Trollbabe: a seven-yr-old GMs
droog:
I've written before about playing TB with my daughter. We have played a few times since, and something happened that I'd like to record.
Jemima started to ask me about colour tweaks. She has recently become a bit of an anime fan (moving on from Studio Ghibli), and she said that she would like the game to be more like Japanese anime.
My reply was cagey. I was a bit caught between some sort of setting integrity and the idea of collaboration. My eventual reply was classic RP culture: i.e. I suggested that she should run her own game. She had actually asked me a few questions about running a game, so she went with the idea quite readily. I was curious to see what she would do.
The first thing she did was to make clear her expectations for heavy Japanese colour. She wanted me to make up a chr with a Japanese name "and cute, like a Japanese anime character." To that end she intervened heavily in the chrgen process, and pretty much made up my chr herself. At first I was actually a bit frustrated, but then I relaxed and went with it.
The, er, adventure, was more of the same. She had two main techniques--present me with a situation in which there was absolutely no choice, and whine about it when I made the wrong choice. Again, momentary frustration gave way to amusement as she railroaded me through some mermaid flick. I experienced participationist play to the full. "I guess I'll swallow the potion, then."
Now, it's clear that she is actually breaking the rules of TB. I'm treating this as a learning thing, and my intention is to teach her gradually how to do it properly. What I find interesting is that her behaviour clearly mirrors a widespread phenomenon in the RP world. She hardly realises what it is that I do differently when I GM.
Arturo G.:
Hi,
Interesting report. Do you have the feeling that she is trying to "play" the kind of adventure she originally wanted you to run?
droog:
I think you would have to break that down a bit. I think that the desired colour is one thing. It's pretty trivial to push that colour over into anime territory, and my own issues with that are simply my own issues. I have residual and atavistic leanings towards the integrity of a given setting, and I'm rather fond of TB's Nordic flavour.
Then there's situation. It would also be quite simple for me to present situations that echoed more closely her source material (though then I'd have to watch it...). I'm studying what she presents as closely as I study anybody I play with.
However--what she simply does not present is choice. There was literally no time that I was free to choose my chr's actions. I was reduced to rolling the dice when she told me I could, and she even intervened a few times in that when the results didn't turn out as she wanted. She's playing me like a puppet.
I postulate that if I offered an analog to that that she would also become highly frustrated, unless I could read her well enough to align what I offered with what she wanted to do. Sound familiar?
Callan S.:
Hi Jeff,
She doesn't seem to be interested in finding out whats going on in your mind without any influence/bias from her (fair enough, she's only little).
But (perhaps walking on thin ice here) I'm kind of thinking what you focused on was not what was going on in her mind, but that you did not get a choice/were played like a puppet. Is it similar to what she did? That it was the choice that mattered to you, and not what's going on in her mind? That's a hard question - please don't kill me!
In terms of widespread phenomina in the RP world, there often seems to be a focus on "Game X is cool" rather than "Game X lets me learn about my friends and associates thoughts and feelings and that is cool". Particularly when someone does something that 'spoils' the game for others, they are often blamed for running/playing the game badly, when really this is a reflection of whats in the core of their mind. Who they genuinely are. And yet they get socially slapped for 'spoiling the game'. I often try to say, in stumbling words, these games should be designed so the GM/player can't make choice X, if it's so dreadful to see someone choose X. But there's always this dread focus on it being the player/GM's fault, as if them having an ego is an error. And that the GM/player should change for the sake of the book, rather than changing book rules (to remove option X, if it's so terrible) for the sake of the player remaining his or her damned self. The focus on changing people to fit the book...it's almost religous! I remember a woman giving an account on story games, who denied but then accepted she railroaded when some player bugged her. I said, that's good to know, now you can write rules which remove that railroading power...but no, she insisted she had to become a better person or something. As if the rules shouldn't change, she should! As if it's not human to be bugged by stuff and get slightly irritable! She should change those things over a stupid book! Gah!
Ok, I ranted - there was some good stuff there. Wash off the rest with some warm, soapy water... :)
droog:
My ice is thick and solid, Callan, so don't sweat it.
This particular game, as it happens, has a lot to do with me finding out what's going on in my daughter's head. It's more to do with that than it is to do with playing a game, as it were.
On the other hand, it's undeniably an RPG, and I'm reporting on it as such here. When I tell my wife about it I focus on the parenting aspect.
I'd say that the rules of TB are actually pretty solid on this. Jemima hasn't read them all, though, and the parts that guide the GM on creating adventures are essentially invisible to her. Yes, it's her fault, but only in the highly abstract sense (i.e. her fault is that she's a child and can't cope with extended technical text).
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