Nicholas Hopkins okay yeah.

First off: I’d say Burning Wheel continues to be best-in-class in its various PvP procedures and solutions. This is because, as I understand it, Luke et al are hyperantagonistic players and a lot of the game grew from managing that dynamic.

In Burning Wheel, formally you always negotiate everything. They can’t necessarily negotiate completely out of a tough roll, but there’s a whole thing in place where you’re required to talk through what’s happening: here’s the intent, here’s the action I’m taking to achieve that intent, here’s the consequence for failure, here’s the die pool and how I built it, here’s what that die pool looks like in the fiction. And after: this roll will stand until something dramatic changes. That’s important too.

In Legacy and PbtA in general, move procedures are either triggered because the fictional trigger was hit (and everyone agrees that that fiction is what actually happened) or the player makes the fictional trigger and the move happens. The GM is constrained in their moves to the moves list, which in every case I can think of is so broad as to be more of an inspiration list than an actual list of constraints. But more to the point, there’s no negotiating: it’s all baked into the move.

In BW if I was about to take away a faction’s control over a hydroelectric dam, it’d all happen at the character level in the first place: this religious group meets with your elders and makes a moral plea that their great work cannot continue without the dam. (First check: is this even a reasonable request by the crusaders? Almost certainly not but … let’s say it’s been fictionally positioned that it could be.) It’d probably be a Duel of Wits. The player would have their own stakes, like get the fuck out of our territory and never come back. And there’d be all the rolls, that add up to a compromise.

It’s possible that it’d be a catastrophic fuckup, the religious group would get everything and offer no compromise. But way back at the beginning there’d be that first “okay sure, I agree to those stakes” between the GM and the player.

Legacy has these family moves that are, first of all, super abstract. Nobody’s really “making” the moves; they’re meant to represent large-scale movement that sets up zoom-in scenes. But the big difference is that there’s no negotiating: I’m spending my Treaty and I want your resource (the dam), now either you spend a Treaty to shut me up or you make the Hold Together move. Oh you rolled snake eyes? Fuck you, the dam is mine.

The whole transaction from start to finish is completely different. BW’s transaction has lots of safety built in so the players can play as hard as they want/can but they’re constantly checking in with each other and agreeing to stakes. PbtA’s transaction cares only about fictional triggers, and there’s no stopping the outcome once the move is made. That can be really powerful in terms of generating unexpected/unwanted outcomes but it’s not “safe” in the same way.