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!
Yan says
One of the potential pitfall I see with these kind of overtly hard challenge his the risk of player not making the effort to coming up with a way to at least try.
I dunno how it works but I would factor the margin of failure in the complication that would result from a failure . You need 6 success but where short one = minor complication, you where short by 5 = major complication.
Just a random thought. 😉
ChattyDM says
What Rafe basically said in the previous post is that since there is no chance of success, let the kid with the most arrogant ‘Must prove I’m hot’ goal give it a shot. Since all players around the table know that the fun really starts with the 1st twist (as happened for us) then now’s the time to make a silly/serious story with the first “unpossible’ obstacle.
At least that’s what my developing indie streak is telling me.
🙂
Andy says
Yep, I think that’s probably the idea, because a failure means more than simply “you lose, try again or do something else”. The idea of implementing twists as negative consequences is definitely conducive to storytelling, because it adds new avenues to the story, instead of merely saying “you fail”.
It’s all about making the story more interesting, whether you succeed or fail. Remember, that’s the central rule: everything that happens should enrich the story, make it more fun to play.
Colmarr says
I’m getting a very strong vibe that the metagoal of Mouseguard is to fail entertainingly rather than succeed.
But presumably at some point you want to stop failing in order to achieve your personal goals.
I’m looking forward to hearing how those metagoals and personal goals interract.
.-= Colmarr´s last blog ..Raiders of Oakhurst; Ch 3.5 =-.
ChattyDM says
@Andy: Usually, for players who aren’t all that into active role playing (it’s not yet our acquired style, much less natural), the beauty of storytelling manifests itself after the game when we reflect on what we accomplished. MG’s strength for us lies in the engine forcing us to come with explanations and complications when things go south or good descriptions when things go as planned.
@Colmarr: The game tries real hard to do away with the “need to win with minimal use of resources” that D&D and the other adventure games I’ve known do. But as you surmise, it is about meeting the missions’ objective and secondary objectives of the party.
So yeah, getting to the ‘succeed’ part comes forward at around the mid-point of a 4 hour game. (Which is made of roughly 4-6 scenes)
Scott says
i’ve said it before, but i’m a homebrew system kinda of guy. Since purchasing mouse guard and begging borrowing and stealing from it’s engine for my own personal system i ran Pass/Fail system with 6 seperate tiers in the Pass/Fail and used it under the assumption the only Epic Fail meant the players didn’t achieve their goal at all, the five other tiers let the players achieve thier goals but with declining complications arising from whatever they were trying to achieveing.
What i’m slowly getting at is the point Chatty made at the start of these comments, along the lines of Mouse Guard really only starts after the first fail. This came as a shock to me. One adventure with my new system saw my players sore through about 4 weeks of adventure in 4 hours, they just kept passing everything no matter how hard it was. Instead of being frustrated they didn’t run into any of the cool plot twists i had planned i let myself go and ran with it. My players loved it and i did to. The next week was full of Fails and they enjoyed it too, but one of my players keeps talking about that night where they just ‘passed’ the night away and how awesome it made them feel.
While failing is crucial to any game the idea of forcing a fail to progress the story doesn’t sit well with me.
I probably read to much into chatty’s passing comment but i wanted to express my opinion.
Scott
.-= Scott´s last blog ..Nerd Watching: How to Win Friends and Dominate Minds =-.
ChattyDM says
@Scott: You’re touching a fundamental design difference between 4e and Mouse Guard.
In 4e, the formal, mechanistic rewards come in 2 forms: Treasure and XPs. However, unless you are playing with a progressive DM, access to these rewards require success in encounters/searching and quests.
4e pushes players really hard to succeed with the minimum amount of resources. Failing makes the scenes longer, pushes back quest XPs. In fact, Crane gets really passionate when he argues that you CAN’T import plot-twist failure in D&D because players have no rewards to motivate them to WANT to fail.
I’m getting ready to argue back, it’s just a question of redefining where and how rewards are given 🙂
In Mouse Guard, failures, from a mechanistic points of view, leads to more drawn out scenes where more skill rolls are made. Making skill rolls IS a reward in Mouse Guard because that’s the only way to increase skill scores (you need to pass and fail a certain number of rolls to level-up a skill)
So yes, high-level failure (i.e. getting the diamond without triggering the Death-sphere trap) is implied in basic adventure design because there’s more rewards behind it.
Scott says
@Chatty, You make some very good points there. Being a homebrewer i tend to only use what i like and some of the aspects of 4e i’ve completely ignored. Exp and Treasure being completely ignored in my system.
I level people up and certain pre determined points so they can focus on the story and not the xp of each battle so avoiding battles can become beneficial.
Treasure and rewards in my game is assigned in fairly long to describe process as it is unique to alot things.
For Example, one player wanted to explore a pond of swirling white and black liquid he failed and got sent to the Chaotic Realm for 10 years. He came back with more Wis and Str plus his Axe was now a relic of Chaos, tied directly to the elemental chaos. So for failing he got some really cool stuff.
So after all that i guess i agree with your comment was just not intimately familiar of the 4E and MG differences.
Thanks
.-= Scott´s last blog ..Nerd Watching: How to Win Friends and Dominate Minds =-.