Mouse Guard, Anyone?

[theRogueRooster]

Also:

What? No more Tales of the Mouseguard? Say it ain't true!

Well I can't speak for Novem5er, but my group hasn't had the chance to meet again. Though with any luck we'll be meeting this weekend for another thrilling tale of adventure and intrigue. If it happens I'll post the results here.

-tRR

 

[Mark Chance]

Well I can't speak for Novem5er, but my group hasn't had the chance to meet again. Though with any luck we'll be meeting this weekend for another thrilling tale of adventure and intrigue. If it happens I'll post the results here.

-tRR

Woohoo!

 

[lin_fusan]

After a not-so-great first session of Mouse Guard, I am determined to make the next one more interesting.

But I've come across some confusion about Animal Natures and how they work in the game.

For example, I have a mission where the guard are chasing down a ferret spy. The ferret's Nature has Clever, Stealing, and Hiding, so a chase conflict makes sense, so I roll Nature to its base Nature for its starting disposition. Got that.

Now, in the case where they catch up to the ferret, I'm thinking it will fight, but fighting is nowhere in the ferret's Nature description. Does this mean that they won't fight?

Or in a fight conflict, do they not roll Nature to add to their base Nature?

In fact, how does the Nature descriptors work for animals?

Any help would be great. I really want my crew to enjoy this game, so I want to run it the way it should be run. Thanks!

 

[Novem5er]

After a not-so-great first session of Mouse Guard, I am determined to make the next one more interesting.

But I've come across some confusion about Animal Natures and how they work in the game.

For example, I have a mission where the guard are chasing down a ferret spy. The ferret's Nature has Clever, Stealing, and Hiding, so a chase conflict makes sense, so I roll Nature to its base Nature for its starting disposition. Got that.

Now, in the case where they catch up to the ferret, I'm thinking it will fight, but fighting is nowhere in the ferret's Nature description. Does this mean that they won't fight?

Or in a fight conflict, do they not roll Nature to add to their base Nature?

In fact, how does the Nature descriptors work for animals?

Any help would be great. I really want my crew to enjoy this game, so I want to run it the way it should be run. Thanks!

Hello, all! I'm back for a bit to answer questions!

lin fusan, to answer to answer your question; Weasels are NOT animals! At least, not in the way Mouse Guard treats animals. Weasels have a whole range of attributes and skills, just like mouse characters. Other animals, like foxes and ravens, only have a Nature stat, which they use for everything.

To break it down more, for a Fight conflict's starting disposition:

• Weasel rolls its Fighter skill and adds successes to it's Health attribute as a base(just like mouse characters)
• All other "animals" (i.e. except mice and weasels) roll Nature and add successes to Nature as a base.

Here's another tip. The Nature descriptor for Animals (other than mice and weasels) has NO mechanical meaning. It's just a descriptor to guide the GM for roleplaying these animals. Just use the Nature descriptors to guide what the animal acts like. The Snapping Turtle is mean, swimming, and snapping so don't put one in the middle of a forest, acting as gentle lump of shell. It should be the Godzilla of the Territories

RE: posing more Mouse Guard adventures. Sorry! I've just been busy. My group has played a few more sessions and they are a blast! Unfortunately, it looks like Mouse Guard is going to be a "side game" for our group. We all really like it, but it's missing that high fantasy pazazz! The mice characters don't really have any special abilities or complex mechanics. This is a good thing, for the game, and anything else would really destroy the feel for the game.

Mouse Guard really emphasizes a struggle versus nature, and characters overcoming their humble natures (mice) to really live in a hostile environment where you are the bottom of the food chain. Epic magic, monsters, and abilities would destroy these themes.

But sometimes you want fireballs, demons, and magic relics! So we'll play Mouse Guard again, and I'll post more when we do. For now, we're actually checking out the new Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay system for our brutal swords and sorcery.

 

[lin_fusan]

Oh! Thanks for the reply, Novem5er. This thread got so buried I hadn't realized you had answered my question.

The second session went incredibly well by comparison to my first (not having a headache helped). I was able to smoothly (relatively) transition from GM Turn to Player's Turn, show the three levels of tests (simple, versus, and conflict), and get the players to understand the importance of the negative aspects of their Traits as well as their positive aspects.

The mission was to discover what had happened to a couple of moss harvesters (a husband and wife). I had left the first session on the players finding their bodies instead of a proper end of a Player's Turn, but decided it would be a good hook to start off on.

