[Trollbabe] VoIP play, Session 2

[Chris Gardiner]

Character creation and first session writeup are here: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=19034.0

We played our second session of Trollbabe via Teamspeak last night, and I was much happier with it than the first session. We're getting used to the medium and the system, and everything ran much smoother.

A fourth player joined us, creating Monolith (number: 8) a member of a bare-handed troll warrior-cult who swear oaths never to cut any living part of themselves, allowing their hair and nails to grow. But a human wizard had overpowered Monolith and cut her horns off, the shame of which had caused her to leave the cult. Specialities: troll magic, unarmed, insightful. I put Monolith into the skinchanger scenario from the Trollbabe rulebook.

My favourite part in Monolith's scenes was when she came across a man fighting a bear, with a bunch of lackeys around. The bear knocked him down and was about to gore him, and I asked if Monolith was going to intervene. At first the player said no - that the law of the hunt was at play; but then she changed her mind, jumping in and making a Fighting/Social conflict to scare the bear away - not to save the hunter, but to save the bear from his friends' reprisals. And after she'd done it, she took the bear as a relationship. Nice.

Breaker actually finished her scenario, following Meg into the swamp behind Rottenmere and finding the swamp trolls that had raised her and the ancient human ruins they guarded. The trolls kept the old, evil spells under the ruins quiescent, but Meg's presence was causing them to awake, and she had to leave. Breaker took her as a relationship, and together they left the island to go in search of the treasure marked on her map-tattoo. The pirates that are interested in Meg are still out there - no doubt they'll make a reappearance at some point. Breaker's player opted to keep the scale at Personal for now, didn't change his character's number, and decided that the first stage of the map pointed to Otun's Belch - so that's where Breaker's next scenario will be set. It's also where Monolith's player said Monolith was heading to, for a religious festival, so we'll probably have another meeting of trollbabes next time.

I love how, once things are rolling, story starts creating itself - now we've got a piratey treasure hunt on a sacred troll island during a religious festival. Top stuff.

Mountain-Cloud and Fire-Eyes followed the spirit that had stolen Fire-Eyes' body to some old ruins (left by the same civiisation that made the troll-guarded ruins in the swamp of Rottenmere) and found it about to sacrifice a possessed troll in a ritual. Mountain-Cloud used a spell she'd established in a previous scene to drive the spirit from Fire-Eyes' body and then fought to keep the possessed troll from sacrificing itself to complete the ritual. This was a Fighting/Social conflict (I called for a fighting conflict, the player asked to add Social to it, since her Fighting is so low, justifying it as calling on the troll's spirit to try and seize its body back). Like our previous two action-type conflict, this went bad fast and the troll died, completing the ritual and awakening a great stone god.

Meanwhile, Fire-Eyes (back in control of her body) engaged the sorcerer-spirit in a Magic conflict, trying to bind it into her book. It took a couple of rerolls, using a Sudden Ally (the dead troll's spirit) and a Geographic Feature (the magic of the altar used in the ritual), but the player succeeded, bound the spirit, and took him as a relationship: an enemy.

Fire-Eyes and Mountain-Cloud's play basically consisted of that one multi-faceted conflict, and by the end of it they were pretty low on rerolls (and Mountain Cloud was incapacitated). It was our first really heavy test of the system, and the stakes that we were all setting were pretty intense. When the possessed troll and Mountain-Cloud were struggling over the ritual knife, for example, we set the failure stakes at "The troll wins free and plunges the dagger into his own heart, completing the ritual" and the victory stakes at "Mountain-Cloud tears the knife away and the troll's true spirit manages to drive out the possessor".

It was the stakes-setting that I had the hardest time with, actually. It's something I'm new at, and I have a tendency to try and make the stakes for *every* conflict drastic and blistering. I've read lots of descriptions of lame stakes causing a real dip in play, and I think I'm erring to the other extreme. One consequence of this is that the players are very reluctant to accept failure, and tend to push their rerolls to the wire. I'm also reluctant to have the consequences of failure be "Ok, your spell doesn't work", and tend to look for something else to spice things up, which some of the players think is unnecessary.

Has anyone got any advice on setting quieter, but still engaging stakes? Or on pacing severe and quieter conflicts? And how about setting the stakes of failure simply as "What you try doesn't work" - is the status quo being maintained a suitable consequence to a conflict?

[John Harper]

Stakes-setting is something that takes practice, yes.

Remember that everyone has to agree to the stakes. It's not solely the GM's job to set the stakes -- you're just the buck-stopper. The players are expected to negotiate and suggest alternatives if they want to. In the most basic sense, stakes that everyone can agree to are "good stakes."

That said, I think it's good to push for stakes that don't leave the status quo in place. A conflcit in Trollbabe should usually change the situation in one way or another. Think about consequences. "What you try doesn't work, so... the pirate gets away." Or you look foolish. Or Greta doesn't speak to you for the rest of the night.

