Sep 10

Sep 10 The Great Mouse Hunt

I have a fifteen-year-old daughter, Claire, and she is a great kid. I have trouble acknowledging that I have reached this point in my life, but I couldn’t be happier, and she is one of the biggest reasons I feel this way.

Sappy, I know, and I don’t care.

We have similar personalities, the same twisted sense of humor, and the same hope that the world will be a better place, although my outlook is a bit more defeated than hers. People say that she is just like me, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. She’s fearless even though she gets scared, a strong advocate for herself, curious, willing to ask questions to find out the answers, and has never met a person she couldn’t talk to. So when people tell me she’s just like me, I tell them no, she’s not. She’s Claire, and she’s one of a kind.

There are also a million things I don’t understand about her, and that’s ok. She is quick to tell me that I wouldn’t understand since I was never a fifteen-year-old girl, never had a little brother, and don’t know the pressures teenagers face today. She also likes to tell me how much simpler life was back when I was a kid, you know, before electricity. She’s absolutely about everything but the electricity part, of course. I do my best to listen to her, which often involves telling me I don’t understand or explain why she can’t do the things I ask her to around the house. She’s always too busy with homework, dealing with her after-school activities (no sports but just about everything else), or trying to maintain her social life. But at the end of the day, I’m not her friend, I’m a parent, and it’s my responsibility to make sure she does the things she may not want to do.

Look, I get it. Doing chores suck. It’s not like, as adults, we don’t have chores. I’d prefer not to do the laundry, make dinner, be a child uber, and so on. We do them, sometimes begrudgingly, because they need to be done. Kids act like the world is plotting against them if you ask them to take the garbage out. With Claire, the mountain she decided to die on was cleaning her room. I had no idea that a room could be so messy. I’m not sure the floor saw the light of day in the past two years. When we ran low of forks, they’d be in her room, even though she wasn’t supposed to eat in there. Calling it a pigsty is unfair to the living quarters that swine live in. No matter how many times we asked, what we threatened, or the consequence we landed upon due to her not doing it, she would clean it just enough to get us off her back.

Until the mouse.

It was winter, cold as hell, and we live in an old house, so it was not a surprise that a mouse got in. Once it found a warm place to reside, the next thing on its mind was to eat, and I’m sure to it, my daughter’s room was like a buffet in Vegas. I have no idea how long it was there, but she started to hear rustling, to which I said it’s nothing. A few days later, she swears she heard something make a noise “like a squeak, or chittering” in her words, to which I said it was just the old house making weird noises. It was when she actually saw the mouse run across the bedroom, did see scream, yell for me, yell at me, and tell me she told me so.

Like any parent, I let her calm down first. When she did and wanted to know what I was going to do about it, I shrugged my shoulders and said that things like this happen, so we’ll take care of it (I’ve lived in large cities including Boston, Washington DC, and Houston until we had kids. I’ve lived in buildings with rats so large you could have put a saddle on them and gone for a ride). When was I going to take care of it was her next question, which I answered when we figured out a plan of attack. She declared she was sleeping on the couch till it was gone, and after the first night, I think she finally understood the difference between the pronouns we and I. I laid out the plan of what we needed to do to get rid of her new little roommate, with the understanding that even after we completed the entire process, it may not be enough, and we’d have to call an exterminator. In actuality, I had already called one, but I didn’t tell her that. I wanted her to clean her room and understand the importance of keeping it clean.

So what does any of this have to do with D&D? Well, this whole debacle made me think about what happens when a party enters into a room. Working in her room was an adventure in itself, and I was entering an unknown space and looking for an unknown opponent. There are parallels between the Great Mouse Hunt of 2020 and what we as players should do as we launch ourselves into an unknown situation. As we moved through the plan, I realized I hadn’t taken several things into account, and looking back wish I had done a couple of things differently. This made me think about things we know we should do in our game as players but are at best inconsistent in doing.

Getting in

It was easy for us to access the room, but it may not be you and your party of mighty adventurers. Doors are often locked when you are traveling through the deep dark dungeon, and it usually means something or someone bad is behind it. Many times a rogue will want to attempt to pick the lock, a barbarian will want to smash it, and the wizard will want to head back to the comforts of the inn you just left. No matter how you decide to get in, please make sure you put your ear up to the door and listen. It’s better to know that something is on the other side, even if you don’t know what it is.

