Ditto BW, though that one I’ve played — but never run. That would be quite an experience.

As a side note, possibly it’s because I have the original printing, but I never particularly got the impression that Bunnies and Burrows was silly, quite the opposite in fact. Despite being more of a _fantasy_ medieval setting, I got much more of a gritty vibe off of it.

Creative constraints don’t have to be a bad thing, even with kids.

@Rosti – The Burning Wheel system in general is eminently driftable. I’ve written about that on the Stew.

Beliefs would be easy, as would Goals and Instincts; just tie them to a type of reward that works in your game. In D&D 4e, that might be Action Points.

The Seasons Scale would require a bit more work, as you’d have to use the twist mechanics as well. You could do it, though.

@LesInk – It depends what you want out of the game you choose to buy. They’re both great, but MG does one specific thing, whereas BW delves a bit deeper across the board, and can do many things. MG is also a bit more polished overall.

@Knight of Roses – What’s been less than ideal about your BW experiences?

@Aquatopia – Yep, that’s how it works — it’s very much intentional. Like Rafe said, in play it should cause your players to be very proactive about earning checks in the GM’s Turn.

@burning.luke – Dude, they gave me grief for two years over my running two abortive campaigns in a row. They’ve earned it.

@Scott Martin – You COULD conceal it, but I suspect that would backfire. The moment you chose (during the GM’s Turn) to explain why your players should be impeding their own efforts to earn checks, you’d have shocked players wondering why the hell you didn’t tell them that before. I vote for full disclosure.

@Matthew J. Neagley – Wow — that’s a totally different impression than the one I came away with! I see what you’re getting at in every case, though, and obviously I defer to your experience over my speculation.

I hadn’t considered the effect MG’s structured approach would have on kidlets’ natural creativity. Hrm. At the same time, I stand by my impression: I’d try MG with my daughter when she gets old enough. Maybe I’d run into the same issues, maybe not.

Anyone else tried using MG this way and run into the same kinds of problems? Anyone played RPGs with their kids and have different suggestions for how to approach MG?

@Nojo – Each “round” in a conflict would involve one roll on each side, but multiple players could contribute to that roll.

I don’t have any skin in the indie vs. traditional game — MG isn’t better or worse because it’s indie, but the fact that it’s indie is important (at least, I think so).

@deadlytoque – I haven’t played MG, but I don’t see why it’d be so tied to knowing the MG world. It seems like you could describe the Territories in just a couple of sentences and do just fine — the lore is pretty thin in the comic, too.

For example: “Your mice are intelligent, and live in a land called the Territories. There are other intelligent mice there, as well as weasels — the enemies of the mice. Lots of other animals live there, too, but they’re not smarter than normal. There are no humans, but the mice build cities inside trees, forge weapons, and live in a medieval society. You’re in the Mouse Guard, a military organization that patrols and protects the Territories.”

What else would you need to know?

… our patrol found ourselves by the sea, out on the sand. We’d strayed pretty far off-course. We suddenly realized the tide was coming in fast. The GM announced it was a chase conflict, so we set it up.

Each side has a disposition, which is like situational “HP.” The tide was basically part of the Spring season, so it had 7 dice (its Nature) to roll and the successes were added to its Nature. I think it had a disposition of 12 (5 successes + Nature 7). We were running away, something mice do very well, so one of us (the patrol leader who said “Let’s get off this beach!”) rolled his Mouse Nature, with 1d from myself and from the other player. We ended up with a disposition of 5, I think. Pretty grim!

Tide Goal: Sweep these mice out to sea!
Mice Goal: Escape to higher ground, with our gear and especially the mail (the focus of our mission) undamaged!

Now the conflict. Since the tide is one entity, the tide would act three times in a row whereas we, being three players, would each take one action. (Each team gets 3 actions per exchange, regardless of how many people are on it.) The GM picked and placed three conflict actions, hidden face-down from us. (You can write them, but I whipped up cards for quick and tactile reference.) We did the same. We chose our order: the intrepid recruit, the grizzled vet, then the valourous patrol leader.

Action 1 vs Action 1: Each team flips their first action card/reveals their first action. Our Maneuver vs the tide’s Attack. In rolling, we won by 2, so we would roll +2d on our next action (as dictated by the Maneuver action).

Action 2 vs Action 2: Our Defend vs the tide’s Feint. Crap! We couldn’t even roll! (Feint is a risky move: Attack negates it, but it negates Defend.) 5 unopposed successes and the conflict ended, because our disposition was reduced to 0.

Ouch! We didn’t even get a compromise because we didn’t touch the tide’s disposition. The tide accomplished its goal unimpeded and…

… we got washed out a bit to sea, but managed to grab hold of a rock and pull ourselves out of the water. We were all Tired (a condition) from the ordeal.

Then a sea gull spotted us……. (another twist, which was awesome. It also resulted in a player twist; ie, we lost and chose to force another twist and somewhat nullify the sea gull’s goal, which was to make a tasty snack out of one of us.)

Hope that helps some, though it may just confuse things if you don’t have the RPG.

I’ve played BW and I quite enjoy it, but I prefer MG for its streamlined conflict resolution system.

Matthew Neagly above makes a good point, though, which is that MG -as written- is fairly dependent on knowing the MG world. This totally isn’t necessary, however. If your kids want to steal from humans, then go right ahead, add humans. MG isn’t Secret of NIMH, but there’s stories there that would work just as well, and the perils are the same, so the system works just as well. On the other hand, you could just buy the MG comic and read it to your kids before you run the game. I’m sure they’ll love it. One of my fellow playtesters read it to his son, and it quickly became his favourite bedtime story (And Peterson was kind enough to do a sketch for the kid at the Calgary Comic Expo). I’ll ask him if he’s ever run the game for the little guy.