Mouse Guard Diaries: Delivering the Mail, Part 3

Fight at Raven’s Hollow

With a failed Pathfinder’s check, I moved to the adventure’s first plot twist.  In a home brewed adventure, the GM would have had the choice of creating a plot twist or letting the PCs succeed but gain a negative condition liked ‘Angry, Sick, Injured’.  From my understanding, the GM is encouraged to go for the most dramatically appropriate twist and is offered multiple templates and models.

This being a pre-written adventure, the failed check lead the party to seek shelter for the night in a hollowed-out  trunk (based on Baron’s survivalist skill) occupied by a big-assed Raven!  Said raven was very curious about the mail bags and decided that it wanted them for itself.

Thus was set the evening’s first conflict.  We broke out the rules book because even after reading about them 3 times, conflicts are the most complicated aspect of the game (as combat rules usually are unless you are a game named Risus).

We divided the game in 2 teams: Quentin and Daim on one side,  Baron and Robin on the other.  We then proceeded to attribute conflict goals to each team.  That’s where each side decides what they wish to achieve by winning the conflict.

We ended up fumbling with the rules here… which lead to a somewhat inconsistent conflict.  The raven’s goal was pretty straightforward:  Capture all the mailbags and fly away (hence the plot twist as it would frak the party’s mission) .   However, the 2 teams ended up choosing diverging but complementary goals.  The junior mouse (Baron/Robin) chose ‘Slow down the Raven to let Patrol Leaders escape’ while the older mice chose “Flee with the mail and hide it from the Raven”

Now I missed a very small paragraph in the rule that says ‘if teams choose different goals, run separate conflicts’.  This means I should have played out the ‘stall the bird’  conflict followed by the ‘you can’t catch us!’ one.   We ended up playing the whole thing as one team fighting the Raven while the other made a fighting retreat and the bird trying to block any escape… it was a bit disjointed but we got to learn the rules real good.

Conflicts in Mouse Guard are played in rounds of 3 actions.  Each round are planned out in advance with teams choosing all 3 actions to be performed one after the other.  Each team member are assigned specific actions (a team of 3 mice = one action each).  The actions are ‘Attack, Defend, Feint and Maneuver’ (regardless of conflict type… the abstraction is nice and clever).  Then all teams reveal Action 1 (GM first, players second), a cross-reference chart is checked and leads to some sort of dice roll (either against target number of successes or opposed to the opponent’s number of successes).

Multi-teamed conflicts are further complicated but I’ll spare you the details.

Then the GM and players describes (as a narrative) what each side plans to do.  In our case, I told players ‘describe me what you intend to do up until the point of uncertainty’ and I did the same with the bird.  Dice are then rolled and this usually leads to ‘damage’ being dealt to the some or all teams’ dispositions’ (the conflict teams’ Hit Points).  Then the GM/players narrate what happened.   Repeat for action 2 and 3 and restart the cycle until a team’s disposition reaches 0, meaning the winners reach their goals.

I’m doing the game a terrible injustice but I’d like to close this series before Santa comes and gives me that copy of Super Mario Bros Wii I bought myself.  So I’ll cut the mechanics talk short and go full narrative from now on.

Here’s what I recall from the fight. The bird charged the mice to knock them down, to gain a slight advantage… after a short faceoff with Halberd-yielding Baron, it flew outside the hollowed-out tree to catch Daim and Quentin before they ran away with the mail.  Baron, boosted by Robin, flew up the tree’s interior, climbed on top of the broken trunk and dropped on the raven’s head, impaling its halberd into the bird’s skull, knocking it out cold.

(Remember, death wasn’t on the line here… plus Mice can’t normally kill ravens, they are too high on the Animal Order, I’m serious, this is a cool concept… Mice vs Wolf = Mice paste, Mice + Science vs Wolf = uncertain).

