Exchange of Realities

A while back, I mentioned my experiment with Mouse Guard: in sum, a hiatus game meant to both buy me time to plan for my primary game and to give me a chance to test out a shiny new system. On the first count, it worked spectacularly well; I’ve had quite a while to get my notes in order and prepare for the confusion I plan on unleashing on my players.

On the other hand, it’s taught me a lot, most notably that while there may be groups that can make Mouse Guard work over IM, mine is not one of them. The mechanics carry a heavy emphasis on teamwork: enough so, in fact, that many rolls are near-impossible without involving as many members of the group whose skills are relevant to the roll in question as possible helping. And when you’ve got five minutes lag while each person is determining whether their skills apply or not, it adds up really quickly—particularly when the GM has an early wake-up call the following morning and half the group is three time zones ahead of the other half.

At first glance, I actually thought it would be perfect for my group. This is a game that encourages working together, that has mechanical rewards for remembering and restating what happened the session before, and where there are clear benefits from group consensus on how well a character worked. Unfortunately, this also means that if you can’t get agreement, nothing happens and everything gets bogged down. Which happened, a lot. We tended to need to save an hour for the post-session bookkeeping, and because of the pace of the game and the pace of the bookkeeping itself it tended to work better as a post-every-other-session bookkeeping exercise.

Between that, a number of badly timed absences, and the fact that the group had difficulty agreeing on plans, what I had thought to be one mission ended up lasting getting on for somewhere between a month and a half and two months in real time, slower even than my primary game and without as much of the quirky characterization that makes the pace of the latter tolerable. The original plan had been a few seasons of play, including a couple GM switches. We ended after one mission.

In addition, we gave up on the player turn/GM turn division, which in turn meant having to improvise some rules regarding checks. I’m sure it’s an interesting mechanic when you have a plan, but none of us did, so it was hard to tell where to end one turn and begin another. Never quite figured out how to rebalance for it, but the balance ended up not being necessary.

Conclusions: While it’s still a beautiful game, and I still want to try it as a player at some point, wrong group, wrong system, and/or wrong format. Your table may vary.

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