November Mausritter - Debrief
George Howard Vyse. Illustration from Lady Moreton's translation of Perez the Mouse. 1914.
I've just concluded GMing a micro-campaign of Mausritter by Isaac Williams, using The Estate. Our story ran 5 sessions and leaned heavily into the game's hex-crawling and encounter mechanics. You can find links to my detailed session reports below. I think they're worth the read.
At the end of these micro-campaigns I like to take some time to reflect on the material I was running and how I can improve for next time. This time I'll focus on Mausritter proper and save my thoughts on The Estate for another time. These thoughts don't constitute a review; I'm not putting the pressure on myself to bring them together into a coherent thesis or a final recommendation.
Playing a Mouse
Fittingly, I think the most successful aspect of Mausritter is playing a mouse in a human-scale world. The Estate came primed with locations and dungeons inside of suits of armor or hollowed out stumps, but I also found I was pretty able to freely improvise what human materials the world was made of. This has two important ramifications:
First, players audibly reacted to a good description of a scene in a way they almost never do in typical dungeon fantasy. One of our opening scenes featured a bustling mouse inn inside of a biscuit tin. Visitors were cutting off slices of a scavenged Big Mac. That just hits harder than "you find yourself in a tavern." I think moments of playful mismatch in scale like this make it easy to describe scenes in a way that are fun, memorable, and spatially coherent.
Second, much has already been said about how the framing of mouse vs. cat has different expectations than knight vs. dragon. We expect the mouse to hide, flee, or (in fables) do something clever like tie a bell around the cat's neck to avoid them. Mechanically, this plays out as a pretty extreme set of maluses when attempting to fight a bigger creature that more or less require forming a larger band of troops (domain play!) or coming up with a radical plan (adventure!). These expectations map well to those of post-OSR sandbox play. The players need to be crafty, because they are in a land of giants with only their wits and the contents of their pack to save them.
My only issue with the game's stock mouse-world was language. Rules as written, mice can communicate more or less fluently with mice and other rodents, but must test WIL to speak with other mammals. Otherwise, creatures "can't" directly communicate. This doesn't feel like a satisfying substitute for languages, though admittedly, I house-ruled this away too early to try it at the table. I want culture and community to matter at my table more than species (or, class I suppose. It also doesn't match with my Red Wall or Charlotte's Web influenced narrative expectations that animals can more or less talk with anyone except a human. That's how I ended up running at the table.
Character Mechanics
Backgrounds
The real highlight of this system was discovering your mouse's background. To do so, you roll your pips (currency) and HP and look up the result on a d66 table. A background is just a one or two word description of a job like "Kitchen Forager" and two pieces of gear. These really seemed to resonate with the players and formed the backbone of their characterization of the mice they played.
Attributes
Mausritter's three attributes were less of a hit. To start, player's roll 3d6 summing the two highest dice for each of STR, DEX, and WIL. I like the fact that this keeps stats low, ensuring that player will be scrabbling for every source of advantage, but it has the unpleasant side effect of keeping most stats kind of the same across characters while leaving capacity for some characters to be just strictly better than their peers. I think that I increasingly want a system where randomized stats arrive at the same sum or are differentiated across more axes to make it less likely that one character should never be rolling the dice.
Inventory
Inventory was a big success, but I think that was more about slots than Mausritter's lauded spatial inventory system. I think only of of my players had the tiles to do it manually. The limitation on space made players constantly decide between carrying tools, treasure, or weapons. Conditions that went in inventory did a good job feeling like a gut punch without actually killing the hyper-fragile PCs.
Features
A significant core of my group are coming from games like Dungeon World or Blades in the Dark-likes which have significant character differentiation through class features or abilities. Several of my players spoke to wanting more of that in Mausritter - some unique verbiage that gives them a special something to play towards even if their attributes are kind of middling and undifferentiated. I know this is the direction that Chris McDowall has gone with Electric and Mythic Bastionland, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a good Mausritter 2e that tried on some of those ideas.
