Please don’t houserule until you’ve run the game several dozen times. You’re really going to miss out.
Next week, after I recover from PAX, I’ll write something on why A/A/A doesn’t really matter.
If the players aren’t helping each other on EVERY action within their team, then they pretty much deserve their fate! It’s not automatic, but it should be STRONGLY encouraged, expected, and normative to be doing so.
Regarding the examples above, why would you defend on the first action? I find A/M/D or A/A/D a much better strategy–you want to lose some disposition and then recover it. I think the OP is missing a few critical points due to not playing this enough RAW. 1. NPCs are supposed to script according to the fiction, so there may in fact be great opportunities to throw in Feints and advantages that are granted to them (or to the mice) to certain types of moves, mixing up the situation. 2. Good compromises suck: fight a naval battle and lose the boat? No thank you–I am really motivated to Maneuver up an advantage, disarm their +1s weapon, and Defend to restore my disposition. Trying to avoid major compromises makes your mice fight hard, as opposed to A/A/A when it is not appropriate, makes for more exchanges, and encourages critical thinking and heroism. That said, sometimes you want it quick and dirty and don’t care if you are tired or angry or if it gets done right–A/A/A is fine there.
Defending on action one is when you’re fairly certain they’re going to attack. And usually, you have more dice for defend, especially with help.
I think I mentioned it in another thread, but for my patrol this is the opposite of what we have going. I think that’s a major part of my problem. Attack can be overcome by Defend or Manuever, but only if D&M have more dice to throw than the opponent’s Attack (or are luckier). But my mice ended up with 3-4 nature to start, so they face things like mustering 8 dice on defend when they double-tap nature and have help from both teammates, against an 8 die attack.
Also, aside from differences in dice, Manuever is a better round 1 counter to an expected Attack, since you can use your excess successes to setup for the next action.
I’d love to hear it. 
Hopefully there will be some valuable insights I can make use of.
I appreciate your concern. However, perhaps because my mice are balanced wierd, the system as-is isn’t satisfying for me. I’ve already worked out the houserules I plan to use, and presented them to my players. Anyone curious to hear them can PM me.
I understand the rules as written are working great for a lot of people, but I find it important to have a clear counter to Attack (and to Manuever, and something that Defend clearly counters), that doesn’t really on dice superiority (which my players lack).
The problem is right there: you’re giving the opposition more dice than you should.
Opponent natures for a team with an average peak useful skill of 4 should be 1-2 points higher - Nature 6. Or a group of two nature 5’s, or 3 nature 4’s, or even 4 nature 3’s…
Mutiple teams of players? multiple teams of opponents (possibly teams of 1) or a single opponent with Best Team skill + mice in team.
To make a D&D analogy…
You’re throwing dragons and ogres at first levels, and then complaining about the system causing them to fail.
As I mentioned in another thread, the party has nature 3-4 almost exclusively (there is one PC out of my 7 with nature 6, who has made it clear she will avoid combat if she has the option. Being cowardly is how her nature got so high). I’m less clear on exactly how high their offense is, but I gather several of them have 5-6 dice or more in either Fighter or Hunter, after factoring in weapons, before factoring in helping dice. So if I aim the enemy’s nature at the mice’s nature scores then I will be giving them cakewalks. Defend becomes useful in reducing compromise, but victory is basically automatic if they use A/A/A, and the only way they can lose (aside from horrid dice luck) is if I catch them with some lucky feints when they try to Defend to shore up their victory.
To counter your D&D analogy, it’s more like playing low level D&D with a party of fighters (or Slayers in 4e) and noticing that their best chance of winning is to do nothing but basic attacks, and then they need to rest a lot. So then I notice the problem, give them some extra healing potions (and in 4e maybe tweak how they work a little, like making them surge-free healing but not available for purchase or crafting), and maybe given them some extra optional manuevers that are situationally better than basic attacks so that they have more choices in game that don’t amount to “Press X to die”. And leaving out monster that require specific counters that only a cleric or wizard has.
I realize that my problem is not universal, but so far the only counter has been basically “mice will have better Defend/Manuever than Attack” and the reason for that (which completely fails to apply in most conflict types) is that the nature questions have little mechanical drawback for answering “yes” to all, or at least two. But my players were presented the questions first and answered them honestly according to the concept of their character, rather than given them as mechanical options to chose between. The result is 3-4 nature almost across the board. And the one nature 6 takes very seriously that she will run and hide instead of fight, and fears weasels, wolves and owls (and darn near everything else). It seems like the standard is to say “yes” but then find convenient excuses whenever it matters why this time your mouse is going to do their Guard duty and hunt the predator that they are afraid of. That’s fine, I guess, though it doesn’t sit well with me.
