Shared narrative vs. Exploration of Character in Trollbabe

[rafial]

I'd like to discuss an issue which I believe has been an undercurrent of tension in the Trollbabe campaign I am currently running.  The issue is the possible negative impact of a shared narration mechanic on player enjoyment of exploration of character.

The mechanic in question is the Trollbabe "when you win the GM talks and when you lose, you talk" mechanic.  In general, the GM winds up describing actions of the character, using the players stated goals during the free and clear phase, and the attribute descriptors as a guideline.

I've noticed however that the players get very frustrated having me talk about what their characters are doing.  One particular quote that stuck with me was "I had very particular ideas about how [my guy] moved and acted, and now I've had to abandon those."  This told me that the player was primarily interested in exploration of character, but now it seems that the central mechanic of the game we are currently playing frustrates that interest.

One particular stopgap solution that has evolved is a change in the way we are using fortune in the middle.  Players are no longer saying "My goal is to whomp this guy", rolling, and then letting me fill in the details of the whomping.  They are saying "I'm going to whomp this guy in this very specific way", and then rolling, and then I generally say "okay you did that."  But that feels a little a little weird because now the die roll has just become task resolution.

I'd like to hear if others have had similar reactions and experiences, and how it was or was not dealt with.

[Jeffrey Straszheim]

In my few sessions of Trollbabe play we didn't run into this problem.  However, note that I play one-on-one with my wife, so we can get away with being pretty informal about everything.  My take on the matter is this: the right to narrate does not imply that others must sit silently, nor that their wishes must have no influence.  So when I'm "narrating" her Trollbabe's success, we do discuss what she'd like to see happen.  It's just that I have the final say.  The reverse applies when it is hers to narrate.

My own rule of thumb is that I should never narrate a choice that her Trollbabe makes, however small, without her being alright with that.  Past that I feel pretty free to put my own stamp on the action.

For example, I would never say, "You wrestled the cheiftain to the ground, but then decided to let him go," without her being cool with letting him go.  It's best, obviously, when this is settled in Free and Clear.  On the other hand, I'd freely say, "You wrestle back and forth with the chieftain, raw strength versus raw stength, neither gaining ground, until he slips on a patch of ice and goes down," even if that's not how she'd like to see the action go.

Tough cookies, I think, to a player who couldn't accept that level of GM power.

[Bob McNamee]

I've had it feel strange narrating successes for players. Especially in the text based IRC play. It sometimes feels strange, like I'm taking over the character.

Tha players haven't complained, but I do try to make my descriptions as interesting as I can, and often kick around the basiccs of what I'm about to say before I do it.

Like "How about if she deflects the Leader's thrown dagger in order to kill the tracker ?..." when Nathan wanted specifically to kill the female tracker.

Its still feels strange narrating the successes (even though it really common in "comfortable" task resolution RPGs).

The more the players give me in information about intent and style of action, the more it helps me deciding how to balance action and scene narration needs.

[Alan]

I think someone observed about Sorcerer that the advance talking-up for dice worked best if it was an actual description of success.  

So, in Trollbabe, have the player describe success before the die is rolled.  If they succeed, the GM just describes the affect the actions have on the target.  If they fail, it's the player who decides how to change his own description into a failure.

So in combat, encourage players to describe the kind of hit they want and, if they win, mention only how the target is damaged.

Likewise in persuasion or debate, let the players speak the words and describe how they win, then they roll dice.  If they win, only narrate the dialog and actions of their opponents.

How's that?

[Bankuei]

Hi rafial,

How does it contrast and compare to, say, playing GURPS or D&D?  I mean in terms of who narrates success and failure?  In most games like that, I'm used to the player saying something like, "I got a critical!  What happens?" and having no problem with me narrating some results.  Is it the players are coming to the table with different expectations, or is it that the taste of narrative power makes them even hungrier?  Or do you think some other factor is playing a role?

Chris

[rafial]

How does it contrast and compare to, say, playing GURPS or D&D?  I mean in terms of who narrates success and failure?

