- It gives XP for playing, roleplaying well, rolelayingroleplaying your disads, and completion of goals.
- It gives mechanical detail for phsyicalphysical combat, and in some editions and sourcebooks, magical combat - like AD&D, it grows out of a character scale wargame.
- It makes little distinction about killing, and it's easy to accidentally kill an opponent in melee.
- The most valuable disads are those that make combat harder, such as missing limbs, followed by those that mandate or deny violence - this encourages polarized characters.
- Skill use is rewarded by skill specific experience
- needing to attempt stuff you are incapable of doing is required to advance skills and attributes - Failure isn't required, but is likely
- doing easy stuff is required for low skill levels - and worthless for high ones
- Helping someone better than you stilstill counts as the full difficulty for skill experience, so helping someone do something you can't succeed at yourself still counts for advancing that skill
- other skills that you have can provide bonus dice by linked tests or by "FoRKing" them in.
- Failure is encouraged to be made interesting
- Retries are prohibited
- Help is multiply rewarded - the helper gains experience as if tackling it alone, the helped gains a bonus die for the task.
- Playing defined beliefs and traits is rewarded with one of two types of expendable, Fate and Persona depending on which, and how.
- per session, the player most useful to the group and the player who played best, both by group vote, is rewarded with a Persona point. In groups over 2p, they have to go to different players.
- Heroics, story completion, and storyline subplot resolution can be rewarded with a 3rd expendable, Deeds
- Artha: Fate, Persona and Deeds. These are one-use expendables, easily earned.
- Fate grants extra dice for each 6 rolled, spent after rolling to "open end"
- Persona is used to add extra dice before rolling, and to survive mortal wounds.
- Deeds doubles your skill or stat for one roll, or allows rerolling all failed dice on a roll.
- dice from artha don't count for experience, so they are how you do the stuff you can't and still succeed.
- Social (Duel of Wits) and Physical (Range and Cover, Fight) combats receive mechanical detail
- Magic has plenty of mechanical detail
Mouse Guard, despite its origins in Burning Wheel, is a very different game because the reward cycles require you to nerf yourself to get freedom to pursue your own goals. The conflict system can be used for non-combat encounters, and it's great fun. I've used conflict for things like building a dam, moving a behivebeehive, and travellingtraveling across a burning grass field. When you get the same detail level for these as for a fight, it's a high chance that players will consider them the high point of the session rather than the combats, which can hurt badly. The requirement for failures to advance a skill is also interesting, in that failures always bring some consequence, and in the GM turn, that's allowed to be a more interesting encounter.
For Burning Wheel, encourage non-combattantcombatant PC's. And then simply turn them loose. The system rewards playing their beliefs quite strongly, so don't approve ones that lead to psychotic behaviors.