[Trollbabe] Trollbaby!

[Moreno R.]

The hunters, armed and alert, proceed on the path to the cave.  Their leader, Sven, guides them through simple gestures, avoiding speaking to do not betray their presence.   

Sven is furious, his honor is tied to this hunt, the greatest of all his glorious career, and he will not be denied his glory by an old superstitious fool, or by those two strange girls with horns!  They may have scared the carriers with their magic and their illusions, but he and his men are not afraid of some witch's tricks!   

Diamante is on higher ground, hidden behind some bushes.  Behind her, the entrance of the cave.  The lair of the sleeping Dragon, the Dragon that should not be awakened.  Only her quick reflexes saved her and Geli a short time before, when her friend had imprudently risked waking the beast that slept for centuries.   

So far they have only tried to scare the men without killing them, but it was not enough ..  They did not obey, did not turn back.  Now they will suffer the consequences of that decision.

Quietly, she strings the bow, a bow longer than her height.  Then she nocks the arrow, draws and takes careful aim.  A moment later, Sven emits a groan, looking at the arrow that has just pierced his heart.  He is dead before he hit the ground .   

The others flee at that point, but it is too late.  The already discovered the secret path. Relentless, Diamante kill them all, one after another.  Nobody will wake the Dragon, the inhabitants of the valleys below are safe.   

The old guardian of the cave runs toward her, and notwithstanding his age and his frailty,  picks her up and hugs her, then place her astride his neck and carry her in triumph.

  Yes, because Diamante is her:










She is 7 years old, just like the girl that is role-playing her.

She is the daughter of one of the other two players (both are women).  The last time she watched the game sitting in her mother's lap, rolling the dice, and in general cheering for the Trollbabes.  I knew (from her mother) that she would have liked to play, so I asked her if the next time she would have like to play a Trollbabe too.

Her mother tell me that she talked about it all week with anticipation of the game, but when it was time to create the character she was a bit intimidated. This quickly solved itself when she began to delineate Diamante bit by bit. She did choose (apparent) age, number (6), size and shape of horns, human object (a doll) and troll object (a sword) etc., and the drawing has been done (by Silvia, the other player) following her instructions .  That is precisely Diamond like she imagined her.

During the session? She played very well and with a lot of enthusiasm, and thoughtfulness, and carefulness when things got tough. And I realized that seeing her eyes open wide when I was describing a cave, a sleeping dragon, etc..  pushed me to describe things with more care and attention, with much more vivid details than usual. By comparison, I realized how all too often I usually rely on bland and banal stock descriptions, with players who can't wait to take action and are impatient with too much exposition.

So?  So after this experience I would say not only that a 7 years old child (at least, one raised with books and stories) may well play Trollbabe, but that she would also improve the experience for the GM too...  :-)

With some care, though.  I read some time ago this thread on the Forge (which refers to the first U.S. edition of Trollbabe, more complicated and less clear): http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php?topic=29084.15
That thread describe how a game with an older girl (9 years) started well but ended badly, and I did not want my game to end like this.  So I looked at all the reasons why Ron says in that thread Trollbabe is not a game for children, and I tried to correct them.

- Narrating failure:
Ron says: "Making failures heroic - and thereby enhancing and deepening heroism - is a developed skill in authorship, and I can understand that any number of people have no intention of doing so, and that a child in particular simply didn't come to any game-situation with that in mind"

  Fortunately the girl was "her mother's child" in the sense that he inherited a freaking luck with dice (in the adventure in question she did win almost every conflict) so there were not a lot of possible problematic moments in the game.  But before playing I had agreed with the mother that, to avoid self-humiliating narrations of defeat, (which I see often even with adult players to the demo), she would have suggested the possibility of some more heroic events as for example telling her that "perhaps one of his men got in the middle and you hit him instead "or other similar suggestion (or a succession of suggestion, if the first one had not convinced her). During the game she often waited for 2-3 suggestions before making her choice (and in at least one case the did make a choice not suggested by anyone) but in every case the narration was not humiliating in the least.

For added security, her Trollbabe and her mother's played together on the same adventure, to allow the mother to help her "in character" too (during the adventure it worked in reverse, her mother's Trollbabe was saved in at least a couple of occasions by her)

  What would I have done if, after all these precautions, she had lost a conflict that involved her capture or other serious effects?  I do not know, but I think I would have tried to avoid conflicts of that type, by suggesting conflicts that did not involve similar losses and suggesting to abandon the conflict if it got too dangerous.

I must stress that all these "suggestions" did not happen at the table in a noticeable numbers, because she won almost every conflict and she had not problem in choosing "heroic failures" when she didn't. I don't know if, in different circumstances, the amount of suggestion could become excessive, as a sort of "play her Trollbabe for her", but I don't think so: she welcomed suggestions, and we were careful to phrase all them really as simply suggestions,  first asking her phrasing the question like "something happened that disturbed your shot, what it could be?" making clear that it was her decision.

What would I have done, if, all precautions notwithstanding,  she would have been captured with a GM hostile narration of failure? I think I would have "toned down" the rules in that case, making a not-hostile narration (but I am not sure it would have been a real violation: with a child of her age probably even a not-hostile narration of defeat and capture would have been equivalent to an hostile one for a adult player)

For example, the week before (when all she did was rolling the dice sitting in his mother's arms) there was a conflict in which the Trollbabe wanted to "stop the spectre from sucking the life out of the child" (the classic ritual sacrifice to a "undead big boss", with children as victims) and the trollbabe , with the dice rolled by his daughter, lost the conflict.
If I had known earlier that her child would stay up to watch the adventure I would not have put a child in danger (she usually goes to bed before we play, because we play in a school night, but in this season the school are closed).  It was already established in the backstory that the spectre killed the sacrificial victims.
What did i say? I thought quickly about the way the trollbabe goal was stated: it didn't say "avoid the death of the child", so I described he as weakened and tired, but still alive, and that the rite was not finished yet, with the last part still to come .. .

  - One important thing: she was the only one in the group that had not already played Trollbabe least a dozen times.  So I could devote my explanation exclusively to her without having to explain the same thing to an adult and a child at the same time (and having to check both for errors in play)

  - About declaration of conflicts: I didn't explain the rule, I simply played every explicit declaration of conflict in fiction ("I kill them") as a stated conflict from her, and in doubtful cases I simply declared them myself (in addition to those that I would have declared anyway)

  - Describing the victories with adult players sometimes is problematic too, because they do not say what they really want to do (reminiscent of the games where "you should not give the GM too much informations, he will use them against you", I guess), and after the narration they are not satisfied  and say "but I wanted to do this other thing ..."  "Why do not you say so before? Ok, then I will change the narration .."  . Etc  etc ".
  I was afraid that this would have been worse with a child, and instead it was very easy.  She has not yet learned to "do the poker face", it was obvious what she wanted to do in conflict, and during the narration of victory she was not timid in making everybody know how excited she was by some detail or event.

  - Relationships: she has not taken any, but if he had shown attachment to any character in fiction, I would have asked her if she wanted him or her to be her friend (or whatever the case, I would have followed the events of the game).

  In general, I avoided trying to explain too many rules and I simply asked, in terms of fiction, what she wanted to do.

