We’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons with the same group of friends since 2019. We meet monthly–or try to–and despite us all being adults trying to coordinate all our schedules especially since one of us has kids, we’ve managed to play Dungeons & Dragons all these years. We’ve gone through three or four major campaigns at this point, and we finally completed our latest adventure, which ironically, was not Dungeons & Dragons but Mouse Guard.

Mouse Guard is, on the surface, an adorable TTRPG where all of the players are mice and have roles in the aptly-named Mouse Guard. The party comprises a company of mice with roles such as Guard Captain, Patrol Leader, and Tenderpaw (the apprentices of the group), and they do their best to uphold the laws of the mousey kingdom. Below the surface, the typical/written campaign is that the group of PCs must investigate the murder of one of the ruling mice of the kingdom. Aside from a murder mystery, our characters deal with enemies from their pasts, try to figure out which side their friends are on, and deal with the natural dangers of the world, such as hawks, snakes, and torrential rainstorms.

Mouse Guard is very different from Dungeons and Dragons, and it was a delight to try. Our DM is a good friend with experience playing Mouse Guard so he was able to coach us along with anything we didn’t understand about the rules, character sheets, and the way “battles” are played out. For me, I appreciate how the character sheets are laid out. Not only do you choose your mouse’s name, rank, and where they’re from, but you can also list who their parents are, their friend, and their enemy, which is fascinatingly woven into the storyline.

Rather than a set of dice, Mouse Guard only used standard six-sided die. Rolling a one through three was a fail while four through six was a success – for example, if you were rolling to scout in a forest with an obstacle level of three, you needed at least three successful rolls. I will admit, I still am not quite sure how the battles worked. I was very glad that our other friends seemed to understand them better. Instead of choosing an attack or spell, your Mouse Guard team would either attack, defend, maneuver, or feint. The first two are rather self-explanatory, while maneuvering allowed your character to either give your team an advantage or the opposing team a disadvantage depending on how well you rolled. A feint generally represents a sneak attack, but it could be risky in that if the opposition uses the attack option, then your feint is null and void.

I still don’t completely understand the battle system, either, but I enjoyed it a lot. In Dungeons and Dragons, and the like, battles are a team effort, but every individual has their own turn. You roll for initiative to determine the turn order, and go from there. You’d patiently wait for your turn in battle to attack or support a team member, planning your move while hearing about what your friends are doing first. Sometimes, if low in initiative order, and there aren’t many enemies, your companions might defeat the enemies before you even have a chance to go. In Mouse Guard, the battles are collaborative. Each round contains three volleys of what Kris described–attacking, defending, maneuvering, or feinting. The DM chooses three moves for the enemy while the players, as a team, choose three moves and assign one to a player character. Every character has to go at least once before someone goes a second time, allowing every player a moment to shine in combat.

Depending on what each side chose depends on how the volley of combat goes. Sometimes the result will be both sides rolling independently, with each sides’ result hurting the other. Other times, the roll will be a versus, whereas one side will win the volley. Other times, one side may pick the type of move that blocks the type of move that the other side chooses, negating a roll entirely. You can do your best to plan with your fellow Mouse Guard characters, but there is an extra element of chance depending on what the DM chooses to do as well.

See, that’s part of the combat I didn’t understand. The character sheet had a little chart, but my brain has trouble comprehending it. That said, each side had combined HP called disposition that we rolled for at the start of every combat. If one side lost all their disposition, it simply meant they lost the combat, but not that they were dead or anything. I guess you could think of it like energy.

I believe this type of combat system was supposed to encourage more role-play than just doing math and counting down HP. Choices like maneuver or feint could help or hinder your side throughout the battle, and each choice could turn the tide and become plot hooks themselves. Perhaps the fight is against a rainstorm, and the weather itself chooses to “defend.” The weather beats the PCs in their rolls, and the rainstorm knocks out a bridge that would have helped the PCs reach their destination quicker. With that all said, I am glad that our DM was experienced in the game and helped us through the combat scenarios!

I thoroughly enjoyed the combat system, I just had a hard time understanding it. Luckily, my character, Rona, was a wee Tenderpaw, which means she’s at the bottom of the totem pole. She’s basically still in training. While I did pipe up with ideas from time to time, Rona mostly waited to do what she was told. Aside from the time she got distracted and wandered from the group on a side mission, but that’s another story.

Rona was great! She definitely helped to explore other storylines with her wanders, haha! My character was Clove, an older mouse who essentially kept saying, “one more mission before retiring,” was the rank of Patrol Leader, a step behind the Guard Captain. Her highest skill was healing, and did her best to give sound advice to the others while also being a little grumpy at times, like Bones from the Star Trek universe. I had a delightfully wonderful time with her!

Clove was wonderful, often helping wherever needed, and I don’t just mean with healing. Sometimes when certain people in the group had specific tasks to do, Clove would tag along with whoever to help get the various jobs done. Plus, she was also just “done” with everything. The world was going down the tubes and Clove just rolled her eyes at it. And yet, I know if she were actually retired, she wouldn’t be able to sit still.

Oh, absolutely! She wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she did retire, haha! Rona’s growth was awesome as well. She was essentially an apprentice and started the campaign off very unsure of herself, but the last session had her directing a battalion of archer mice to go against our enemies. It was wonderful to see how all of our characters grew and stayed true to themselves throughout the campaign!

Everyone had a tremendous amount of growth, and I think that’s one of the reasons Mouse Guard was such a great choice for our group. We’ve been playing together for roughly six years now and I believe this is the best role-playing we’ve all ever done. Mouse Guard is different than Dungeons and Dragons and other TTRPGs and, honestly, I thought it was going to be weird to play as a mouse. But I think I had an easier time playing Rona than I did with any of my other TTRPG characters. We’re not battling Orcs, we’re battling a snake. A rainstorm doesn’t just make us wet and cold, it hinders our progress and threatens to drown us. It was a unique perspective to role-play and it was a delight.

Agreed! We role-played fantastically! I will admit, however, that I missed the typical Dungeons and Dragons experience. I very much enjoy the epic and high fantasy themes from those campaigns. However, since giving Mouse Guard a try, I am looking forward to trying out different TTRPGs. There are so many different kinds and we’re fortunate enough that our friends are part of other groups that explore these games so they in turn can teach us!

Kris

Kris is the older sister of the pair, and has been playing video games since she was able to read. She was introduced to the gaming world mainly by her uncles with the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 consoles.

As a child, she wanted to grow up to be a teenage mutant ninja turtle, but instead she works a typical 9 to 5 office job. Much of her other time is spent pet-sitting, writing, and role-playing shenanigans in tabletop RPGs.

Rachel

Often seen as the second player, Rachel grew up watching Kris play video games before she was old enough to pick up a Nintendo controller herself. Now she only sometimes gives Kris the hard bosses to defeat.

In real life, Rachel is a full-time pet sitter and part-time storyteller. She writes game reviews for Pure Nintendo Magazine, and is working on creating her own video game.