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Steven Robert
United States
Altadena
California
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Mouse Guard is an RPG about anthropomorphic mice, with a roughly medieval technology level, attempting to survive (and thrive) in the harsh wild – made even harsher by the vicious weasel enemies .
The game and its setting are based on the Mouse Guard comics, written and illustrated by David Petersen. The RPG is designed by Luke Crane, designer of The Burning Wheel (Revised Edition). Mouse Guard is in many respects a stripped-down and streamlined implementation of that game.
It is, in short, a beautiful book and game that pushes RPGs in some very interesting directions. How, you ask? Read on! Below you’ll find some basic info, and I’ll intersperse comments on what I find to be the great aspects of the system with a  and the less compelling aspects with  .
Disclaimer: Alas, I have not had the opportunity to play Mouse Guard, so this is a reading review. But I found the game so interesting that I wanted to share what I have learned from it with others coming from a similar “traditional” gaming background to me. I have no doubt that one could learn even more in play, and hopefully I will get that opportunity someday!
Second Disclaimer: I have not read the Mouse Guard comics (or indeed any comic in the past 15 years). But in my youth I loved Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and Watership Down – so a game about rodents doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch for me…but, as they say, your mileage may vary.
O what a beautiful book!
The Mouse Guard RPG is physically gorgeous: a lavishly illustrated, full color 320-page book with the same form factor as the hardback comic collections (roughly square, and smaller than most RPG books these days). The glossy pages have a parchment-like background. The text is laid out nicely as well, with lots of white (well, beige) space and lots of section headings.
The rules are presented in clear prose with an informal tone, and there are icons to indicate when a rule is meant specifically for the GM or players. These serve better as reminders than anything, though, since it’s hard to envision how one would actually skip the GM sections, for example – they are all highly interspersed through most of the book.
The book is currently out of print, but there is a boxed set on the way with a softcover version of the book, plus dice, minis, a map, GM screen, character sheets, cards, and an extra rules supplement. Shiny!
The System
The nuts and bolts of Mouse Guard are very straightforward. Each character has a set of attributes and skills. When a character attempts to accomplish a task (called a Test in the game), the GM determines the relevant skill or attribute and assigns a numeric difficulty (or Obstacle, abbreviated Ob) to it. The player then rolls a dice pool – with the base number of dice equal to the skill or attribute – and attempts to roll at least as many 4/5/6 as the assigned Ob. (There are also versus tests, which pit two characters against each other by each rolling their dice pools.)
What happens if a PC fails? One of two things. First, they can still succeed – but get penalized with a condition, like Angry, Hungry, or Injured, that will penalize them on future rolls. Second, the GM can assign a Twist: a change to the story that makes life more difficult for the mouse. For example, if the Test was to blaze a trail to Copperwood, failure might mean that the group stumbles upon an angry mink along the way. The point is that, if the Test is crucial for the story, there’s a simple way to move the story along but still penalize the players. If not, failure simply opens up a more interesting story. The expectation of forward – or at least sideways – progress here is a very elegant way of generating stories while allowing the die rolls to still have big consequences.
A step up in complexity – and drama – from the simple Test is a Conflict, where two “characters” oppose each other (though one of those “characters” could be Nature or Weather itself). In this case the parties agree on the stakes of the conflict and then each side rolls their Disposition based on relevant attributes; this represents their “hit points” in the conflict. The Conflict then proceeds in a series of scripted stages: each side scripts a set of three actions, which are then resolved against each other according to a matrix of interactions.
Abstract Mechanics: The great thing about this system is its abstraction: the same basic structure is used to describe fights, negotiations, and even chases or journeys. The action categories are very general (Attack, Defend, Feint, and Maneuver), so the different types of actions simply have different mappings between skills and the actions. I love the ability to use one set of rules to resolve all sorts of interesting episodes. I also like how the participants are divided into “teams” that act as single entities throughout, since this enforces teamwork very well.
Scripting: I do not like the enforced scripting of three actions at a time – to me it is simply too artificial of a construct to plan several steps ahead without being able to react to your opponents’ choices. It seems like it would work great if you have three (or possibly two) participants per team, because then each participant gets one action before moving on. But with smaller or larger teams, it becomes too “gamist” for me. That said, others like it because it forces you to come up with some sort of strategy rather than continually reacting on the fly (see this thread for some discussion).