Also, I personally just don’t like Attack requiring dice superiority to counter. I’d prefer there be an option you could chose that would give you an edge against an Attacking foe so that you could best them even if they have more dice than you. And that that option have a weakness as well, and so forth so that every option has a counter regardless of dice. (with the houserules I’ve settled on, if the opponent has more than twice your dice you’re pretty much screwed regardless, but I don’t plan to use anything that crazy. And it’s not like that’s a change.) The current system feels too much like “Rock, Paper, Scissors, except that Rock ties Scissors”. Even if subtle trends to give Rock more dice make that not true in many people’s games, that doesn’t escape the obvious feel. (Or the fact that you can get just as many dice in Scissors fairly easily.)
I will note that my mice beat the snake they faced, with just 3 of the 7 players participating. They just did it with essentially A/A/A, coming out with 5 of 11 dispo. Any other action they could have taken would have faired more poorly for them, and their victory was basically a result of me -not- doing A/A/A. That’s what I want to change. And without retconning their character to suddenly be skiddish or just get free nature points. I want it to be obvious what to do if you know what your opponent will do to take advantage of that knowledge. Then I can be comfortable having my animals and bad mice act according to their personalities and the mood of the situation without worrying that I’m giving the PCs an easy win by chosing weaker options. I can make it a little game: figure out a pattern that fits the NPC(s), then see how long it takes the PCs to figure them out and counter.
And because this is Mouse Guard, not D&D, I don’t necessarily have to worry about a TPK so much. If the PCs lose, it doesn’t have to mean death, if they can earn some compromise before they go down.
5 of 11 disposition? Man. That’s a big deal. I would have pointed to a player and said to him: “You are trapped in the snake’s mouth. If your fellow friends don’t rescue you, you’re done—you’ ll die of thirst”, using the example from the book, or some similar serious shit. When a character dies (or whatever) the players are going to worry about those big compromises. This is not a punishment. Is that the life of the mice is hard.
None of which is immediately relevant to the question of “what beats attack?” though. 
I believe we do have that answer though:
- Attack with different range and more dice. (Attack with just more dice is sort of a pyrrhic victory.)
- Defend with more dice.
and - Manuever with more dice.
(or in short: “more dice”)
For my game, I decided to house rule: - Manuever with at least half as many dice. (and Defend beats Manuever similarly.)
I think it will work for me and my table, but those of you whose games are running great should keep doing what you’re doing.
I also like the “Lure” action someone else mentioned, I think in another thread. But I didn’t want to add an action to the game, since I’ve got those nice pretty cards that came with the box set.
Almost anything can beat Attack, except Feint and another Attack. You don’t need more dice, also. And the only Conflict when you use Fighter are Fights. Your house rules seem to make the conflicts last longer, and there is no need for that. Attack is the main action in a Conflict, and is supposed to reduce disposition. Completely stopping an attack is supposed to be hard.
We should let this dead horse lie. Istaran has already made up his mind.
Sad, but sure looks to be true.
How long do conflicts usually last in your experience? My one data point so far is exactly 6 actions, which seems really short to me, especially with the three action sets. Is that typical, or really short?
I’m not sure my changes will actually draw out combat, taken as a whole, but then I haven’t given them all to you. (And if it does, it will be because people chose attack less often, which is kind of what I want.) Do people actually want to hear what the houserules are? Actually, I may have ultimately tuned up damage too much, we’ll see. I’d be nice to have an estimate of typical combat length so I can compare what I observe.
You don’t need a perfectly balanced, RPS-like system because, as has been pointed out, combat is about lowering disposition. Also, it would kind of rankle me a little in that it would turn combat into a matter of whether you played the “right” or “wrong” action, and trying to pick what your opponent is doing, instead of formulating a general strategy and seeing how that goes against your opponents.
Just to clarify what you’re asking, it seems that your problem is that your players feel the best way to act it A/A/A, and you want to break them out of that, right? If that’s the case, it sounds like less of a mechanics problem, and more of a player behaviour problem, in which case you’d be better to look at modifying their behaviour before you start house ruling a system that seems to work well for the majority of groups. You should have plenty of tools in your GM toolbox to deal with that – you could throw them into a non-combat conflict where their skills aren’t strong enough to steamroll their way through solely by attacking, or go all out and inflict some major compromises on them and then chuck them straight into another conflict. You said you have a player with high nature who’s a coward and tries to avoid combat if she can – that’s GM gold, at what point is she willing to overcome her cowardice to help defend her fellow guardmice?
