[Trollbabe] Dungeonbabe & Dragons (Actual Play)
Ron Edwards:
Kind of a relief to read that post. I was concerned I'd stepped too far over the line even for the tequila forum.
I'm a fairly new father - twins (boy and girl) at two years four months, another boy at ten months. They're already scary-smart, and I want to introduce them to literature and myth much the way you're doing with your daughter. I was lucky as a kid: deprived of most TV, little if any contact with traditional kid-movies, and generally not close to consumer culture. Plus there were lots less intrusive elements, no constant-cable, no home movie viewing. I say lucky because I encountered Pooh, fairy tales, Norse and Greek mythology, and more through the written word, and knew "the movie" was always an adaptation, often fun or excellent but a given person's take on the actual thing. Plus it was a really long time ago - no Star Wars yet, no Alien, no Bladerunner, et cetera. I was reading Harlan Ellison's The Glass Teat and John Gardner's Grendel in the sixth grade, to give you an idea of where my head was.
Anyway, my kids aren't in the same zone; I don't see how they can be unless I somehow manage to live in a way in which they chop wood to burn it to heat the house, or can go to the corner stables instead of the corner Starbucks, or if I successfully pretend that cell phones and the internet don't exist. That doesn't appear to be an option. All of this is a very long and stupid way to say that your example comes to me at a very opportune time.
It seems the task is to find a solid-Gamist RPG which is not based on killing and piling up the corpses. Tunnels & Trolls might do it if you focus on problem-solving, funky/thought-puzzle traps, and interactions with really solid NPCs.
You wrote,
Quote
Earlier, you wrote that there's "a whole ton of possible discussions to come out of playing Trollbabe in this fashion", and I'm interested in what you had in mind. Was Creative Agenda trouble one of the first things that jumped out at you? I guess it depends on what you meant by "playing Trollbabe in this fashion", since I deviated from standard Trollbabe in several ways, starting with Setting and Color.
Creative Agenda trouble is always a consideration when separating Trollbabe's fictional content from its system. However, my thinking in writing that post was a bit more general. The idea is that 'fantasy' is a troubled term these days, and Trollbabe is written to invoke or perhaps to resurrect a certain beefy, sex-positive, female-and-fun underground comix kind of fantasy - which in my opinion has more in common with both knightly legend/literature and ancient myth than "fantasy as a market demographic" does today. So my main concern is bumping the system to a more familiar and (in my view) debased fictional content. Hell, early D&D would be fine - it's full of that hallucinatory multiple-reading-source vibe. It's post-1980 I'm forced to say, judgmentally, "ain't rock and roll," especially after being rolled in anime and baked in Hollywood's blockbuster oven.
But that doesn't seem to be where you and your family are at, at all. The Creative Agenda thing is actually much more easy to deal with and to arrive at solutions for, so I see that as good news.
Best, Ron
jburneko:
Hello,
I have been following this thread rather closely with interest. With the current turn of the conversation I feel I have some personal experience that may be relevant.
When I was 8 years old (aprox. 1984) my mother bought Red Box D&D at a Toys 'R' Us. She had been hearing about the game from sources I'm not completely sure of to this day. My mother has this phrase she always says, "the way you keep a young boy happy is you give him monsters." This is why Ron's "Naked Went The Gamer" article made me smile. A lot of what he said in there about monsters, my mother said to me when I was a kid. Although, *boy* was always explicit in her ideas so I don't know how much she would have applied this to a young girl.
Anyway, I'm a very unique case among gamer culture because (a) D&D was a *family* game and (b) it wasn't taught to us by anyone already entrenched in the hobby. We had to puzzle the whole thing out ourselves from the books. My mother greatly enjoyed drawing maps and was very good at crafting encounters. That's what our games were like. We very rarely went into huge sprawling dungeons. We usually went to much smaller areas peppered with about six or seven very interesting encounters.
In particular these encounters were often very evocative and full of "Ooooooooooooooooooooooo...." factor. I remember many of them to this day. I remember walking in some hills and coming across an Ogre. I think this was the first time we had encountered an Ogre in the game. He was swinging his club at nothing. Then all of a sudden he reached up to his shoulder and it started to bleed as if stabbed from nothing. It was only when we got closer that we saw he was under attack by a swarm of Pixies. The image of an Ogre being swarmed by Pixies like mosquitoes was really, really neat at the time.
Also we often had ethical decisions to make but they were usually at a very high level campaign branching level rather than the scene-to-scene character-to-character interaction level. The main villain of our campaign was a Magic-User (!) named "The Cobra Woman" (again !!!) and there was a point where we found out she was actually a cursed Silver Dragon. We found this out right as we had a chance to strike against her. We had the choice of attacking her now or trying to break the curse which involved several steps and likely further adventures. The choice was real. Had we attacked we would have gone into a set piece battle. If not then we would have ended up in an adventure trying to find the item we needed to break the curse.
