First of all, hi. I´ve posted here before, but only minor doubts, so I present myself again. I´ve played a whole year with my own group, and a couple of sessions (I think they were 14), and posted about it a complete actual play in spanish (sadly). You may read it here, at an hispanoamerican forum.
During such time, I´ve had time to think about some minor tweaks to add to the rules, and tested many of them. They´re mainly related to the turn structure.
Here it goes:
-First of all, a player suggested me to allow using traits to hinder yourself during the player´s turn. At first, it didn´t seem right to me, but I went with it with a limit: you may use traits to earn checks during the player´s turn, and you will be able to spend those checks only during your next player´s turn. Also, no more than 1 check may be obtained this way.
I think this works fine to encourage the use of some traits that are easier to use during player´s turn, as they relate to urban contexts. Obviously, this can be solved by introducing urban missions, which I´ve done many times, but it helps nonetheless to give the players more space to get checks.
-As my campaign advanced, I started to notice that, during players´ turn, some actions were chosen for the sake of story or roleplaying only, as they didn´t give tests for advancement, while others gave this benefit (any action that requires a test to be done). From the first group, specially, some actions were really important for the development of the character, like assisting to a friend´s funeral, and I felt they were overshadowed by other actions that helped advance skills or stats. What I thought to solve this is to give tests for advancement for actions of this sort that don´t test anything. Let´s say that this mouse gives a speech remembering her friend during the funeral, so he gains a test of orator, or maybe, during the funeral, he gets to know her friend´s family, so he gets a test of “that city”-wise, for example. Another possibility is to create a test out of every action, but sometimes it´d feel very artificial (I say it because I´ve tried it).
This could be a nice oportunity, also, to generate new wises and advance them.
-During one of the last sessions we played, the guard mice were trying to infiltrate inside a noble family, suspected of separatist activity. They contacted a noble in barkstone, where they assisted (with her) to a noble party as her servants. There, one of the guards (Othello, who has the instinct: always make a friend in every town) was introduced to the servants of the other noble families, and got on well with them. The guards worked well as servants, so they got an interview with the separatist family next day to see if they were appropiate to work as their bodyguards, and then be able to get information from their plans. This is the important part: after the party, some of the servants offered Othello to hang out with them until morning. By doing this, Othello could fulfill his instinct, but he´d be pretty tired for the following interview (it was an argument conflict). He got the tired condition, but it could´ve been handled as a twist also: a health test to run and don´t arrive late at the interview, or a will test to stay awake and don´t miss it, or whatever a GM makes up. I think of it as an interesting way to present the players with interesting choices to make (albeit maybe not very important): temptations or opportunities during a GM´s turn in a city environment, that may complicate further resolution of the mission (by twists and conditions). But I´m maybe toying too much with the game´s structure, as these should´ve been done in the players´ turn.
What do you think of them? All of them have been tested and they seem to work while not changing a lot the game experience. The first one, in particular, got used only two times in 8 sessions, so I think it wasn´t really necessary for my group. The second one was used many times, to the extent that players wanted to know how they advanced after a particular action in player´s turn that didn´t involve a roll. And the third one was tested only once, in our last session, and it worked out really well, I think.
Khimus