Burning Wheel: Difference between revisions

* [[Easy Exp]]: Subverted with skill advancement and inverted with Fate Points. Advancing skills through use seems easily exploitable but you can only advance skills by advancing the plot. As the book puts it, "No testing your magic skill by sitting around the tower setting your couch on fire." As for the inversion one way of earning Fate Points is to invoke a flaw or trait of your character in order to generate further conflict or make your, or everyone's, life harder.

* [[Experience Points]]: Of the non-traditional sort. Stats and skills, which must be used to advance, require level-dependent dice tests to improve. They use a series of dynamic experience points called "tests." Artha Points can be used to make a character's skills/stats hop to heroic or godly stature, making them another form of XP besides their in-game use.

* [[Functional Magic]]: Dwarven crafting and rune casting and Elf songs are examples, as well as human Faith. Most human spells have functional purposes such as the simple lighting of fires or causing weather effects to favorably/maliciously change.

* [[Hit and Run Tactics]]: A mobile character with a long weapon can use positioning to swoop in, strike, and flee before their enemy can land a blow. Also a viable tactic in ranged combat to keep your opponent out of range.

* [[Giant Spider]]: In the Monster Burner book one of the 'playable' monster races is the Great Spiders which are spiders of human intelligence, modeled after Shelob and the Mirkwood spiders of Tolkien's Middle-Earth, that range from the size of a medium sized dog to that of a horse (depending on breed and life-path). Most are loners (like real spiders) and the rest are either pack hunters or 'Evil'.

* Gorn: An Orc with the trait "Unrelenting Savagery" can add his Hatred dice to combat rolls if the ''player'' is able to describe how gruesomely and disturbingly he is murdering his foes so that the other players at the table grimace and squirm.

* [[Ignored Epiphany]]: The penultimate Spite check that a Dark Elf can make involves "realizing that the Paths of Spite breeds nothing but hatred and division and that this divergent path will be the end of Elvendom -- ''but walking it anyway''."

* [[Instant Expert]]: Not quite averted. You have to use a skill you don't know (with difficulty) a number of times before you learn it, and the number of times required is dependent on your stats. With high enough stats, you can learn a skill instantly just by trying it—and you'll start with a fairly high degree of mastery. In practice, virtually no characters ever have stats high enough.

* [[Magic Is Evil]]: How Dwarfs view the fate-warping Rune Casters, their own form of "mage" who are shunned from their society.

* [[Mutually Exclusive Magic]]: Human arcana, Elf songs, Dwarf rune casting and Orc Blasphemy are all race-based and cannot be learned by someone not born of their stock.

* [[Our Dwarves Are All the Same]]: Since they are based on Tolkien's dwarves they fit most of the stereotypes, to the point of having Greed as a racial trait (although it can have other focuses the Mithral or Gold).

* [[Our Elves Are Better]]: Since the setting is even more Tolkienesque than D&D the elves are one of only two playable races that are unaging do not suffer from decrepitude (Orcs are the other one, but they have their own problems). However, since abilities get harder to learn the higher they go the shorter lived races catch up quickly. They also suffer from their immortality, represented by the Grief attribute that gets worse as they witness years of betrayal and atrocity.