A Tale of Three Trollbabes [session 2]

[rafial]

We had our second session of what we are hoping may be a four or five session Trollbabe campaign.  Unfortunately, due to player illness we were one babe short, but thanks to the fact that all the players are still making there way in widely separated parts of the world, this did not represent any obstacle to play.

Once again, I'll begin my report with a focus on prep.  I started by writing up a two or three paragraph summary of consequences for each set of stakes from the previous session.  I also have a list of locations which I'm using to keep track of setting detail we invent on the fly, which I updated.

Then I had to come up with situations and stakes for session 2.  So far this has proved to be a simultaneously quick and protracted process for me.  Quick in that once I have hit on the right idea, it only takes 30 minutes or so to write out a paragraph or two describing what is going on, as well as an explicit statement of the stakes, and a list of possible one sentence bangs given that situation.  Protracted, because it seems to take several days of having things percolate in the back of my head before I get an idea for a situation that really seems to gel with my notions of what the player is looking for.

As I'm tossing around potential situations in my mind, I've found it essential to be constantly reminding myself both of the current scale, and the need for the stakes to be concrete.  I find I spend a significant amount of time meditating on page 34 of the rulebook.  I'm considering forming the text into a mandala and having tatooed on the inside of my eyelids ;)

Right off the bat, we got good use out Ron's advice on Trollbabe Injury and Recovery.  I decided right off the bat to dump Kweli into some (non stakes related) action by presenting her with some white water rapids to navigate in her canoe.  We resolved it at action by action pace, and got some nice narration, including having Mengu the troll grab her at the last moment as she was about to pitch overboard, and a remembered spell being used to lift the canoe over some particularly jagged rocks on a spout of water.  However, at the end of it all, Kweli was doubly injured.

However, remembering that narration can define the scope of the injury and suggest how it might be recovered from, we decided that the injury really represented the fact that the poor canoe was getting battered to shreds.  We followed up with a scene where Kweli and Mengu (and Risket the dog) stopped for lunch, and then decided to abandon the canoe which was starting to take on water, and proceed on foot.  As GM, I determined that this represented a recovery for Kweli, since it represented a move away from the situation that was causing her impairment (the damaged canoe).

She eventually arrived at a mysterious fishing village on the shores of the Sunken Sea where actual stakes related conflict ensured.

Things did not go quite as well on the other story thread.  The player of Yalla has established that one of the character's drives is to search for information about her parents.  This proved to be a good hook in her first session, when I had her meet an NPC that gave her information about her father.

For Yalla's second set of stakes, I decided on a young boy, a seal-human skin-changer, who was searching for his father, a fisherman belonging to a sort of Native American/Maori/Sami inspired tribe that I placed in the area into which the character was headed.  The stakes were to be the danger to the boy as a result of his unfamiliarity with the dangers of dry land, and his fathers reluctance (once located) to accept the boy as his son.  The hook for the player was the echo of her own search.

Unfortunately, not much in the way of good conflict ensued.  Yalla met the boy, met the tribe, met the tribal elders, etc, etc.  It started to devolve into GM story telling, and not much player involvement.  We talked about this during and after the game, and the conclusions we drew were:

1) I had misunderstood the players statement of "what I'm doing next" from the previous session.  The player was really more interested in the political situation established in the first session, and found the "help the lost boy" setup coming a bit out of left field.

2) Old habits.  The player stated "well, I didn't want to do anything too odd, because I didn't want to derail what you had planned."  Unfortunately, what I had planned was for the player to think of cool things I hadn't anticipated.

3) General lack conflict potential.  When preparing these stakes, I had had real trouble thinking up good bangs for my list, and went into the session rather short in that area.  In retrospect, I should have realized that if I was having problems thinking of bangs, maybe there wasn't enough conflict built into the situation.

4) Always succeeding in your rolls is just not that entertaining in Trollbabe.  The player happened to make nearly every roll, and as a result there was no justification of rerolls (which always livens things up) and the player just didn't get to talk much!