  Two things I feared but have not been a problem:
  - The complexity of the rules: Trollbabe is a very simple game, but I was afraid, however, that it could be too complex for her.  Instead, he immediately grasped the concept and had no problems of that type.
  - Violence: both me and the other players decided to tone down the violence. I created an adventure that could clearly be solved by talking, no dead bodies at the start or horror tones: a hunter who wants to kill a sleeping dragon, a guardian who wants to avoid it.  And the mother has toned down her trollbabe's nature (usually rather bloody and violent) using non-violent methods, talking, illusions, etc. throughout the adventure.
So we got to the scene I described at the beginning, with the hunters near the cave. And as I described the scene, the girl jumps up, and says "I'll kill them all!"  .  I look at her a little shocked and ask her "uh ... what exactly do you want to do?".  "I'll kill them all with my bow."
  As I said, she is her mother's child...  :-)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Moreno,

I appreciate the post. We need to make this thread distinct from the one at Gente Che Gioca. If I can cast a vote toward that topic, I want to follow up on what you wrote here:

What would I have done if, after all these precautions, she had lost a conflict that involved her capture or other serious effects?  I do not know, but I think I would have tried to avoid conflicts of that type, by suggesting conflicts that did not involve similar losses and suggesting to abandon the conflict if it got too dangerous.

I must stress that all these "suggestions" did not happen at the table in a noticeable numbers, because she won almost every conflict and she had not problem in choosing "heroic failures" when she didn't. I don't know if, in different circumstances, the amount of suggestion could become excessive, as a sort of "play her Trollbabe for her", but I don't think so: she welcomed suggestions, and we were careful to phrase all them really as simply suggestions,  first asking her phrasing the question like "something happened that disturbed your shot, what it could be?" making clear that it was her decision.

What would I have done, if, all precautions notwithstanding,  she would have been captured with a GM hostile narration of failure? I think I would have "toned down" the rules in that case, making a not-hostile narration

The hostile narration content at this exact moment of play is Trollbabe's dark heart, or perhaps, shadow-side. Perhaps because what's on the paper is only the barest touch upon the actual possibilities of play. I'll go straight to the harshest.

It may not be clear upon the first read, but I took immense care with Trollbabe to have rape be a possible danger to the player-characters, with mechanics that made it possible, but without it being a mechanically-determined outcome in the ordinary "table of consequences" sense. Instead I left it to a creative and procedural dial whose setting (for you and your group) would be discovered in play. It's embedded in the "Dice Rolls and Outcomes" section:

If this second re-roll fails, however, the trollbabe not only thoroughly loses the conflict at hand, she is flat-out incapacitated: knocked senseless, hurt too badly to move, or anything similar. In this case the GM describes the details and is encouraged to be rather hostile to the trollbabe in doing so.

All is not lost, though. You may check off a third and final item, bring it into play, and get a third and final re-roll. If this one is successful, the Goal is still lost and the trollbabe is still incapacitated, but her unconscious, or bleeding, or knocked-stupid self can somehow be brought into less-disadvantageous circumstances as the player describes. In other words, you're rolling for narration rights about her helplessness. If this third re-roll fails, she remains at the mercy of whatever force or entity was opposing her efforts, as previously described by the GM.

An important point: as I tried to specify in my phrasing, the hostile narration isn't something one invents out of nowhere, but rather should be based entirely on what has already occurred. Therefore it is perfectly all right to play Trollbabe including many such narrations which have no shred of this worst-possible-outcome content, while still being - given what's happened so far - the worst possible outcome.

Anyway, I bring all this up in part to express my surprise at your reluctance to use capture as the hostile narration, because that's generally my mildest application, posing as it does the fun opportunity for information about one's foes and for escape. In playing with one or more children like you did here (and more than one such player seems like a real possibility to me now), I'd advocate for retaining the final GM narration's "OK, this is the nadir" content, and capture seems to me to be a perfect candidate. Again, probably because I know just how bad that situation can be given what the preceding circumstances' content could be.

Best, Ron

[Moreno R.]

Hi Ron!

About the problem of narrations of failure, I would divide it in three different cases:
1) the failure of the goal, as stated, no matter who narrate (for example, in the example of the sacrifice, a goal stated as "stop the specter from killing the kid" in case of defeat in the conflict would mean the death of the boy, period)
2) Humiliating narrations of defeat, caused by a hostile GM's narration
3) Humiliating narration of defeat, caused by a poor choice of narration by the Player (I am assuming it's poor choice, because if that narration is what the player really wanted, for creative reasons, there is no problem)

From my point of view, when I play Trollbabe as the GM, the (2) is the most problematic. The (1) and (3) are usually solved the same way, by teaching the game (by explanations and actual play). if the players enjoy the freedom of narrating their own defeats and their own goals, as soon as they realize what they can do with this system, they run with it stopping putting their own hand in the meat-grinder.

I have met some players that really dislike that freedom, but they simply don't play Trollbabe. I have met some players that instead enjoy that freedom but they abuse it too much (with boring narrations where they always try to turn defeat into success) and in that case I am the one who doesn't play trollbabe with them

In this specific case, what I (hope) I am doing with all these suggestion we are giving her, is teaching her the game. By playing it. This worked really well in the first session, I hope it will continue to work well in the following ones (her mother has alerted me that there is simply no way her daughter will go to bed early next time if she know we are playing, school night or not: we have got a new regular player, at least with Trollbabe), but I think it will.

The (hypothetical, until now) question is what will happen in case of a defeat with a GM hostile narration. As I said until now she played her trollbabe as very cautious (a consequence, I think, of seeing the situation with her imagination more than with rules: a Scary Dragon for her was a Scary Dragon, not a "scale x opponent") so the few conflicts she lost, she did drop the attempts at "inconvenienced" every time. So, it's still a "what if" question I am considering

First, let's look at the actual situation, in my trollbabe games, even without a child playing: I never, ever put rape or any other kind of forced sexual situation on the table. (sometimes it can be inferred as something between NPCs, for example if I narrate that a nearby city was "sacked by savage northmen", it's improbable that there weren't rapes, but they are never explicitly stated). It's nor so much a "line" (I would not object to a rape narrated by a player) as something I really, really dislike narrating myself (I would be really embarrassed, too).
Other things that I don't touch even with a ten-feet pole: torture, mutilations, anything too splatter and violent.
By the other hand, I like having a darker atmosphere in Trollbabe: I really dislike the way some other GM and players play it as a funny comedy with fantasy superhero characters. I like adventures with dark forests, undeads, savage cults, more Conan and less Hercules.
So it's a difficult task, coming up with hostile narrations that would push the Trollbabe to roll to avoid them, in a dark setting, without narrating anything too dark.  Usually I put some NPC at risk, or find something in the situation that the Trollbabe would avoid.  (I think the most "hostile" narration I did lately was having the trollbabe be thrown from a very high sea cliff into the rocks below, breaking her bones to the point of making her completely paralyzed. She was recovered by her (damaged) undead servant (a relationship) that carried her away. She was healed in a few weeks and unleashed a deadly pestilence on the villagers, in vengeance)

What would change, with a child playing? I probably will tone down a lot the undead and horror stuff, and the blood and violence (even if maybe this will be unnecessary, seeing the last adventure...) but in the case of a situation like the one I talked in the paragraph before..  the villagers win the conflict, the trollbabe is incapacitated, I would not choose to have them throw her from the cliff, but probably they will simply tie her up (a not-so-hostile narration), leaving her able to flees right in the next scene with another conflict.

Probably capture will become THE standard "hostile narration": as you said yourself, usually it's really the least "hostile" option before goint into "player favorite narration" territory.

So what I was talking about here?

Hi Moreno,

I appreciate the post. We need to make this thread distinct from the one at Gente Che Gioca. If I can cast a vote toward that topic, I want to follow up on what you wrote here:

What would I have done if, after all these precautions, she had lost a conflict that involved her capture or other serious effects?  I do not know, but I think I would have tried to avoid conflicts of that type, by suggesting conflicts that did not involve similar losses and suggesting to abandon the conflict if it got too dangerous.