Flexibility: One thing I really like about the unified mechanics is their flexibility. That is, if in one mission you consider the journey itself to be the centerpiece, turn it into a conflict. If the next mission also has a journey, but the centerpiece is a showdown with a weasel, the journey may just be a test. There’s nothing in the rules demanding that a combat be staged in rounds, or a chase as a seven-part skill challenge. Thus the GM can seamlessly focus attention on the central drama without doing any violence to the system.
Role-playing and roll-playing – all at the same time!
Of course, there are complications to these basic structures – like teamwork on tests and equipment. The most interesting of these allow a character to utilize rewards gained from role-playing their character.
Beliefs and Instincts: These are two of the narrative elements of a Mouse Guard (or Burning Wheel) character. A Belief is the character’s code of honor or worldview. An Instinct is what the character automatically does when danger appears. Like Aspects in FATE, these narrative elements have genuine mechanical impact on the game by how PCs are rewarded: acting with your belief or instinct grants Fate points, while acting against your belief grants a Persona point. (There are other ways to receive these points as well by being important to the group and accomplishing your goal during the mission.) These points can be spent during tests or conflicts: Fate points are spent after rolling to let dice explode, while Persona points grant extra dice before rolling. This provides two benefits: it incentivizes the PC’s personality for the player, and it gives a clear signal to the GM of what kind of conflicts the player is interested in pursuing.
Traits: Even more interesting are Traits, one or two word descriptions of a character’s personality or physical quirks. These can also be used for an advantage (granting extra dice for a test). Or, more interestingly, they can be used against a character by impeding them or granting their opponent an advantage. This earns a player “checks” which will be very important later on. Again, the incentive to accept the negative consequences of your character’s personality is very strong here, which offers great roleplaying opportunities.
One final wrinkle is the Nature score, which represents how “mouse-like” or “human-like” your character is.
Taxing and Tapping Nature: Nature can be used like other skills when it applies to “mouse-like” tasks (hiding, escaping, climbing, and foraging) but it can also be used for any other roll (if you are in a bind and don’t have the right skill) or tapped for a bonus to any roll (by spending a Persona point). But there’s a risk: if you fail, your Nature decreases (it is taxed)! Moreover, Nature is a double-edged sword: if it becomes too high, you lose the will to adventure, and if it becomes too low, you pick up a new Trait marking you as an outcast. This balance – having a powerful ability, but needing to keep it in check except when necessary – has the most potential for “heroism” in all of the game’s mechanics.
Characters and Advancement
Although the book has several pre-generated characters and recommends using them at the beginning, the final chapter contains a system for generating new guardmice. And it is fun!
Mousepaths! Character creation is a fairly simple “lifepath” system, where you follow your mouse’s life story and develop his or her statistics from those experiences. Hometown influences traits, your parents and mentor influence skills, your age influences overall abilities, etc. At some points you answer a series of questions about your mouse, and the answers determine statistics. It’s a good blend of storytelling and mechanical choice – although it is also prone to min-maxing if you don’t buy into the story aspect.
Skills: The only downside to the character system is the skill list, which includes a few very important interaction, fighting, and wilderness survival skills and a ton of “profession” skills (like Potter or Brewer). In practice, characters will have a lot of the former and one or two of the latter, even though there is such a long list! In game, those profession skills are only going to come up occasionally, so it makes me think that they could have been streamlined significantly.
Advancement: Mouse Guard stories are meant to play out over a series of missions and seasons, and one of the nice things about the game is that characters have an opportunity to grow. The method by which skills advance is very clever: to increase a skill, you must pass a number of tests equal to its current rating and fail a number of tests equal to its current rating minus one. So you learn from success and failure! This means it is very easy to improve low skills, but very difficult to improve high ones. More importantly, it provides a strong incentive for players to take risks: they have to fail occasionally in order to improve! I really like this system; the only downside is that it is a fair amount of bookkeeping.
Playing the Game
Mouse Guard is actually a highly-structured game, much more so than most other RPGs I’ve seen.
GM and Player Turns: The coolest part of this is the division of each session into two phases. In the first, the “GM’s Turn,” the PCs receive and execute (more or less) their mission. This runs like a fairly typical RPG. But the last part of each session is the “Player’s Turn,” where they explicitly take the initiative. Player’s each get to execute one test in this turn, and they earn additional tests by using their Traits to hinder themselves in the GM’s turn. In the simplest case, this turn could just be downtime to rest and recover. But the players are free to be more proactive: they could use their tests to find (or make) equipment or contacts. Or – in the best case – they can use the freedom to move the plot forward in creative ways.
