Mouse Guard is very much supporting “story now”, yes. And of course, the game is for me, first and foremost, so you’re right, I should build it the way I want it. Thanks for reminding me 
I’m glad I don’t have to keep the discussion inside my own head, this really helps!
Cheers,
I’d had a nice long post about the whole realism thang, and then in my delay getting it to the board all my points were pretty much covered by others, and in a far more succint way.
The issues I’m picking up from our game and the boards could be summarised as…
1: We have played one real session and as such we are still finding our feet with the system, setting and our characters.
2: I think Per, that if you put forward a police procedural game with greater focus on how and why the people involved interact inside the case and beyond the office, then players are going to come to the table with assumptions. I did. I’m not saying we need to 100% accurately portray how a police investigation unfolds, but I think there should be a nod to the common (mis)perceptions on how such an investigation will be followed.
As such, my character (DC Riley) is a caricature. He’s a bitter (and perhaps quite racist and very bent) cop in an unhappy marriage who’s career is in its death-throws. He’s surrounded by young, keen coppers who are part of a new way of policing. One that Riley is out of touch with. But that is how I read the setting and the game.
3: Which leads into a reiteration of Pete and Paul’s posts. What game do you want to write/play? Your explanation above really helps narrow this vision down, and I agree with Paul that it should go into the rules. At the moment, I don’t think the rules as written set that up, and perhaps we are coming to the (virtual) table with incoherant views on what exactly we are playing.
John
Hi again, and apologies for the delay in responding, but all this marvellous feedback has given me a lot to think about.
John and Pete, you’re right of course, I need to make an effort in describing what kind of game I’m looking for. I didn’t do that in the playtest document, and it’s a valuable lesson. Joe also mentioned the lack of agreeing on style etc., which I need to nail as well.
All in all, I’m very grateful for your help so far, but I need to return to my study and work some of these things out, which of course is what playtesting is for. I hope I will be able to address all the issues thrown up here.
I have to call a halt to the ongoing playtest - even though the three of you have indicated you want to continue, I don’t think we’ll learn much more with the game text in the current draft.
I discussed a bit back and forth with Joe over email, and there’s a interesting discussion whether MG is Story Now or not, which would be interesting to have out in the open, and whether MG is the right engine for this, Not sure where to have this debate, though, here or somewhere else?
Sure thing, take some time to yourself to think.
Okay.
I’d like to read that discussion.
Here or on Story Games I guess.
Cheers
Pete
Hi, all.
Per, I’d suggest that as we have three people who were expecting to do something on Thursday with you, that’s as rare as hen’s teeth and you should exploit us. Don’t look at my questions as a roadblock. Take everything I said, keep it somewhere, and get on with running the game. Now that we got a discussion going and I understand more of where you’re coming from, I’m happy to play towards where you want to be. It’s not that sort of police procedure, it’s this.
So character generation and tone was a bit of an obstacle for me. Grand. You could spend a few weeks rewriting that or just comfortably disagreeing with me, and then something crops up in advancement or plotting down the road. Might as well see if that more or less works right now.
It’s cool. This is playtesting. If the game worked smoothly, we wouldn’t be playing at all. =)
Joe.
I don’t see how Mouse Guard is especially Story Now. In fact, I’d suggest a lot of things it does make Story Now more difficult to achieve. Here’s some comments taken from a discussion Per and I had on Facebook. Per, if you’d like me to edit the post and take anything down, lemme know.
Per: “What I’m trying to parse is: mechanically TSOY and MG are very very similar - perhaps the reward feedback cycle is instantaneous in TSOY and “after the session” in MG/BW. But fundamentally they do the same things in the same way. Even the crunch levels are close and they both have a learning curve necessary to be able to discover the handles and levers you have at your disposal. They also both fall apart if you ignore their systems.” Per then discussed how I’d dismissed my character at the end of the second session - I didn’t think I had, per se, but I understand how he felt that.
Joe: [i]"… I don’t know how I sounded, but I didn’t mean to imply my character wasn’t important. On the contrary, I want/need a character with some real meat to him in order to put him through the wringer. But I haven’t found his voice yet. Character generation helped me build a couple of interesting opposing forces in his life, but didn’t include (for example) ambitions, his approach to detective work, his relationship and history with the other PCs, and goals shared with the other PCs. Unlike, say, Shock, we also don’t have a shared theme we’re exploring. Unlike Dogs, we don’t have a clear remit. Unlike PTA, we don’t have a sense of the oncoming arc. We can work that out in play, but until we’ve touched on that, I just don’t know which way the wind blows with Kumar.
Like I said in the forums, I really build a character in-play more than in character generation - look at how I hummed and hawed over his Burden during character generation. It took me a while to see what everyone else was doing, and then pick a Burden that looked like a locus for everyone. Y’know? ‘Everyone has a price’ applies to John’s cynicism as well as Kumar’s cool distance, but I had to see John play in order to riff on him.
And MG feels pretty static to me. Unlike TSOY, I can’t ramp up skills or throw out a Burden for another one. I’m also not nearly as competent a character as characters in TSOY, so it’s a little hard to see how Kumar even got to be a detective.
And another thing, and a big reason why MG doesn’t feel story nowish to me. We’re not having a lot of conversations about what we want to do. I think you have a lot of good stuff in your head you haven’t expressed or haven’t realised you need to express - like I said, you’re a very laid back GM, which is cool. But for four people who haven’t gamed together, with a new system and a genre we’re not 100% in agreement with, it’s absolutely ok to give us more direction. You can lead us in certain directions and you can be explicit about what you want to get out of a session."[/i]
That’s a big thing - I personally don’t feel this game has to be entertaining. It’s the first jam.
