Burning Wheel Praise and Design Symmetry

One thing I should make clear about the last post is that The Burning Wheel still deserves your dollar. It really is an exceptional game.

Many of its innovations (and a small number of its problems) come from something I like to call design symmetry. Design symmetry is when you try to give equal time and detail to all of the subject matter covered by a given RPG. Most games are asymmetric designs. That means that they have a few things that merit great detail; the rest is clearly secondary. D&D’s asymmetry favours dungeons crawling and combat. Dungeoneering skills are strictly delineated to allow very fine specialization between characters using Spot, Search and Listen. Little needs to be said about the emphasis on combat.

The Burning Wheel tries to impart equal detail to practically everything you’d want to do in a BW game, from debating to ranged combat (though I think the “position and loose” system is a bit bulky for what it achieves). However, the game is also good about providing simple fallbacks when you just don’t want to deal with the headache of scripted combat or debate.

This is great because it brings a common design principle out into the open. One of the problems with mainstream games is the disconnect between design principles and description. Many, many games are designed with this bilevel approach, but are short on saying, “Either use the basic task resolution system or this complex system for computer hacking (or whatever).”

This kind of symmetric design seems to have inspired some great solutions to common issues in gaming. Instincts are one great example, as is the way the game handles fantasy races. You have to wonder if this kind of thing might be a barrier to getting a game past the planning stage, but that isn’t a flaw. Not every game ought to be designed for out of the box play.