My wife and daughter bought me a D&D 4th Edition "starter kit" for my birthday, and we had more fun playing the intro adventure with its pre-fabricated characters than I ever remember having with Dungeons & Dragons when I was a kid. The rules seem simpler and more consistent than before, and the powers listed on each character's sheet provide an easy menu of cinematic actions.

Anyway, my daughter, almost nine, picked the "Eladrin Wizard", whom she gave the Tolkien-style moniker "Silwen", and my wife picked the "Dwarf Fighter", whom she named "Skah", a name I read from the Trollbabe names list. After playing the first encounter and realizing how much a balanced party was needed, we added in the "Halfling Rogue" and "Dragonborn Paladin" as supporting characters. When their team faced the Big Bad, I decided to throw in a minor moral choice for them-- the boss offered them a bag of loot to leave dungeon and the town and enjoy the rest of their lives. He also said that if they chose to stay he would utterly destroy them.

They chose to stay and fight, but it was the most vicious battle of the game, and their two supporting characters were brutally killed by the boss's big wolf. The town held a funeral for them, and gave them the Palladin's family crest, so that they could return it to his people.

After that, I asked them if they'd be willing to continue the adventure with different rules, and I suggested Trollbabe. My daughter played Trollbabe with me before a few years ago, but my wife always avoided roleplaying until now. She had fun playing D&D, apart from the frustration of being on the brink of death so many times, and she said she was willing to give Trollbabe a try.

Converting their existing characters was no trouble: Skah was definitely a "fighty" type, and Silwen a magical type. They chose 8 and 3, respectively, for their numbers. To ease the transition, I decided to let them pick one power or concept from their D&D character sheet as a reroll item, replacing one of the five standard-issue rerolls.

Here's my report on their first adventure, which took place over two sessions.

Cosmology: One of cosmological assumptions of D&D is that the PCs are a party of adventurers that travel from town to town, delving into dungeons in order to fight monsters and help the yokels. This assumption is missing from Trollbabe: Trollbabes are lightning-rods for conflict because of what they are, not because they follow some adventure hook to explore the local Caves of Doom. Since Skah & Silwen are both Fey, I figured that might contribute a similar tension-- I decided that in this world, there's an ancient intractable cold war between Elves and Dwarves, and both peoples regard humans as vermin. I suggested that the PCs be some kind of changeling, broadly defined. I also decided that Elves in this setting live largely solitary lives in moonlit cloud-cities; while the Dwarves live in sprawling labyrinthine tombs, ruling over the damned. This led me to think of relating Elf magic to dreaming, glamour, illusion, and transformation; with Dwarf magic deriving from necromancy, crafts, architecture, and wealth. I think there's an unstable truce giving way to mounting tension and rumor of war. These issues were indirectly connected to the stakes of the first adventure, but they aren't yet resolved into anything like a canonical history.

Background: I started out with the destination they chose on the map that came with our D&D starter kit: Fallcrest, a dot surrounded by hills near a major crossroads. The Stakes conflict had to do with a Dwarf princess held captive by a human sorcerer in the ruins overlooking the village. The townspeople look at him as their protector, and the Dwarves are planning some kind of war council to discuss options for freeing their princess. I wanted to blur the lines between different magical peoples in the setting, showing their presence and magic to be similar, with the distinction being culturally enforced-- so I knew I would present "orcish" and "trollish" characters mixed in among the others.

I started with three lists of names:

Names for Fey characters: Grilig, Vaadish, Rung, Rugor, Vulo, Guushnak, Gagar, Kriol, Kaarag, Eruugdush.

Names for Human males: Adrian, Anghel, Bogdan, Claudiu, Damian, Demetri, Cristofor, Dorinel, Henric.

Names for Human females: Adelina, Brigita, Corina, Doina, Dorota, Estera, Lorea, Marica, Natasa

Using these, I decided the sorcerer was Lord Dorinell (which I inexplicably added an L to in my notes), and the captive princess was Adelina. The sorcerer was away on a journey. The consequences would be either that Adelina remains captive or she is freed.