The conflict was ended… and we were a bit confused as to how to mesh the various goals.  When a conflict is done, the winners get 100% of what they want.  The loser gets part of its goal or can inflict a condition on the winners relative to the amount of ‘damage’ it dealt to the winners.  This is done through out of character negotiations.

So in essence, the bird had been stalled and the senior mice had escaped with the mail but the bird was allowed a minor compromise.

Chatty: Okay, then as you stand around the bird, it stops faking and tries to  poke one of Daim’s bag to at least get one letter

(A later complication asked for a mice NPC to do something foolish because she didn’t get an expected letter)

Yan: I really, really don’t want to lose any mail, it’s my goal.  I’d rather be hurt!

(Yan had not yet realized how bad being hurt was)

Franky: No! I’d rather take the hit, my goal is to see to the leader’s needs before he does.

So a compromised was reached by having players invoke goals and beliefs.  Really cool.

Chatty: Okay, as the raven aggressively pokes its sharp beak toward Daim , Baron shoves the leader out of the way and gets skewered by the raven’s beak.  Appaled at the unexpected taste of mouse blood, the raven squawks in frustration and flies away.  Baron bleeding from a side wound is now injured and might be able to heal in the player turn.

(Yes, you may heal after the mission is over.  In Mouse Guard, you usually get to rest when the job is frakking done! )

End of the line

The PCs reached Gilpledge.  Before they delivered the mail, they got accosted by a reputed artisan who was a refugee from one of the cities taken over by the weasels. He asked the PCs to help him go and recover a heirloom in the abandoned city behind the border.  The artisan was willing to argue to convince them.  They said yes (!!!), after convincing Martin (Daim rolled a Persuader check) to wait for late Spring (i.e. within a few days) to start off after the mail was delivered.

This brought the adventure and the GM turn to an end.  One test, one twist/conflict… about 90 minutes.

Up next: The Player turn, and an unexpected introvert conflict!

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Mouse Guard Diaries: Delivering the Mail, Part 2

The Players

I had 4 players attending this Mouse Guard game:

• Yan: Legendary fiddler and king of crunch. Yan expects fast interaction with the game, be it Story or dice rolling.  Patience incarnate he is not.
• Franky: Our groups most eager storyteller and explorer.  Give him a new setting and story hooks and he’ll go to town with it.
• PM: Recently added to our RPG tribe, PM has long been looking for THE game that would allow him to get out of his ‘Squirrel!‘ state and explode as a storytelling evil bastard.
• Mike: Calm and, to a point, reserved. He’s halfway between the butt-kicker and casual player.

I really wanted those 4 players to participate, but more specifically I wanted Yan and Mike there.  Yan because I wanted to see if he would ‘get’ what the game was about and help me understand it.

As for Mike, I had an ulterior motive (he’s so going to kill me when he reads this).

You see, lately I’ve had the feeling that Mike isn’t quite satisfied with his game sessions.  You can see on his face that he’s slightly annoyed, bothered or unsatisfied at least once each night (He also hates that I can read him like this).  Unless I ask him (usually between games), he usually doesn’t tell me outright what he wants or what’s wrong.

I’m pretty sure I understandd why.  Mike doesn’t want to make a fuss.  He hates to be a bother and, quite likely, is our most conflict adverse player.  So instead of saying what’s not right for him, he waits it out or hopes others will notice, and he sends ‘tells’, non-verbal signals that something’s up.  (That’s my perception of it, nothing more… it’s also possible that Mike is just one of those eternally unsatisfied dudes… but I chose not to believe that)

Those who’ve played Burning Wheel before  know where I’m going with this.  You see, Burning Wheel’s motto is “Fight for what you believe in” and Mouse Guard’s is “It’s not what you fight, but what you fight for“.  If this game engine is about one thing, it’s about conflict.

I couldn’t wait to see how Mike would react to it… Mwa HA HA HA!

The Setting and the Mice

I gave a short, 5 min intro of the implied setting of Mouse Guard.  How each PC was a sentient mouse, not so much a furry than what mice would evolve into if they walked upright, developed language and tool use while retaining their mousiness.  I explained that the PCs were all in a Mouse Guard patrol, ranger-like troopers in charge of ensuring various protective and supportive services to the mouse territories.

