Ok, so I just finished reading Trollbabe. I liked it. A lot.

Reading it, I noticed two things about Trollbabe that I think work together in interesting ways.

1) Trollbabe is in many ways about the hot warrior woman in the chain mail bikini (or HWWiCMB or just plain HWW). The HWWiCMB is a figure of much controversy in the role-playing world. Much discussion about sexism in RPG’s centers around HWW. Much fantasy art centers around the HWW. And in Trollbabe, the PC’s MUST be hot warrior women. The chain mail bikini’s are optional.

What is the effect of having every PC be a Trollbabe? It means that the HWW, which is so often passive and objectified in traditional RPG’s, is made the powerful, important, central subject of Trollbabe. Trollbabes are not just HWW’s they are empowered female protagonists. Their power is central to the resolution of every Trollbabe story. Much like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Trollbabe takes the sexist assumptions that underlie a genre’s conventions (that HWW’s are window dressing in an RPG’s text, objects to be ogled and not three dimensional characters to be played ) and turn them upside down. By doing so, Trollbabe not only facilitates addressing of feminist premises in actual play, but addresses feminist themes in the game books’ text.

2) The text of Trollbabe contains a lot of, well, cheesecake. The cover is cheesecake. A lot of the interior art is cheesecake (although, importantly, the Trollbabe is rarely passive; She’s almost always doing something). Sex and sexual situations are common occurrences in Trollbabe comics. The sexual appreciation of the trollbabe is encouraged by the games text, and the text facilitates the addressing of these sexual themes in actual play. Trollbabes are not just powerful female protagonists (it’s not called Trollwomyn, after all.) They are, most definitely, hot warrior women.

What’s going on here? I think that at least one of Ron’s design goals for Trollbabe was to show that feminism and gamer cheesecake are not necessarily incompatible. In this way, Trollbabe is much like the work of many sex positive feminists, who try to create pornography free of sexist assumptions. It’s also a challenge to those in the gaming community that find the HWWiCMB offensive on their face. It’s like Ron is saying “This game is clearly not sexist. But it’s chock full of hot warrior women. So, either your opposition to hot warrior women in gaming is satisfied or you must admit that it is not fear of sexism, but pure prudery, that drives your opposition.”

Questions:

1) Did I get this right?

2) What does this say about the possibility of “message” game design?

Hi there,

You nailed it! Everyone, that is it exactly.

I'd like to call attention to the physicality of the trollbabes in the illustrations. These women have haunches; they are not anorexic models or impossibly long of thigh. Their breasts are not hyper-huge and they have space between them like real ones do. And as you pointed out, few or none of the pictures are objectified "here she is, look at her" shots, but rather the character is doing something or expressing some unique feature of her personality.

All of these were and are explicit instructions to the artists for the original game, the upcoming book, and the comics.

I suspect that the term "cheesecake" is subject to a great deal of interpretation. For instance, I don't think the cover is cheesecake, not even with the astounding sexual impact of the exposed thigh/hip zone. Which, incidentally, was all Veronica's doing and none of my suggestion at all. But I'd really like to avoid debating the use of the term, because I do readily admit and support the raw content of all the illustrations: that beneath these women's clothes is moving, muscular, and fatty anatomy, which is fully functional.

My plan was always to keep the trollbabes clothed in the book illustrations, partly because players (both male and female) are often inclined to strip their characters during play - more often for completely casual scenes, like skinny-dipping, rather than in overtly sexual ones. So it seemed to me that showing them clothed in the pictures made more sense. And that their clothes are really clothes, which is something else I'm picky about with the artists.

A recent comic story showed Retta nude, and an upcoming Tha story will do the same. The point of these is to "get it over with," in that we've seen them clothed (or, in one case, in a bubble bath), and everyone's developed a mental image of them unclothed, so - here it is, yup - and now the clothes can return. I'm a big, big fan of Allison Bechdel's brilliant comics work (Dykes to Watch Out For), and one detail she has utterly mastered is the use of frank nudity for sexual, personal illustrations, with no hint of pornography whatsoever. Ditto for Alex Robinson's Box Office Poison. I really wanted to get that same effect into the Trollbabe comics eventually - with the question being, can that effect be obtained when the topic is literally a fantasy-female adventure hero?

Naked? Yup. Helpless sacrifice? No freakin' way.

... Trollbabe is much like the work of many sex positive feminists, who try to create pornography free of sexist assumptions. It’s also a challenge to those in the gaming community that find the HWWiCMB offensive on their face. It’s like Ron is saying “This game is clearly not sexist. But it’s chock full of hot warrior women. So, either your opposition to hot warrior women in gaming is satisfied or you must admit that it is not fear of sexism, but pure prudery, that drives your opposition.”

I won't bother requoting, but this is exactly what smacked me sideways in reading about trollbabe and, personally, helped clarify my own perspective on the cheescake issue

(and I haven't even seen any trollbabe art apart from what's on the adept website)

to me this cheesecake vs empowerment presentation is the hook for the game, much like the unsettling term "demon" hooks the player and drives the metaphor in sorcerer (I haven't identified such a thing in elfs, but maybe I haven't looked hard enough? my thoughts on trollbabe & elfs are founded on discussion while I await their appearance in print)

ron, I am always impressed to hear how much thought goes into the direction of your game products

Yep.

So this explains the "certain demographic" stuff and why part of the game text was irritating to me. Personally, I could have done fine without the message, but that may be an cross-cultural issue.