If there are no consequences, there's probably no conflict.

[John Harper]

Chris, these threads about stakes might also be helpful:

A skill to cultivate: Setting Stakes

Before Stakes: What is your intent?

[Chris Gardiner]

Hi John,

Thanks for the links - I've read those threads before, but it's been really helpful going back over them again.

I'll be more active in asking the players to suggest modifications to stakes during Free-and-Clear; and be prepared to revise them based on that.

That said, I think it's good to push for stakes that don't leave the status quo in place. A conflcit in Trollbabe should usually change the situation in one way or another. Think about consequences. "What you try doesn't work, so... the pirate gets away." Or you look foolish. Or Greta doesn't speak to you for the rest of the night.

I tend to agree, but I've got a particular example from the last session of play that's giving me difficulty:-

Monolith was taken by Cullen, the skin-changing boy, to his father's cottage. His father, Feargus, wasn't well - he'd been a logger, and a tree had fallen on his leg a while ago, breaking it in several places. It had never healed, and now Cullen had to fend for both of them.

Monolith's player asked to use troll healing magic (which she described as a rite of healthy new Spring growth) to heal the leg. The initial stakes were:

Success: he's healed
Failure: he's not

But because I wasn't sure about the last one, I changed it to:-

Failure: he's not healed, and his spirit sinks. The problem with this is that I didn't have a consequent action for Feargus - I didn't want him to throw himself off the mountain, or anything, so the stakes aren't actually that different from "You fail - nothing changes."

In this specific case is "Nothing changes" a valid failure stake? Cullen and Feargus are kind of in dire straights - they're living on the breadline, Feargus is only going to get worse, Cullen's life revolves around supporting him - do the continuation of those circumstances warrant being one side of a conflict?

How would other people have handled this conflict? Is it a conflict at all? Now I look at it again, it's looking more like task resolution than conflict resolution.

[John Harper]

I'm not sure it's automatically a conflict. You could just say yes, he's healed.

To make it a conflict, I would dig down into what the player cares about. "Will Cullen and his father make it through the coming winter? Not with his leg like that. You can try to save them from their fate, though. Magic conflict. Stakes: Success: Feargus's leg is healed, and the family will see next spring. Failure: The leg is not going to heal and you have to remove it. Feargus won't survive the first snow."

Or, if the player is really into the magic thing, the stakes could be about the spell:

"If you win, Feargus has a brand-new leg, and the spirits of the green world leave in peace. If you lose, Feargus's leg is healed, but the green spirits are angry that they will not receive his body in the earth come winter. They demand that you bring them a corpse as payment."

Sometimes it's good to assume task resolution and make the stakes about the consequences of the task. Pushing back to the player can work well sometimes. "Okay, you can do this, but what will it cost you? How could it go wrong?"

[Nigel Evans]

One of the players here (Breaker as it happens).

Regarding stakes, I think we need to get more practice with negotiating.  We tended to accept the first set of stakes that Chris offered, which caused some of the problems with the stakes being a little high too often, and nobody ever giving when a conflict started to go bad.

There seems to be an issue when finding stakes for the failure of magic tests that aren't being actively opposed (the healing spell mentioned above and a divination that I did for example).  Anyone have experience with what are sensible stakes to put up for that?  Or is it better to just let them happen?

[Chris Gardiner]

To make it a conflict, I would dig down into what the player cares about. "Will Cullen and his father make it through the coming winter? Not with his leg like that. You can try to save them from their fate, though. Magic conflict. Stakes: Success: Feargus's leg is healed, and the family will see next spring. Failure: The leg is not going to heal and you have to remove it. Feargus won't survive the first snow."

Ah-ha! That's good stuff! I hadn't thought about widening the scope to that degree.

Or, if the player is really into the magic thing, the stakes could be about the spell:

"If you win, Feargus has a brand-new leg, and the spirits of the green world leave in peace. If you lose, Feargus's leg is healed, but the green spirits are angry that they will not receive his body in the earth come winter. They demand that you bring them a corpse as payment."

Additional ah-ha! Or "the mountain is angered you've unmade its judgement. It won't be kind to you on the rest of your journey."

Sometimes it's good to assume task resolution and make the stakes about the consequences of the task. Pushing back to the player can work well sometimes. "Okay, you can do this, but what will it cost you? How could it go wrong?"

Initially, I did ask the player to suggest a failure condition and she suggested that her own leg become twisted and gnarled. I really liked that, but thought it sounded more like an injury, so we agreed to use it if the conflict came resulted in an injury instead.

I think Nigel's right - that the players and I need to be a bit more active when it comes to negotiating stakes. I may point them this way.

Thanks for the help!