new to M.G and need some help

hello, i have been playing and running rpg’s for some time. i had a long break and recently came back.

mouse guard is really great but the system is a little differnt from what im used to.

i have a few simple questions if anyone could take the time to help me please.

how do you deal with falling? poisoning? or adverse effects like fire?

how do you uses wises? there is little discription for them and im a bit confused.

cheers

Hello,

If a mouse were climbing a tree and fell, as his GM, I might impose the Injured condition. If here were to fail a Health test to resist getting poisoned, I might give him the Sick condition (or, if it was a really strong poison, maybe both Sick & Injured), and if a poor mouse caught fire he’d surely have the Injured condition. Just remember that you should offer Obstacles for each of these instances that offer a chance to avoid being hurt. If they fail, apply the condition - or a twist. Instead of applying the Injured condition to a character that falls from a tree you could instead use a twist - maybe an owl flies by and grabs the mouse out of the air!

Wises are really easy to apply. Let’s say my mouse is making a sword and one of his friends has the skill sword-wise. My friend can offer my a helping die if he can describe a logical reason for why and how his wise is helping. You can make up new wises too. Just add “wise” to it and it is now a wise. Maybe you want your mouse to know a lot about cloaks and the history of cloaks and why guardmice wear them. Maybe he wants to know the history of each famous guardmouse’s color. Give him cloak-wise.

I think I’m right here, but correct me if I’m wrong somebody, but you can’t help yourself with your own wise.

Hope that helps!

No, you can use your own Wises to help yourself. That’s what I Am Wise is for.

Ah, how did I miss that. Page 92. Thanks.

Wises can also be used for player side narration. For instance, you can see some wolf tracks and roll Wolf-Wise, you can declare something like “These tracks look like they were marking the area as regular hunting ground. They will be back within a matter of days.” If successful, even though the GM didn’t have that as a plan, it is generally supposed to happen unless it would violate reality/genre/other important plans. How far you go with this is a matter of taste however (its a pressure from the Burning Wheel side of things that isn’t as explicitly declared in the Mouse Guard book). But if you look at what skill like Weather Watcher can do (actually change the weather!), its not a big leap.

This is interesting. I will keep this in mind.

What Serp is saying is described on page 33 of the rules.

Just apply a condition as the result of a failed roll. I’d like to know, however, what kind of situations you anticipate where these things are relevant?

well again my games harp back to fantasy, but a forest fire in summer might cause the guard to combat a blaze, any time you climb is a chance to fall, and if you play a saboutage (excuse any spelling) game poison could be an issue, or dealing with poisonous insects.

just a few ideas thats all.

but thanks for your help all

Anyway, since no one just came out and said it:

Falling: injured.
Poisoned: Sick.
Fire: Injured, Tired or Sick, depending on what’s happening.

You forgot drowning.

But, yeah, what Luke said. My point was that the players shouldn’t have to deal with burns unless combating a blaze, falling unless they’re climbing, or poison . . . I’m not sure how to poison someone in this game. It might make an interesting twist in the right situation. Initially, I didn’t think your post jived with Mouse Guard-style play, but I think you get the picture.

Umm, I did.

Oops! My apologies, sir!

There’s also some stuff about fighting fires in the Seasons chapter under Summer.

Falling I would handle as a challenge, and the result of such a fall would greatly depend on how far, and into what. Set up the Challenge, and think of the conditions of failure. In a straight, cause and effect sort of situation, you fail the challenge, you splat on the ground. But there are lots of situations where it could be “stranded on the way down, and Injured”, or “hanging on by your teeth and Tired”.

In what I have been experiencing, MG is not about rolling to save. It is about describing the narrative of a story. So instead of the Fellowship of the Ring crossing the bridge of Khazad-Dûm, and Boromir fails his check and falls to his doom, in this one he gets a small condition. Far less random, far more about creating a story again. Which works for me.

This is the idea I was trying to get at earlier.