Ron,

Your welcome.

So, what does Trollbabe say about the possibility of "message" gaming, anyway? I know that you've been skeptical of the possibility of message game design in the past, but this game has "message" all over it.

Is this a question of a games design facilitating the addressing of a specific "message" in play rather than dictating that message in text, as, say WoD games often do?

Kingston

Hi Kingston (name?),

My call is that Trollbabe is highly focused in terms of Premise, which is to say, a problematic issue which permits a wide variety of interpretations and answers. But "message"? I'm not sure. It's certainly not a message in terms of the answer to the problematic issue. If anything, Trollbabe offers an absolute nullity of "answer-ness."

Let me try to explain that a little more carefully ... one thing that has struck me repeatedly during play is how immediate and intuitive a player's decisions for his or her trollbabe are - often from the first nanosecond of play. Again and again, people refer to scenarios as "obvious choices," even the ones which I play many times for different people, observing different answers each time. In this, Trollbabe is very similar to the In Utero Sorcerer scenario: people are so grabbed by the immediate situation that their own answer to the Big Question it poses is not perceived, by them, as a choice, but rather as "the answer," a priori.

So yeah, the game delivers a message ... but it's the message that the player of a particular trollbabe wants to say, to the rest of us, and it's only realized through play itself.

Are the issues that you brought up, regarding sex-positive feminism and the role of iconic sexuality, themselves a "message"? I don't think so, not in the sense that I want people who don't get it to get it from reading or playing Trollbabe. Rather, it's more like a litmus test. Either you get the whole "powerful female sexuality" thing, or you don't. If you don't, you'll go hissing and puffing away, indignant about how awful this fantasy-female game is ... and in my opinion, much to my relief. I'm not interested in dealing with Trollbabe players who can't hack that particular issue.

So I'm not sure it's a message at all, because it's not aimed at people who don't get it. It's more of a recognition-thing, on a certain non-verbalized level, based on my many experiences with women who know about role-playing but do very little or none of it.

Best,
Ron

Had to add my $.02 to this.

I enjoy Trollbabe immensely; as a narration engine, I think it's nigh flawless. But yet again, my view of the Premise and the creator's has apparently diverged. ;-)

See, what hooked me into the game was not the "powerful female sexuality in a stereotypically cheesecake environment" Premise. In fact, this thread was the first to smack me upside the head and challenge me to explore that part of the game. Now, of course, I can't not see it. But fear not, I approve, and heartily so! I've always had a sneaking suspicion that certain fantasy artists were trying (in a clumsy, backhanded type of way) to emphasize and reify the power of the female, but ending up with "cheesecake" as the result of not having a clear idea of what they were doing or how to go about doing it. (The good ones, anyway; the rest were interested in softcore porn and selling it under the guise of "art.") Ron's game brings thought and planning to the mix, and now the way should be a little clearer.

No, what hooked me into the game was the Premise of The Eternal Outsider.

Ron Edwards wrote: I'm not bothering with whether or not trollbabes are troll-human hybrids...Hell, I don't care. What matters is that trollbabes do not exist in the setting except as player-characters, and you shouldn't think of them as being a race of any kind...(A) trollbabe is neither troll nor human-she is functionally apart, yet tied into the fates and interactions of both peoples...The trollbabe may be automatically percieved as an automatic friend or and automatic foe by both humans and trolls, yet her perspective is not identical with either one's. (emphasis mine) Her presence cannot help but destabilize the status quo...Ultimately, she may become the means of resolution.

Ron Edwards wrote: The story opens with a cool trollbabe hiking along...

Carl (Spooky Fanboy),

I see no reason for your post to be a challenge of any kind to me as the author, nor does it require any sort of apology. So the "outsider" stuff grabs you more? Fine, enjoy it.

A great deal of your post assumes a particular relationship between author and audience that I have very little interest in developing. The initial post of this thread is exceptional in that it did hit that connection, but that doesn't mean that, due to this, it was exceptionally good or (ugh) my "goal" as author.

If someone wants to know what I think about sex-positive feminism, I'll just tell them. No need to write a game for it - most especially not a game which opens up questions rather than answers them.

One more point, though, Carl ... you're male. I expect that the potential for the sex-positive feminist Premise is not going to be spread evenly across the genders. It's not so crudely generalizable as females-yes, males-no, but I do expect a certain skew there.

Best,
Ron

Hi,

Ron Edwards wrote:
So yeah, the game delivers a message ... but it's the message that the player of a particular trollbabe wants to say, to the rest of us, and it's only realized through play itself.

Are the issues that you brought up, regarding sex-positive feminism and the role of iconic sexuality, themselves a "message"? I don't think so, not in the sense that I want people who don't get it to get it from reading or playing Trollbabe. Rather, it's more like a litmus test. Either you get the whole "powerful female sexuality" thing, or you don't. If you don't, you'll go hissing and puffing away, indignant about how awful this fantasy-female game is ... and in my opinion, much to my relief. I'm not interested in dealing with Trollbabe players who can't hack that particular issue.

Hi Kingston,

Dead center.

Best,
Ron

It has occurred to me that a lot of the play examples I've seen (and my first impulse as well) was folks grabbing their wife/girlfriend and running it solo. This ties into this somehow ...

- James

james_west wrote: It has occurred to me that a lot of the play examples I've seen (and my first impulse as well) was folks grabbing their wife/girlfriend and running it solo. This ties into this somehow ...