Advancement
Advancement felt like a real stinker here. Some of this had to do with the structure of our game - troupe play with a revolving cast of players and sessions that rarely started or ended in town. As a result, Mausritter's XP system of XP-for-pips tabulated each time you return to town proved a little cumbersome. Characters only leveled in the very last session and when they did, they found the results kind of lackluster. Some more HP and a diminishing chance at stat growth didn't impress. This is the only system that I would outright hack the next time I ran Mausritter, likely calculating at end of session instead of on return to town.
Procedures of Play
Hexcrawling
Hundreds of blogposts have been dedicated to the task of describing hexcrawl systems and Mausritter uses a relatively boilerplate system. Time is measured in 6 hour watches - enough to travel from one hex to another. Encounter rolls are d6s and occur at morning and evening with a 1 being a direct encounter and a 2 being an omen. I loved this system mostly in that it served as a "loading screen" between adventure sites. It felt like the time cost of travel was present, but it rarely ate significantly into our sessions. I also never felt like I was rolling away, performing game actions that were illegible or invisible to the player, which is a personal pet peeve of mine.
This was my first time running a fully revealed, "packed" hexcrawl where we played on a small map (2 hexes radiating from the central tile) with a significant feature in every hex. This really worked nicely at mouse-scale, but also as a game flow. We sometimes breezed past a hex the players had already visited, but I basically could describe travel as the next major landmark they were encountering. I think this might fall flat in a more exploration-focused game though.
Mausritter provides an excellent array of roll tables for encountered NPCs, treasures, weather conditions, and the like. The only table I found myself really missing was one that reflect what an encountered group was doing when the players arrive. I ended up borrowing the Knave 2e table and it worked fine.
Combat
As ever, Into the Odd combat feels fast and deadly. Players more or less find out in the first round whether they are going to be able to win out or need to retreat and surrender. I think an unfortunate amount of that decision comes down to DEX rolls to act first, something the players are habitually bad at thanks to Mausritter's deflated attributes.
I've run very few combats in these micro-campaigns. I tend to err light on combat and rely heavily on reaction rolls, preferring fights to come from actual differences in goals or beliefs, but even by those standards this was sparse. We had only two fights and both ended in a matter of moments. Some of that might be different in more of a dungeon crawl than a sprawling social sandbox like we played, but some of that comes from the systems explicitly discouraging getting into fights. I want to earmark this subject for a more in-depth post in the future, because if feels like there are a lot of complex ideas entangled here ranging from how I describe traversal of spaces to combat rules to encounter and reaction rolls.
Social Mechanics
Persuasion, intimidation, and outright lying - Mausritter is like most games in the pOSR space in that it doesn't actually have any mechanics for these situations.
That's not entirely true. The reaction roll is a good starting point and Mausritter add a nice scene setting question to each (e.g. an entry looks like "6-9 | Unsure. What could win them over?"). You also have a WIL save since that attribute broadly covers "will and charisma."
Most saves emerge from situations with clearly defined consequences. When you roll DEX to avoid getting hit by a dart, we know that HP is on the line. WIL saves in social situations are murkier. I could use more guidance on what exactly the risks are beyond the person just saying no or not buying a lie. Again, I'll earmark this as a topic for a future post.
In Conclusion
I'd absolutely play more Mausritter. In fact, where we left things off with this micro-campaign, we have a clear inciting condition for another campaign. I'd also be interested to play it in the mega-dungeon format and really see how the treasure / slot / combat / condition dance operates under a little more stress.
Next time though, I want to revise the way advancement works to better fit the cadence of play at my table. This is maybe a good idea for any repeat game with a system. I'd also consider building out a set of unique features in the vein of more recent Chris McDowall games that reinforce the already strong background system. The trick would be doing that in a way that doesn't undermine the "look at your inventory, not your character sheet" ethos of Mausritter.