I’ll be GMing my first game this weekend, and I need help getting my head around twists. It seems like if a mouse fails at pathfinding, you can introduce a twist like, say, it snows.
How does that work in the game world? The characters wouldn’t see any relationship between those two events. I’m imagining the other mice being angry with the failed pathfinder. “Nice job, you did such a bad job at finding the path that it snowed.”
Am I reading this wrong?
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
That being said, remember that the patrol still gets to its destination regardless of whether the pathfinder test is passed or failed; so a failed pathfinder test, which means that the patrol doesn’t reach the next settlement before the snowstorm arrives, and therefore everyone has to test health at Ob 3 or else become sick (page 138), is a perfectly valid twist to a spring pathfinder test. The twist represents the unexpected thing that happens to them on their journey. A snake coming out of hibernation or hungry mouse bandits are valid twists as well.
If it’s late fall, winter or early spring, “It snows” is generally a good twist for any skill test. The key here is to describe the failure so the twist makes sense. “You’re out for so long, working your way down that “shortcut”, it begins to snow before you reach town. You can press on through the snow—making a Health test—or use Survivalist to try to camp out for the night.”