This is part of what I'm trying to figure out.

"Okay, I take a swing at the orc." *clatter* "17. hit." *clatter* "5 damage."

"Alright, you step up and deliver a good backhanded slash, which slips under his shield and delivers a solid cut to his side.  The shock of the blow drives him back toward the precipice."

vs.

"Okay, I'd like a fighting conflict, exchange by exchange, my goal is to kill the orc."

"Let's take that down to action by action."

"ok." *clatter* "7. success."

"Alright, you step up and deliver a good backhanded slash, which slips under his shield and delivers a solid cut to his side.  The shock of the blow drives him back toward the precipice."

Seems pretty bog standard to me.

Is it the players are coming to the table with different expectations, or is it that the taste of narrative power makes them even hungrier?

Perhaps this is the case.  See below.

Or do you think some other factor is playing a role?

Well, one thought that has crossed my mind is that most of our experience with FiTM mechanics are of "player describes successes, and GM describes failures" school (Sorcerer, InSpectres, Octane, etc), or ones that tend that way (Dust Devils), and Trollbabe inverts that mechanic.  Now I personally think the inversion is key to providing the checks and balances built into the game, but it does seem to be constant source of surprised expectations.

Ron describes Trollbabe as Vanilla Narritivism.  I almost wonder if its structure would be less alarming to someone coming to it as their first indie, than those of us who have already had our consciousness raised.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

"Okay, I'd like a fighting conflict, exchange by exchange, my goal is to kill the orc."

"Let's take that down to action by action."

"ok." *clatter* "7. success."

"Alright, you step up and deliver a good backhanded slash, which slips under his shield and delivers a solid cut to his side.  The shock of the blow drives him back toward the precipice."

Any player playing Trollbabe this way that's unhappy with the results is doing it to him or herself. That same player could have said:

"Okay, I'd like a fighting conflict, exchange by exchange, my goal is to kill the orc."

GM: "Let's take that down to action by action."

"Ok. For my first action, I'm going to jump up and bring down my sword like an axe on the orc's head, hoping to split his helmet and stun him. *clatter* "7. success."

GM: "Alright! You split the helmet in two, and actually drive the orc to his knees. He's a fast one, though, and rolls back with the blow, flipping over and aiming his spear right at you."

----

You see what happened there? The player said what he wanted to happen and it did. The repercussions and results of that were determined by the GM, just as they'd be determined by the player if he'd failed his roll.

[Rob MacDougall]

I played Trollbabe for only the first time last weekend, so I can't claim to be an expert, but the balance of narration and control worked pretty well for us just the way Clinton and others have described. The players weren't shy about asserting what they wanted to see, even when they were successful. And I never overruled a player's characterization of their own Trollbabe in my narration.

The key is lots of communication, like Bob (I think) said. Both when I was narrating and when the players were narrating, there was a lot of "oh, how about this..." and "maybe this could happen..." bandied back and forth, even after the "free and clear" was officially over.

As the session went on, the players got pretty creative with setting their conflict goals, too. That's another fruitful avenue for the players to both shape the story and characterize their Trollbabes. One of my players, each time he had a Fighting conflict, said his goal was not to win, but to "learn something". (This worked great the first time, when I had already decided that the "monks" he was fighting were actually a pair of bandits in disguise. Later, when he took on a mighty ogre in a climactic clifftop fight, I was at a loss what to have him learn, other than maybe "don't mess with ogres." He failed the conflict, so it proved moot.)