It wasn't until around High School that the purely imaginative qualities of these "encounters" began to wear off. I started craving something more unified. Something more intimate. And I think something more self-reflective or introspective. I won't go into the details but the transition from "reveling in pure wonder" to "craving *story*" happened rather naturally and without need to cultivate it. Once that transition happened is when things became rather arduous, complicated and painful because of the complete and utter lack of tools suited to the job.
That struggle is well documented in all my posts on The Forge since I first came here.
I don't know if that was helpful or enlightening but I felt it was relevant and worth sharing.
jesse
John S:
@Ron: Tunnels & Trolls was a great recommendation-- thanks! It seems to be an awesome fit for the kind of Gamist-positive, Narrative-lite game everyone can dig right now.
Not knowing about your actual play threads, I read up on T&T here, creating a character using the Abridged rules, and taking it through a few solo adventures. Even though I didn't get the power of Saving Rolls at first, I could tell the girls would appreciate this game. I ordered a Mythical 6th Edition rule book, but we got started playing a few days ago using the abridged rules, and we've had a lot of fun. [6e was the only one available from B&N, for which I had a gift card. I didn't know until after I placed the order about the Outlaw Press IP issue. It's no wonder that the book arrived without any cover art!]
Reading your actual play posts was pretty inspiring. It's been so long since I planned a dungeon delve, so we got started using an adventure outline I found online: The Lair of the Wyrm (pdf). Taking a cue from your play reports, I suggested that the girls each roll up two characters, and warned them that it was likely that a character would die. My daughter enthusiastically played a solo adventure with each of her characters first to accumulate treasure and adventure points. When her Elven Wizard was fatally stung by a scorpion at the Wyrm's Lair, she was actually excited to return to town and roll up a new character. She enjoys the aspect of figuring out the game dynamics and putting together an effective character/party-- identifying her desire for a Gamist CA was a good call.
The book arrived last night, and my daughter wanted to run her new character through the solo adventure it contained, with me as a referee. I observed something interesting that I wanted to post about: When posing her level 1 Human Warrior against an MR 30 monster in the adventure, it was pretty much an impasse. The monster consistently got the upper hand in combat points, but never did enough damage to penetrate the fighter's 13 Armor-- only by creatively applying (unbidden) Saving Rolls could she get a purchase, and defeat the monster. Had she played the adventure as written, the battle could have gone on perpetually without anyone giving or taking damage.
Anyway, your post about "the most open-ended, mind-bogglingly flexible task resolution system ever" saved the day. She came up with various feats of Strength and Dexterity, and used her Saving Roll margins of victory as bonuses to her Combat Point Total.
Playing this way seemed to beg for Sorcerer's Currency mechanic, which we adapted to great effect! Here's how we did it:
Once per combat turn she could attempt a feat to gain some kind of combat advantage, giving a creative description and an attribute. If she passed a Level 1 Saving Roll, she would have a certain margin of victory which she could bank as a bonus to her Combat Point Total. But, if she could come up with an even riskier feat that built on the previous feat, she could attempt a Level 2 Saving Roll, and get double the margin of victory as a bonus. In this way, it's possible to continue escalating to higher level, riskier feats to gain greater multiples of effectiveness. Obviously, this is limited by two factors:
1. A combat turn is 2 minutes. You probably can't get to a level 10 IQ check to construct elaborate tripwires all over the place in the middle of combat.
2. Higher level saving rolls must build on the preceding saving rolls, and would be narratively constrained to what could reasonable follow (if anything).
Maybe another limit could be that you could only use each attribute for one SR in the sequence.
She had a lot of fun playing this way. Using sequences of SRs like this with rollover victories giving a geometric bonuses may seem way too formal for the T&T rules, and for most situations it may make more sense to negotiate Saving Rolls ad hoc. But reading Jesse's Sorcerer Unbound essays about Currency bent my mind in a certain direction that led us to this result.
I know this isn't the right forum to post about T&T actual play, but I wanted to update this thread with a word of thanks.
@Jesse: I appreciate your comments a lot! That's so cool that your mom was your first GM-- and the rich encounters you describe remind me about my first experiences with roleplaying and what I enjoyed most then. Thank you for sharing these touching memories! You've inspired me to dust off a few of the quirky NPCs that populated the worlds that my brother and I created in our middle-school era roleplaying games.
Ron Edwards:
Hiya,
I'd be generous about the two-minute limit for a given tactical notion. Gromit built those train-tracks pretty damned fast relative to each of the penguin's chicken's pistol shots.
Don't forget all of the EPs for each of those Saving Rolls!
Best, Ron
John S:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 10, 2010, 07:01:18 AM
I'd be generous about the two-minute limit for a given tactical notion. Gromit built those train-tracks pretty damned fast relative to each of the penguin's chicken's pistol shots.
Good point! That would be the verisimilitude you mentioned in your AP post.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 10, 2010, 07:01:18 AM
Don't forget all of the EPs for each of those Saving Rolls!
Oh, I haven't forgotten. We've played two sessions, and the characters surviving from the first run are almost at level 2 already reached level two in the third session tonight, with only one combat! They haven't even faced the Wyrm yet. I started a new T&T thread in the AP forum.
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