There’s clearly an art to this: it seems to me that the GM’s turn should offer some degree of resolution, but open up some new problems that the players are inclined to pursue during their turn. But you have to make sure that the PCs have enough tests between them to investigate those problems (or, alternatively, you use the flexibility of the test/conflict system to move things along at an appropriate rate). So I suspect there would be a learning curve in making this work, but it’s really a nice idea to explicitly put the players in the driver’s seat and invest them even more in the world.
Wide Focus: The setup of the system also lends itself well to many different kinds of “action” – an arduous journey, a fight, war, a chase, or a negotiation, all of which get roughly equal treatment in the rules. I like the support for these kinds of stories – yes, lots of other RPGs can accommodate such things, but including explicit rules for them elevates them to an equally important part of the game.
Player v. Player: The only part I don’t like about the way the game runs is the expectation that the PCs will compete, or at least disagree, with each other and that their arguments or fights should be resolved with the dice. This is my own personal play style, but I prefer a more cooperative format. Now, the players are all fundamentally assumed to be on the same team, but – as in the comics (or any story), part of the drama is expected to come from their disagreements. So I understand why it is there; I just don’t particularly like it as part of my game.
The Rest
The book has a lot more information as well: lots of setting description, a “bestiary” of animals (and weasels, the archenemies of the mice), extensive information on how weather can influence the game, and three sample missions of varying complexity. All of this is of course helpful but not groundbreaking, so I won’t go over it in detail here.
Final Impressions
If you’ve read the full review, you’ll see that I think very highly indeed of Mouse Guard. There are several aspects that I would rate as “superb:”
 The GM/Player Turn: This is a beautiful way of engaging the players and helping them to drive the story.
 Roleplaying incentives: The reward system is elegantly structured to incentivize players to follow both their strengths AND weaknesses.
 Failure and Twists: The basic assumption that players will get where they need to be, but perhaps suffer along the way or be diverted into a more interesting story is a great way to approach story challenges.
 Drama of all kinds: The flexible, unified resolution mechanic makes chases and negotiations as interesting as fights and wars, so this is a game that lends itself to a very wide range of stories.
 Skill advancement: I also have to give another shout out to the skill advancement system - which incentivizes risk and heroic attempts!
That said, like every game, Mouse Guard is not perfect. To me, the biggest drawbacks are still relatively minor:
 Anthropomorphic Mice: If you can’t abide the thought, at least give the system a read and see what ideas you can import to your game!
 ”Gamism:” There are several elements to this game that provide rich and interesting tactical choices but don’t have good explanations outside of the game. Scripting is the one that bugs me most (though it seems like a great system if you have just the right number of players), but the reward system also falls under this category (why does acting against your belief reward you in one way while acting with it in another?).
All in all, this is one of the best games I’ve ever read, and I really believe there’s something in this system that everybody can love. Hopefully someday I’ll even get to play it!
Note: This review is my ninth entry in the Iron Reviewer series.
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Charles Donnell
United States
Houston
Texas
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Amazing review. Detailed, thorough, and still enjoyable. Keep them coming.
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William Hostman
United States
Eagle River
Alaska
Gaming in Greater Anchorage area, Alaska since 1978. Looking for Indy-willing RPG players in Eagle River (or willing to drive to Eagle River). Geekmail me if interested.
Yes, this really is what I looked like when I uploaded that avatar. Not that it's quite current anymore.
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One small issue:
If you have more than 3 players, you break up into multiple teams; you should never have a team more than 4 mice, and even then, a four mouse team has every mouse acting every action... but only one is rolling the dice. This is because one must describe the help and get a nod from the GM before the help die counts....
I ran it for a group of 5-7 players (depending on who had to work). Worked GREAT... until players got lazy about describing the actions.
vestige wrote: ”Gamism:” There are several elements to this game that provide rich and interesting tactical choices but don’t have good explanations outside of the game. Scripting is the one that bugs me most (though it seems like a great system if you have just the right number of players), [...]
See above, and, note that with 2 - 3 players, scripting ensures each acts once per turn, and helps the rest. It is very gamist, but it also creates interesting drama. It grows on people... into either "pretty nifty" or "No $&#*ing way!" With 4 players, I saw players typically go 2 teams of 2, or 1 of 3 and a lone mouse, depending upon whether there was an opponent the lone mouse could handle.