In the end it was not a total loss.  Near the end, I managed to get things going by having the kid freak out when he met the fisher people, draped in seal pelts, and realized that his father was somebody that hunted and killed seals.  Also, the player made nice use of the relationship mechanics during the meeting with the tribal elders.  She request a magic conflict involving a belt she has that belonged to her father, in which it was determined that one of the elders might have known her father.  She then took this elder (which I had not named) as a relationship, and then used this relationship as a point of influence when trying to get her story across to the council.  Very nice, I thought.

Kweli's story went quite well however.  It also involved seal-human skin changers, and in fact was lifted directly from "The Silkie Wife" aka "Secret of Roan-Inish", with a fisher folk couple (here more nordic flavored) where the wife was a silkie held hostage by the fact that the husband had stolen and hidden her seal skin (unknown to her).

The player did a great job of putting his own personal spin on it.  In my list of bangs, I had this mental image of the silkie's former "under the sea" husband seated on a rock off shore in the moonlight, playing a lament on his flute.  It was just supposed to be color, but the player latched on to it, and dragged both husbands into the final resolution of the conflict.

Similarly, I had had no plan as to how the seal skin might be recovered, or even where it was hidden.  The player however was right on it, and used Kweli's relationship with Risket the dog, as well as the "relationship goes first" rules to set up conflict where Risket was used to hunt down the missing skin by scent.

So, one home run and one pop fly for the second round of our campaign.  The players chose to advance the scale at the end of this session, so I am even now cudgeling my brain for "small group" situations.

[Alan]

Hi guys,

I think there's two styles of declaration in Trollbabe - explicit and implicit.  Explicit declaration presents conflicts and other game mechanics in plain words.  Implicit declaration presents conflict through the implications of the fictional description and dialog.  Trollbabe rules support both styles of play.  

The players around our table, including myself, use explicit declaration quite often.  However, I like the concept of implicit declaration - I think it's more elegant - so I have often experimented with the method.

This seems to have led to some misunderstandings.  It may sound as if I'm just playing and describing a character from simulationist agenda - but I'm really trying to present narrativist decisions without breaking verisimilitude.  I believe this has led to Wil's missing my between game declaration, for example, and several times in the current adventure when Yalla was "asking" for more danger and conflict - as when I announced I was looking for people following us into the woods.

Wil, now that you know what I'm doing, I hope you'll see it more often.  Likewise, I'll try add explicit declaration after implicit, to help clarify things.

[Bankuei]

Hi rafial,

It sounds like your group is really learning that communication about "when to pass the ball".  As a GM, for myself, I usually need a conflict that spills forth ideas for subconflicts and bangs, otherwise it might not fly.

I always see it on the GM's side to have tons of those bangs ready.  On the other hand, Trollbabe allows players to request scenes as well as request conflict rolls, did you find this being used to introduce a form of bang at any time?

Chris

[rafial]

I always see it on the GM's side to have tons of those bangs ready.  On the other hand, Trollbabe allows players to request scenes as well as request conflict rolls, did you find this being used to introduce a form of bang at any time?

I think so, I've seen the following two things happen in the game:

1) The players requests a scene for their own purposes, and I realize that the scene setting narration provides me with a perfect opportunity to present or develop aspects of the current situation.  That is, the player made the scene request, but I (the GM) bend it to my own ends.

example:

In the first session, Yalla was travelling on a boat, and requested scene in which her troublemaking ward, Petrus the werefox, had gambled away all their money to the sailors, and was being chased by them because he still owed them more.  The scene involved one of the sailors becoming Yalla's enemy, and turned into a perfect setup for the pirate attack I had planned, as I decided that the hostile sailor was really an "inside man" for the pirates.

2) What I like to think of as the "bang for the GM" in which the player asks for a scene that I as the GM totally didn't anticipate being part of the situation, but which winds up moving the consequences along in a cool a different new direction.

example:

Also in the first session, before I even started introducing the stakes, I went around and asked each player to propose a scene.  Kweli wanted to encounter a human outpost, and I almost said no, because I was attached to my vision of the stakes as a pure troll conflict.  But then I sucked it up and went with it, and the presence of the humans turned out to be crucial to the eventual resolution of the stakes.