[Trollbabe] Keep on Rockin' in the Troll World
James_Nostack:
Paul and Dave came over. We ate some food, we drank some drinks, we talked about all'a you people on the Internet. And then we broke out some old-fashioned Trollbabe action. My main goal in this post is to highlight one or two unclear points of the old text, in the hopes that it's not too late to get a few of them clarified in the fresh-money tricked-out new version of the game.
Couple of textual issues:
1. The big problem with my brain occurs on Injury, on page 20. I've read that a million times and it confuses me each time. Amazingly it made perfect sense in play the other night, but that might be attributable to wine. In any event, the first paragraph on page 20 is... dense, and might bear some more explication.
2. I think the scenario creation rules could probably stand to be a little more robust. I find that there's not quite enough guidance there to get to reliably juicy scenarios. Meanwhile my friend Scott routinely overthinks the scenarios he comes up with, and I'm having a hard time trying to explain to him what's going wrong (which implies that it's not clear in my head, either). Some advice on how to deal with a "turtling" Trollbabe would probably be helpful too.
3. Is there a point to distinguishing between the Stakes and the Consequences?
4. I find the terminology of Roll, Series, etc. a little confusing. A roll = series, a series = several rolls, therefore roll = rolls. It makes sense when you take the time to sort it out, but it's disorienting when skimming through the text.
5. Let's say there are several NPC's involved somehow in a conflict with the Trollbabe. Can that player then create relationships to each of those NPC's based on that one conflict? (I.e., looking for one person with the help of two others = three relationships?)
These are, of course, minor points and didn't significantly affect our enjoyment of the game, but I just wanted to flag them in the hopes that they might be tweaked.
We had a great time playing the game. Trollbabe exists at this weird junction between the Muppet Show, Bakshi's Wizards, Tomoe Goezen, and the Brothers Grimm, which is a very fruitful place imaginatively. Paul and Dave were very easy-going players and a lot of fun to game with.
* Dave created "Ingrid Vorhild," the first Trollbabe I've seen with a surname. Hand-Held Weapons, Troll Magic, Insightful. Green hair down to her middle back, short horns angled forward. Number 2 (obtained by rollind 1d10). Ingrid was raised among humans and has never met a Troll.
* Paul created "Thora Seakind," skilled in Athletics, Human Magic, and Feisty. Dirty blonde dreadlocks and ram's horns. Number 8. Thora was a foundling at sea, and was raised by Trolls. She's never met a human.
Both players wanted to play in the Silent Forest, which (I decided) was the home of a Troll community, which I played as an otherworldly fairy-land Scandinavian thing. I'll post the elementary relationship map here:
* Gantwood, a big scary dumb lonely feral troll
* Mollywort, a good girl Troll who cares about Gantwood
* Virresprocket, a Troll aristocrat who wants to wed Mollywort
Plus some lesser NPC's, like Timbuckle the Troll-child who is practicing how to spook animals, and Klaus the human prisoner.
Ron Edwards:
Hi James,
I should probably clarify that the new rules text is not a re-write or a brush-up of the old text. It was all completely written from the blank page on up. Scenario creation, for instance, is now a whole chapter. A lot of your points read like recommendations regarding the existing text, which is essentially now all gone.
Therefore instead of going through your points one by one in full, I'll pull out the procedural questions and answer them directly. I'll definitely print out your points and compare them to the existing text, though, and I appreciate you contributing them here.
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Some advice on how to deal with a "turtling" Trollbabe would probably be helpful too.
Huh - it's a highly personal thing. In some cases, aggressive framing means the player can settle comfortably into a more traditional, reactive form of play; in others, allowing for a relatively gentle and not particularly pushy pace to the story is better. The only problem is that each tactic is disastrous when applied to the wrong person.
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Is there a point to distinguishing between the Stakes and the Consequences?
The way I'm now saying it is, the Stakes are a tangible "thing" (person, et cetera), and Consequences are events or outcomes. So conceivably, given a certain designated Stakes, you as GM still have many options concerning the kinds of Consequences will serve as your framing and intensity guide throughout play. A scenario defined by whether the girl will stay with the tribe or leave is very different from another defined by whether the same girl will live or die.
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5. Let's say there are several NPC's involved somehow in a conflict with the Trollbabe. Can that player then create relationships to each of those NPC's based on that one conflict? (I.e., looking for one person with the help of two others = three relationships?)
The requirements for a Relationship are (1) for the NPC to have been involved somehow in a conflict, and (2) for the trollbabe to interact with him or her right afterwards. That means that you can only get one Relationship out of a conflict, because if you make one, then you can't fulfill requirement #2 for the second.
