad than deep.

There are separate methods dedicated to resolving haggling, ranged weapon fights, arguing, and melee fights. All but haggling have the same basic structure: the two sides pre-plot three moves in secret, then reveal their moves one at a time and cross-reference them to determine how to resolve that round’s outcome. Although the foundations are similar, the sets of moves you can make during these different conflicts vary greatly, and the number of interactions is a combinatorial explosion. Ranged positioning has three basic moves (although each has three variants). Arguing has seven moves, all specifically strong or weak to subsets of others. Melee has thirty action maneuvers, plus four additional positioning maneuvers that are handled in parallel and modify the former.

You don’t have to go to this level of detail to resolve every skirmish and squabble. In fact, you’re not supposed to. Sideline fights can be dispensed with by a single Weapon skill vs. Weapon skill roll. The in-depth rules exist so the game has a sliding scale of focus — when a tense, one-on-one manhunt or winner-take-all political negotiation are the crux of the story, you can give them more screen time than if you’re hunting a random deer or fast-talking a constable. But that means you’ll only occasionally have to dip into the official rules on chariot racing, or dog shows, or what have you. I expect so much unfamiliar detailed material either slows the game down or encourages the GM to ignore it and improvise.