I must stress that all these "suggestions" did not happen at the table in a noticeable numbers, because she won almost every conflict and she had not problem in choosing "heroic failures" when she didn't. I don't know if, in different circumstances, the amount of suggestion could become excessive, as a sort of "play her Trollbabe for her", but I don't think so: she welcomed suggestions, and we were careful to phrase all them really as simply suggestions,  first asking her phrasing the question like "something happened that disturbed your shot, what it could be?" making clear that it was her decision.

What would I have done, if, all precautions notwithstanding,  she would have been captured with a GM hostile narration of failure? I think I would have "toned down" the rules in that case, making a not-hostile narration

Case (1), no child playing: "they tie you up, roughly, and beat you with kicks and staves until you are not moving anymore, then they take you away. You have three broken ribs, a concussion, a dislocated arm and a deep cut in your forehead"

Case (2), with a child playing: "you feel a hit to your head, and you fall unconscious. You wake up in a cell"

Same effect from the failed goal ("I flee them") and incapacitation, but in the second case, less-hostile narration.

[Moreno R.]

Second adventure tonight. This time, a desolated swamp, a Witch and her servant Naga (who always licked her lips when she looked at the little trollbabe), a stolen ruby (the talisman that did give the witch power and eternal youth) and the troll who did stole it.

I am going directly into fairy-tales material for the horror (witches, monsters, etc.) because it seems the best way to get that kind of "fairy-tales fear" that stay in the fiction without spilling in the real world and is already known by her from bedtime stories (even if she knows that kind of material more from old cartoons like Snow-white or sanitized versions than from the original fables, it isn't completely unknown).

And she is scared sometimes. The mere mention of the "witch that lives in the swamp" made her ask to her mother "we are not going there, right?", and the Naga who showed that appetite looking at her made her noticeably uneasy. But she confronted them without being forced or pushed. (I think that the old Chesterton quote, "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed." could become the theme of these adventures...)

Her cautiousness is noticeable in another thing: like the first time, she never did a re-roll. She never risked being wounded, and I must say that I prefer it this way. Losing conflicts doesn't seem to bother her too much, and she almost always goes for the "moment by moment" pace (I think it's because she like throwing dice)

So, it seems that we really have got a new regular Trollbabe. One problem is that we will have to try to start playing earlier: this time she had to go to bed before the end of the adventure because she was so tired she was falling asleep (she negotiated with her mother a last conflict before going to bed - she had sided with the Troll, and she tried - and failed - a magic rite to destroy the ruby and kill the witch outright)

[Moreno R.]

Third trollbab(y) session yesterday!! And yes, Diamante killed another man! Again! With an arrow! Again! And now her mother tell me that she want to play with a bow and "real" arrows now! (the toy arrows with suction cups are not enough anymore). I am starting to worry for her friends...

But let's start from the beginning. This was the sixth session for the two adult trollbabes (Diamante joined them at the fourth session, but her player was present, rolling her mother's dice, at the third one too). They are still at Scale 1, from past experiences they like that level more (and it's easier to play for the child, too).

This time the item/person at stake was a engraved and gem-decorated fragile crystal cerimonial chalice, that was taken by trolls during a raid in a human village years before, and now had been stolen again from the trolls by a human, on the run from a troll posse. The dichotomy was "the chalice will be broken or not" . The two party that wanted the chalice were the thief (the son of the artisan that did create it, as his masterpiece, and was killed in the troll attack) and the new troll chief (the son of the chief who guided the trolls in that daring raid into human territories) that consider the chalice the proof of his father's deeds and valor in battle.
I abandoned the "fairy tale" theme this time because I wanted to see Diamante in a more active and decisive role.

At the end, Diamante had the chalice: to decide who would be the final owner, the two trollbabes decided to leave the decision to luck (they could not decide and every competition they though of would have been unfair, for the troll strengh and savagery and the human culture and agility). They convinced the two sons (the human one was convinced by Diamante's "puss-in-booth stare", from the "Shrek" movie cycle - she's a big fan - and the troll was convinced by the "punches in the face" persuasion method of the other trollbabe) and they organized a draw.

The troll won (there was a roll at the table to decide who would win) but the human, mad with frustration and rage, tried to break the chalice with a rock. I told Diamante that she, alone in the middle of the exultant trolls, saw the expression on the face of the human and what he was starting to do (both, human and troll, had said many times before that they would have destroyed the chalice before giving up their "right" to own it). I asked her "what do you do?".

I should have expected the answer: "I kill him with my arrows!"

Everybody at the table was surprised, because until that time Diamante was very friendly with the human, more than with the trolls. Then she added, with a matter-of-fact attitude as if she was explaining what he had for dinner "he did promise me, but he lied. I kill him with my arrows!"

And now she wants to learn to use a real box with real arrows... mmmh...  I think I will have to think twice before making promises to that child...  ("Moreno, you promised me chocolate, and you give me vanilla? Mammy, where did you put my bow?"

OK, seriously: for now it's working very well, she doesn't need so many suggestions anymore and she is very assertive and clear in what she wants to do. One thing that mystify me a little is how her behavior about starting the game changes quickly: the mother tell me that she wants to play and ask about it during the week. But when we show up at her home to play, she procrastinate as much as she can, watching cartoons, playing another game, as if she didn't want to play... but when we really start, she jump right there at the table with enthusiasm.  My best guess is that she is a little intimidated by playing with adults and gets stage fright, that disappear when she go "in character".

These post are about playing with a 7-years old girl, so I have not talked much about what the other player is doing... her trollbabe is a moody, dark character, who like to use magic and avoid physical (and social) contacts with people. She had done things in the past adventures (like spreading disease in a city well, in revenge for being thrown from a cliff) that would make her sinister fame spread, and she goes around with a undead (warrior skeleton) servant. So everybody she meet obey her every whim, while shaking in fear (yes, I do that to annoy the player: i want to see if she will try to change her sinister fame or she will increase it destroying even bigger things).

I cite her now because I liked very much how she used the relationship rules yesterday: she had her "enemy" in the adventure - a rival necromancer - bound, gagged and thrown, alive, in a mountainside side tomb, that she then sealed with spells. To die there.
But at the same time, she took him as a relationship (enemy), in this manner assuring that he will survive and return to harass her in the future (at a time of her choice).

He was a character with a name, but I liked the idea and I had no further use for him, so I accepted the relationship, playing him screaming, just before being gagged "this is not the end! I will return, and I will kill you!"

Next time, the stakes increase. Not for the trollbabes, for me. The other player has asked if her nephew (a 9 years old boy) can play, too next time (he is at the moment living in her house while his parents are away for a week).
I have more doubt about this than with the girl: she already saw us play, she already did read books and she is a quiet kid. I don't know the boy, but I know that he is rather iperactive, doesn't read outside of school, and what he know about rpgs is from MMORPG or D&D. 

Oh, well, we'll see, maybe next post will be about some sort of disaster session, but at most it will be one session only... and if it goes well, maybe I can save him from learning to play from pathfinder or D&D...

[Ron Edwards]

You're braver than I am.

Has Diamante's player made use of any re-rolls yet?

Best, Ron

[Moreno R.]

Has Diamante's player made use of any re-rolls yet?

No. This time, because she never did lose a single conflict. She did lose some series, but she almost always goes for the action-to-action pace, and she always won the fifth roll.

I would have said that she always go for action-to-action, but yesterday, for the first time, she did choose to use a single roll for a couple of minor conflicts.

About the series in a action-to-action conflict: she is impatient to roll dice, so in the previous sessions I had to stop her from rolling to ask her what happened after a bad roll or to narrate her getting the advantage after a good roll. But it was obvious that she didn't care for these middle-of-conflict narrations (while she is very attentive to the initial and final narration), so this time I decided to drop these narration in her case and let her rolls the dice one after another and I narrate the final result if she win (as she always does)

[Moreno R.]