Joe: [i]"In PTA, I’m pretty comfortable. I give the GM an agenda for the session, he gives it a twist to keep me guessing, and we play. In TSOY, you focus on flagged skills and Keys. In Contenders, it’s obvious what Pain vs Cash means.
But so far, we had a crime scene that was a little jolting, where we as players didn’t know what the purpose of the scene was. To show off? To gain clues? To interact? Or perhaps a better example - talking to Toby’s wife. If you and I had talked it over beforehand, and you said ‘I want to make Kumar uncomfortable with someone’ or ‘I want Kumar to have an opportunity to show off’, then it would have been above-board Story Now. As it is, I feel like I’m groping around in the dark and trying to guess at what you want to play.
And I got caught up in how unlikely it was - if ‘likely’ isn’t as important to you, but you just want to drive towards a conversation with the wife, then we could talk it over and I can help you work out a level of likely I’m comfortable with.
Ditto Pete’s racist jibe - he figured I’d made a British Asian character because I wanted something. But we didn’t have a chance to talk it over; he blindsided me, and my first reaction was ‘This isn’t likely; Pete’s being flippant’, so I backed off." [/i]
Which is totally true. And I reached for ‘that isn’t likely’ instead of the more honest ‘this is making me uncomfortable for a bunch of reasons’. Not the racism - that’s fine! But I didn’t know what you were doing, Pete. =)
Joe: [i]"I went back and reread some of Ron’s article, and I think in my posts above I am conflating improvisation and narrativism a little. Improv’s a technique I use in order to commit to Story Now, but then we didn’t do a lot of improvisation in that Sorcerer game.
I think I’m also conflating getting stuff ‘visible’ like setting up a scene in PTA and narrativism. Again, in Sorcerer, I just used Bangs and wasn’t explicit about ‘what I want from this scene’.
BUT, Sorcerer has some techniques that get everyone on the page that I think we may be lacking. I think they’re techniques that are implicit in the art and text of MG, but aren’t in DitH. So look at how Humanity focuses the players’ choices in Sorcerer and gives them a shared theme to riff on. In Mouse Guard, you’ve a tension between mouse and human nature. In DitH, there’s no such tension.
Or in Sorcerer, defining demons, Kickers and R-maps helps define the obstacles and stakes of the setting. Here’s the risk, here’s the reward. In MG, you’re the guard and what’s at risk are the mousetowns. The obstacles are all those pictures of owls, weasels or snakes. What’s the risk in DitH and who are its owls? "[/i]
There’s two other areas I think need attention.
Mysteries are a stalwart in games, and we’re probably assuming something needs solved. That will draw our attention when it maybe doesn’t need to.
Relatedly, if we’re focusing on the crime as important, that’s where the disconnect mention in previous posts about rank and advancement is coming from. All our skills are devoted to solving mysteries, but if the game isn’t about that, why are we doing it? Is increasing rank interesting enough that that’s where the advancement system should point?
AND, I then don’t think we have enough skill points to go round, as I feel I’m failing a lot of rolls. I’d cut down the skill list to more like 10-15, with ~15 skill points, so that it’s easy to have a 3 in one core skill and a sprinkling of strong secondary skills. At the moment, is the skill list primarily derived from the necessity for variety in the attack/defend/maneuver grid?
I don’t view anything above as being especially difficult to fix, y’know? Per has a vision in his head, and that’s the only thing I want to work towards - not my fun, not the story, and not the rules as written. If, for example, we need to see the ‘owls’ just as in the Wire we meet Avon and Stringer as early as we meet Bunk and McNulty, then setup could include that. Or if we need to have more things on the table that are at risk, there’s mechanics there that can do that. It’s all doable. Just depends on where Per wants to take it.
Thanks, all.
Joe.
Terrific post, really interesting. I can totally see where the disconnects are happening (although obviously I wasn’t, you know, there to observe).
I think a lot could be done on the “get everyone on the same page” front to fix many/most of the disconnects.
Tonnes of good stuff here, yes.
At he moment I don’t want to play on as is.
(Oh, here’s a very interessant [-Did-you-ever"]BE post by Luke](http://www.burningwheel.org/forum/showthread.php?10238-[BE):
I don’t know if it’s useful in terms of our playtest, but it’s
certainly discussing the challenge of PC goals that Bx games are built
around)
I’m fine with discussing where to go from here: retrofitting/adjusting
the current game, fx, and then play on from there with the same case -
altered/new characters where necessary, re-tooling
Credo/Instinct/Burden. Maybe even inventing a different test cycle.
Et cetera 
Suggestions are welcome.
But right now I’m keen to keep:
GM turn: Scenes with Obstacles that challenge PCs’
Credo/Instinct/Burden are put in front of PCs. They will fail often -
or rather: they will succeed at a price or via a diversion. Often
scenes will be a result of an in-fiction order to the PCs from a
higher ranking officer: interview him, investigate that, get me this
etc. Of course a PC can choose not to follow orders, but they will
have to own up to it afterward of course.
I’m cool with player suggestions for scenes.
Player turn: spending checks to do whatever you want your PC to
pursue: eradicate the conditions that were the price for succeeding in
the GM turn, explore private lives, second jobs, out-of-hours working
on the case, play out Credo/Instinct/Burden. Possibilities are
endless.
(right this second I’m thinking: should getting a condition earn you a
Player Turn test? What would happen?)