In the first session, we had five scenes:

Scene 1: Skah and Silwen are traveling on the road toward Fallcrest when they realize that there is someone behind them on the road. Skah creeps through the woods to see the person from behind, and possibly gain a combat advantage by surrounding him. Silwen hides behind a tree. It's a misshapen little man on his way to the war council. Silwen jumps out and says "Who are you?" Creeping up on people this way causes a conflict, and she states her goal is to find out whether he is a good guy or bad guy. She fails her initial roll and narrates that a squirrel has thrown a nut at her from the tree while she was talking, blipping her in the head. The little man starts cackling, and she doesn't reroll. Skah comes up from behind and tries to question the dude further, but he doesn't give any information. No one presses for another social conflict, or anything else. So I narrate that the man lopes away. My feeling is that the players aren't really sure what to do; in D&D, the what to do was obvious: kill the monsters. This is a lot more open-ended. I end the scene.

Scene 2: Skah and Silwen see chimney-smoke from Fallcrest several miles off around sunset. They also see the ruins, which I tell them appears to be standing stones on a hilltop. It begins to rain, and they see the windows of the castle light up-- it isn't ruins after all. The path forks: one path goes up to the castle, one down to the village. They choose to go to the castle and ask for lodging for the night.

When they arrive, a small, beautiful woman opens the door and welcomes them in. She dines them in a lavish hall with a warm hearth, and they notice an iron chain on the floor near the fireplace where the woman sits. She leads them to their lavish rooms, and whadaya know, they'd like to share a room, and they see that the chain is attached to their hostess by the ankle. Dang. They sleep in shifts, and when the sun comes up, the lavish castle is gone-- they are in a ruin again.

Scene 3: They go back to the dining hall, which still has a roof over it, and they find the woman still chained to the fireplace, only now she has grey skin and matted hair. She tells them that she is being held by a cruel sorcerer, and beg them to free her.

Silwen touches the chain and the iron burns her hand. Skah hits it with her axe, and feels an electric shock, so Silwen uses her magic to summon up a fire elf to break the chain. Fire elf appears in the hearth and says he needs some whiskey to break the chain, so the player characters decide to visit the town.

Scene 4: Silwen and Skah arrive and survey Fallcrest, a small village with more livestock than people in the center of town. They go in the tavern, and Skah immediately asks "What is the deal with the old woman in the castle on the hill?" Her specialty in Social is "blunt". The people are very suspicious of an Elf & Dwarf traveling together, and trespassing on their protector's property to boot. They find out that the town knows the sorcerer as Lord Dorinell, a holy man, and D is currently on a journey, but they don't know anything about Adelina. Silwen tries to buy some whiskey, and the price is two eggs. But Silwen isn't carrying any poultry products, so we have a social conflict. She fails the initial roll but uses "a carried object" for a successful reroll and pays in gold. Just when they are about to leave, Skah thinks out loud what she thinks of these rednecks, and a brawl almost ensues, but she succeeds in her social conflict roll and they get out of there without fighting. Two characters in this scene got names from the list: Henric, the bartender and de facto leader of the guys in the bar, and his boy Claudiu, a pimply teenager with a cracking voice, who called out "That's what I *thought*!" as the player characters exited.

Scene 5: How would you feel if you've been chained up by a sorcerer for a couple decades? Silwen summons up fire elf again and he blasts one of the links, breaking the chain. Adelina rises up to twice her previous height, stretches out tree-like hands, and says: "Thank you sisters. Now I will tear that town apart!"

At this point, we broke, and I knew I hadn't thought through the stakes well enough, especially making it clear what everyone wanted and how they were connected to the stakes. So before we played again, I made a relationship map and made a few further notes.

Background, Round 2: Dorinell derives a lot of magical power from holding Adelina captive, and he probably has other such wives elsewhere, which accounts for his journeys. Years ago, Adelina bore him a son, but Dorinell took the child to the village where he was raised by Henric and his wife Natasa, who named the child Claudiu. They know nothing of the child's true origin, but have loved him as a son. The ruins come from an earlier, more chivalric age, but the earlier castle was destroyed by Adelina's clan, whom the town fears. Since Lord Dorinell came, taking the Dwarf princess captive, there have been no attacks on the village. Now Rugor, Adelina's consort, and their son Vaadish, have gathered forces-- not knowing that two strangers would free her before they could act. But Adelina will not leave town before she finds her estranged son.

The second session had four scenes:

Scene 1: Picking up right after they set Adelina free, the players immediately say that they want to go warn the town. But as they turn to leave, a raven perches on the ruins, Vaadish in disguise, and speaks to them. Since the townspeople had been so unsympathetic, I decided to give Vaadish a friendly voice: "I deem that you are not enemies. I come with a message to the Princess Adelina. Where is she? [...] That is very good news! Etc." After a very brief conversation, Vaadish cuts them off-- "You have company!" -- and flies away. Silwen and Skah hear voices approaching, and hide behind a boulder adjacent to the castle ruins.

