GM's turn length problem, and Failure

Mouse Guard Missions
1

This game looks awesome. After pouring over it, we went and nabbed the actual comics, and they’re great stuff too. But! Questions.

For the GM’s turn - I’m not sure how I’m supposed to stretch out 2 or 3 obstacles into an hour or more of game time. The group does get some non-obstacle solving, pure roleplay time in between the tests, don’t they? The book makes it seem that such scenes occur only during the player’s turn, and that the GM’s turn is just roll-to-roll-to-roll until we’re done, just in-character.

Even with twists and such, that’s maybe… 15 minutes, it seems?

First obstacle - roll. Fail! (with roleplay, maybe 5 or 6 minutes)
Twist (same as above)
obstacle two (15 so far. Maybe 10 if it’s a conflict.)

Should I pad all that with scenes of pure roleplaying, or should I stretch it out more, or what? Not even a few more rolls seems like enough to take this past 20 minutes or so.

Should I be aiming for, maybe, a LOT of twists? How do I fill an hour? 2 hours?

  1. It seems like the game is promoting failure. It needs you to fail rolls for twists, and for checks. Is that the case? Should I be pushing everyone to succeed just a little, but then fail a lot?
2

  1. Play naturally. No padding needed. When you come to the end of a session, play again. Mouse Guard plays very quickly. I can run a complete session in an hour.

  2. The game embraces both success and failure. The trick is to break your habits of fearing failure. You don’t get what you want when you fail, but it’s still cool.

-L