Check out the Landscape & Opponent

Our first task was to look at Claire’s room and figure out a plan of attack. Step one was to get all the crap off her floor. Clothes went in one pile, trash in another, and then odds and ends that she wanted. Claire is a big-time thrift store shopper, and the number of clothes she owns amazed me. (Look, I’m her dad, and that’s not something I pay attention to, especially since she only uses my money for expensive stuff). Once that task was completed, we had to pull everything out of her closets that a tired little mouse could sleep on, in, or under after eating at the buffet. Yes, I explained to her, a mouse can climb up to the sweaters on the top shelf. They went into a separate pile to be checked and possibly washed. This process continued until everything in her room, from the closets to her desk, was emptied.

Now, if the barbarian bursts into a room and you find a pack of kobolds innocently eating dinner, we both know you’re going to slaughter them where they stand or, in this case, sit. Before you do that, at least one person in the group should take a second and look around the room to see what you’re getting yourself into. When you enter, the DM will give you a description of the room, which allows you to see any potential hazards to be avoided, such as difficult terrain, and it can also show you the stone pillar that the wizard can hide behind. That’s all fine and dandy, but it never hurts to make a Perception check in case something important was left out by the DM on purpose.

Your passive Perception only goes so far, so if you think more than meets the eye here, it’s worth rolling that d20 to double-check that you didn’t miss anything. Everyone knows that the chest in the center of an otherwise empty room is a mimic, but most of the time, the danger isn’t that obvious. It’s always nice to know that something is off before you rush forward. If your passive Perception already picked that up, you can make an Investigation check instead. Who knows, you could see an eye-stalk peering at you from the giant pile of trash in the corner of the room. Maybe you’ll even know that it’s attached to an otyugh, but at the very least, you know to give the compost heap a wide berth.

After Combat

Yes, I skipped combat. We had no expectations of actually finding the mouse, and even if we did, I wasn’t feeling too confident about catching it. While my daughter would have run away in sheer terror - she told me as much - I’m way too old and slow to have any chance of snatching it up. Everyone knows that monsters need to be killed, and a sword or fireball will hopefully do the trick, so let’s move on.

Checking the bodies and looking for loot is the first thing we as players do after the last gnolls have been killed with prejudice. If we’ve walked into a mad wizard’s study or the like, we’ll (hopefully) make an Investigation check to find hidden compartments in their desk or secret hiding spot for their spell scrolls. Make sure to specify that you want to look for secret doors, which are woefully underused in the 5th edition. It’s probably not a bad idea to check for traps again. If you roll as I do, there is a good chance you missed it on your pre-battle check.

It also pays to secure a room if you think you will have to go out the same way you came in. This doesn’t have to be done for every room you go through, but if you are being chased on your way out, it’s nice to prep some surprises for your pursuers. A couple of simple traps that can slow your opponents down can be the difference between getting out safely with all that loot or having to fight one last battle with under half your hit points and no spell slots left. Personally, I like the idea of casting the symbol spell on the front of a door. Leave the door open, and when you run into the room, close it behind you and then keep on moving (it also may be a good idea to put a password on it that you can all say quietly as you go by). Now your trigger will be touching the front of the door, so when the baddies chasing you go to open it, they can have any number of horrible things happen to them.

Maybe you’re going to take a long rest in your cleared room. Ever notice how many times you do this, not realizing your sleeping amongst the corpse of your victims? But I digress. Before you lay down your weary head, don’t forget to cast the alarm or magic mouth spell you thought you had no use for. Any number of wandering monsters can smell the blood of your victims from three levels away and might decide to see what their dinner options are.

In the end, after completely cleaning Claire’s room, laying out traps, and monitoring daily, we never did capture the mouse. While she swears she heard rustling for a couple more weeks, nothing was very found, and the mouse scaring the crap out of her is a funny story we tell. Her room isn’t as clean as after the purge, but it is still light years better than before. I’m hoping it will stay that way as we trend toward another winter, and the threat of another tiny roommate should be enough to keep it clean.

One last note. A couple of months after The Great Mouse Hunt, her room was deteriorating quickly. We discussed it with Claire; my wife and I made a few veiled threats, but the cleanliness of her room stayed on a downward spiral. Being the amazing parent I am, I found the mouse cat toy we have and placed it on the center of her bed while she was at school.

I’ve never heard her scream so loud in my life.

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