Has anyone here ever played the Burning Wheel RPG?  It's a relatively new (< 10 years old) system that I keep reading about in blogs lately.  From what I understand it uses a simple dice pool-based skill-check system, and everything I read about it says that it lends itself to character-driven campaigns.

Apparently there are a couple official campaign settings; one heavily inspired by Dune and an historical setting based on Heian-era Japan.

Anyway, it seems kind of interesting.  Does anyone have any first-hand experience with this?

Here's the link to the game's About page:
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No love for Burning Wheel!  Does that mean that this is also a bad place to ask about Empire of the Petal Throne?  The setting for EPT sounds amazing, though I don't know anything about the system.

I guess I've just been craving an off-the-beaten-path RPG and/or campaign setting lately - what about you?  Are there any games or settings you've always wanted to try but never have? 

I'll research Burning Wheel and EPT as I await the official release of Dark Sun 4E.

EPT is another kettle of fish entirely. Its about as old school as you can get. Back in the day, different settings had different rules systems. I think with either burning wheel or EPT you're more likely to get an existing group to try a game than to make a game group for those systems out of whole cloth.

I'm interested in dark sun 4e just to see how they handle the setting with all the stuff they added in. To make 4th ed they had to make some major changes in the standard setting (and forgotten realms for that matter) It will be interesting to note if they just mash all the new races etc into dark sun or just try to produce something consistent with the old setting but with 4e rules.

I actually got an old copy of Empire of the Petal Throne and read through it.  While the setting seems incredibly well thought out and cool (the guy who wrote it was a contemporary of Tolkein), the society/culture does not seem to lend itself to "adventuring" as it is incredibly rigid and caste-like.  Furthermore, I do not believe I have ever read of a setting (except maybe Darksun) where the entirety of the world outside of the cities seems geared to killing the pcs.  I mean its freaky that a plant along the road could easily kill a character you've spent three hours creating.

So final thought: cool setting to read about and maybe read in novels, but WAY too hard to actually play

Heh,

At least you get to the road for the plant to kill you (funny story about that actually..... Woad!) In the classic Sci-Fi game traveller you could have your character get killed 3/4 the way through character creation!

Was Traveller any good?  Was there a setting along with the system or was it a system set up for outerspace that you used for any setting you wanted?  Never really understood that. 

Traveller is awesome, though I've definitely lost a character during the creation process.

Character creation is REALLY intense.  Get this: you roll on a table for the attributes of your home world - technology level, landscape, climate, et cetera; these affect the skills your character possesses.

I've never actually played a game of Traveller, but I've read through my book a decent bit (my version is Mongoose Traveller which is fairly recent) and rolled a few characters.  Since then I've been dying to play.

Oh, and there is a campaign setting called the Third Imperium.  People are apparently pretty cultish about it, but I've never taken a look at it myself.

Originally traveller was to be kind of generic but had something of a standardized setting (kind of like original dnd) I never did a Third Imperium game because canon material and I dont tend to get along.

I played traveller a lot (about 25 years ago) but have the newer Mongoose system comming in the mail. I'd run a few games with some variant rules (dice pool skill checks?) once I check everything out.