7th Trollbabe session yesterday! The 4th one with Diamante. And this time, with another player at the table, a 9-years old boy (the nephew of the second adult player).  And this one was a much, much, much overbearing presence at the table. We had a very good session at the end (one of the best with trollbabe until now) but it was really stressful! Never again, until he grow up at least a little!

The bigger problem was that he did not stop talking. Ever. Non even for a few seconds. So it was practically impossible to talk to him.  He was very enthusiastic at the beginning, her aunt had already explained the gist of the game to him, so the character creation was quick and smooth. So I framed the first scene.. and he did start talking over my description of it. The strange thing was that he was not distracted, and was not trying to talk about other things: he did took the first few words that I said, and did build on that, something like this (I don't remember the exact words, this is a simulation):
Me: "You are on the side of a mountain full of snow, looking down to a valley..."
Him "ThereISaDragonInTheWalley? Or ThereIsaCity? MaybeThereIsaRiver? ARiverWithSharks! Flying Sharks! FightingWolvesWithSwords!..."

It was not really like this. The simulation I wrote is really too slow and structured. In reality it was as a flood of words, a stream-of-consciousness right out the Finnegan's Wake. I tried to continue the description after a few seconds, with "no, there is a dark wall"... and he did start again.  After a while I realized that it was hopeless and I turned to the other player's framing. And he did continue talking. And I had really a hard time listening to him and the other player at the same time.

His aunt had warned me that "he never stop talking", but I thought that was a way to say "he is a big talker", not a precise definition of the state of his mouth every hour of every day!

After this first moment of sheer terror, it got better: his aunt got some kind of control on him, enough to keep him distracted while I talked to the other players. He could not stay on the chair for long, so after a while he did began to walk around the table, and this instead of a distraction was a improvement: he did walk muttering by himself, without talking to anybody else, and in this way he was not so near my ears, so I had less difficulties hearing the other people in the room. And, most of all, after a while I realized that he was not talking to me. He was simply thinking out loud, but it was not necessary to reply. So it was not even necessary to listen. I stopped listening, considered it a background noise, and played with the others. It's in this way that we could play the great session I talked about at the beginning: but it was not with him. I really played with three players, only keeping tabs about that his character was doing, and making him roll a couple of times for very non-consequential things. It was easy because his trollbabe was often doing something absurd far from the action.

So...  what can I say? I did what I had to do to save the game, for me and the other people, but I failed in making him really play. I was not able to pierce his wall of words.

It was a really strange experience, too: I believed to have experience in coping with children. My mother did baby-sit some neighborhood family sons and sometimes I helped her. Then I had my sister's sons around the house for some years... and at the time I was the one that was able to talk and reason with little child even when their parents could not get them to listen.  But this was really a lot of time ago, I don't remember how I did it, and I have never seen a child behave in this manner before. The adult women at the table, talking about it (not in the children presence) stated that they have, and it's even very common these days with boys of that age...

This is usually the moment when I jump over a soapbox and start ranting about the way schools and in general the social life of children is worse these days, and I don't want to turn this into a social commentary: but I remember that at his age I passed most of the afternoon (after school) running with a band of other boys, playing cowboys and indians or hitting each other with wooden swords (or hitting each other with our fists...), and at the end of the day after all that work my idea of a good time was to watch TV or read comics on the couch. But probably if I had been cooped most of the day in a overcrowded classroom or alone at home, I would have started behaving strangely...

And his reaction at the end of the game? I was surprised by that, too: he was enthusiastic. He wanted to play next week, too, and when his aunt reminded him that in two days he will return home (too far to continue playing) he was almost in tears and tried to convince us to play again tomorrow.

He was almost ignored during the game. While the other players did a lot of things, he did roll something like two times, and for nothing. None of the NPC had any meaningful interaction with him. At the climax of the session, when the other trollbabes were really at risk, I think I even forgot about him and did not frame a couple of his scenes. But he was enthusiastic anyway. Just to be there, play a character, be in an adventure.  After so many years is easy to forget the impact even these simple things had when we "discovered" these kind of games, and it seems that it has the same effect even on children used to have "adventures" always around them with TV or videogames 24h/day...

In any case, after this experience I am even more impressed by the way Diamante's player act and talk. It's not like she can't act like the other boy (when she played with him after the game, they ran around the house playing make-believes or with toys, and she was not timid or intimidated in any way), but when she was at the table playing trollbabe she seemed adult in comparison, and she is two years younger... (but she has probably already read more books than the number a lot of adults read in their entire life)

This time she even risked incapacitation and capture by rolling again when wounded! But I will write about it in my next post, I prefer to keep this post separated from the one about the adventure.

[Moreno R.]

About the adventure: I want to talk about two aspect in particular. One of them is Diamante finally risking re-rolls, going as far as risking incapacitation and capture (more about this later), the other one is about the choice of goals in conflicts and the way it was used to keep a dramatic pace in the narration.

I was not very satisfied by my first Trollbabe games, years ago, with a bigger group. It was not a problem of the rules, so much as a mismatch of creative preferences at the table about color and pacing. The text in the manual depict the setting in broad strokes, leaving the players to fill the blanks. And in our case the way I filled the settings and its color was very different from the the way some of the players filled their characters. Not a problem in general, the Trollbabes are "something different" in the setting anyway: the important part is that the trollbabes should be characters that you would like to read about in comics or books. In this case, they weren't. I did lose interest after a few evenings and we changed game. Talking with the player about it afterwards, it become clear that we have very different vision of what the game is about, and on the very concept of the Trollbabes.
This had consequences on the pace of the game: the players in trollbabe set their trollbabe's goals in conflict, and often the pace of the conflicts, too. A player can "jump" over a lot of fiction simply by choosing a goal that include a lot of actions, or he can slow the game to a crawl choosing very little, inconsequential conflicts procrastinating the climax of the adventure. This influence and it's influenced by the desired color (if you desire a fun comical game, choosing to comically end a difficult problem with a single roll work (see the infamous "gun against whip" very short duel of Raiders of the Lost Ark): if you want a dramatic adventure... well, not so much). At the end to be able to play at all I did choose to have them play different number of adventures, because one player finished most of his adventures in an hour, an hour and half at most, with goals like "you say that your problem is with the king of xxxx? I use a spell to make him appear here and now, naked. We take him prisoner, end of the problem", and another needed at least two sessions to finish her adventures with goals like "I want to open the door to the stairway without being noticed".  Both choices are in my view too extreme, in a way or the other, and removed much of the fun of the game for me.

This summer I had to find something to play with only two other players, both females, and with tastes more similar to mine (even if one of them - not Diamante's mother, the other one - is the one that procrastinated in the previous paragraph), I decided to try Trollbabe again.  I discarded the maps on the book because I wanted to start in a "new world" without any assumption from the previous games, and I downloaded a fantasy map of a big island, half covered in ice, to use as the new setting. I was very careful this rime to keep a more coherent approach to the setting, keeping things like dresses, names, technology more similar between locations (and keeping all of that with a very "dark age" flavor, more "age of vikings" and less the faux-middle-age typical of fantasy role-playing). I decided from the start that in this Island, savage trolls were on the rise (using Darkness elemental magic), and humans were losing ground, after having almost made the troll extinct in previous centuries hunting them with weapons and necromancy).

This new approach (and the lower number of players: I discovered that I find playing only two adventures at a time much more enjoyable) paid off, I have seen the synergy between us increase with every session, and with more time and attention for every player I could better adapt the way I play to get that effect. For example, the player that did procrastinated is doing that less and less, being more confident on the game and what she can do, and I have adapted the adventures to her slow pacing, basing them more on magic, conversations, and intrigue than about action. And I have learned how the setting and situations influence their pacing.

