[Trollbabe] Save the Young Man! and wrestling with Scale
Bret Gillan:
Brand, I'm gonna put a pause on our conversation for a bit because I get what you're saying, but I think Ron is talking about a different approach. Let's untangle this a bit first.
Ron, it sounds like I went about things the right way, but got a little too caught up in some confusions about Scale. I don't think the problem is anything that Ellen did either. I had a situation set up, she wasn't interest, that's totally cool. I was just suddenly in a spot of having to cook up some other things for her to interact with as I'd only prepped that one situation.
The two young men in the two different adventures were different young men. The adventures were different locations, different surrounding events, different people. I wasn't trying to overlap them. So we're good there.
It may well be that there is no problem at all apart from the confusion about how to apply Scale to conflicts when the Trollbabe's goal is out of the scope of the current scale. You make it sound rather easy, attempt anything you want but the GM will apply the current Scale of the campaign to the narration. If so, that's simple and it's like the pieces fell into place for me.
ieatwithgusto:
Hello! I'm Ellen.
Ron, your reply was definitely helpful. Being very new to gaming, I approached the game feeling like there was something Bret had in mind for me that I had to do. And then when I didn't do that things were crappy and I ruined everything. But that's not true.
I'm keeping in mind that my Trollbabe doesn't have to do things for the greater good. If I want to leave a boy to die, I can.
Our biggest issue was definitely with the Scale. Once I ran into a situation where I wanted a whole town to stop hunting Trolls, I couldn't think of what else I could possibly do to make that happen. But it makes a lot of sense to be able to attempt things on a larger Scale but have it only make any effect on whatever we're actually using. I'm glad we decided to stay on a personal scale for the next session so we can try it again if the situation arises.
So I feel like I have a better grasp of the game now. I'm a little slow to catch on sometimes but I think this next session is going to be a lot smoother.
Markus:
Hi Bret,
I think I can give you a bit of practical advice on this, since I struggled with this very issues in my first Trollbabe games, IIRC. Well, if I read your post correctly you had two problems: (1) adventures seemed too short and sketchy, and (2) the scale of stakes seemed a bit too constraining in practice. Both are quite simple to solve IMHO. What's more, both of them can be solved with your main tool as a Trollbabe GM - scene framing.
The answer to the first problem is in my opinion rethinking the 'strategy' of your scene framing. You basically framed the very first scenes of both adventures in a way that everything was there to directly and utterly decide the stakes. According to this, it's not surprising that you didn't get much mileage from the stakes themselves. I cannot say that doing this is an 'error', in each and every situation, BUT if you want a more relaxed pace, with enough time for you and players to properly settle into the situation and so on, then yes, it's probably a bad idea.
The second problem (the scale-struggling stuff) will probably not be a problem anymore, in light of what Ron said in his #3 above. But I reached a slightly different solution to this in my games, and I'll describe it briefly just because I think it can be complementary to Ron's clarification.
As Ron stated above, the current rules don't help much in this area, *explicitly* at least. But if you check that paragraph about using relationship rerolls at different scales, and you'll find that most of it directly apply to most conflicts, even prior to rerolls and/or getting help from relationships. (For the sake of clarity, it's the paragraph in which Ron explains how a relationship with a single person can help you if you're fighting an army, if I remember correctly). For some reason, that piece of advice did overlap with 'standard' resolution rules in my head during play, and this helped overcome my initial problems.
During prep, I try to figure which NPCs will be relevant to the situation at hand. Here's the trick: if you think about it, NPCs also have a scale, just as stakes. So you could have a 'small group NPC', a 'village NPC', maybe even a 'kingdom NPC'. Now, all I do is to make sure that the NPCs most relevant to the stakes are of the same size of the stakes. That's it. I don't have to know where/how/IF they will come up, but I'm kind of prepared to offer to my players right-sized 'handles' to, errrm, handle the situation. I don't know if this makes sense to anybody else.
