[Forge Midwest] Trollbabe- Player Choices, and a Question for Ron
Willow:
At Forge Midwest, I finally got to play Trollbabe, which was ran by Ron himself. Yay!
For plot, Frunhilde, badass Trollbabe Axe-Warrior, found herself at Everyone's Inn, a haven for cannibals pretending to be a pacifist commune. They tried to eat Frunhilde, so she stymied them and shamed them into actually becoming a pacifist commune.
Anyway, at one point, I took an NPC, the owner of the inn, as a relationship- specifically as a Comrade, as Frunhilde sympathized with these idealistic (so she thought) peaceniks. Ron remarked that he expected me to take the man as a Rival based on my own character description- and doing as I did pretty much changed the whole tenor of the potential relationship and the conflict as a whole. Which was pretty darn cool.
So, my question for Ron- you had three players, and three different situations (inn-full-of-cannibals, rednecks-collecting-trollhorns, and island-of-evil-dream-flowers.) How much of those had you come up with ahead of time? How did you decide what situation to give what trollbabe? Were there any specific things (either during character creation or in play) that you treated as flags?
Ron Edwards:
Hi Willow,
That's not really just one question!
As far as prep is concerned, I had prepped nothing prior to our sitting down together. Before we made characters, I had only listed a few names on my note paper: two each for male human, female human, male troll, female troll. This is described in the rules - as characters appear, and when and if they need names, I simply take them from the list. When I realized there were three players, I added a couple of names to each as well.
I did not prep anything about the adventures until after the characters were done, and after each of you had chosen where your characters were. In each case, I started with a few words, and then drew an arrow and wrote a note about the key "pivot" character in the situation. (The rules call this the Stakes, but I am changing that term for the book version that's coming out later this year, I hope.) That's all I had. I did not improvise much during play, though, because with only the short phrase ("friendly inn, eat the guests" for instance) I knew tons of stuff about them.
In your case, I knew the people of Everyone's Inn were eating guests and pretending they weren't. I knew that the main guy (and I took his name, Oskel, from the first on my male human list) was more-or-less the ringleader or at least knowledgeable about it. I knew that the first real crisis I'd throw at your character, unless you started one of your own, would be the attempt to capture her and take her to the kitchen for breakfast-prep. None of this was prepped or made up in any way prior to play. It all popped into my head with the words "scary inn," and I was ready to go.
It's true that I was aiming at some contrasts, so as I came up with the three concepts, I distinguished among "more or less normal community" for the first, "freaky surreal ghost drug flowers" for the second, and "blasted war-torn desperation" for the third. I began only with the place names: Foggy Bottom, Rottenmere (the idea being to make the place pleasant and beautiful in contrast to its name), and the Blood Gate.
None of this had anything to do - nothing! - with anything about any of the characters. So regarding flags (not a term I use), there weren't any. I'll explain why.
Part of the context for creating Trollbabe was a game of Legends of the 5 Rings, in which I played a character. Although I liked the character very much, friend Dav and I discussed our frustrations with the game at length - ultimately, we decided, all the hassles emerged from a key design consideration. In that game, it is possible to play someone who is not a bushi. We realized that we didn't see why this was so, beyond the habits coming from the "column A column B" school of character creation, and furthermore, that doing so led to a whole smorgasbord of emergent properties that we agreed were not fun for us.
Basically, I was thinking quite hard at the time about games in which the characters, regardless of individual details, were pretty much the same type or thing, and that type or thing was central to play. I'd already done this with Sorcerer, of course, but now I was thinking about it in regard to fantasy adventure. And in RPGs about fantasy adventure, formal diversity of character options was a staple. I was beginning to get pretty annoyed with that staple, at least as an assumption.
All of this is a longwinded way to say, matching a scenario to a player-character's particular details is absolutely not an issue in Trollbabe. There is no earthly reason to do it. Since the character is under no obligation to take any particular side, to care about any particular person in the situation, or to do any particular thing, it does not matter at all which character encounters which scenario. All I do is look at the name of the place the character picked, flash on a neat idea for that place and name, and carry on from there. The trollbabe in question could be any possible rules-made trollbabe.
In particular, I do not consider the character's Number (and hence any emphasis on magic or fighting) at all. If a lesser-fighter character ends up in a war zone, well, too bad - or actually, it's not, because nothing stops the player from initiating conflicts and thereby having authority over what Action Type is in play.
Does that answer your questions? What do you think about what I've said?
