Maus Haus: House-Rules for Elementary Schoolers

As promised, a follow-up post on my house-rules for playing Mausritter with my elementary-age children, derived from negotiating with my kids over four sessions of our ongoing Mouse Knights campaign.  These rules are a work in progress and when we wrap our campaign in a year or so, I will update this post.  The previous post on my Mausritter principles of kid play is here.

In true OSR style, I am going to present our table rules and then comment on the rationale for the changes in italics.

These 11 table rules would likely work well for playing other Odd-like games with younger kids, like Cairn.

Haus-rule #1:  Mice don’t die. They are Guards for their village and made a magical oath.  I told them in the first session that magic has bound them to the village Guardstone, and they and their pets will resurrect at that stone if they ever die.  They won’t have their equipment, though.  

Dying is not fun, and my kids are emotional and and imaginative and spent a half hour drawing their mice and dreaming up their backstories. When we first played Hero Kids a few years ago, they didn’t even want to accept damage to their characters, crying when they got hit hard.  So how to avoid many tears, while still having stakes in combat?  This time around, I decided on auto-resurrect to help lower anxiety and emotions around bad rolls in the face of danger.  

They spent a LOT of time drawing and picking equipment at the start

So we have resurrection, sans equipment, often many hexes away in their home village.  They love their equipment and will always go back for it, and they have companions they HAVE to go rescue, etc.  They learn of dangers firsthand and then can work together on how to beat them next time.  Thus far we have had one death, and it was laughed off and learned from.

And for variety, I plan to mix and match auto-resurrection with defeat-in-leiu-of-death: like others, I find defeat is often more interesting than death, and it will get worse for them after a defeat.   Rescue attempts, ransoms, parleys–all fun situations that can result from putting mice in a hard spot, rather than bringing the game to a hard, emotional stop. 

Haus-rule #2:  More HP.  At first level, they got the HP of a second-level character (2d6).  When they hit second-level, they re-roll their HP and only increase if they roll higher.   

This house rule increases the survivability of our mice PCs and makes them more heroic.  My kids want to feel like heroes, not be defeated all the time.  With a bit more HP. they have a cushion that lets them see the Strength damage coming, and take steps to avoid it, like dodging combat.  Mausritter is plenty dangerous even with this small bump.

Haus-rule #3:  Use a shared array for attributes.  For the three basic attribute scores, roll three times for the table, and allow the players to use those numbers for any Attribute.  

My kids get seriously jealous of each other, and random dice do not give them equal attributes. So after a lot of squabbling, I rolled for the table (10,9, 9) and they could use those scores in any order for their attributes.  Problem solved.  

Haus-rule #4:  No Will damage from magic, just wild magic.  Magic dice are supposed to do Will damage on a 6: instead they trigger a roll on the Feral Magic table.

I don’t like attribute damage as a solution to making magic costly.  If you want players to use magic regularly, don’t over-penalize them for using it by damaging their characters.  I feel it’s far better for magic to be unpredictable and risky: that makes magic fun and exciting and a touch fear-inducing, the way magic should be for kids.  The Feral Magic table by Hugh Lashbrooke has few truly negative outcomes and much potential for hijinks: it’s wonderful and free.  My daughter once cast a Heal spell, rolled wild, feral magicked a giant sphere of darkness, then my son used that darkness to secretly sink a competing ship.  It was a great moment.  

Haus-rule #5:  Additions: more birth signs, coats, species to play.  At character creation, they can roll on the Expanded Birth Signs table from the Hansen Expansion and choose from the dispositions and coat patterns available there and in the main book.  I also added in playable species from Ferntree Hollow and generated a Hedgehog character from the “monster” listings in the Hansen Expansion (special power: roll forward to do d4 blast damage in a line).   

There’s just the right amount of crunch in Mausritter for easy creation: rules, but not too many of them.  The kids love their star signs and coat patterns, and our party is a fairy mouse, a mouse, and a DM-PC hedgehog.