I can give you an example of a session I GMed some time ago that seems to be relevant here - one adventure had the life of a single troll at stake. The troll was the son of the boss of a nearby trollish community, and was kept prisoner in a human village (etc. etc... further details skipped). The point is that the trollbabe that got enmeshed in this situation could not engage the whole human village or the whole trollish community in a conflict; but I had prepared some key human and trollish NPCs that could decide for their communities, and they could be certainly be individually convinced about the issue at hand either by talking, magic, or maybe a particularly large axe.
bye
M
Ron Edwards:
Hi Bret,
Markus has it exactly right, for which I am very grateful because I was struggling a lot with my intended reply.
Here's some text from the new draft, in the section about endings.
Quote
THE SCREWDOWN AND THE PIVOT POINTS
You have a guide in play, the Stakes. Sooner or later, the person or group who represents the Stakes will eventually come to a final point: killed, escaped, whatever, however you phrased it originally. The issue at hand is how the events of play develop into these dire circumstances, prior to conflicts which resolve them. Most especially, how this happens without a sequence of nothing-much scenes followed by an instant ending.
Bad example: Your trollbabe, Retta, wanders through various scenes in the Stumpy Mountains without consequences, and conflicts that seem to appear, resolve, and then disappear. After a while, the GM drops a conflict on you – Retta happens upon Gallg engaged in a complex troll magic ritual upon Ree-Sha, and she is growing hair and horns. You name some Goal or other, the conflict goes one way or another … and there you go, one of the Stakes-conditions is fulfilled, and the adventure is over.
The Stakes’ situation isn’t like a light switch that gets flicked one way or another in a single motion. Instead, it increases steadily, both directly and indirectly. Characters feel more and more as if they have less and less room for compromise. That doesn't mean less and less range of possible commitment, but rather less and less option to stay sitting on the fence about various problems, or to wait and see what others do next. I call this process the Screwdown. During real play, you express it by having your characters cross paths with one another and with trollbabes during scenes, by having them reconsider their current situations, by having them make decisions and act upon them, and by having them make claims about and take risks to get the Stakes.
In effect, they act more and more directly toward a permanent resolution of the Stakes.
Here’s how it works for an entire adventure. ...
And then I use a bunch of diagrams to show what I mean by "pivot points" and other stuff.
The big point for purposes of this thread is that your characters, the NPCs, shouldn't begin the adventure at the very last moment of their most desperate commitment regarding the Stakes. That moment is still a ways off.
At first, the Stakes should be relevant to many of your NPCs; then later, the characters should be excited as the Stakes move into jeopardy in some way based on the events of play; and then finally, the Stakes' situation is desperate because the NPCs no longer feel as if they have any choice.
What do you think of that idea?
Best, Ron
Markus:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on December 02, 2008, 11:05:22 AM
And then I use a bunch of diagrams to show what I mean by "pivot points" and other stuff.
The big point for purposes of this thread is that your characters, the NPCs, shouldn't begin the adventure at the very last moment of their most desperate commitment regarding the Stakes. That moment is still a ways off.
At first, the Stakes should be relevant to many of your NPCs; then later, the characters should be excited as the Stakes move into jeopardy in some way based on the events of play; and then finally, the Stakes' situation is desperate because the NPCs no longer feel as if they have any choice.
What do you think of that idea?
Ron, thanks for posting this small preview of the new book... I didn't imagine that the rewrite would include this sort of stuff, and now I can't wait until the book comes out.
The "relevant/dangerous/desperate" ladder seems like a neat way of giving structure to something that usually doesn't, and as such, it seems very interesting. I know that with time and experience, things can become much more nuanced and fulid, but I think that this type of schematization can help immensely a novice GM to enter in the right mindset. I also hope that similar "training wheel concepts" can in the near future be devised for other things that are often difficult to grasp if you didn't see it in action at least once - traits, scene framing, etc etc... This is exactly the type of stuff I'd most like to see in innovative RPGs right now.
bye
M
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