So I ran my first session of MG this week and the GM’s turn went good. Did the grain peddler mission. Now I only had 2 players so keep that in mind, but the players turn only lasted about 15 mins. They only had their free check because they didn’t understand the use/ just didn’t want to hinder themselves with their traits. So what happens in this case. We had to wrap it up anyway because we started late but what needs to happen next time for the players turn to have some more umph?
Thank you in advance
Hello Dwashba, I am new here as well and so my help may not be as great as the others. My first game was played last week. When it came to the players turn I had similar results.
After handing out the rewards the players and i had a long discussion about doing more during their turn. And if they want to play more they’ll have to take risks to earn checks.
My players had a hard time succeeding at their checks. They didn’t want to hinder themselves any further. But I believe an excellent time to hinder yourself is before a check you believe you won’t pass anyway.
Hope this helps.
Templeton
How many conditions did the players have going into the players’ turn?
If you have more time set aside for your session, engage in another GM’s Turn-Players’ Turn cycle. Don’t reset any of the “per session,” stuff, have an authority figure assign the patrol a new mission that follows up on what happened in the previous one, and keep playing.
I’ve seen players struggle with earning checks for the Players’ Turn in every campaign I’ve run. It takes time for some people to get into the rhythm of it. Accelerating the cycle by playing two missions back-to-back can help with this.
Related questions:
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How did the players spend the checks they did have? Did they only test to recover from conditions? Make sure they play out these scenes, and don’t just say, “Saxon wants to recover from Angry. What’s the obstacle?”
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Who earned Fate and Persona, and for what?
Also: What were their Goals?
One of them was injured and the player did roll to get rid of it. The other player was trying to fulfill his goal of proving his worth( he was Leam) by trying to find who the grain peddler was giving the info to. He did this by a circles roll and failed. We rollplayed it a little bit but I didn’t know where to go with it. Um I don’t remember what people did for persona/fate but I think they did something… they used them though most of them anyway.
That’s an excellent oportunity. How Lieam was trying to find the traitor? Maybe someone is no happy to find this little guard sniffing around, so he’s going to try to take him to a trap. Ambush and Conflict in your door! (Another half an hour of play maybe?)
In this game it’s fine to fail a roll. The worst thing that can happen is that something new arises and that is a lot of fun. New problems, new rolls. New oportunities to use your Traits and gain more Checks. In a regular game (say, D&D or whatever) a lot of terrible things happen all the time, and only because the master wants to happen. No even a roll is needed. And what’s the problem with that? New problems, new opportunities to have fun. Here is the same, but you have something to say about it. (And be rewarded for it.)
Say to your fellow players: You are not hurting yourself through your Traits. You are trying to prove you can do it despite your weaknesses. You are trying to prove that you are a hero, and a hero confronts the problem no matter what.
If you didn’t have a twist to insert off the failed test, the player should have succeeded with a condition (“Failure,” page 68) and still found who he or she was looking for.
For our game, we were given a few goals- help build a bridge, deliver mail and help restore relations between the town and the Mouse Guard. The first two are basically GM Turn stuff, but the last one definitely made us want to get checks to handle things on the Player’s Turn. So maybe making sure there’s open-ended problems besides the mission is a good start.
The second thing is reminding players that extra actions means:
- Building relationships who could help you later (“Hey, let’s talk to Jack, the Mapmaker, I bet he can tell us a shortcut”)
- Getting additional tests, which makes it quicker to build up skills
- Getting info or tools
- or saving the Checks to use for bumping up your Traits on a mission.
We found actually, when you decide to have an argument between Guardmice, it’s a prime time to give the other side 2 dice and get 2 checks for the effort.
Chris
Right…I forgot about that, This is all really good info that I’ll keep in mind thank you to everyone.
And with Circles there is also that twist of all twists, the Enmity Clause.
Wait what is this?
Aha! Page 240. 
No problem. I’ve boned a couple players by forgetting this in the moment. The game’s much more interesting when failure leads someplace instead of being a dead end.