  

Haus-rule #6:  Blast damage.  Following Cairn, blast damage is when a spell or attack hurts all creatures within its range.  It can damage warband-scale creatures. 

Adding rules and items from other Odd-like games (Cairn, Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, Mythic Bastionland, etc.) is a snap. 

Haus-rule #7:  PCs benefit from a declared specialty.  Mausritter is classless, but my kids want to be special and good at the things their characters care about.  So they decided to declare specialties, and I limited them to one new speciality per level: my son’s mouse is an inventor and sneak, my daughter’s fairy mouse is an enchanter and a mom, and my hedgehog is good with people.  Specialties come with extra items (e.g., a packrat to carry mouse-kids (with extra inventory slots)), special abilities (e.g., being able to invent new weapons from existing materials), or favorable outcomes (not advantage, but they are less likely to fail, or they can roll to sneak in more situations).  

A fully class-less game is good fun, but my kids wanted their PCs to start out knowing and having things, diagetically (in-game), and can learn and make more.  They created backstories and came up with (and keep coming up with) non-traditional ‘skills’ their mice have learned.  I limit the power level of their additions, but the rule of cool applies.  

So far, their specialty-derived items add inventory space, or are weapons that do standard damage and cause one extra effect (e.g., tripping or a minor enchantment, at a cost of inventory space).  Cairn 2e has great ideas for backgrounds, and the d100 lists of minor magic items from d4caltrops are great creative inspiration (I make suggestions, they riff, and vice versa).  

Principles of fairness and niche separation also apply: if one kid is seen as being too powerful, the other one complains or tries to copy their powers (triggering jealous bickering).  So I am clear now that each one has a specialty the other shouldn’t copy, and that I want each child to get to do equally cool stuff.  

Haus-rule #8:  Crafting is easy.  Roughly following the book, I charge a flat fee of 500 pips for construction.  Crafting major items takes downtime and either pips or the right materials (quest hooks).  But minor items, including minor enchanted items and single-use powers, are easy to make for PCs with the right backgrounds, only taking an hour or two and 50 pips.  All items have a benefit and a cost: my daughter’s needle wand stores a few spells after major crafting, but she must still carry one tablet to power the wand.

My kids like to invent new items and add on to their homes and home base (a boat). Last session, my kids spent over an hour re-drawing their boat and the additions they made.  They made many additions, and a flat fee simplified the process for me.  Limiting their crafting is like refereeing a game of Calvinball. To keep things realistic, I tried to impose downtime and high money costs for crafting, but that was voted down in an emotional appeal. 

Daughter: “Dad, why can’t we make what we want, without you charging us too much?  This game is no fun!”

Son: “Dad, I think what she is trying to say is that your costs are keeping us from making cool stuff.”

Daughter: ‘Yes, I like this game but the fees are not fair.  Why do you keep charging us and saying things take a week to make?”

Me: “Well kids I want the game to be realistic, so you are not super-powerful and have to use your minds creatively to solve problems.”

Daughter: “But Dad, we ARE using our minds creatively, to craft items to solve our problems!”

Dad: “....Fine.  You can craft things, within reason, for 50 pips.  Final offer!”

I honestly never expected my daughter to point out that Calvinball is, indeed, a fun game to play.  And she’s not wrong–manipulating the game world to win is a long-held OSR principle.  There’s honestly not much daylight between using terrain to ambush some hobgoblins and spending the evening A-Team style making a rat trap and some rat-blinding dust.  Both take imagination.  

As long as I manage to keep the crafting realistic, and their power level low-enough where they are still constantly challenged, this rule should be fine.  It helps that warband-scale creatures in Mausritter are immune to damage from single mice–they will never stop feeling small.  

Haus-rule #9:  Why not? Creativity is rewarded, often by changing the world.  In play, we co-create the world: they have added quests, enemies, mysterious figures, allies, all as they imagine.  My only job is to point out when it’s too much, in order to maintain balance between my two kids, make it all make sense, and to keep the world presenting a challenge.