I'd like to follow up on the Oskel relationship, especially because I had to make a difficult rules-based call about whether you could utilize that relationship in a particular conflict. But we can get to that later.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
I found my notes from the game. They are a teeny bit different from what I said above, but not in contradiction to my points. For archival purposes and further discussion:
(before character creation, I wrote the first two names in each category; the names come from lists in the rules)
Human male: Eki, Oskel, Gram Human female: Freawaru, Gwyneth, Rhiannon, Mari
Troll male: Spuh, Narg, Kronker Troll female: Washu, Schoonda
(then upon seeing three people, I added the third name to three of the lists; I think I was interrupted before adding one more female troll)
(then we did character creation and established where each trollbabe was; in the notes, the lines are actually arrows; also, they go vertically on the page instead of horizontally)
Zara - Foggy Bottom - trollhunting - contest - Erl
Greta - Rottenmere - old dead + lost couple
Frünhilde - Blood Gate - ruined by recent war - cannibal inn - Oskel, Snorri
One thing pops out that I'd totally forgotten: the idea that there'd be a young human couple lost in the Rottenmere forest. I think this vanished from my mind, during play, when Thor narrated that his character's past history was involved. Also, I do know that the old troll was there in my mind from the beginning, even though he wasn't written on the sheet, much in the same way that I knew people at the Blood Gate inn would often wear rags around their faces against the plague.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
Here are some more thoughts about the game.
The session was conducted as three unconnected stories, as the players chose three separate locales and did not concern themselves with affecting one another's stories through narration. That's not a bad thing, but it should be recognized as arising from their choices alone. The GM has no control over that, nor does he get any, because the players always choose those things, per adventure. For me, the three characters ended up being so vivid that I bet they'd end up running into one another, if the players agree with me about that and if we were able to play more.
The characters were Julie's Zara, who was quite trollish; Thor's Greta, who was almost a perfect blend between troll and human culture, and Willow's Frünhilde, who was a total axe-badass sort. Curiously, we discovered that all three were blonde, and all had curly horns of some kind.
I backed off on specializing the three scores, and let people simply arrive at that kind of specificity through play, which had its strong and good points. I do need to alter that rule, which can be confusing anyway, as specialization applies differently to each thing. In fact, I think I'll have a player specialize only (and any) one activity (Fighting, Magic, Social), for Color only. Less time, more bang, more flexibility for later, no fiddly rules, and less confusion.
I'd like to post a bit about GMing the game - it's a matter of being highly reactive, rather than directing. I also distinguish very strong between me as GM and me as fellow table-talker.
In Zara's troll-hunt contest story, the story took an interesting jump due to a specific narration of being inconvenienced (my new and better term for "discommoded," which always struck me as getting your toilet stolen). Zara had convinced some of these rednecks that instead of killing trolls for their horns, they should just amass all of the horns stolen so far, and thus become chief that way. So she was out stealin' horns with them, and failed the first roll. Julie squinted at the possible narration, and I (as table-talker) suggested that one of the local trolls shows up, bonks her, and runs off with the horns. Julie liked that and ran with it quite strongly, failing all her rolls down the Series and thus ending up captured by the trolls. She abandoned the whole horn-stealing plot entirely and turned instead toward working with the trolls to cast a big practical joke on the humans. Although it was my suggestion for a momentary event, her narrational use of that event and subsequent narrations are what mattered, in not treating it as a funny vignette and sticking with the humans.
In Greta's flowers story, the whole crux of the story lay entirely in a key narration by Thor - he identified the site of the adventure as Greta's homeland, which she had left when only an infant. That actually tossed out some of my prep about the lost human couple, which wasn't a decision on my part so much as simply having it driven out of my mind, and set the core issues of conflicts from that point onwards. What I especially like is that Thor did not exert inappropriate control over the back-story during (say) scene framing, which is the GM's proprietary job in Trollbabe, but rather brought this stuff (a) about his character rather than the back-story and (b) during a time of his authority over narrating her failure to do something.
In Frünhilde's cannibal inn story, a couple of difficult or interesting moments cropped up. They both concerned Willow's choice of NPC to take as a Relationship, and what kind - she chose the innkeeper, who was fully collusive with the cannibal practices although perhaps rather more idealistic about it than some of the others. This was interesting because it meant that she'd pretty much taken over one of the characters I'd thought of as a Bang-deliverer. That's why, in the rules, if an NPC has a name, the trollbabe can't take him or her as a relationship without the GM's permisssion. In this case, I went "H'mm! Interesting," and granted it, knowing that this was going places I couldn't influence using that NPC. Which is why I granted it, actually.