For example: this time, I had to prepare a single adventure. Four trollbabes, all in the same adventure. For this, I wanted something big, a "colossal". Something impressive. But this would have never worked with players that wanted to show their craftiness with careful-worded goals that would bypass all that: to make it work, I need players that would follow my cues, that (to use Ron's words) "keep the pace with the bass player", that slow down when I slow down: for example, by choosing to subdivide a goal in a number of lesser goal in account of the difficulty that we want to show in the fiction, in a completely unstated, natural way, without having to talk about it, ever.

This is what I prepared: a old, ancient fortress controlling the only open pass to a land of cultivated fields and fruits, a green land in the middle of the Ice, protected from the cold and the trolls by the spells of a circle of sorcerer. But the sorcerers are old, there are not enough talented people born in this land to replace them. Much of the old arcane knowledge is lost, and now nobody alive would be able to cast again the spell cast on the massive outer wall, that kill any troll approaching the fortress. Thousands of trolls are camped in sight of the wall, an army hungry for revenge against the people who did force them away from their old land, that they want to reclaim again. Night and day Troll shamans cast ritual spells to overcome the black wall, and if they will ever be able to do so, nothing could withstand that troll horde.
There is a object, a key, that could open the wall removing the spell, but it's hidden in the fortress, protected by monsters, spells and warriors, and the troll can't reach it. But the human can't destroy it because it's the only way they have left to "recharge" the wall when it weaken.

But now there is something new to tilt this stalemate: the trolls have two new allies, powerful sorceresses that have already helped them in the past. They are obviously Geli and Diamante, and their first scene is their first view of the enormous troll camp (at this time, they are there because they were asked to go talk with the troll war chief, they have not even heard of the problem facing the troll. I did bet here on the way Geli was played until now, openly disgusted with humans and very sympathetic to "natural" troll values (courage, valor, vengeance, etc.), and the bet paid off plenty when she and Diamante did swear to the chief that they would have done all that they could to bring down that wall.

In the meantime the sorcerers on the fortress had foreseen the arrival of the trollbabes, and fearing that they would not be able to stop her, they searched magically for someone who could. And they found the other trollbabe, Zachi.  Her first scene was on the slope of the impassable mountains surrounding the pass, looking down at the fortress after having teleported herself and her two companions: a skeleton warrior disguised by bandages and a young noble of a rich family that can't return home, can't survive by himself and follow her complaining about everything, from hunger to cold. She keep him around because it amuse her and for occasional sex when she can spare the time (and for useful re-rolls, too)

In that first scene there was another trollbabe at first (Anastais, the nine years old trollbabe played by her nephew), but after a few minutes trying (unsuccessfully) to say what they saw without being interrupted, I decided that he was already in the castle, instead, eating in the kitchen (she did stay there most of the adventure) and that Zachi was the only trollbabe on the slope.

Zachi is a very aloof and distant trollbabe, in the previous adventures she simply enacted terrible vengeances upon anyone who angered or simply disturbed her (plagues, being buried alive, etc.) and refused offers of riches and knowledge. So I didn't know what could have turned her to fight for the humans (or at least against the trolls). The adventure would have worked even if she had turned against the humans too, but I wanted to see some trollbabe vs trollbabe action.  I decided to offer her acceptance: a home, allies, plus all the knowledge of the sorcerer circle. It worked, this time she accepted the offer and she promised to protect the wall.

(I notice now that I didn't write the trollbabes impressions before: Zachi is remote (and more than a little sinister, cold and sarcastic), she has shoulder-length red hairs with short horns and dress as an human. Her number is 5. Geli is sexy  (and carefree and fun-loving, she is the one who always find herself in trouble of the duo), she has horn like a ram, with long wavy brown hairs, dress in a mix of human leather and troll animal furs. Diamante is fun (but cautions and peaceful. until you anger her, then she become murderous and vindicative), and she is depicted above. The number of Geli and Diamante is 6.)

After the first few scenes detailing the situation and various npcs, Geli and Diamante pass though the wall in exploration mission, but they are intercepted by Zachi (that at this point is the only one who know that she is against other trollbabes). They talk with each other, everybody says that they don't want to fight the others, they agree to a truce and to try to convince the chief of the two factions to negotiate a peace where both troll and humans can live together (sometimes they have these little idealistic moments...  and other times they slaughter a lot of people without a second though. It's funny). After a while they meet again as agreed, but none of them has got any results (we played both scenes: the troll chief said that he would be killed by his own people if he would even propose a truce, and the fortress chief of command said that he would be removed by the King or even by his own officers and thrown in jail).

Geli insist that she will back the trolls, no matter what. Zachi is less than impressed by this blind loyalty, and reply that they should be above these petty squabbles, and they should leave troll and humans alone to fight their own battles. The tension rise, both players ask if they can actually play a conflict to change the other's behavior. I don't remember right away the answer from the manual, but I replied that in any case nothing could prevent the loser to change his mind back at the discretion of her player. At the end both state again that they will not fight another trollbabe, Geli agree to leave the trolls fight the battle by themselves if Zachi will do the same, and they go each to her own camp...

... where Geli start immediately to plan a raid on the castle, to get that key at any cost!

This is where it start the sequence of rolls that was a perfect example of what I was talking above, and that did push Diamante to risk the third roll.

At this time, Geli's player could simply play a magic conflict with as a goal "I want the key in my hand, right now". One single roll.  The first times we played maybe would have done so (the player I talked above almost surely would). But where is the fun in that? And the player is clearly having fun, playing this daring incursion in enemy territory, against another trollbabe. So she makes two distinct magic conflicts, to prepare herself for the incursion: one to become invisible, one to know where the key is hidden (using the strong magic from the wall to find the linked kay). (I am using magic differently this time: in this campaign, every single use of magic, no matter how minor, is always a conflict. Magic is DANGEROUS here).

First surprise: Diamante refuse to help her. She will not betray her promise to Zachi.

Geli goes on anyway but she gets hurt (wounded) in the second conflict (the magic of the wall is too strong, she cough blood and has a nosebleed). Before going out, she ask Diamante at least to cure her with magic.

Diamante agree, but this time (and in a lot of following rolls) luck turn against her: she fail the first roll on the fifth, decisive, series. Geli says "stop, it's too dangerous for you to continue. Thanks, anyway". And she start to narrate her going to the wall.

I stop her and I say to Diamante's player "just a moment please: she has told you to stop healing her, but it's you that decide if you roll again or not. What will you do? Remember that if you fail, you'll be wounded, too".

She decides to ignore Geli's protests and rolls again. And fail again. She describes the exact same effects that happened to Geli.

At this time both are wounded, and Diamante changes her mind: she will help Geli, she will not leave her friend alone.

After this, one or the other of them succeed in a sequence of rolls: to enter the castle and reach the chamber, to peer into the chamber (is the bedroom of the High Sorcerer, the one who talked with Zachi and got her help and sympathy), to deactivate the magical alarms...
In the view of cold number-crunching, it's the wrong way to go: they are rolling a lot of unnecessary dice, they are taking a lot of unnecessary risks. Geli could have gotten the key already with her first, successful magical conflict. And now she is even wounded. Doesn't she know how to play this game?