Another OSR principle, actualized in play as me saying a lot of “yes, and…”  I want my kids to be creative, so when they want the game world to bend to their wishes, it definitely flexes more than it resists.  I do say no sometimes, but mainly in situations where they really are not putting their imaginative backs into solving the problem at hand.  

Example of play: we are in the Song of the Frogacle boat race (AMAZING adventure).  My daughter asks if she can heal our paper boat with her Heal spell.  Why not?  To reward her creativity, I change the universe, Heal now works on inanimate objects. 

I have never seen a fixed world (‘blorb’) as a prerequisite to OSR play; it’s not the only way to Rome.  Instead, co-creating a game world together, including rewarding creativity by changing rules, is a natural way to follow the OSR Principia Apocrypha.  

Haus-rule #10:  Strict time records are not kept.  We use exploration Turns and Watches, but they are more suggestions and tools to remind me to regularly inject fun events, then something I strictly track.  In our game, Time is a story, and it passes as the story needs.  

This one is less of a planned house-rule than a recognition of reality.  In a given session, I field hundreds of questions, mediate disputes between the three of us, get interrupted constantly by their excitement, and otherwise just try to keep my eye on the ball of where they are going next.  Tracking time amidst all of that is…challenging.  I think even ol’ Gary Gygax couldn’t do it.  

So I try to track exploration Turns and Watches, but don’t stress if I forget them and then come back to them later.  Careful time-tracking is a suggestion, a reminder, but ultimately less important than the story my kids are telling.  

Haus-rule #11: Mice are big and independent.  Trees are normal-sized relative to them, there are no humans, and they live in their own world.  

So this request came straight from my kids, who do not like the idea of being small relative to plants, or scuttling around in the ruins of a human world (don’t get me started on how confused my son is by the fluctuating scale in the book, Redwall).  Giant cats are fine, but every plant a giant? No way.  Anyway this is what they needed to enjoy the world, so of course I said yes.  Inches became feet, regular animals became giant animals (giant snakes, enormous badgers, etc).  

Wait, how BIG is the horse cart carrying 100s of invading rats?

Now, I am allowed to include the occasional super-giant tree, but otherwise I describe the world as human-free (far off giants exist), with three-foot mice and mostly normal trees.  The mice tend to make villages in fallen super-giant trees, because who wouldn’t do that if they could?  For those familiar with animal-themed RPGs, this is similar to the 5e setting of Humblewood, which is great because I can pull extra inspiration and images from there.  My kids still feel small relative to the things that threaten them, but they no longer feel puny relative to the world.  Kids deal with enough of that feeling in real life, I get it.  

This rule is last because it is the most work to implement.  Most Mausritter settings assume mice live underfoot of humans (or amid the remains of human civilization) and set adventures in old human buildings and giant trees.  This is what I call the ‘default Mausritter setting’. Adapting existing adventures to be human-free, while worth it for my kids, can be a touch difficult if you are a parent short on time. Something awesome like Junk City is a non-starter, for example.

Sadly, not what they want (it's so cool!)

Fortunately, there are many good adventures that are, or can be adapted to be, human-free and/or re-scaled.  And I am permitted a few giant houses and super-giant trees here and there, to use others. Thus, I am pulling maps and adventures from the Estate adventures and the Baron’s Grip and Kiwi Acres settings, among others.  But honestly, I am excited by the increasing diversity of Mausritter settings, and look forward to more adventures set in magical worlds with different civilizations of small animals, like Ferntree Hollow, Tales from Behind the Ferns, Rinn, and Tiny Fables.  

Pro-tip for parents: Don’t assume every Mausritter adventure is going to be kid-appropriate. There are lots of free Mausritter resources, and almost all adventures and settings are reasonably priced.  But this is a game made by adults and some adventures are for adults only: themes of horror, war, and oppression do pop up.  Fortunately, they are quite easy to filter through (Mausritter adventures are clearly described and often very short (3 pages and a map), a virtue for sure).  And personally, I am also excited to play innovative mini-settings like Hell in a Hog Waller with other adults: WWI with mice and magic missile guns?  Sign me up.

