MOUSE GUARD: Review

BACKGROUND

The Mouse Guard RPG is a table-top role-playing game based on the eponymous comic book by David Peterson. I’ve read two of the comics myself (Fall and Winter) and enjoyed them both.

I write this review after concluding a Mouse Guard campaign that lasted 9-10 sessions over the course of about two months. The book recommends this as the approximate length of a campaign, which spans an in-game year across four seasons. I was the referee for five players, though many of our sessions had only four players due to conflicting summer schedules.

Before continuing, I want to acknowledge that we played only with the digital version of the rules. While other reviews can speak to the quality of the physical products, I will stick to our experience with the digital version. The PDF is very pretty, though.

An example of the game's beautiful artwork

SUMMARY

Players take on the role of Guard Mice belonging to the Mouse Guard. Petersen describes the Mouse Guard as:

“A selfless group of cloaked mice who keep the common mouse safe from predators, weather, and the wilderness. They patrol the Mouse Territories to allow mouse civilization not just to survive, but to thrive. The Guard has no ruling power or authority over the Mouse settlements, only in the open country between them and in their home citadel of Lockhaven.”

Each player character is defined by their Abilities and Skills (comparable to Ability Scores and Skills in other RPGs). They also have Traits (as in, character traits), Wises (specialized areas of knowledge), Beliefs, Instincts, and a host of NPCs from your character’s background. Interestingly, although other RPGs hand-wave much of that stuff as “fluff,” Mouse Guard actually provides mechanical benefits (in the form of die-roll bonuses) when players take actions related to their character’s traits, beliefs, and instincts.

With regards to resolving actions, Mouse Guard is very similar to the system of Burning Wheel (and therefore similar to Torchbearer). There’s other, better words on the internet that discuss its unique conflict resolution system, if you'd like to read about that.

Mouse Guard takes an interesting “meta” approach to gaming sessions as well, which could perhaps be described as more “heavy-handed” than other RPGs I’ve played. It almost achieves a "board game-like" quality. Rather than simply describing how to “play the game,” the rules actually divide the gathering of players (each session) into a series of steps to complete, as follows:

1.      A player provides a recap of last session

2.      The referee introduces the mission for the mice

3.      The players write individual goals their mice will try to accomplish during the session

4.      The GM’s Turn, where the mice try to accomplish the mission

5.      The Player’s Turn, where the mice have “downtime” and players dictate what they do

6.      The Post-Session Reflection, where the players provide one another with in-game mechanical rewards for good roleplaying, teamwork, etc.

In this sense, Mouse Guard sessions felt more “scripted” than other RPGs I’ve played. That’s not to say the game was “predictable” or that I knew what was going to happen each session, as the actions of the player characters and their resulting complications still drove the narrative at our table.

However, in our Dolmenwood hex crawl (for example), the players might potentially spend all session exploring a dungeon, if that’s what they chose to do. And, using traditional AD&D exploration rules, we would spend the session measuring time in 10-minute turns and declaring actions, with the occasional combat encounter or social scene.

Mouse Guard wouldn’t do that. At the beginning of each session, the referee would “assign” the shared goal of the Guard Mice. The Mice would “do the mission” for the first half of the session, and have a sort of “downtime” during the second half of the session – though this “downtime” may not play like “downtime,” depending on what the players decide to do with it.

Were we to conduct a “dungeon crawl” in Mouse Guard (like the journey through the Darkheather tunnels in Winter 1152), it would feel very different from AD&D-style exploration. During the GM’s Turn, we would abstract time and move from scene to scene as the players navigated different complications in the tunnels. Once the narrative reached a “break,” we would conclude the session with the Guard Mice making camp or something in the Players’ Turn.

While other tabletop RPGs have felt like an improvisational jazz solo, Mouse Guard has a set verse-chorus structure to its sessions that establishes a rhythm. It works, but it results in a very different “feel” that is both good and bad.

So, on to the good and bad.

GOOD THINGS

When I asked for their opinions, many of my players said they enjoyed Mouse Guard’s emphasis on role playing, compared to other games. This surprised me, as I think my players actually had less in-character conversations while playing Mouse Guard than in other games (due in part, I think, to the artificial constraints around player downtime, discussed later on).