An even odder wrinkle in negotiating what "success" meant came later when another player took on the same ogre. The Ogregabe (our game was set in a pseudo-Asian fantasy world rather than the default pseudo-European, so we substituted ogres for trolls) was trying to protect one of the false monks; the ogre had travelled a great distance to do battle with the real warrior monk the false monk was impersonating. The player said his goal was to slake the ogre's blood lust without getting killed himself. But then he got wounded a couple of times, and then he used his relationship with the very bandit he was trying to protect as a reroll. So the ultimate outcome was that he had succeeded in slaking the ogre's bloodlust, but the false monk he was protecting was dead. That was easy to narrate. The ogre fought the ogrebabe to the ground, then turned and cut the false monk in half with one blow. Satisfied, he went along his way. As it turned out, everyone was entirely happy with this outcome! :)

Rob

[Bankuei]

Hi rafial,

I agree with your view of the GM's narration in Trollbabe being not much different in form than traditional GM narration of success.  The major difference that I see, is that unlike GURPS or D&D, where the character concept is tightly defined by abilities, skills, and feats, Trollbabe is all Color.  

Trollbabe-wise, Gimli and Legolas are pretty much in the same field of ass-kicking, but have very different styles of doing so, although it boils down to a difference in Color, controlled through narration.  So in this case, it can be highly deprotagonizing to have Legolas suddenly get all in your face with it and Gimli to get prissy with ranged attacks.  The very character concept gets stepped on.  As System lets go of exact details about characters, Color steps forward to fill that void, increasing its importance to the players.

I agree that the overall requirement for effective TB play is open communication, and openess to give and receive suggestions at all times, although not all suggestions need to be followed to the T.

Chris

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Actually, this might surprise people, but the bog-standard narration by the GM, in the case of character successes, is intentional. The GM is required, therefore, to protagonize the player-character in an active and fun way (and as others have said, with an eye toward what the player has already provided). The player has to trust the GM that he or she will do the character justice, and the GM has to return on that trust.

Trollbabe is deliberately designed to model what actually happens but is never textually acknowledged in a traditional game, as I learned over the years playing Champions. I observed that narration is almost never one-sided, player or GM. It's always negotiated, regardless of where the buck stops.

In other words, person X will be "where the buck stops," but everyone else (typically the GM if X is a player, or the player of that character if X is the GM, but everyone else is involved too) gets to toss in his or her penny before the buck gets there.

I can't over-emphasize that this is the default communication-mode of role-playing. It's what people do when they haven't been entrained and limited into narration-control mechanisms ("GM always says," or "fight for narration with counters"). So I just formalized it a wee tad, not much, for Trollbabe, partly as a de-training mechanism and partly just to get the process out into the open.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

The difference is that in "bog-standard games" you don't use FitM, or Conflict resulution. Meaning that the GM often narrates only "you hit" or something of that extent. In this game the narration gives much more lattitude to the GM.

So I can see the potential issue.

Mike

[John Harper]

I'm the player that brought this issue up in the first place, so I'll try to articulate what I meant. First, Chris (Bankuei) has pretty much hit the nail on the head when he talks about Color. My character is an ex-gladiator with a certain kind of fighting style that it central to who she is at the beginning of her tale. Through all of her first Fighting conflicts, however, she succeeded, meaning the GM described her actions, not me. I initially had a problem with this, but now I think I know why.

Clinton's post says it best. I needed some time to get used to dealing with FiTM and the "Free and Clear" phase of the game. Instead of describing my moves and success before the roll, I was only stating my goal for the conflict and then silently hoping the GM would "do it right" (which he did, actually). This is not the way the system is meant to be used, and I'm only now realizing that I was causing the problem that I complained about in the first place.

The idea is "fortune in the middle" not "fortune at the beginning." It's the player's job to talk through the situation with the GM during the free and clear phase, before the dice hit the table. This is where the player gets to add his input about the character's Color elements, which the GM then can use during success narration. Likewise, the GM can add Color elements for NPCs that the player can use during a failure narration.

Like Ron said, it's an issue of trust. I throw the ball to you, you throw it back to me. We both trust that neither of us will catch the ball and run away with it. As a long-time GM and short-time player, I'm just beginning to understand how much I have to learn about player-skills and trusting the person running the game. I've never had to develop my "trust the GM" skill to a very functional level until now. Fortunately, I have a GM that is worthy of that trust and is willing to be patient with me while I learn.