Pro-tip 2 for parents: Not into playing mice? Cairn 1e is free, just like Mausritter. And evidently there are third-party inventory tokens, including ones on Etsy, although I now want MORE for my adult Shadowdark game.

Further Resources

I want to thank ktrey of d4caltrops for a conversation that made the death haus-rule commentary far better. If you liked this post, you will enjoy the excellent reflection by Widdershin Wanderings on their experiences teaching Cairn to middle-school kids, and Clayton’s Haus Rules for Mausritter. 

And if you are new to Mausritter, be sure to check out the glory of Mausritter stuff here, and the many new third-party adventures published for Mausritter.  Mausritter Month and its companion game jam is in November, and I got some excellent mousy Christmas presents last year from there.

Maus Haus: Playing Mausritter with my kids

Playing role-playing games with my kids has taught me, more than anything else, how to be a better GM. It is incredibly fun when it goes well.  But it can be hard when it does not go well, and so I thought today I would talk about why I am playing Mausritter with my elementary school-age kids.  I also want to lay out why I think Mausritter is a better call for younger kids than something like DnD 5e.  

This post (and its forthcoming follow-up) is inspired by the excellent reflection by Widdershin Wanderings on their experiences teaching Cairn to middle-school kids, and Clayton’s Haus Rules for Mausritter.  But unlike those two posts, I wanted to first reflect on the principles that led me to playing Mausritter, specifically, with my older elementary-age kids.  

Principles of Play

I should begin by saying that I began telling stories together with my kids when they were young.  It’s something my grandfather and mother did with me, and I wanted to pass it on. So I would start a story, and when we got to a part where the hero or heroine makes a choice, I asked them what they wanted to happen next, and we went from there.  Epic and episodic stories ensued over the years, from the Magic Cloud to Little Monkey Girl, from Hank the Dragon to Adventures on the Purple Planet. 

At its heart, telling stories together is the simplest, and original, RPG.  But at some point, once we started playing board games together, I could not wait to pass on my love of more complicated TTRPGs.  I mean, Exploding Kittens was more complicated than some of the RPGs I saw online. 

So when my daughter hit 2nd grade and my son was in kindergarten, I started them on Hero Kids.  Hero Kids is a grid-based d6 system, an incredibly simplified version of DnD that is straightforward and easy, bright and attractive, and came with good GM advice and tons of adventures (from a Bundle of Holding).  It is an excellent, award-winning game marketed for ages 4 to 10, and can easily be mixed with the outstanding d6 game Adventurous for additional options without too much added complexity.  

At first, the kids really got into making their characters, and I thought it was going well.  

But good heavens, Hero Kids was a mistake.  First principle of playing RPGs with kids: match the complexity to their age.  I went from freeform storytelling to grid-based combat with a 5 and 7 year old, and making that transition required constant rules-reminders and immense patience on my part when my kids insisted on grabbing their pieces and zooming it around the map whenever they were bored.  Or scared.  Or had a cool idea.  Or wanted it to go talk with their sibling’s pieces.  Or wanted to protect any of their pets by swapping places. I would like to say I never yelled at my kids for playing RPGs wrong, but I am not a perfect person.  In fact, my evident irritation at them not staying on the grid is what eventually killed that game after a few sessions.

Age is a tricky thing: some kids are emotionally built to sit at a table and follow instructions, and others struggle with complex instructions, reading, or sitting still, or being patient and waiting their turn.  Every kid is different.  Mine were not ready, and honestly I was not ready.

So we went back to storytelling together for a year, and I pondered on what I did wrong.  That’s how I arrived at my second principle of playing RPGs with kids: do it for love of a good story, and if a rule gets in the way, break it.  Flexibility in playing RPGs is something I had struggled with up to that point.  I am a neurodiverse person who memorized much of the AD&D Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual as a kid, and knew 5e like the back of my hand.  But I had placed my reverence for a silly set of system rules over my first responsibility as a dad, being patient and loving with my kids.  I had messed up.  