With 5, it's 3&2 almost every time, or rarely, 3-1-1....
vestige wrote: [...]but the reward system also falls under this category (why does acting against your belief reward you in one way while acting with it in another?).
The reward is for creating Drama that way, and note also - if you play against it too often, the end of year, it gets voted off. You might not get a replacement, either.
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Marshall Miller
United States
Medford
Massachusetts
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Quote: Player v. Player: The only part I don’t like about the way the game runs is the expectation that the PCs will compete, or at least disagree, with each other and that their arguments or fights should be resolved with the dice.
I too am not the biggest fan of PvP; however, a PvP for low stakes means one of you marks a pass and one marks a fail - everybody wins. I don't think the book really advocates "hard" PvP.
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The Harnish
Germany
Duisburg
NRW
Cult of The Harnish Leader
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Great review! Having run the game quite a bit, I have a few comments, along the lines of what others have said, that may add to the whole conversation.
Quote: Scripting: I do not like the enforced scripting of three actions at a time – to me it is simply too artificial of a construct to plan several steps ahead without being able to react to your opponents’ choices. It seems like it would work great if you have three (or possibly two) participants per team, because then each participant gets one action before moving on. But with smaller or larger teams, it becomes too “gamist” for me. That said, others like it because it forces you to come up with some sort of strategy rather than continually reacting on the fly (see this thread for some discussion).
The gamist bit of scripting is intentional, but ultimately can be very narrative and and enjoyable once you get the hang of it because it's describing the results of actions, not the actions themselves. The key to making it work awesome is that players need to state what they're doing to accomplish what they are scripting. So a "Feint" may involve faking to move left with your sword and then bringing your dagger in the other hand around, or pretending to stumble. Anything that involves "misleading your opponent" is translated into the "Feint". The same goes for the other 3 action choices. The scripting is just a manner of getting people to commit to a choice that can be translated in to a mechanic. It's easy for this to devolve in to simply scripting actions with no narration, which ultimately does make it very gamist, but that problem is inherent in almost any RPG - we've all played in D&D games where all someone does is say "I swing my sword, 18, did I hit?" or "I use sly flourish!" over and over again. For MG (and Burning Wheel), the narration part is very critical and is pretty much required or you don't get to do the action. This is spelled out much clearer in The Burning Wheel: Adventure Burner for Burning Wheel.
Quote: Skills: The only downside to the character system is the skill list, which includes a few very important interaction, fighting, and wilderness survival skills and a ton of “profession” skills (like Potter or Brewer). In practice, characters will have a lot of the former and one or two of the latter, even though there is such a long list! In game, those profession skills are only going to come up occasionally, so it makes me think that they could have been streamlined significantly.
It's not apparent but MG is built for long-term, campaign style play. Thus the skill list is meant to make very rich characters with very specific areas of expertise. A really good game and game master should really be bringing in all kinds of skills and players are actively encouraged to find uses for their knowledge skills as well. Burning Wheel does this much more explicitly with the FoRKs rule (which MG does not have), where you bring in whatever related skills you have that you can justify will help in the current situation. While MG lacks this (it does let you bring in -wises though!), it still has the helping die rules and that's where the skills shine. So, a mouse with brewing might bring in the skill to help a comrade win a drinking game, or spot a drugged drink, or determine the value of a grain shipment, or.... The key here, like mentioned above, is that you have to narrate how you're helping to get the bonus - no narration, no help.
Quote: Player v. Player: The only part I don’t like about the way the game runs is the expectation that the PCs will compete, or at least disagree, with each other and that their arguments or fights should be resolved with the dice. This is my own personal play style, but I prefer a more cooperative format. Now, the players are all fundamentally assumed to be on the same team, but – as in the comics (or any story), part of the drama is expected to come from their disagreements. So I understand why it is there; I just don’t particularly like it as part of my game.
PvP is very much part of the original comic and is what makes the game awesome in my experience. The characters in the original series are all cut from different pieces of cloth and are at odds with each other, but work well as a team when push comes to shove. The game is designed to encourage that as well (through beliefs, traits, and goals, plus the conflict mechanics). It's what creates these fabulous moments in which the group argues but ultimately comes together, whether out of loyalty, duty, or through the power of one character's persuasion. It's what makes the stories about the characters, rather than just about killing weasels or snakes. In the vast majority of cases PvP never involves more than heated arguments or making compromises - it seldom turns in to what a lot of people think of when they hear "PvP', that is, players killing each other.