She does, she does know this game better that someone who would look only at number crunching. That sequence of rolls is like a sequence of scenes in a movie, every one a point where everything could go wrong, and each one underscore the bravery of Geli's attempt and the obstacles on her way.  Zachi's player adapt her actions to this rhythm: instead of "casually" casting some spell that would reveal Geli's attempt, and instead of ignoring what Geli is doing "because my character don't know that", she start a credible sequence of actions that will reveal to her Geli's presence. But not now, not in the first scene. She act calmly, without any hurry (she want to look at an enemy that she thinks is sleeping, why should she hurry?), she talks to her companions, but really "talking to the audience" about how she feels about having to leave the home she did found, to avoid fighting Geli.  She add urgency and significance to Geli's actions.

And Geli (and Diamante) fail the roll to disable the magical defenses on the chamber's door. They both get wounded again (how? an alarm goes on, their presence is discovered, so they break thought the door by force. Geli hurt her shoulder in the process, Diamante gets zapped by one magic trap).

Zachi "hears" in her mind a call for help from the old Sorcerer, woken up by the slams against the door frame by the trollbabes, and she run to help him. In the room Geli find the Sorcerer, armed only with a "knife" (more a paper cutter), that he point to her saying that he will kill her if the take another step. The next instant he falls down, killed by one of Diamante's arrows (conflict, combat). He should not have menaced Geli.

With the guards (and Zachi) rushing down the stairs, Diamante takes the rear, killing with her arrows the first two soldier that show up in the corridor. Meanwhile, Geli open the chest that contains the key. It's enclosed in a sphere of annihilation, that would destroy anyone who would try to touch it (or would destroy the key if someone tried to move it by magic without touching it). She rolls to get the key by magic opening the sphere, but she fails, she is wounded again by a light contact she do with the sphere in her hurry. And at this time she risk incapacitation, and rolls again. She fail, again! My hostile narration is that she is teleported away, in a magical cell (so that Diamante can't reach her, not without a lot of risks anyway). She win the next reroll, and narrates that all the magic she is using had twisted the teleporting trap out of whack, so she is teleported, unconscious and wounded, in a isolated place in the slope of the mountain instead.

At this time, Diamante tries to follow her. First roll, failed, she is wounded again (an arrow from the soldiers). She risk a roll, again, even if I explained that if she would fail this roll, she will be captured, and that she could flee instead. She win this last roll and I narrate that she is able to follow Geli, finding her unconscious in a snow field, and take her to safety (and a fire) saving her life (this is color narration, Gely could not have died there, but Diamante's arrival is a good explanation for her survival).

It's the end of the session. We are more than one hour late on our usual cut-off time, and nobody noticed (even Diamante's player, that at the end of the session is usually sleepy and tired, is still so excited that after a few minutes she start playing "magical battle make-believe" with the boy). I ask Geli and Diamate's players "if you want, you can leave the adventure now. Just tell me where you will be next time", Geli's answer: "I will be right here! I will get that key!" and Diamante agree.

And Zachi will be there to stop them: with his last words, heard by everyone in the castle, the old Sorcerer did name Zachi as his heir and the new Head of the Sorcerer's Council of the fortress...

[Moreno R.]

8th Trollbabe session (5th one with Diamante), ending the 7th adventure.

It was a very short session, because one of the players could nor show up until 10:30 (she had to work late), but we had to skip the last two weeks because Diamante's player and her mother were on vacation very far from here, and we didn't want to skip another week. There was enough time to finish the adventure, though.

The last session ended with Diamante finding Geli unconscious face down in the snow on the mountain peak.  This session started right in that moment. Diamante did choose to avoid risking another magic roll (she is wounded and Geli is still incapacitated) and simply did drag her friend to a nearby cave, where she started a (not magical) fire to warm her.

Meanwhile, at the fortress, Zachi ask questions about what happened and check the scene of the fight. Her appointment as the new head of the keep's sorcerer's council is unchallenged, and one of the other seven sorcerers left, Victor (that become her de facto advisor by giving her advice and informations) explain why: as the new council's head, she has the responsibility of keeping and defending the Key. And the last one with that responsibility is laying dead at their feet, killed by someone who overcome every magical defense devised by the most powerful magician of the circle...

I was surprised that she didn't immediately follow Diamante and Geli. It was probably her only chance to get them both at their weakest moment. At the end of the session it become clear why, but at this time I though that she simply was making a mistake. (that player always play with her cards hidden, she almost never talk about what her character thinks or feels. It add to her character's mysterious behavior, but it make more difficult to understand exactly what she is doing sometimes, and it make being her GM more difficult).

Instead of following the other two trollbabes, she begin to increase the fortress magical defenses, hiding the Key in the library with a spell, and giving out a lock of hair to each one of the surviving sorcerers to allow them to find and retrieve it if necessary. Then she start training them and convince the fortress's commander to evacuate women and children, in case she will not be able to stop the other trollbabes the next time.

Seeing that nobody was doing anything urgent, I jumped to a few days later, with Geli in the troll camp checking her ability with the sword after her recovery (in a scene straight from the first Conan movie, that I referenced directly in the description). The Troll chief ask her if she still want to help them, and she confirm her determination to steal the Key.

This time she decide to use magic to take control of someone inside the fortress. She win a moment-to-moment (two rolls) conflict, one roll to find a suitable subject and the other to take control of his body.  Narrating her victory I decided that she had taken control of Victor, simply because I thought it would be more fun to have her control the person more friendly to Zachi in the entire castle.

"Victor" and Zachi meet on the very next scene. At this point the players asked me a rule question that I had some difficulties answering, and I am still not sure about my answer.  Zachi's player asked me if she could notice something wrong about Victor with a roll.

I thought about it for a while, during the character's conversation. Zachi was not using magic, she was not ready to fight, and she did not want to change Victor's actions. At the same time, I felt that I had no authority to say what Zachi thought or believed. So my reply was that if the player wanted, Zachi could simply notice something wrong about Victor. Just like that. BUT, at the same time, Geli could have noticed Zachi's suspicions, and use a social conflict to reassure her. Confirming that social conflict can only be used to change an active course of action ("Zachi discover Geli's presence and act about it" can become "Zachi do nothing", with the persuasion as the means to get that effect)
Bit I would like to get Ron's "Stamp of Approval" about this rules interpretation, to be sure (after he will finish Shahida. Shahida has precedence)

Zachi's player said that Zachi noticed something wrong and that she was suspicious. But she left the room and didn't interfere in any way with Geli's action (this too surprised me, as when she didn't follow Geli and Diamante in the first scene).  Zachi's player still didn't say anything about what her craracter was thinking.

Geli searched for another sorcerer, and convinced him that they could not trust Zachi (social conflict). To win the conflict Geli used the "unexpected ally" re-roll, so another sorcerer added his suspicions to what "Victor" said.  So the three sorcerers went to the library and used the locks of hairs to retrieve the Key (with Geli following doing what the other were doing, because she didn't know where the book was or how to retrieve it).
Having discovered (and retrieved) the Key, Geli attacked the other two Sorcerers to kill them, but she had a string of bad rolls (justified in her narrations as the problems in fighting in another's body). She failed two re-rolls and got incapacitated. My hostile narration of defeat was that one of the other two sorcerers killed Victor, blocking her in a dead body, with no means to move or return to her true body.

To avoid that happening, Geli's player used up her last re-roll (from her only relationship, an air elemental), but failed another time, ending up imprisoned in the dead body and all the re-rolls used up.

Diamante had tried to take control, of somebody before, at the same time as Geli, but she failed, and didn't risk a reroll, so she was waiting by Geli's side in their hut in the Troll camp. Realizing what happened, she was able to retrieve Geli's mind and return her to her true body.

At the time, Zachi was examining Victor's body, and she had realized what happened, too, but she didn't stop Diamante from rescuing Geli. After that, though, she contacted Diamante, and at that time she finally explained what she was doing. She reminded Diamante that she and Geli had agreed to leave humans and trolls to fight their own battles, but Geli had betrayed that agreement. But Zachi still did adhere to it . That's why she had not fought against Geli and Diamante, both times they tried to get the Key.

