|
The Harnish
Germany
Duisburg
NRW
Cult of The Harnish Leader
-
Session #4 marked the end of our second mini-story arc. If you've been following the adventures of the patrol you know that last session (Session #3) ended on a cliffhanger in which Tess had walked in to a trap and was surrounded by a group of toughs along with a very sneaky fellow named Langfingers, while Thomas and Vidar were rushing to reach her. Would they reach her in time? Could she talk her way out of the trouble?
Overview & Planning
This session required no planning whatsoever - I knew that there was no real mission but rather just a big showdown with Langfingers and the gang. Whatever the outcome, I knew that the group was going to find themselves in some hot water and face repeated Mouse-related challenges.
Mission: Rescue Tess.
Plot: Group will try to rescue Tess and find out who Langfingers is working for. The plot will thicken.
Summary
The session started off with Tess being tied to a chair in the basement, surrounded by thugs and a knife-wielding Langfingers who wanted to know who she was working for and why she was asking about him. Tess decides to do what her instincts tell her to do and lie, and did she tell a whopper: She comes up with a story that involves her traveling from town to town, where she got a job as a barmaid so she could meet men. She told Langfingers that she was a girl "out to have some fun." Langfingers, obviously interested in the attractive mouse-maiden despite what the fact that she had tried to drug him, bought it hook, line, and sinker.
I didn't see this one coming (the lying yes, but not the actual lie). Tess's player rolled her Deceit skill, bringing in a bonus die for her Cunning trait for a total of 5D. The results? Five successes (all 6's)! Had she spent a Fate point she could have hit it out of the park but 5 successes was more than enough to beat Langfingers measly 3.
Cut to Mullan (whose player was back this week), who came down stairs and found out that Thomas and Vidar were still gone. She sets out to find them, and runs in to a friend who points them in the direction where he just saw them head.
This was a bit of a heavy-handed method of getting her back in to the action, but actually fits well within the rules - she made a Circles test and succeeded, allowing her to find someone who had seen the two guard members head off to the house. Incidentally, if she had failed the test, I would have still had her arrive at the house but only after all the action had started.
Meanwhile, Thomas and Vidar spent a couple of minutes outside the house debating on what approach to take. Thomas decides to knock but gets no response. He then bangs on the door with his mace but before he can even find out if anyone will answer, Vidar kicks in the door. He walks straight in to the arms of two of the thugs that were coming to see what the noise was about (the mace got their attention). A fight breaks out with Thomas and Vidar making a rather impressive team - Vidar, with his great sword and Fiery trait, is all about brutal offense. Thomas, armed with a mace and shield, is much more of a defensive fighter. The two together are pretty formidable and quickly disable the two thugs.
The players are getting a much better handle on scripting and teamwork. In this conflict, they divided up the actions with Vidar taking all the Attack (the great sword gives him +1s) and Feint actions, and Thomas handling the Defend (his shield gives him +2d) and Maneuver (the mace gives him +1d) actions. Vidar chops stuff up while Thomas typically gets very good defense results which earns back any disposition lost during Vidar's volley. It's a good method (even better later on, keep reading) but not really "broken" since if I script correctly I can Feint against Thomas and really trash him. The patrol's goal in this conflict was to subdue the gang members, with the gang members having a similar goal.
We then cut back to Tess who was now alone with Langfingers (he had sent the other thugs up the stairs when all hell broke loose). Now thoroughly convinced that she was just a ditsy she-mouse, he cuts her bonds and tells her to follow him and they'll both sneak out the back while the toughs deal with the intruders. She promptly responds by hitting him over the back of the head with a chair. Unfortunately it only dazes him and a life and death struggle. The two battle, Langfingers yelling that he was going to "cut her eye out and eat it" while she tried to fend him off with the broken chair leg.
Here the stakes got deadly: Tess's goal was to capture Langfingers. I played him mean and sleazy though: his goal was to kill her. We interspersed the rounds of their battle with the one going on upstairs to keep things in sync time-wise, as well as heighten the suspense.
Back to upstairs where Mullan was just arriving as more gang members were streaming from another house as Thomas and Vidar battled in the foyer. She joined the battle and the three of them make very short work of the poorly trained street toughs. Vidar managed to knock two out with a single blow.
