Ok so i am now the proud owner of the Mouse Guard Roleplaying game box set. I got it on Tuesday and am almost 2/3 of the way through the book. I was glancing at the recruitment section and couldn’t find how many skills the new mouse characters start with. Any help figuring this out would be greatly appreciated.
Cakewalk
in part it depends on the choices they make in recruitment. If you look at the templates, you’ll notice that sometimes the same ranked sample mice have different numbers of skills.
Try a few walk throughs of the recruitment by making a few characters of different concepts. You’ll probably find you can make a mouse with many or few skills.
You get one skill from where you were born and then you pick skills based on your rank starting in the life experience section.
Eurika!! thanks chums this is my first time using the burning wheel system so i got a bit confused
Personally, I love the recruitment process of the game because it really helps the players get to know their characters. However, some people may be leery of sitting through it, or a late arrival needing to create a character may compromise play time. Also, the GM might want/need to improvise a fast and dirty character. For instances such as this, I made this chart, to abbreviate the creation process. The values below represent the skill point total of each rank. Keep in mind that this total WILL NOT BE THE FINAL TOTAL because after skills are picked, 1 is added to each of them (see Tally on page 303). Note that these numbers also EXCLUDE wise ranks, as wises are handled after the skills tally. It is possible to generate a character using my chart that cannot mathematically exist within the confines of the recruitment chapter, but this is rare and generally any character can be revisited and justified with some creative thinking and taking advantage of the lesser-knows settlements ambiguity towards traits and professions.
Tenderpaw| Traits: 3 Skills: 12
Guardmouse| Traits: 2 Skills: 13
Patrol Guard| Traits: 2 Skills: 15
Patrol Leader| Traits: 3 Skills: 17
Guard Captain| Traits: 3 Skills: 21
P.S. GM’s! Do not show these numbers to the players, especially new ones. They will whine about not being able to be a Captain or Leader before learning the other stats of the game which help to balance this.
I’m mentioning this mostly for Cakewalk’s benefit, but there’re at least 12 fully playable characters in the Mouse Guard book, precisely for these reasons. I usually have people play at least one session with one of these before jumping into recruitment themselves. There’re also templates for guardmice of various ranks in the Denizens chapter, which are easy to adjust as needed.
I was wondering this exact question today when making a new character for my son to play. It was confusing for me because his tenderpaw was instructed to choose a skill and trait according to his town of origin. But then in the next section he was allowed to choose another two skills. I wasn’t sure if the one from his hometown counted or not. I would guess not, but I just sort of wish there was some sort of method of double checking for accuracy. I also run several PBEM games and it would sure make it easy to be able to do a simple tally and know if player’s characters were done properly. Let’s face it, some people don’t mind buffing up their characters as long as they can get away with it.
Any ideas? Is the chart posted a few posts above mine accurate? Is there any quick way to screen a character for accuracy?
I went through and totaled up all the Skill and Trait checks as well and got the same numbers except on Patrol Leader. According to my read through of the Recruitment section, I think Patrol Leaders get 18 Skill “checks”, as they get two skills for convincing as Guard Captains and two from their “Mentor” like a Tenderpaw (maybe they are using it to train the newbies then lose it after being administrative-Captain like?).
Kovan and my count are the same except for Patrol Leader, and as far as I know I have never meet Kovan to conspire. (no offense) I would say this chart is close if we can agree on the Patrol Leader skill number.
It counts. A tenderpaw will accrue three skill checks from “Where were you born?” and “Pick an area in which you’re naturally talented.”