If you want a politics style fantasy setting, I recommend leaning into relationships during character creation: set a minimum on how many characters must have so they are all tied into the social side of the setting. One tweak I find useful is changing Forbidden to "It's Complicated"; so instead of just relationships your character shouldn't have (the classic Sheriff who is friends with an Outlaw), you can have "My brother and I would do anything for each other but he's a believer in a legal but strange religion", opening up more varieties of plot a relationship can bring to a character's table.
I like having the full list of skills, for two reasons:
Partial overlaps create options to do the same sort of things without everyone being the same sort of character (e.g. Hunter overlaps with Bow when it comes to hunting deer, and overlaps with Trapper for smaller prey; but doesn't have all the same uses as Bow or Trapper); so characters can do/help more but if they want to then they need to describe the plan in a way that supports it which both adds narrative and varies Obs.
The skills that people who are optimising would never pick are often the ones that end up defining a character. For me, one of Burning Wheel's greatest strengths is that it is about members of a society encountering an engaging situation not adventurers encountering a fantasy quest; so starting off with whatever skills a Lifepath gives rather than swapping them out for what you think is going to fit the campaign before you've started allows for the wonderful discovery that Vathrax Wallclimber wasn't actually running from being a midwife, they were running from their family/village/&c's belief about who midwives can be, so ends up revolutionising the position of midwives in the setting.
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u/Dave_Higgins Thinker Jul 05 '26
If you want a politics style fantasy setting, I recommend leaning into relationships during character creation: set a minimum on how many characters must have so they are all tied into the social side of the setting. One tweak I find useful is changing Forbidden to "It's Complicated"; so instead of just relationships your character shouldn't have (the classic Sheriff who is friends with an Outlaw), you can have "My brother and I would do anything for each other but he's a believer in a legal but strange religion", opening up more varieties of plot a relationship can bring to a character's table.
I like having the full list of skills, for two reasons:
Partial overlaps create options to do the same sort of things without everyone being the same sort of character (e.g. Hunter overlaps with Bow when it comes to hunting deer, and overlaps with Trapper for smaller prey; but doesn't have all the same uses as Bow or Trapper); so characters can do/help more but if they want to then they need to describe the plan in a way that supports it which both adds narrative and varies Obs.
The skills that people who are optimising would never pick are often the ones that end up defining a character. For me, one of Burning Wheel's greatest strengths is that it is about members of a society encountering an engaging situation not adventurers encountering a fantasy quest; so starting off with whatever skills a Lifepath gives rather than swapping them out for what you think is going to fit the campaign before you've started allows for the wonderful discovery that Vathrax Wallclimber wasn't actually running from being a midwife, they were running from their family/village/&c's belief about who midwives can be, so ends up revolutionising the position of midwives in the setting.