Once they realized it was a ferret that had attacked the harvesters, the patrol quickly decided to forge westward toward Darkheather and pretty much failed every Scout and Pathfinder test before them. By the time they found the ferret's tracks, they had been sidetracked by a drowning mouse, almost drowned themselves saving him, and were Hungry and Tired.

I launched into a Chase conflict to introduce the concept to them, and due to an unlucky pick (a Feint versus an Attack), the ferret got away.

On the Player's Turn, they attempted to get back to Elmoss, recuperate, and due to more failures and sidetracks, decided to head to Lockhaven immediately to report to Gwendolyn about the ferret spy. This Pathfinder check was perhaps the only one they succeeded on!

There was a lot of discussion afterward about the game, the structure, and the mechanics. There was a lot of frustration that the group wasn't "effective", but I tried to impress upon them that the game doesn't punish "failure". (That and the fact that they were all rolling their best skills; one mouse's Pathfinder was 6, and the other mouse's Scout was also 6.)

One player had wondered why he was forced to choose a "worthless" skill like Harvester. I asked him why he didn't decide to use his checks on the Player's Turn to do some Harvesting, he replied that he didn't have enough; he was spending them to recover from conditions.

I pointed out the several times where he could have taken a hit from his trait to earn a check, to which he again iterated why he would want to fail on a test. I again mentioned that this game doesn't so much punish failure as provide opportunities to tell more story and perhaps succeed.

I'm not sure if that player was convinced about the "effectiveness" of his character. However, the other players suddenly realized that the Player's Turn provided them the opportunity to turn the narrative to their direction. One player decided that she could use her "useless" Apiarist skill to establish a hive in her hometown of Sprucetuck on the Player's Turn!

We'll see if my group will remain interested enough to keep playing.

It's interesting that this game provides an amazing amount of player control over the story (maybe not as much as Dogs in the Vineyard), yet the discussion was stuck on the idea that a character couldn't be effective unless he/she had a stat/skill maxed out.

 

[Jdvn1]

The comics are fantastic. And they have won tons of comic awards.

I've read about a third of the rpg and it seems quite good.

That's where I'm at, too.

 

[Novem5er]

lin fusan,

Nice session report and you do bring up some interesting points. I've found that my players were pretty effective in most tasks, but you're right, the game actually encourages failure from time to time.

Without failing at something, there would be no twists. In my last session, my players did exceptionally well on all their dice rolls and go through my entire session successfully. I didn't have a chance to introduce any challenges beyond the two I'd written out as the main quest.

This was fine, and the players felt successful, but the GM turn was kind of short (about an hour or less!). My players had fun, but they also commented that their successes had created lack of unexpected drama. Sometimes, the fun is in getting in trouble... and then getting back out of it

To make your players feel more or less successful on any task, just adjust the difficulty of the obstacles. Only requiring 1 or 2 successes is much easier than 3+ successes. What I often did was keep my Obstacle difficulty kind of low (1 or 2 successes), but bumped the difficulty up when I knew a character had a high skill for that challenge. By using weather and other environmental modifiers it wasn't too hard to come up with reasons why some tasks were harder than they could be...

It's raining... hard. The path before you is really muddy That's going to be Ob 3 to get through without any problems.

Hope this helps! We look forward to playing again ourselves.

 

[1auxy]

After reading this thread I went out today and used a 30% off one item coupon and picked up Mouse Guard... damn you guys! I mentioned it last week to my D&D 3.5 after discovering this thread on EN World and they thought it sounded fun, so why not!

 

[Woas]

I did the same thing you did 1auxy after reading this thread When I have some more free time later in the week I'll post some thoughts. We've had about 3 or 4 plays so far.

 

[Novem5er]

After reading this thread I went out today and used a 30% off one item coupon and picked up Mouse Guard... damn you guys! I mentioned it last week to my D&D 3.5 after discovering this thread on EN World and they thought it sounded fun, so why not!

That's awesome that more people are picking up the game! Our group really enjoyed playing it, and we will do so again. For us, it will be a great in-between game or a quick pick-up. I have the book on my shelf here and I smile every day I see those little mouse faces peering back

It's one of, it not the best, RPG books I've bought. The artwork and readability are fantastic, and it plays just as great. I actually feel regretful that MG isn't our current game (we're loving the new Warhammer Fantasy RP), but I know we'll go back to it again.

Long live the Guard!