Here is the teamwork that I was alluding to earlier: With Mullan present, she took on the job of Maneuvers because she has the highest Nature in the group. Vidar used Attack or Feint and Thomas stuck to Defend. When scripted properly, it's brutally effective and they made short work of all 5 thugs despite starting with less disposition.
Back to Tess, who's poor combat training is starting to show. The battle goes back and forth, with lots of maneuvering, fumbling, and traded blows. Langfingers finally gets through her defenses, stabbing her in the side and she falls to the floor. The other patrol members show up just in time to see him standing over her body as blood pools beneath it.
She actually did fairly well, knocking him down to half of his disposition and thus he had to compromise - he didn't kill her but left her badly wounded.
Vidar yells and charges Langfingers. Thomas moves in too, while Mullan pulls out her slingshot and joins the frey from the top of the stairs. Unfortunately the three's luck runs out and Langfingers actually holds his own against them, wounding Vidar and Thomas before escaping up the stairs.
This was actually a pretty fierce battle despite the short description, with Langfingers knowing his back was against the wall so he chose to kill them as his goal, while they were determined to capture him. The group tried their now proven teamwork method but I scripted very well against their technique, nailing Thomas with a Feint and Vidar with a strong attack as well. They also rolled pretty poorly for their disposition. In the end, both groups took each other down to 0 simultaneously and my proposed compromise was "Either I escape OR you capture me but I kill one of you." They went with the former and hence Langfingers got away to fight another day. However, their counter-compromise proposal was that Tess's wound looked a lot worse than it really was - while Tess wasn't really part of this conflict, I thought that was reasonable and also good for the story so I said "yes."
At this point I handed over control to the players for the Player Turn. They opted to take Tess to the healer (he's gotten a lot of work from them lately). While the healer saw to Tess's wounds, Mullan found Langfinger's trail out of town. Both Thomas and Vidar took the time to calm themselves, finally recovering from their Angry conditions. However, Thomas decided that the group needed to see the town's mayor first - he wanted to warn the mayor about the gang as well as turn over those the patrol had captured to the mayor's forces. They reached the town hall and the clerk looked at them and nervously said that he'd go find mayor Kuba for them.
I ended on that last revelation with hoots and groans from the group - Kuba is Mullan's enemy and, as it turns out, now the whole patrol's. We'll pick up their next week.
My Thoughts
This week's session was full of action, but all of it was aimed at resolving the Langfingers' mini-arc and finally reveal Kuba to be the bad guy behind the Pebblebrook conspiracy. Of course the group has no direct evidence against Kuba so I'm curious to see how their dialog with the mayor will go. My plan is to move the group towards Pebblebrook in the next season (with perhaps a "normal" mission or two along the way), before they face off the weasels.
This session has represented another turning point in that the players all did a lot better job pushing their beliefs, pursuing their goals, and letting their instincts work for or against them - the result was that they generated a lot more Fate and Persona points and thus are now a lot more capable of facing the dangers ahead.
-
George Heintzelman
United States
Setauket
New York
-
Quote:
This session has represented another turning point in that the players all did a lot better job pushing their beliefs, pursuing their goals, and letting their instincts work for or against them - the result was that they generated a lot more Fate and Persona points and thus are now a lot more capable of facing the dangers ahead.
I'm really enjoying this series of sessions. Thanks very much for posting it!
As someone who doesn't have Burning Wheel or Mouse Guard and is trying to decide whether to go for it, do you think you could call out more the places where the BITs (yeah, I know the jargon.  ) are playing a role and where Fate/Persona gets awarded in your mechanical notes? I really want to be able to see better how these are impacting the play.
-
The Harnish
Germany
Duisburg
NRW
Cult of The Harnish Leader
-
Thanks. I will make sure to highlight where BITs are being used in future posts. The players are just now really getting the hang of using them,which is quite interesting because my Burning Wheel players (all of whom are adults) are actually less savvy in using their traits and instincts on a regular basis.
Looking back, I can think of a couple of places where BITs played a role in the Mouse Guard game. Off the top of my head:
* When Thomas and Vidar were trying to find out what had happened to Tess, Vidar pulled out his whetstone and started sharpening his sword right at the bar while lending a helping die (via his Intimidation skill) to Thomas's attempt to persuade the barkeep to talk. Vidar has the instinct "Always make sure my blade is sharp" which is a colorful but not necessarily useful (mechanically) instinct and yet we realized afterward that it was a perfect match for what Vidar did. Vidar's belief (The only good weasel is a dead one) has gotten ignored so far but it's going to see a lot of use soon.