Fortunately, my kids are wonderful and forgave me, and went on to create to a fantastic, years-long make-believe session with the fantasy paper minis from Rich Burlew, the author of OOTS (which, after a bit, I began to read to them, bleeping out all the bits inappropriate for 8-year old ears).  They would set up our table for weeks at a time, and tell each other about elaborate backstories and create drama for the kobolds and yellow musk creeper and trolls and penanggalan.  Yes, the penanggalan remains a favorite character in their game!

But at night, my search continued for a replacement RPG.  After reading about a lot of systems, I found one that seemed perfect.  It’s called Amazing Tales, and it is incredibly simple, intuitive, and story-first, and comes with wonderful GM advice and a few great pre-made adventures.  Its freeform nature means you can play as anything, and yet fairly resolve any action.  Players pick five things their players are great at, assign dice to each skill (d20 for the thing you are best at, down to d4 for the thing you are only okay at), then try to beat a target difficulty number.  It’s my favorite game to ease adults into RPGs: I once ran my mom through an impromptu Amazing Tales one-shot where she played a magical pigeon.  

But for all I enjoyed reading through and learning from Amazing Tales, I barely played it.  Because when I proposed playing RPGs with my kids again, later, they agreed and then counter-offered.  My daughter wanted to run the game this time, and her system?  Playing with their paper minis, and flipping a coin.  If you are good at something, flip with advantage, and if not, flip with disadvantage.  I learned months later from this post that she is evidently a small John Harper.  

So what did I do?  I followed the second principle: my Amazing Tales rules were going to get in the way of her story, so I dropped them.  Coin-flipping and paper minis it was, and my daughter was a creative and hilarious GM, albeit impatient with our antics (almost like she’s related to me or something).  

Playing with them again taught me one more lesson.  Kids don’t see a big difference between games of make-believe and role-playing games, and playing with pieces for both is just good fun.  I have already written about why I think that is, on a deeper level, but this led me to Principle number three: a great kids game should have lots of room for imagination, scaffolded by fun game pieces.  

Excited by this insight, I went ahead and bought two games with physical pieces (!) that seemed great for kids in elementary school: 

1) the Land of Eem Dungeoneer Adventures kickstarter (arriving in a few months)

2) at PAXU, the Mausritter boxed set (and the Estate adventures, I am a sucker).  

If you are not familiar with Mausritter, the PDF is free and the boxed set comes with wonderful physical inventory pieces (the knapsacks for holding pieces in the Estate boxed set are especially beloved by my kiddos).  

The inventory pieces can be printed out at home, but the cardboard pieces from Exalted Funeral are great.

DnD vs. the N/OSR, for kids

But still, I hesitated to GM for them again, and Mausritter gathered dust on my shelf.  And then last year my kids got invited to play DnD 5e: my daughter in the 4th grade club in her school, and my son with a bunch of his friends and a wonderful teen DM.  I worried my window of us playing simple N/OSR games together was slipping away, as they got busy with their own lives and red-pilled into the DnD-verse.  

Many people will tell you online, based on their own experiences, that kids as young as 8 are ready to play DnD 5e, and that’s right as far as it goes.  But I don’t think modern DnD is right for all kids, for three reasons.  

1. Rules complexity is a limiting in-language that signals ‘I belong’.  Ever since ADnD, the game has been bound around and limited by too many rules, which partly exist in my humble opinion for psychological reasons.  As a nerd, belonging was hard.  But if I memorized a long set of rules and showed system mastery, instantly I belonged to a group.  What’s more, I was ‘cool’ for knowing all the knowledge!  Now as an adult, I do believe rules have their place and I like games with intermediate crunch–but I see two ral downsides of all those rules for kids.  

