Tangibility, Modules, and Minimalism; or how Mausritter makes me excited about TTRPG loot

 This was originally written on my Tumblr blog in November 2024, brought here for posterity. I've not edited it beyond some formatting.

When it comes to tabletop RPGs, I've never been particularly motivated by the prospect of Loot™ (a term I know might have some baggage, but that's not the discourse I'm trying to tackle here with this post) - gold and other valuables worth a bunch of cash, magic items like enchanted swords or spellbooks, and other such rewards.

Whether that's because I was more interested in the character roleplay, exploring the world, or telling a particular kind of story, the bits and pieces picked up along the way have never really been the thing on my mind when I sit down and join the voice chat for the session, whether as a player embarking on an adventure, or the GM who's had to prep it - whenever I get a new Pathfinder 2e rulebook or adventure from a friend (at this point basically not for playing anymore), I completely glaze over the obligatory 4-6 pages dedicated to new items included therein (for a few reasons that later parts of this post will contrast this with), and a lot of the Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark games that I pay most of my TTRPG attention to these days don't feature this style of reward almost at all.

However, the figuratively and literally little roleplaying game Mausritter (which reimagines old-school fantasy adventuring through the lens of tiny mice in a big dangerous world, in the style of Mouse Guard or The Secret of NIMH) has been doing a few things that have had me coming around on the concept somewhat, and I wanna talk about them in this probably long and rambly post today. 

So, what does Mausritter do that other games in its fantasy-adventure-dungeoncrawling extended family don't, for me at least?

For one, I think it has to do with its minimalism - the rulebook is less than 50 pages, split roughly between player and GM sections - and within this, maybe 6 are dedicated to items the player mice can start with, purchase, or find in the world - the game calls out its 15 magic spells as a selling point, and there's 10 magic swords listed in the treasure part of the GM chapter, and most of these have at most one or two one-line rules associated with them.

And yet, through the paradoxical power of "less is more", this is a much more exciting starting setup than the dozens of pages of stuff your PF2 blorbo can go shopping for in that game, to speak nothing of the hundreds of pages of things they can acquire on their journey from level 1 to 20. When there are this few things to pick from (and when modules sprinkle in new ones, more on this later), and when you can only carry a small handful of them (MR's Resident Evil Tetris inventory limits you to 10 slots across your body and backpack, which can also be taken up by gnarly conditions like exhaustion and curses), each one feels proportionally more meaningful - meanwhile a bunch of new items in a PF2 book just isn't making a dent in the game's already extant catalog, and are diluted across the game's 1-20 level range (and just simply don't feel very exciting when they amount to "a little bit of combat action compression, a boring but useful skill bonus, or a modest utility spell on a lengthy cooldown, all of which will likely become obsolete and need replacement in a few levels' time".

The thing is, a Pathfinder character can also advance in myriad other parallel ways (their stats, their skill proficiencies, their class and archetype feats, their spells, their companions and familiars, and so on), and given the game's pretty conservative game balance, each of those is only a small element of the power progression puzzle - there are scarce few elements in the game that are singularly 'build-defining', and the game generally wants you to think about them in aggregate and over levels-long periods of time, and that just isn't a mindset (or perhaps, attention span) that I have.

Meanwhile in Mausritter, items are basically the main (though technically not the only) means of handing out rewards, so they better feel exciting and significant to get! And beyond the fact that their minimal writeups are a lot more liberating and feel very no-strings-attached (like the sword that makes you invisible while you stand perfectly still, or the sword that lets you disguise yourself as any mouse-sized creature), the fact they are all presented as these cute little cards that you physically plop down and shuffle around your character sheet (with a doodly illustration, name, and usage to be filled and cleared) adds an extra layer of tangibility that legitimately makes me wish I could play tabletops in an offline fashion (but alas I have no players nearby nor the money to afford physical books and accessories).

...Which is further enhanced when you consider that this tiny core set of stuff in that zine-sized rulebook (15 spells, 11 creatures, etc.) leaves a wide open space for modules to expand on in bite-sized chunks, mostly done by Mausritter's vibrant third-party community (the game's author Isaac Williams has only published two official modules, and of those one of them was in collaboration with a bunch of 3pp writers), and the fact they almost always likewise include their additions in that same "here's a sheet of item cards to print out and pop out at the table" continues that sense of tangible rewards - but now with the added bonus of the different adventures' themes and visual styles making veteran mice's sheets a real collage and record of where they've been and what they've accomplished (assuming they've lived and held onto the stuff, anyway). 

 

(Not to mention the organic emergent fun of bringing items from one module to solve problems in another in ways the authors of neither could have foreseen, I reckon.)

Also the fact that the majority of Mausritter modules consist of these pamphlet-sized sites that can each be finished in a few sessions each rather than sprawling multi-month affairs means that it's actually feasible to chain them together and see this stuff I'm talking about unfold in a timely manner - especially since Mausritter's world is so freeform and the relative lack of level scaling means that you aren't too likely to buy something that your players are either over- or under-level for.

I've only managed to run and play a tiny bit of Mausritter (tried to run a duet game for one of my girlfriends, and played with her in a cut-short game set in the Estate module that a friend GMed for us), but these and some other realizations make me want to do it again, sometime next year.