Scene 2: Angry men from the tavern arrive, holding wood-axes, pitch-forks, and other farm tools, grumbling. They think the strangers may be in league with the Rugor clan and they don't like Silwen and Skah poking around the ruins unwelcome. When the men fan out around the ruins, Skah comes out of hiding rather than be found, and when Henric tells her to get out of town, she agrees to leave; Silwen then comes out of hiding too. But Damian, another dude from the bar, is ticked off-- he wanted a chance to pick a fight and blow off steam and he got the others all riled up-- against Henric's pleas, he rushes Skah. I was weak on the "fair and clear" here, and I let them announce their goals and roll simultaneously to see who goes first, using the "lowest roll" rule to determine initiative.

Silwen rolls 7, and Skah rolls 9-- both their goals were to subdue opponents, and they fail. For Silwen's failure, my daughter narrates that Silwen was trying to lasso Damian, and her lasso gets caught in the tree. The branch brakes off, and failing her reroll on "geographic feature", she narrates that it lands on Silwen's leg, fracturing it. For a second reroll, she uses "Fey Step", an ability she got from the D&D character sheet. Third roll failed too, and she disappears, reappearing at the top of the tree, where the same squirrel blips her with another nut, and she falls out of the tree, and knocked out. Looks like my daughter has no problem making failure narration dramatic, but she tends toward failures that are embarrassing & funny rather than cinematic or heroic. She chooses not to use a third reroll.

Skah wasn't so unlucky-- my wife narrates that the initial failure was that she was distracted by the lasso mishap. Upon a reroll, she hits Damian with the butt of her axe, knocking him six feet through the air, to the ground unconscious. Then two other villagers seized her arms from behind--

Wife: "You don't have to roll for that?", she says.
Me: "No, I'm narrating. If you don't like it, you can set a goal and *you* roll."
W: "Okay, my goal is to scare them away. I want to intimidate them into backing down."
M: "Alright, roll Social."
W: "But I'm using my axe to intimidate them--"
M: "What matters is your goal, and compelling them to change their behavior is Social."
W: "Screw that-- I suck at Social. I'm cutting someone's foot off!"
Daughter: "No, you can NOT roll to cut someone's foot off! This is all your fault for getting them all riled up in the bar! You should make peace!" Then to me: "She doesn't cut anyone's foot off!"
W: (Whispering) "I cut his foot off."
M: "Okay, so your goal is to *incapacitate* them so they are no longer a threat?"
W: "Yes."

After these two are down, I have a guy charge her with a pitchfork, whom she dispatches in one series, and then I announce that two other guys run up to her in blind fury as the sun sets. This is where I realize my mistake in omitting "fair and clear", because my wife says: "You need to tell us how many people there are in the beginning. You can't just keep making more and more people appear!"

Just then, there is a cry from the village-- a squeaky teenager's voice, and Henric shouts "Claudiu!" They see a large black hawk rising from the village carrying something that might be a person, and Henric dashes down the path toward the village. The remaining villagers look at Skah to see what she is going to do, and she heaves Silwen onto her shoulders and follows Henric.

Scene 3: Skah arrives in the village just after Henric. Henric is talking to a tall woman with dark hair-- his wife Natasa. Natasa says she was drawing water from the well, when a strange little woman approached her and asked if she had seen her child. Then the woman saw Claudiu and transformed into the hawk and carried him away. Henric runs off into the woods with full panic on his face. Skah wants to follow, but not with Silwen like this, so she asks Natasa for a wheelbarrow! I narrate that Silwen wakes up when placed in the wheelbarrow, but by this time Henric is gone and there is no path.

Natasa has talked to the men who are just limping back from their battle on the hill and she is visibly livid at their antics. She offers Skah and Silwen her hospitality, but Silwen tells her that they all have to leave town because Adelina threatened to tear the village apart. Natasa is more afraid about what may happen to Claudiu than the village, but she remains calm under duress. She is obviously the town's true leader.

Henric reappears, shaking his head. There wasn't a path or any sign of where the hawk had gone. Henric and Natasa tell about the Rugor clan's terror on Fallcrest before Lord Dorinell arrived, and they also admit that Claudiu isn't their true son, but was brought to them by Dorinell. Silwen figures out that the boy is only half-human. Henric and Natasa describe the Rugor clan as "Grave Trolls", a concept I hadn't thought of before. Silwen pressed for details about them, but they didn't know much and I knew less. Natasa gives Silwen a poultice for her leg.