However, my players recognized that the rules of Mouse Guard encourage you to make decisions aligned with your character’s Beliefs, Instincts, and Goals. At the end of every session, you have to reckon with all the other players about whether you actually “played your character” or not. And that’s really powerful tool to make you role-play a character, rather than just play yourself as a mouse.

Many of my players coming from Pathfinder expressed how they enjoyed the comparatively simple rules of Mouse Guard. And as a referee, I enjoyed how easy sessions were to prepare. The rules offer good guidance on how to design missions, offering four kinds of obstacles (weather, environment, mice, and animals) you mix and match to create challenges for the players. With regards to prepping, a little goes a long way. After an hour or two of thoughtful work, I had enough material for one or two entire sessions. The rules themselves actually say to not prepare too much and to leave yourself open to improvisation in reaction to the players’ actions.

I also really enjoyed the dice-rolling system the game provides. Each time you roll dice, there are three possible outcomes. If the result equal or exceeds the “obstacle” (or the target number of successes), the mouse succeeds at the task. If the result does not equal or exceed the obstacle, the referee has two options:

·         They can say the mouse succeeds, but gains a condition (ex. you successfully make it to the village, but are tired when you arrive)

·         They can introduce a twist in the story as a result of their failure (ex. because you failed your Pathfinding check, the group is now lost in the woods).

The system above does an excellent job of making each dice roll meaningful. It also encourages a “fail forward” style of play, where failed roles aren’t as simple as “not getting what you want.” Mouse Guard encourages the referee to think, “what are the consequences of failing this roll? Does it make sense for the mouse to earn a condition, or can I think of a twist that comes from this failure?”

I think this idea of success/condition/twist is perhaps the thing from this system I would most consider importing to other games.

CRITIQUES

Though I enjoyed Mouse Guard for the time we played it, I’d struggle to stretch it into a longer campaign. The advice in the book of a campaign lasting 8-12 sessions is good. While our group has played other RPG campaigns lasting more than a year, I’d see us losing interest in Mouse Guard before then.

Part of that short campaign life stems from the undifferentiated conflict resolution system. Though the Burning Wheel’s conflict system is elegant in its universality, I think it’d get repetitive with overuse. The only thing that mechanically separates a heated argument from a violent fight is the use of different skills. There’s differences in terms of the in-game fiction and narrative, of course, but the rock-paper-scissors of conflict resolution would show its limitations if we played for much longer.

This problem of homogeneity extends even further to fights. Mechanically speaking, there’s little to differentiate fighting an otter and a hawk. They both have “Nature 7,” meaning they roll the same number of dice in fights (though the hawk gets a few circumstantial bonuses from its wings and beak). If your table enjoys the tactical and strategic nature of d20 RPG combat, then Mouse Guard won’t be the system for them.

It’s also important to recognize the mechanical restraints the game imposes, which sometimes felt arbitrary. For example, the “player’s turn” is essentially where the players can dictate the pace of the game, outside the mission introduced by the referee. During the player’s turn, each player can spend a “check” to “create a scene.” The rules suggest using the scene to recover from a condition, regroup, re-equip, or engage with other mice.

Every player gets one check for free. The only way to earn additional checks is to use traits against yourself (taking a penalty to your own roll or providing a bonus to your opponent) during the GM’s Turn. It seems dissociated, to say a mouse gets to do more in their downtime because the player chose to penalize themselves during the mission.

This limit on how many "scenes" a player could create also seemed to "tie the hands" of my players, who in other games spend a lot of table-time engaging in witty, entertaining banter between their characters (which I love ❤️️).

There’s also some surprisingly complex parts of this rules system, such as “taxing” Nature (which my players never used). I sense that there’s a more mechanically simple game lurking beneath the surface of this one, waiting to be unearthed. I’d like to (one day) strip away redundancies and over-complexities from this game, though I lack the energy and time to do it at the present.

ADVICE & FORWARD-THINKING THOUGHTS

For our group, Mouse Guard fit well as a game to play between other games. I’d struggle to keep it interesting for more than 8-12 consecutive sessions, though every player seemed interested in revisiting it at some point. If your players have little interest in tactical combat and really enjoy Burning Wheel’s conflict resolution system, you’ll likely enjoy it even more than our group.

FINAL VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 (Recommended)

Interesting in concept. Like cilantro on a good salad: surprising and refreshing, but it’d get bland and lose its novelty quickly if you go overboard.