Six actions doesn’t seem too short a conflict, but it really depends on how you play it. If you roleplaying and narrating everything (what each side is doing and how any help is being provided before rolls, and the outcomes of those actions after rolls) then that can be enough to give the conflict a good length. Obviously if your players are just going A/A/A your losing the time they’d spend deciding on their actions.
I would be curious to see the full house rules you plan to use, but I’m still not convinced they’re needed. It really seems to be a problem that only occurs when you consider the conflict system separate from the rest of the game, which is a flawed analysis.
For most conflicts in my group sessions, it lasts less than 6 actions–most, average, majority.
Now, I’ve had a few strange things happen from time to time; a recent conflict went weird enough that in three actions only one attack actually reduced an opposing Dispo and two maneuvers actually delivered -1D for impede. It was looking like a weird run of cold dice would drag out the conflict.
I’ve seen a patrol Chase a fox (who began with 14 Dispo–max possible) dropping its Dispo in less than 6 actions without losing any Dispo from their side. Another weird run of cold dice for me, and hot dice for the team made that happen.
While I want nothing to do with the houserules or the reasons for them, it seems to me that a first order of business should relate to Conflict Goals and Conflict Compromises. If those are not going well, then a second order of business might be looking over the Action Interaction for ideas of tweaking strength of choices.
After all this discussion, I still don’t understand the premise of why a GM or PC is seeking a stronger counter to Attack than Defend. If it is simply to encourage players to select other than A/A/A, I’d say that is narrative behavior–not mechanical options. For that reason I say Conflict Goals and Conflict Compromises are the area to review; those are narrative with binding mechanical results. The actions are mechanical options with a loose, abstract connection to the narrative.
When a conflict runs beyond 6 actions, I start to worry that it will get stale; I look for a way either to ‘throw the fight’ in favor of the PCs or ‘ground and pound’ the PCs in favor of a prompt conclusion.
I’ve had one-action conflicts, and 40 action conflicts (yes, 13 full turns plus one more action.
Thanks, everyone, for your comments on conflict length. It feels overly short to me, though I am thinking I may make no attempt to drag it out, and instead chain conflicts for climactic scenes if appropriate. (That is, if a conflict is suppose to be a big major deal and not something I want resolved in two sets of actions, I may break it into several consecutive conflicts, possibly of different types such as a chase then a fight or something.) Though that still gives something of a limited time to express patterns.
My problem relates entirely to the incentive structure of the action interactions. I have zero problem with the goal/compromise system as it relates to one team v one team. (I find the way the game deals with two teams on one side to place the narrative at odds with the mechanics, but that’s a whole other discussion.)
It is only the mechanical incentives which I feel, in my situation at least, leads to options other than Attack being “Push X to Die” for the PCs. For my NPCs, either options other than Attack are “Push X to Die” or they are risky but potentially useful options, that move me from auto-win (barring cold dice v hot dice) to risking a loss in order to attempt to eliminate compromise. As a GM, it’s fair for me to try for a no compromise victory but it’s not something I really want to succeed at, much like I don’t want to actually have a TPK when I run a D&D game.
The one mouse in my party with a high nature tips this a little, in that that mouse is probably better off Defending or Manuevering. If I send challenges with few enough Attack dice that she can regain dispo by Defending then she can help the party ground it to dust and get a minor/no compromise. But there was no chance they wouldn’t have beaten such a weak foe anyways.
After all this discussion, I still don’t understand the premise of why a GM or PC is seeking a stronger counter to Attack than Defend. If it is simply to encourage players to select other than A/A/A, I’d say that is narrative behavior–not mechanical options. For that reason I say Conflict Goals and Conflict Compromises are the area to review; those are narrative with binding mechanical results. The actions are mechanical options with a loose, abstract connection to the narrative.
Assume that any action other than Attack will (statistically speaking) mean that whichever side chose the action other than Attack ends with lower disposition or causes the opponent to end with higher disposition. That is, assume that if you chose an action other than Attack you are chosing, ultimately, to grant your opponent more compromise in their favor, or to get less compromise from your opponent. (Or possibly even to swing your narrow victory to being instead your narrow defeat.) That is, it is an example of “Push X to Die”. You can either Attack, and depend on the dice, or D/F/M and depend on the dice with even worse odds.