From there we distributed the Pre-generated PCs.

Dain: Patrol Leader and Brainy McBrainy of the group. Swordsman. Played by Yan

Quentin: Another analytical Mouse Guard, Map Maker and Bowman, mentor to Robin. Played by PM

Baron: Tough Survivalist guard. Halbardier. Played by Franky

Robin: Eager Tenderpaw (Apprentice Mouse Guard) with strong artisan background. Spearmouse.  Played by Mike.

The Mission

We started the GM’s turn.  Mouse Guard has got a very peculiar play structure where the GM plays his turn (meaning the classic GM has narrative control until the Mission’s goal is met or failed) and then the Players play their turn (creating scenes of their own to meet goals and story elements).

As all Spring guard missions,the adventure started in Lockhaven, the Mouse Guard’s fortress city sitting at the center of the mouse territories. Summoned by Gwendolyn, leader of the Guard, the newly formed patrol got its new orders: Deliver several bags of mail in 4 cities, bringing them to Gilpledge, at the edge of the new, post Weasel-war border.

I then described that the 1st half of the journey, while early in Spring, was without problems because the cities near Lockhaven had tunnels and more established roads.  (That’s MG talk to say “The obstacles haven’t started yet, enjoy the scenery).

At that point I noticed that PM, whose PC goal was ‘I’ll map out our route from Lockhaven to Gilpledge’, was doodling on a piece of graph paper, making a map with towns and trees and rivers.

We were off on a good start.

The other Pathfinder game! (Big props to Mike, who handed me play notes)

Once in Sprucetuck (Science Town. Home of Daim and Quentin), I told the players that the path ahead had been damaged during the winter and that finding the way to the next city was going to be very hard.  In a world where everything is mouse sized, a tree falling on a stream is like the Space Shuttle crashing on a LA Highway during rush hour.

Now Franky, whose PC’s goal was ‘I’ll anticipate the needs of the patrol leader’, asked if he could purchase ice climbing equipment.  Now the adventure does not tell GMs to let PCs shop upfront (and apparently, neither does the game’s core assumptions).  However, the rules of dealing with obstacles (what the next scene was going to be) has a ‘gear’ section, so I ruled that it would be interesting to play with the Ressource (get something) and Circle (Get help from a NPC) abilities.

There followed a scramble with the rulebook to establish the difficulty for manufacturing one set of winter climbing gear (Quite clever and intuitive by the way).  With Sprucetuck being a science town and the 2 senior mice being natives, everyone pitched in to find good material and the city’s best equipped smithy willing to let Baron do his thing.  Success was achieved and I told them that the gear could give a mice using it a +1 D if ice climbing was needed or if someone without a relevant skill wanted to help in negotiating such an obstacle (once again, house ruling a bit).

And so the PCs set out from Sprucetuck to travel to Dorigiff and Gilpledge.  The path was hard and the weather bad.  This required a Pathfinder roll vs a target of 6 (i.e. nearly impossible, also the difficulty of going against the ‘Spring’ season).

Now the way it works, one character needs to come forward and offer to make the roll.  Depending on the gaming group’s social dynamics, this might be the first player to suggest a solution or the plan may be the result of table chatter as relayed to the GM  by the Patrol Leader (a lost art in the “My turn now” era of RPGs in my opinion).

My group is of the ‘let’s talk it out’ kind and was still very much into ‘let’s solve this rather than make a story out of this’ mode, which I’m told, is the game’s default mode of playing.  However, when they saw how many dice they got vs the 6 success needed, they knew we were going into plot twist territory.

So Quentin, armed with his trusty map and Pathfinding skill, with the other three mice using Scout, Survivalist and the Ice Climbing gear attempted find the way to the next 2 cities.

So they rolled… and failed.

Up next: Conflicts!

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