Seeing that dialog at the table, it was impressive. Zachi's player appealed to Diamante's honor and her own promise, and asked what she thought about Geli's actions. Talking to Diamante's player as if she was an adult, and not a seven years old child.  And Diamante's player replied in turn, gravely admitting that Geli was wrong, and that she did not approve what she was doing. Zachi's asked why, being that the case, Diamante still had helped her, saving her two times. Diamante's reply was "because she is my friend", said not with a child simplicity, but with a tone of regret.

At the end of that dialog, Diamante agreed to talk to Geli and tell her that she would not help anymore, and that what she was doing was wrong. In the following scene, after some hours, I had Geli waking up, with Diamante at her side. Diamante asked her why she was doing what she was doing, after she had promised Zachi that they would have not interfered anymore. Geli replied saying that she had to try, and asked Diamante to help her one last time, and if that last try had failed, too, she would give up. But she needed Diamante's help (unstated, out-of-character, Geli had the problem of not being able to make even a single reroll anymore. Diamante had half of the rerolls still available and a new relationship with a troll shaman taken before in the session. Zachi had all of her reroll still usable, including three relationships). Diamante agreed to help her one last time.

The last try was a short one. Trying to avoid a direct confrontation with Zachi (that had told Diamante that if they had attacked another time, she would not stand idle as the first two times), they simply used magic to excavate a tunnel under the wall (a very deep and long tunnel, to avoid the magical defenses). Zachi, alerted by the fighting between the trolls and the human guards, closed up the tunnel, and contacted again the other two trollbabes. This time Geli did agree to leave the troll camp, as long as Zachi would leave the human fortress, too.

The epilogue was played as a bitter ending. Zachi had to leave the only place where she was accepted (and, more than that... she had to leave behind the biggest library she had ever seen), and Geli had to desert the trolls after having promised them her help.  Both did not trust the other, so they said that would travel together to ensure that the other would not return. All the three trollbabes did choose the same exact location for the next adventure, at the opposite end of the map (a jungle in the south).

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Moreno,

Given the magnitude of these posts, I am too much in awe to comment fully, but here's my call with your direct question. You wrote,

"Victor" and Zachi meet on the very next scene. At this point the players asked me a rule question that I had some difficulties answering, and I am still not sure about my answer.  Zachi's player asked me if she could notice something wrong about Victor with a roll.

I thought about it for a while, during the character's conversation. Zachi was not using magic, she was not ready to fight, and she did not want to change Victor's actions. At the same time, I felt that I had no authority to say what Zachi thought or believed. So my reply was that if the player wanted, Zachi could simply notice something wrong about Victor. Just like that. BUT, at the same time, Geli could have noticed Zachi's suspicions, and use a social conflict to reassure her. Confirming that social conflict can only be used to change an active course of action ("Zachi discover Geli's presence and act about it" can become "Zachi do nothing", with the persuasion as the means to get that effect)
Bit I would like to get Ron's "Stamp of Approval" about this rules interpretation, to be sure (after he will finish Shahida. Shahida has precedence)

Zachi's player said that Zachi noticed something wrong and that she was suspicious. But she left the room and didn't interfere in any way with Geli's action (this too surprised me, as when she didn't follow Geli and Diamante in the first scene).  Zachi's player still didn't say anything about what her craracter was thinking.

(Let me know if I left anything important out with that choice of text.)

My call is that when Zachi's player "asked me if she could notice something wrong about Victor with a roll," she violated two interconnected principles, or constraints, regarding conflicts. First, calling a conflict must contain no new information. This can be subtle, because it relies to some extent on the GM's as yet unrevealed knowledge or his or her judgment concerning the situation's possible depth. Let's say, as I think was the case, Victor was actually not doing anything wrong even in the GM's mind. In that case, the violations are present and clear: the player was not working with existing knowledge but was creating new information not due to the roll's outcome, but in order to roll at all.

Second, the player was calling for a "nothing changes" conflict. Moreno, this was what you were wrestling with, I think. Think about the imagery before and after the conflict (if she wins) - and if the imagery is unchanged, then it wasn't a valid conflict. Trollbabe conflicts are almost never about "noticing" for that reason; I think there's a pretty extended passage about that in the book including the extreme minority of the time in which that concept is valid.

My solution would be to say, if you're going to call a conflict, then let's talk about what your character is doing - and it has to be a change from what she was doing a moment ago. I think that would keep any hint of your second-order thoughts from arising: if Zachi notices, then we could have Geli noticing Zachi noticing, and now who knows, maybe someone could notice her doing that! This could go on forever! Boy, this is fun! ... if you see my point.

Best, Ron

[Moreno R.]

Hi Ron!

"Victor" and Zachi meet on the very next scene. At this point the players asked me a rule question that I had some difficulties answering, and I am still not sure about my answer.  Zachi's player asked me if she could notice something wrong about Victor with a roll.

I thought about it for a while, during the character's conversation. Zachi was not using magic, she was not ready to fight, and she did not want to change Victor's actions. At the same time, I felt that I had no authority to say what Zachi thought or believed. So my reply was that if the player wanted, Zachi could simply notice something wrong about Victor. Just like that. BUT, at the same time, Geli could have noticed Zachi's suspicions, and use a social conflict to reassure her. Confirming that social conflict can only be used to change an active course of action ("Zachi discover Geli's presence and act about it" can become "Zachi do nothing", with the persuasion as the means to get that effect)
Bit I would like to get Ron's "Stamp of Approval" about this rules interpretation, to be sure (after he will finish Shahida. Shahida has precedence)

Zachi's player said that Zachi noticed something wrong and that she was suspicious. But she left the room and didn't interfere in any way with Geli's action (this too surprised me, as when she didn't follow Geli and Diamante in the first scene).  Zachi's player still didn't say anything about what her craracter was thinking.

(Let me know if I left anything important out with that choice of text.)

My call is that when Zachi's player "asked me if she could notice something wrong about Victor with a roll," she violated two interconnected principles, or constraints, regarding conflicts. First, calling a conflict must contain no new information. This can be subtle, because it relies to some extent on the GM's as yet unrevealed knowledge or his or her judgment concerning the situation's possible depth. Let's say, as I think was the case, Victor was actually not doing anything wrong even in the GM's mind. In that case, the violations are present and clear: the player was not working with existing knowledge but was creating new information not due to the roll's outcome, but in order to roll at all.

Second, the player was calling for a "nothing changes" conflict. Moreno, this was what you were wrestling with, I think. Think about the imagery before and after the conflict (if she wins) - and if the imagery is unchanged, then it wasn't a valid conflict. Trollbabe conflicts are almost never about "noticing" for that reason; I think there's a pretty extended passage about that in the book including the extreme minority of the time in which that concept is valid.

My solution would be to say, if you're going to call a conflict, then let's talk about what your character is doing - and it has to be a change from what she was doing a moment ago. I think that would keep any hint of your second-order thoughts from arising: if Zachi notices, then we could have Geli noticing Zachi noticing, and now who knows, maybe someone could notice her doing that! This could go on forever! Boy, this is fun! ... if you see my point.

I think that a problem I had in that scene was the habit of Zachi's player to keep her character's inner thought hidden. So when she asked if she could notice something odd about Victor, I had no idea about what she wanted to do, and if that request was part of a bigger conflict or not.

In hindsight, she simply wanted to have her character CHOOSE to do nothing (still following her promise), instead of having her fooled. She would have done nothing in both cases.

It's a conflict? You say no, I am not sure. it depends on exactly how the conflict is declared, about what, to do what, and the kind. After I wrote that post, I thought a little more about it, and I came up with some options.