The PvP thing also isn't forced upon the group - you can be as cooperative as you like. However, in almost all the games I've ever run (in 25+ years) players/characters seldom agree all the time and thus the system is set up to handle those situations.
Incidentally, if you want to read what I consider a great set of story-driven PvP situations, check out the session reports I wrote about the game with the after-school club (starting here) - the group was very much a team but they also were highly at odds with each other due to differing motivations and goals, and ultimately two of them ended up betraying the group as a whole which lead to a very dark, tragic ending which everyone loved.
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William Hostman
United States
Eagle River
Alaska
Gaming in Greater Anchorage area, Alaska since 1978. Looking for Indy-willing RPG players in Eagle River (or willing to drive to Eagle River). Geekmail me if interested.
Yes, this really is what I looked like when I uploaded that avatar. Not that it's quite current anymore.
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Michael's right about PVP being part of the comics...
One of the rules throughout the BWHQ designs is that, if it gives a boon to a PC, or if it's not uniformly agreed to by all affected PC's, any PC vs PC action for boon or bane requires a roll.
When PC's are at odds, let them Conflict in "Duel of Wits" mode (DoW); alternatively, render it down to a single die-roll, with everyone else giving a help die to the side they think is right.
It quickly renders things down to "Is it important enough to DoW over?" followed by, "What exactly do I want?" if it's not important enough for a DoW...
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Kris W
Canada
Winnipeg
Manitoba
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Well I'm sold even having no previous exposure to Mouse Guard or even Redwall.
As a father of a young family without a lot of time to entertain his life long hobby these days this sounds like great system, short session times mixed with a focus on story telling. The added bonus is that this is not a "dark" setting which seems to be de rigueur these days. Something that if the little ones overhear as they drift of to sleep they won't hear something that might spook them.
One question though. Is this a rule set that lends it self to min-maxing? Not that it is a huge issue with my party but I am curious.
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Marshall Miller
United States
Medford
Massachusetts
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deadsunwheel wrote: The added bonus is that this is not a "dark" setting which seems to be de rigueur these days.
The comics are desperate for sure but not dark per se. There is a certain harsh vulnerability of being a mouse with the realistic threats of the wild that contrasts with the cuteness of the art. I don't think the rules really lend themselves to mix/maxing. The emphasis on succeeding and failing at conflicts does reward skillful manipulation of the system to achieve the desired probable outcome for a given conflict, however.
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William Hostman
United States
Eagle River
Alaska
Gaming in Greater Anchorage area, Alaska since 1978. Looking for Indy-willing RPG players in Eagle River (or willing to drive to Eagle River). Geekmail me if interested.
Yes, this really is what I looked like when I uploaded that avatar. Not that it's quite current anymore.
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deadsunwheel wrote: Well I'm sold even having no previous exposure to Mouse Guard or even Redwall.
As a father of a young family without a lot of time to entertain his life long hobby these days this sounds like great system, short session times mixed with a focus on story telling. The added bonus is that this is not a "dark" setting which seems to be de rigueur these days. Something that if the little ones overhear as they drift of to sleep they won't hear something that might spook them.
One question though. Is this a rule set that lends it self to min-maxing? Not that it is a huge issue with my party but I am curious.
A certain level of min-maxing is supported, and even encouraged...
But, some built in limits are present and make übermaxing harder:
1) you can't have more than 24 skills; opening skill #25 means getting rid of one of skills #1-#24
2) hard limits on stat/skill levels are present in rules. Skills cap at 6, as do Will & Health; Resources and circles cap at 10. Nature hard caps as well at 8... if you hit 8, instant NPC... and soft caps at 6 (if 7 or 0 at end of year, retire).
The conflict rules can be min-maxed pretty easy. Fighter 6, Nature 6 is pretty munchkin. But, use it enough, and you slowly climb to Nature 7, and have to do really stupid stuff to drop it back.
Realize: Luke Crane is a munchkin turned narrativist... min-maxing is quite possible, and accounted for in his playtests.
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Matt H
United States
Morganton
North Carolina
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Fantastic review, Steven. I'm looking for a new game to introduce to my family, and Mouse Guard seems like a good choice.
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Posted Wed May 4, 2011 8:12 pm