If that is the case (and I have shown that it is the case in this and/or other threads for my group in fights at least, and that avoiding it is basically dependant on building characters in a specific way) then any deviation from Attack based on narrative considerations is basically saying “based on the narrative, this creature is foolish or suicidal”. (For that matter, I would probably be inclined to use A/A/A for a suicidal zealot or the like. I could use F/F/F for that but that seems to stupidly easy when A/A/A is such a base default.)
We’ve discussed why this situation -isn’t- the case for all patrols, and it largely comes down to character creation giving Nature away cheaply, if you are willing to ignore or downplay the implications of the questions that determine starting Nature. If you just look at what you give up mechanically, you are giving up an option for traits you probably don’t want anyways. Maybe you want one of them, so you settle for a 5 nature. But chances are you won’t let the claim that you run from fights and fear predators actually stop you from doing your guard duty, ever. At best, you’ll play up how your mouse swallows hard and faces his fears, because there’s something important at stake. You’d probably cry foul if the GM simply insisted that your mouse breaks and runs instead of saving the town based on that being how you got that point of nature in the first place. But we started from concepts of our mice based in part on the idea of what a guard mouse is and should be, answered the questions based on those concepts, and then took the mechanical effects as they were, with the result that the natures are 3 3s, 3 4s, and a 6 (or thereabouts).
If you change the mechanics so that every action has it’s strengths and weaknesses, a priori (without considering the number of dice involved) then you can easily go to narrative for determining action patterns without being concerned that you’re just chosing foolishnesses, chosing to set yourself up for failure. I could, for example, have an “intelligent” foe that opens with M/M/A (assuming the PCs open with A/A/A), then always choses to counter their last set of actions. A PC party that follows a fixed script will get torn apart, but clever players can pick up the pattern and counter it effectively. I could have a brash zealot that just does A/A/A and the party can catch on and tear him apart. I could have a tricksy animal that uses a pattern like M/A/D which does well against A/A/A and just stick to it regardless of what the party does, letting them quickly slip into a counter-pattern and win.
Whatever actions I chose have strengths enough to justify them, so I can chose a pattern suitable to the foe, and let the players play clever guardmice who catch on to the patterns and turn the tables on their foes. Or if they choose poorly, the narrative unfolds from there.
Of course, all of that suggests I want conflicts to average around 3-4 sets of actions so that there is enough time for the patterns to emerge and be taken advantage of. However, at this time I will do nothing to change disposition generation or explicitly try to drag out combat longer. Hopefully making Attack no longer super-dominant will be enough. Attack is still the default best option, since it makes progress, prevents the only other option for making progress, takes on Defend in a straight dice-off (with the only risk being enemy regaining dispo, not making progress) and Manuever only sets up the next action. The actual counter with my houserules to A/A/A is M/A/A or M/M/A or the like, as Manuevering never wins on its own.
Actually, that’s part of what I like. The way to beat A/A/A isn’t a simple thing like M/M/M, it’s a more complex pattern and there are several viable options. A/M/D, for example, will trade blows, then build up while blocking the second attack, then try to recover dispo at the end. Normally, this would be foolish against A/A/A without dice superiority, but with my house rules it should work well even against a somewhat stronger foe. But M/A/M also works, or M/M/A or A/M/A, etc. Since there isn’t a single exact winning counter pattern, it’s a little harder to counter the counter.
In a few examples of combat, I should be able to exemplify the weaknesses of A/A/A and stop the PCs from using it all the time, and get them to branch out. And if neither side is doing A/A/A with any frequency, F becomes a viable option. It beats D and is effective against M after all. Anti-A/A/A strategies will always include A, but some can be beaten by F/F/F overall.
Anyways, I like my house rules because of how it transforms the set of incentives, but I realize the game works reasonably well as is with PCs with more Defend/Manuever dice than Attack dice, so I’m not urging everyone else to change.
A mouse guard does not fight with his strengths. (It has not many.) Fight despite his own weaknesses.
I’m not sure why you think that this is the case for your group. We already saw that this is not the case. Quite the opposite.
The thing is… It dosen’t matter how many dice you have in one skill or another. You don’t choose actions based on how many dice you have. You choose actions based on a fictional situation.
But I think we are not going anywhere here. Test your new rule and then tell us how it went.