The starting point, and what I was asking you about, is a single principle: I don't think that it's in my authority ad GM to tell what Zachi's is thinking. I thought a little more about it and I am even more convinced: the rules say that the player's is the one who decide what the trollbabe is doing, thinking and believing, outside of the narration of a conflict's consequences. So, if there is no conflict, is fully in Zachi's player authority to say that she is suspicious about Victor, that she notice something odd about him, she can even say that "her sixth sense alert her". She has complete authority about what her character is thinking and believing, if there is not a conflict.

About the "no new information" rule, I think it would apply only if Zachi's player had narrated something really NEW ("the spell you used to invade Victor's mind created a red arrow that point directly to his head, with scrolling letters that say THIS ONE IS NOT VICTOR"). But saying "Geli don't know exactly how Victor act, she never meet him, so there is something odd about his behavior" is "new" like using the "surprise ally" reroll in the middle of a busy street,using a new guy never seen before: even if unstated, the street was full of people, and a person is full of mannerisms that somebody could notice changing.

Even if there was absolutely no reason at all to suspect, it would be fully in Zachi's player authority to say "Zachi is paranoid. She believe there is something strange about Victor, even if there is no difference from before".

So, in that situation, I think it was simply a player's narration of what her character was thinking. No conflict, no roll, no fuss, she can do it. Or...  she can do it, IF NOBODY SAYS NO.

That "no" is what create the conflict. The exchange between Victor/Geli and Zachi could be fully played in a impro manner, just "saying yes" to what the other say. And this is the way the two players played it during the game: Zachi noticed something, but did nothing, Geli noticed that Zachi noticed, and they went on doing what they were doing before, without interfering with each other.

Who could have said "no"? Every player with a trollbabe in the scene or the GM.

Ron, you said in the past that in Trollbabe there is not the "say yes or roll the dice" of DitV. I think that the difference is more nuanced: the "say yes or roll the dice" exist at the player's level in Trollbabe. But the rules assign to the GM the option/responsibility of saying "no" even if both players would have said "yes", if the GM see a conflict happening in the fiction.

In that situation, I saw no conflict, because no-one was trying to change the other's behavior, or doing anything that could be considered a conflict by the rules. So the situation resolved without conflicts.

No, in a hypothetic case... what kind of conflicts could have happened?

This is where I was suffering from a lack of imagination during the game. I thought that the other trollbabe could start a social conflict to  avoid being discovered, but thinking about it afterwards, any kind of conflicts is possible, with different objectives. It all depends of what they exactly try to do. (Yes, this is what you wrote in your reply, too, but I needed to arrive to that answer thinking in terms of authorities)

But the important part, in my opinion, is the starting one: the GM can't say to Zachi, outside of a conflict, "no, you don't think there is nothing wrong about Victor". It's outside of his authority.
Saying "there is nothing wrong in Geli's imitation of Victor's behavior" instead is permitted by the letter of the rules, but I think it would betray their spirits: it's only a different way to say "Zachi can't notice anything wrong in Victor"

What if I had called a conflict anyway, after Zachi's player had declared that Zachi had noticed something? By the rules I could, even if there was no conflict in that moment: but I would have to explain where is the conflict, or introduce it in some way. So in that situation in practice I couldn't.

[Moreno R.]

In case someone was wondering about it...  this Trollbabe campaign is still going on. A game every week, when we can. We are around the 20th session, I think, but I stopped counting.

I stopped posting, too, because Diamante was absent from most of these sessions. At the end of September her player began school (2nd grade) and her mother don't let her stay awake so late in a school night.

But it seems that she was loudly complaining about that, so we took the occasion of the Christmas school holidays to let her play again a couple of adventures.

The first one didn't have really nothing of remarkable, apart from a reminder about how "lawful" are the children of that age: it was placed in a small village oppressed by the corrupt town guards, and she did balk at the idea of attacking them with the other trollbabes because.. "they are the law!"  [I made a mental note to avoid putting law officers as possible enemies, evildoers or similar when she play, I don't want to encourage a 7 years old to disrespect the law, she will have much more fun doing that at 17)

The second adventure is the reason I am posting again about this campaign: it was the first time I presented Diamante with a hostile narration of defeat!

The situation: the three trollbabes are near the mouth of an active volcano (on the verge of a catastrophic eruption) and are attacked by three "fire salamander", gigantic reptiles that live in flowing lava (don't ask how they can eat or breathe, it's fantasy!).

One of the trollbabes suggested taking one of the beast alive, as a relationship, and when they decided who had to try to capture one of them, Diamante's player raised her hand saying "me! me!"

So, each of the trollbabes take on one monster (the trollbabes are still at scale 2, and each monster was a scale 2 target), and Diamante call as her goal taming the beast.

And then, she start a string a bad rolls.  She try to jump on the giant burning lizard with a rope (both her and the rope are fire-proof as a consequence of a previous spell), she fail, and she get wounded when she slip and she is trampled trying to keep her grip on the rope that she already had tied to the beast's neck.

I tell her that Diamante is wounded, and that can drop the rope and avoid risking incapacitation. But no, she wants that giant lizard, so she risks a reroll. And fail.

Thinking about it afterwards, my hostile narration was really much more hostile than the narrations I talked (hypothetically) about in the previous posts. But at the moment, there was a narration that made perfect sense, and was the one I used: if Diamante had not dropped the rope, the trampling of the beast would render her unconscious, but the rope would entangle her and tie her to the monster... with the monster going back to the lava lake in the mouth of the volcano. The narration did close with Diamante going down under the lava surface, still protected by the spell but with no way to breathe in molten rock.

She looked at me very worried, but she grasped immediately the concept that it was a "possible" narration that would become true only if she stopped there with the rerolls or failed the next one. She decided to roll...  and this time she did make it, and described how instead she was able to cut the cord at the last moment before losing consciousness.

So, it seems that I was (again) worrying about nothing: she can take even violent narration with her character taking beatings and wounds without problems (I have seen 30years old players being more a... crybaby whan that happened to their characters...).

Ah, I almost forgot... this time, too, she did exterminate a entire group of humans with her arrows. And she even took one of the prisoner to "make him talk". I had the prisoner begin to talk and say everything from the beginning, before she did start to interrogate him, because I was not sure I wanted to know how far she would have gone... 

Anyway, finally they decided to go to scale 3! I was scraping the barrel trying to find interesting stakes at scale 2 (I found it much more difficult than at scale 1...)

[Moreno R.]

Hello again!

This trollbabe game is still going on (and still at scale 3, the players seems in no hurry to get to higher scales.  Diamante's player played a couple more sessions, but there is not much to tell, she has learned the game by now.

She;s got a Troll female shaman as a relationship, and she wanted to draw her herself. This is the picture:


She's got these other relationships, too:
- A giant burning salamander (big enough that she can ride it, using a amulet she made to avoid being burnt by the flames), that usually is shrunk to a lizard's size, that she keep as a pet.
- A riding horse
- A water spirit that she keep safe in a necklace of sharks' teeth she wear. She went to get these teeth personally. With a broadsword underwater using herself as a bait...

She asked me if another girl that is in her class can play one of these times too, but I am trying to find excuses to avoid it: I am picturing myself surrounded by little girls jumping around hacking and slashing with swords and spells and I am more than a little scared at the prospective...

[Ron Edwards]

This may be the longest-running Trollbabe game on record! Perhaps the best synthesis of Roger Dean, Vaughn Bode, Elfquest, and the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH) as well.

I may have missed one or more direct questions in the past two or three posts. If you want, please summarize any that you really want an answer for. I think your summary of "the power of no" is accurate and reasonable.

Best, Ron