Hello.

I will be gamemastering Trollbabe sometime in the near future with a new group. There will be two or three other players, and I will probably be the only guy in the group.

Only one of the players, Kristiina, has played any roleplaying games before. We tried some Sorcerer in the Spring, and I instantly learned to trust her. However, the rest of the Sorcerer group - the guys that I've been playing with for six years, but never before as a gamemaster, and never before in a narrativistic game - couldn't really commit to the game and failed to show up all too often. I had to kill the game. That's a shame, because I was having more fun than ever before in a roleplaying game, and Kristiina said the same.

Trollbabe seems like a perfect game for this new group. I have some questions about how to GM the game.

I want to run a player-driven game, and Trollbabe is a good game for that. But I get the impression that Trollbabe gives the players less power than Sorcerer in the setup phase, before the actual game begins. Especially I miss the Kicker mechanism, and Kristiina loves it too.

Would it be a good idea to use Kickers, and combine them with the Stakes somehow? Perhaps a group kicker would work best? Or maybe I should just let the character creation session affect my choice of setting and the Stakes in a less obvious way. I don't know, really. How much do you usually draw from the characters' backgrounds and the players' other ideas in Trollbabe when you are preparing for a new game and making up the Stakes?

Kicker made it all so easy in Sorcerer. I'm spoiled, I guess.

I don't want to pressure the new players too much before they've had some actual roleplaying experience, but at least I definately want to draw as many ideas as possible from Kristiina's overactive imagination. It would be boring to design the scenario on my own. I want to be entertained.

And I also want to have a better idea about the players' tastes. I'm a bit nervous, and at the same time positively excited, because I don't really know what kinds of stories the new players enjoy. My nervousness might have something to do with the players' gender. In the past I've been mostly gaming with men, and I expect it to be somewhat different with women.

Simply put, I want to give the players power over the setting and the beginning of the story, and I'm asking what is the best way to do this in Trollbabe.

Hello Mikko,

Here are some threads that should help out a little. Many of them show how the mechanics serve to create "mini-Kickers" very reliably in play for the protagonists, through their own choices and decisions about whom to help or whom to defy.

[Trollbabe] First run advice
[Trollbabe] Conflicts and pace
[Trollbabe] Player-created conflicts
Trollbabe roll and goal interpretation
Trollbabe: switching the Social range?

Overall, though, I suggest you make sure to read through the section about preparing for an adventure, specifically Stakes and Consequences. Don't worry about the players' proactivity, because you will find that trollbabe characters instantly "grab" their players in a scary way, such that people never wonder about what their characters would do, but simply do it.

Best,
Ron

Thanks Ron, those links did help!

Character creation seems to be less important in Trollbabe than in Sorcerer from the GMs point of view. I'm used to using a lot of player ideas when I'm prepping for a game, but in Trollbabe this seems to be unnecessary, because players have so much power to shape the world during the actual game.

This brings a question: is a separate character creation session really necessary, or a good idea, in Trollbabe? Character creation is a lot faster in Trollbabe than in Sorcerer. For example, characters don't need to have friends and relatives in the beginning, because these can be easily invented during the game. Right? In general I feel that I should encourage players to keep their background information very short. (Kristiina might not like this, though.)

I see benefits in letting the new players get a taste of roleplaying during the very first meeting. On the other hand, a separate character creation session would allow me to prepare bangs for specific characters, and would make me feel more confident when the adventure starts.

If we decide to have a separate session, that leaves us plenty of time to prep all kinds of things, if we want to. Where should we focus after we have completed the character creation as presented in the rulebook? Deeper character background? Group definitions for Trollbabe and Magic, perhaps? None of this is really needed. I was a bit worried at first, but now I realize that even just the information on the character sheet gives me plenty of options for player-specific bangs. Maybe we should just use the extra time for learning the rules better.

I was planning on finishing my master's thesis before I start a new roleplaying project, but damn, I'm getting too excited about this to wait that long...

Hi Mikko,

In every single game of Trollbabe I've played, character creation flowed into play almost instantly. There's something about the imagery that makes the player want to move those limbs.

So I learned quickly always to have three or four little scenarios already prepped. You don't need much: just Stakes, Consequences, a few named NPCs, and the all-important list of other names.

Once you're looking at a couple or three player-characters, and once they pick where they're at on the map (sometimes more than one place), this prep will immediately transform itself in your mind to a very character-appropriate scenario in each case.

Best,
Ron