Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Do I look nervous? I'm about to play Burning Wheel.

The truth of the matter is that I am about to GM a game of Burning Wheel. For those who have never heard of it, it is a table-top RPG that is as crunchy as they come.

My first observation for those who might be looking at starting up a game, is that character creation with five players and 1 set of books takes forever. I assume that we would play last weekend when I gathered my posse to make to make characters, but I also didn't assume that we wouldn't. All told we were probably together for over 5 hours without playing at all, without even finishing character creation completely.

I'll offer a little disclaimer for those who are scared by that figure. We are friends after all, we socialized, listened to music and generally had a good time the whole time. The lifepath system Burning Wheel uses to created a character is just a greedy process, and once I explained the basic idea of lifepaths to each player, each and every one of them needed some private time with the book.

I say it makes me nervous but that it an exaggeration, my friends won't string me up for running a lousy game. I've secretly made a vow to try to go "off book" as much as I can as a GM from this point forward. Burning Wheel is going to make that a genuine chore.

Until next session...

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