First, complex rules are both a price of admission and a gate–if you don’t memorize a goodly number of them, you can’t play like a cool kid.  And if you keep going outside the rules, you get asked to stop by impatient peers–which led my daughter to leave her DnD 5e group after a few months.  

Second, following so many rules means wearing an early corset on your developing imagination.  Before you have even explored all the worlds of fantasy, you learn that character concepts have to be molded to fit the rules, and rarely vice versa.  So kids learn to imagine playing a certain way, but not another.  Dad, my wizard can’t wear a sword (JRR Tolkein, what were you thinking?).  Dad, I am going to memorize every single spell in the PHB, and then rules-lawyer you about all the magic we imagine because it’s…fun?

2. The N/OSR is better for imaginative problem-solving.  DnD 5e promotes a culture of play where the answer is not in your imagination, but which skill or item button you press on your character page.  In the N/OSR, the rules are simple and you are weak, so you must be clever.  Dad, I roll Perception (sorry kiddo, you see what you see–do you want to move closer?).  Dad, I attack the giant head-on, because I am strong (kiddo, you should have thought of a way to sneak around, you have 3 HP so he knocks you out and puts you in a sack).  

3. Modern DnD is a black hole of sameness.  Its cultural dominance and ubiquity calcifies fantastical imagination (and yes homebrew and settings can vary, but you are still pushing against the GRAVITY OF SIMILARITY). I could see DnD 5e expanding my kid’s imaginations, but also making them expect all fantasy worlds to line up with the one they were reading in the Monster Manual and Player’s Handbook (although Pokemon and Minecraft help push back a little). Dad trolls always have to be bad, black elves are bad, kobolds are not helpful fae, sorcerers don’t memorize spells, magic missiles always are magical force darts, and dragons are color-coded.    

So I took action, a stealth N/OSR lobbying campaign.  I let them check out my RPG library, which features Dolmenwood and Mausritter (they loved playing with Mausritter’s pieces), and their minds were blown repeatedly that one can play DnD with different rules and cooler options. I also bought both the Land of Eem Dungeoneer Adventures book series for them (they loved it!), and let them know it was a RPG that would be coming to our house soon.  

But after I checked out the Mouse Guard books from the library and we read them at night, Mausritter won the honor of the first game they wanted to try, and Dolmenwood and Land of Eem are scheduled for next year. (My son, the biggest DnD 5e fan, read the entire Dolmenwood Player’s Handbook and was delighted to meet the creator at last PAXU–Gavin gamely asked him for his favorite Dolmenwood spell and was happily surprised when he rattled off three of them).

The goal of our Mouse Knights campaign

So starting about six months ago, we played our first Mausritter game, and we are five sessions in and having a blast.  But we are not exactly playing it rules-as-written, which I will get to in my next post.  Suffice it to say for no that I say a LOT of “yes, and…” to every zany request.  

They wanted to draw their mouse characters and invent equipment–done.  My daughter wanted a pack-rat to carry all eight of her mouse-children around–done, but I capped it at four.  My son wanted to craft crazy inventions with minor powers–done.  My daughter wanted a wand to cast spells with, instead of an obsidian tablet–done, with restrictions.  They asked me to have a DM PC who is a hedgehog–done.  Here’s my character sheet for Fergin the hedgehog:

Mausritter is a magnificent system, because you can hack it to hell and gone and you still have

A) an OSR system with low HP, so choices matter.

B) simple rules which make it easy to make up monsters, equipment, powers, etc., and 

C) all the glorious tactile pieces they love to play with, discover, and draw on.  

Next time, I will get to the Haus Rules we have so far, many crafted through negotiation with my kids.  They all follow the principles: simple, flexible rules, with imagination first.  And they all serve a larger goal.

Rather than set my goal to be teaching them an OSR playing style, I follow my kid-RPG principles and have an easier goal: to have a fun game, one that gets out of the way of their rampaging creativity.  One that they want to keep playing, with their dad.  Cause that’s the whole point, isn’t it?