As I’ve been reading more about running different types of Burning Wheel games, I’ve come to some realizations about my Burning France setup that I should have done differently, in retrospect. In particular, reading about Burning Thac0, an attempt to model old-school D&D with Burning Wheel, was quite an eye-opener for me. I think it’s the meta-system discussion that really highlights what is specific about the system itself, and brought some ideas to the fore.
The first thing that I realized I should have done differently, in retrospect, is work more on the specific situation in Session 0. The start as of Burning France as of now is based just after interesting things happened (the burgeouisie has just overthrown the feudal opressors); however, that leaves us with a big open questionmark as to what should happen next. Now, I had an overall idea lying around, where the characters were Dogs in the Vineyard-style justices being sent out to troubleshoot problems in this nascent political structure, but that’s more the context rather than the immediate situation.
My second realization flows directly from the first, in that I should have focused more on what the individual characters are here for. Now, we’ve agreed that they’ve somehow have been involved in the uprising to the degree that they’ve been selected to do this itinerant justice thing but we hadn’t explored much of the why and how. I realize that what I should have done is ask all the players why their characters bothered to join the uprising and what they are intending to get out of it from hereon out. Moreover, the largest problem, I realize, is that we didn’t get to creating our beliefs together as a group at the same time.
That last issue, I realize now, is the largest one that ties the first two together. Making beliefs together at the same time should have been the moment for all four of us to brainstorm what game we were going to play. The players should have written their beliefs, I should have worked with them to see how they intertwine, and together we would have made the initial story out of this. Ideally, we should have played out a single quick scene just after the first creation of beliefs, and then immediately after adjusted beliefs again to create a direction.
It’s funny, we haven’t even played our first session yet, and already I’m learning how to do better.