Now, if your trollbabe's Scale is high enough, you could have her sit down with several of the characters in a group and form a single Relationship with that group, but I don't think that's what you were asking about.
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Trollbabe exists at this weird junction between the Muppet Show, Bakshi's Wizards, Tomoe Goezen, and the Brothers Grimm, which is a very fruitful place imaginatively.
I agree! That's a really good way to put it, although I suggest that the precise nature of that junction is just as much, or more, a product of your mind as reader and practitioner as it is of mine as author.
You did a fantastic prep decision for these two trollbabes: one's never met a human and one's never met a troll, so you toss them a troll tribe with a captive human. Perfect! I will definitely reference that.
Best, Ron
edited for format hassles - RE
Paul T:
I am the Paul in this game.
First of all, a big thanks to James--he put together a really great situation/scenario, and populated it with really charming, memorable NPCs. I was trying hard not to laugh (from appreciation) at his depiction of the characters through much of the game.
A few interesting notes:
It was the first time playing Trollbabe, for both Dave and I. We made characters by each rolling a d10. As his number was low, and mine was high, I think it inspired us to make our Trollbabes foils for one another. Dave's was a nature-loving, huge-hammer-carrying druid sort of Trollbabe, who, though she had never met Trolls, was an expert in Troll magic. My 'babe, having a very poor Magic roll, I decided must know some human magic--but only at a very basic, uncertain level, since she had only lived among Trolls and had never met a human. There were some other ways, too, in which our characters were kind of mirrors for each other, which I really enjoyed.
We played the second session (both were pretty short, so it felt more like one "regular" session to me, with the two halves being separated by a week of time) last night, and concluded the story quite nicely. I hope James will post about that, too!
Though we had some trouble with the mechanics (I'm still confused by how the "wounding" or conditions stack, and how bringing multiple conflict types into one conflict changes that), it was a really nice game. It's funny: te way it turned out, it was exactly what I always tried to do with D&D as a teenager.
James_Nostack:
Man, I'm ambivalent about the whole new rules text, because I think "first edition" Trollbabe kicks ass except for a few confusing parts of the text. Also, I don't deserve any credit for the "antithetical Trollbabes" thing: that was entirely player-generated and caused me no end of confusion as a GM: I had to use Post-It notes with arrows to remind myself who was who.
I'm uncertain whether discussing the "classic rules" makes much sense, but here goes:
1. Trollbabes with numbers close to either extreme appear to be at a very serious disadvantage in the game. The GM can, if she were a total ass-wipe, declare a whole string of unfavorable conflicts, which would just pummel the player horribly. Alternately, if the player declares a favorable conflict, the GM could always add the Social action type, screwing the player again. (I'm not saying this would ever happen among non-ass-wipes, but the fact that it could happen at all is pretty weird.)
2. Let's say in Conflict 1, a Trollbabe gets Incapacitated. Some time passes, we frame a scene where she recovers back to Injured. She then gets involved in Conflict 2, which features two different Action Types, and therefore she rolls two dice. Both dice fail. Does this mean that she's straight Incapacitated again? Poor Paul kept running into this repeatedly in the game. (I should mention that this was the nightmare scenario about Injury, I think, that fortunately never arose in our first session, but kept coming back to haunt me during our second session. I felt a very strong need to hand-wave Thora's injuries away, in part because it would spare me from having to parse the text, and to be nice to Paul. It seems there's something very close to a death-spiral there.)
3. It looks like an extremely clever and socially attentive player could run rings around a GM, first by initiating conflicts (which looks like it's a key skill in the game as it allows players some Director-level stance over the scenario), and then by clever use of Goals, would never need to spend re-rolls until a real emergency. She runs the risk of being repeatedly being discommoded in conflict after confict, but because she never re-rolls she doesn't get clobbered. Meanwhile she can narrate failure to avoid severe problems - and who knows, maybe she'd win. This appeared to be Dave's approach with "Ingrid"--I don't think he spent a re-roll the entire game, and he was clever enough about avoiding conflicts or stating his Goal so that losing the conflict was usually a pretty mild occurrence. This is in contrast to Paul, who kept going for re-rolls and getting hammered. Snagging re-rolls is a fun thing, mechanically and narratively--but it looks like it's not "optimal" play to the extent such thoughts apply to the game of Trollbabe.
4. What happens if two Trollbabes team up to take on one villain (having complementary but different Goals)? I ended up running this as two Conflicts in series, rather than in parallel, but I wasn't sure if there's a preferred approach.