* Thomas's belief and instinct is almost too easy to nail: The thug Vidar stabbed falling through the bush and into the street was a perfect example where the sight of a mouse in need sent him running, only to find out Vidar had done the stabbing. He also rushed to Tess's aid, volunteered the group to help the stranded mice (which lead them straight in to the frog ambush), etc. His belief or instinct would be a great one to have in any group...both in the same character, and the patrol leader no less, makes for the magic.
* Tess is a little harder because her belief is a bit more adult and abstract ("You can lie to others, but be true to yourself.") - It came in though when she was trying to con Langfingers, only to turn around and try to attack him with a chair when he was trying to get away. Similarly, her instinct ("Always exploit knowledge of others") is another complex one but we've both interpreted it liberally. So it pushed her when she saw that mail from others (and thus lead to the current story arc), and she did it again in the current session when she used the knowledge that Langfingers considered himself a "lady's man" to lie to him. I give her a lot of leeway since it's a very cool, but tough instinct to use if you don't give her a little rope to hang herself.
* Mullan is perhaps the funniest set. Her belief (I have to prove myself to the guard, it's all I have) comes up constantly...and she fails over and over again. This has lead to a pretty funny situation where she's the "little tenderpaw who couldn't." Over and over she puts herself out there and then fails. Her instinct (always check the surroundings for danger) is another one that she uses a lot but fails (she has really bad luck with the rolls; she has a scout skill of 4!)
The game really is awesome, if you're willing to take your hands off the wheel and let the players, their successes and failures, and situation push the story in the direction it wants to evolve - I've never had so much fun in a game I've invested so little effort in preparation.
-
The Harnish
Germany
Duisburg
NRW
Cult of The Harnish Leader
-
I ended up expanding my explanation above about how I'm using the BITs in play into a post on my blog. If anyone is interested, you can read about it here.
-
Reko Nokkanen
Finland
Järvenpää
Uusimaa
-
Hey, really cool session reports so far. I'm a fan of the graphic novels and noticed there's an award winning RPG out too, so I just had to take a look. I'm a bit old school roleplayer so I have absolutely no idea what has happened with RPGs in the past 10 or so years - so my surprise about the mechanics of MG RPG was pretty profound. It's nothing I've seen before.
It also seems like a perfect game for me, since gone are the days where I could spend an entire weekend planning the next RPG session. Instead, MG seems to deliver in terms of storytelling and ease of planning. Of course, I'm a bit hesitant since it seems slightly linear and "gamey" due to how everything is resolved. Few questions:
There are some occasions in your game where obviously a failed roll means that the mice are ending up in a bad way instantly or soon enough. What do you think about those failed rolls where you plan on introducing the failing later on in the game - ie. When a weather check fails and you decide that it'll start raining later on in the game? Does it matter at all that the players will see a visible failed roll and know something bad is coming? Typically in other games I've played, I wouldn't tell anything about how easy or hard it is to pass a skill check, so the players just need to guess based on how well they roll and judge accordingly.
Same thing with conflict goals - The system for it is perhaps the most intimidating thing in the whole book, but I've seen nice examples of it from reading various session reports that I'm mostly concerned how the players will learn to play this "meta-game". But how do you feel about revealing the goals early on in the conflict? Like that the thugs want to capture you instead of kill you? From a traditional RPG POV, I'd like to keep the players in the dark about what the thugs really want to do.
But are all my concerns pretty null anyway? I've not played MG yet and it could be that all of these things mesh into the storytelling anyway and aren't such a big concern after all.
PS. One more thing - how many obstacles and conflicts do you have during these sessions? To me it seems like there's plenty (even though the book describes 3-4 as optimal for sessions), but are they just bigger conflicts with multiple skill checks within? Or do the amount of obstacles and conflicts even matter? Since the book talks a lot about the amount of those per session, I've begun to think that perhaps there's some game mechanic issue behind it. But that's probably my boardgaming background speaking.
Anyway, thanks for great and inspiring session reports and sorry for the long post :-)
-
|
|
|