Anyway, the more problematic moment came when Willow called in the innkeeper to help Zara when the guys who came to take her to the kitchen arrived in her bedroom at night. She'd defined him as a Comrade, which I suppose I should have been a little more clear about at the time - Comrades do not leap to one's aid like a sidekick does; they only help when the conflict concerns common interests. And in this case, the innkeeper was still committed to the cannibal practices. Note: outside of conflicts, the player says what the Relationship person does, but the GM plays his attitudes and opinions. But this was in a Conflict, regarding re-rolls, and the rules about that are pretty explicit. So I experienced an uncomfortable sense of "no you can't do that" during play, and felt as if I was decreasing the character's effectiveness in a way that wasn't necessarily clear to the player. As it turned out, Willow played the scene brilliantly anyway and used something else for a re-roll, and was able to use the innkeeper later at the end when it was consistent with the rule.
I think all three adventures illustrated rather good uses of success and failure throughout. In the first, failures showed up early (and often); in the second, a key mid-story failure permitted a key narration; and in the last, there was only one minor (but interesting) failure. Again, the timing of these led to major narration and resolution consequences, and hence to very fine but very different stories.
The session also raised a number of rules concerns, as I was effectively playing with the rules that I am prepping for book publication.
As discussed for some time in the Adept forum, the concept of using Modifiers for dice outcomes is hugely inelegant and not fun. I've decided those rules are nothing but ass, and am discarding them for the book version. At present, I'm leaning toward the idea that Scale is Scale, period, and whatever a trollbabe can meaningfully affect with her roll is at her Scale, period. (This also means throwing out the Modifiers for specific prepped characters, too; I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that.)
The thing is, that rather satisfying and elegant conclusion tripped us up a bit at the end of Zara's story, when she wanted to cast a spell that gave all the humans in the village troll-horns. Well, her Scale was one person. But it's magic! It seemed quite right to me that her magic should do this. H'mmm! I am currently tempted to permit Magic (as a primary action type, not as a snap-shot spell re-roll item) to go up in Scale. That might go well with its casting time limitations as well, which I was planning to enforce quite strongly anyway.
Throughout the session, we ignored the Pace options and always used one-sequence conflicts. This came about simply because I forgot to call for Pace with every conflict, and in part because teaching the basics of a Series within a given roll was my top priority. That leads me to think, regarding the current rules re-write, that I might decree a group's first session be constrained to the one-roll Pace, and maybe even have only "one" and "two out of three" instead of the current three distinct ones.
I liked the characters a lot and I think each story had a strong punch, bringing out some values issues and some depth to each character which none of us would have anticipated in specific terms. One good sign is that I really, really want to play all those Relationship characters in later adventures with these trollbabes, which lets me know that issues and ideas have been raised, rather than finished and closed, by the adventures so far.
Best, Ron
rafial:
Ron, thanks for these detailed writeups. I've always been an enthusiastic fan of Trollbabe, and getting an insight into how you yourself do situation prep compared to what is in the current text is excellent. I'm excited to hear that Trollbabe is (hopefully) going to return in a more polished form, and I hope that some of the advice you've given above will make it into the text.
Some comments:
* I think dumping modifiers is a good decision, they were always fiddly and difficult to apply in practice.
* The notion of recommending one-roll Pace as an option for new players is not bad, but I strongly favor keeping all three levels (1, 2 of 3, 3 of 5). My experience is that the two that get the most work out are 1 and 3 of 5. Sometime its just right to drill down on a conflict and say "I want to drag this out in all its gruesome detail".
* I think the text needs to talk more about what it means that magic conflicts must be "slow". Specific examples of what is legit, and what is not when using Magic would be really helpful.
A question:
* You said: 'So I experienced an uncomfortable sense of "no you can't do that" during play' - can you talk about this in a little more detail? You didn't explain exactly what Zara said the innkeeper was doing, and how you wound up resolving that, only that it worked out in the end. This seems like a key moment of sausage being made, and I'd like to hear more about it.
A suggestion:
* Regarding scale shifting: I offer rules hack I've been fiddling with for my "Hellbabe" (Hellboy with Trollbabe) hack. The player can choose to declare a conflict whose effect is one level up the scale, but they start their series with an automatic failure on the first roll. This means they face real risk, no shrug and walk away with an inconvenienced. Make of it what you will.
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