My daughter asks for a scene to form a relationship with one of the villagers in the scuffle, whom I had described as having red hair and a scar on his lip.

Scene 4: Skah and Silwen sleep in the loft of Natasa's barn, and Natasa wakes Silwen in the morning saying she has a visitor. Bela, the red-haired boy whose pitchfork was shattered by Skah's axe the night before, leaving a flesh-wound in his chest, has come to apologize, and he brought flowers. My daughter was embarrassed: "He has a crush on me!" She puts Bela down on her card, and writes "human" next to his name.

Natasa invites Skah and Silwen in for breakfast. Henric apologizes on behalf of all the village men, and pleads with them to find his son Claudiu. He says the Grave Trolls live in some ancient tombs deep in the woods. Skah accepts his apology and they agree to go rescue Claudiu.

End of session. I tell them that the stakes have been resolved, and the next session will be a new adventure. I'll put my reflections and questions in another post.

The main challenge I face now is developing meaningful stakes for the next adventure that arise directly from the consequences of this one. The players have chosen a destination, albeit not one on the map, and they seem to think they know who the good guys and bad guys are at this point in the story. I'm thinking that Adelina's return, and especially bringing this pimply human teenager and asserting that he's her son, may create a new stakes conflict among her people-- but I'm not exactly sure what. I don't think we'll see Dorinell in this adventure, since I don't picture him visiting the so-called "Grave Trolls" out of kindness, and the player characters would get there before he found out about Adelina's escape-- but I could be wrong. It would make sense for him to feel the chain break...

I have some rules-based questions too; in no particular order:

After playing D&D, my wife and daughter found the lack of snap-shot magic outside of rerolls disconcerting. My wife argued that Silwen should be able to use unprepared magic in combat since magic is what she's good at. On page 22 of the PDF, there is a rule that suggests that different characters may use Magic and Fighting in the same conflict-- the dice hit the table at the same time, and the one who rolled lowest has her actions resolved first, which "dictates that successful magic is slower than successful fighting". I'm wondering what circumstances might allow this? Is it only when one character has the luxury or watching the conflict without being under the same immediate threats as the fighting character?

I see Trollbabe as providing scope for much more cinematic magic than the standard D&D-style snap-shot spells, but that hasn't been easy to demonstrate to my girls. Since they don't have a menu of abilities like those listed on the D&D sheet, they're not sure what to do. I think this is aggravated by my failure to provide concrete thematic examples in the setting-- which gives me ideas for some magical conflicts in the next adventure. Since my daughter and I just read Funke's Inkspell together, I framed it in terms of that story:

Magic is *very* powerful in this setting, but it takes time to prepare. Remember when Fenoglio created the book that made the Adderhead immortal? It took him time to find "the right words", and it took further time for Mo to gather the materials and bind the book. Remember the scene in the mill where Dustfinger was cornered and Farid used his magic? [Dustfinger and Farid both have the power to speak to fire and command it.] Since Dustfinger was already cornered by the bad guys, he couldn't use his magic, but Farid, who was looking in unseen, had time to kindle the magical fire.

Hi John,

There is a whole ton of possible discussions to come out of playing Trollbabe in this fashion. I'd like to follow up in any way you'd like, so don't let this single reply define the possible range of the thread as a whole. Bring up whatever you'd like.

Anyway, for this post, I do have one suggestion aimed toward your second post's questions. It is: take some time to share sources which aren't gaming, and probably a little older, which led to Trollbabe. Comics and fantasy novels with a strong mythic/fairy vein, as well as Celtic, Norse, and Baltic myths. A lot of that has strong female voices and characters too. I think it'd help for them to get out of "Let's play D&D as even-better D&D using this Trollbabe thing" mode.

Best, Ron

Anyway, for this post, I do have one suggestion aimed toward your second post's questions. It is: take some time to share sources which aren't gaming, and probably a little older, which led to Trollbabe. Comics and fantasy novels with a strong mythic/fairy vein, as well as Celtic, Norse, and Baltic myths. A lot of that has strong female voices and characters too. I think it'd help for them to get out of "Let's play D&D as even-better D&D using this Trollbabe thing" mode.

Bring up whatever you'd like.