Surprisingly for me, I do have some "theoretical generalizations" or whatever they are, about our experience of play, but it's late and I'm tired.
Ron Edwards:
Hi James and Paul,
Since we're in the limbo between first-version and new-version rules, I should clarify the points for purposes of your game. I'm going to assume that it's OK with you guys to adopt some of the new rules concepts; after all, I wrote them in order to bring the game into yet better play-procedures, and I think it's probably more constructive to learn and use them than it is to try to band-aid or mess about with the older versions.
Also, James, I'll be interested in those generalizations.
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1. Trollbabes with numbers close to either extreme appear to be at a very serious disadvantage in the game. The GM can, if she were a total ass-wipe, declare a whole string of unfavorable conflicts, which would just pummel the player horribly. Alternately, if the player declares a favorable conflict, the GM could always add the Social action type, screwing the player again. (I'm not saying this would ever happen among non-ass-wipes, but the fact that it could happen at all is pretty weird.)
Not as bad as you might think. The GM and player are equal when it comes to conflict declaration within a scene, so potential to see that fear expressed in play is pretty minimal compared with most games. I recommend completely ignoring the multiple Action Type rules; those are absent from the new rules and tended to cause trouble with conflict goals.
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2. Let's say in Conflict 1, a Trollbabe gets Incapacitated. Some time passes, we frame a scene where she recovers back to Injured. She then gets involved in Conflict 2, which features two different Action Types, and therefore she rolls two dice. Both dice fail. Does this mean that she's straight Incapacitated again? Poor Paul kept running into this repeatedly in the game. (I should mention that this was the nightmare scenario about Injury, I think, that fortunately never arose in our first session, but kept coming back to haunt me during our second session. I felt a very strong need to hand-wave Thora's injuries away, in part because it would spare me from having to parse the text, and to be nice to Paul. It seems there's something very close to a death-spiral there.)
Well, we can reduce the noise of the problem by sticking with one Action Type. Another way to do it is simply to recover back to full capacity, which is a lot easier in the new rules too.
And finally, the new rules treat Injured as injured, period. In other words, taking another injury while injured doesn't bump the character to incapacitated - she's just now injured twice, that's all, and the rules-status of injured remains unchanged. She begins the conflict closer to incapacitation than she would if uninjured, but the initial failed roll merely hurts her again with no rules-effect beyond later narrational concerns; it doesn't pop her to incapacitated right away.
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3. It looks like an extremely clever and socially attentive player could run rings around a GM, first by initiating conflicts (which looks like it's a key skill in the game as it allows players some Director-level stance over the scenario), and then by clever use of Goals, would never need to spend re-rolls until a real emergency. She runs the risk of being repeatedly being discommoded in conflict after confict, but because she never re-rolls she doesn't get clobbered. Meanwhile she can narrate failure to avoid severe problems - and who knows, maybe she'd win. This appeared to be Dave's approach with "Ingrid"--I don't think he spent a re-roll the entire game, and he was clever enough about avoiding conflicts or stating his Goal so that losing the conflict was usually a pretty mild occurrence. This is in contrast to Paul, who kept going for re-rolls and getting hammered. Snagging re-rolls is a fun thing, mechanically and narratively--but it looks like it's not "optimal" play to the extent such thoughts apply to the game of Trollbabe.
How is this running rings around a GM? You're assuming the GM wants the trollbabe to get into conflicts and take damage, which is bad Trollbabe GMing because it's play-before-play.
Let's clarify something: you're failing to do something here. You're failing to work with the conflicts that the trollbabe keeps losing. Accepting the failure and not re-rolling means she loses in whatever conflict of interest has come up. That means she gets physically pushed around, psychologically victimized, socially marginalized, physically restrained in freedom of movement, and above all, nothing she wants happens.
You need to make those lost conflicts stick, narratively. They need to have consequences for the trollbabe and consequences for the Stakes.
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4. What happens if two Trollbabes team up to take on one villain (having complementary but different Goals)? I ended up running this as two Conflicts in series, rather than in parallel, but I wasn't sure if there's a preferred approach.
That's a complex and carefully-outlined topic in the new rules. For now, you're probably best off sticking with the parallel conflicts like you're doing, but to make this work, make sure the goals are orthogonal - in other words, both might succeed, both might fail, and either/or in both directions. Also, a new-rules thing you can try is to have the second trollbabe to announce (or get announced into) the conflict be constrained by the Pace of the first.
Best, Ron
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