Adelina has returned to Trowehaven, the Dwarven tomb city, but things are not all well. Her husband Rugor is the thrall of Dorinell's rival, Faurumahd, who gave him a nose-ring that gives him the power to touch and weild iron weapons, but enslaves his mind to the wizard's command. Faurumahd's objective in freeing Adelina was to weaken Dorinell's power base. Suspecting something was amiss when approaching the gate to Trowehaven, she created a magical ward over Claudiu by transforming him into a stone pendant with his name engraved as a stylized rune.

There are about six pairs of Dwarves in the city (about half of whom are couples), and an small army of damned souls (50ish) who normally toil in the mines, but Rugor has outfitted them for war in service to Faurumahd. Vaadish is there too, and he'll probably be disposed in a friendly way toward the player characters, but openly defiant about his mothers imprisonment.

I realized after re-reading my last post that I left out something when describing the new conflict: that Rugor, by Faurumahd's command would imprison Adelina upon her return. But never mind that-- we played a sort of inter-session series of scenes last night† that unexpectedly amped the conflict up to a new level! This was partially afforded by the players finally allowing their characters to be in separate scenes. Here's what happened:

My daughter asked for some recovery time before beginning the new adventure so that Silwen's leg could heal, and my wife asked for a scene to cement a relationship with the dude whose leg Skah had cut off in the battle, who got the name Demetri.

It turned out Demetri's wound was badly infected, and he was in pretty rough shape, and even after Silwen healed him he was pretty surly and fatalistic, so they decided to carve him a new leg out of wood to magically restore him. Silwen got successes on her roll to formulate the right runes, but Skah's search for the right wood led to disaster-- she used and failed all her allowed rerolls. This led to great narration about how Skah found a special stream with a great old Rowan tree, but she gashed her leg on the rocks; then she found a potent healing herb for her wound, but it turned out to be poison, and she passed out swollen up, lying in the stream. And of course, she was carried away by a scavenging beast.

Like the rules say, this critical failure has shaped the story in a big way. When Skah didn't come back by nightfall, Silwen went out to investigate. She found the Rowan and the stream, but no Skah. She gathered a sturdy branch that could be used for Demetri's leg, but she decided to continue searching for Skah with the aid of a night Elf she summoned, who changed her into a wolf (the Goal of the conflict was to gain information). She used her heightened senses to follow Skah's scent through the woods, which was mingled with the scent of a fell beast.

Skah had been dragged away by a big spider, but it was quick work getting herself untangled and dispatching the beast; on the final roll, I narrated that an arrow came out of the darkness and hit the spider's abdomen at the same time that she dashed it's brains out. Thus, Skah met Vaadish again, now in his true form, and they set off together. I allowed Skah to take Vaadish as a relationship, which gives her a stake in the Stakes and a chance to learn more about the conflict from his perspective.

Silwen found the dead spider, but the spray of guts that covered Skah in the battle has masked her scent, and Silwen decided to return the wolf-cload to Mooram-Ah, the night Elf. She asked Mooram-Ah to change her into a blackbird, but Mooram-Ah warned her that in that form she might be mistaken for one of the Rugor clan Dwarves. Silwen took Mooram-Ah as a relationship. We ran out of time, so we ended there.

At this point, I realized that the primary conflict is now the feud between Mooram-Ah's people and the Rugor clan. The night Elves see evidence that the Dwarves are forging iron weapons (for their chief and their undead army), and they see this as a blatant violation of the treaty and a dangerous threat. Faurumahd's lust for power that I hinted at earlier is now grounded more vitally in concrete stakes related to real things that character's want, as outlined in the rules. Power itself, I realize, doesn't make for compelling stakes in Trollbabe.

What is the etiquette regarding actual play reports? What information is useful and what information is overkill? It's lucidly clear to me how the rules have given rise to the direction and content of the story, but I don't want to be oblique about that if there more mechanical detail is needed.

Hi John,

Quite a few things you're struggling with, or at least bumping up against, are altered and clarified in the book version. Please email me your mailing address, and I'll send you a copy as a Christmas gift for the family.

Contrary to my usual habits, I have to break the next series of quesions into individual units in order to be as clear as possible. However, together, they do present a unified issue, and you did ask them in a very coherent unified way, so I recommend reading my answers as a group rather than in isolation.

For the skulking thugs example on page 12 of the PDF, what action type would it be to watch out for enemies, with the goal of making sure nothing is there?

What if the goal was "to avoid anyone who's trying to bushwhack me?" In the forum discussions, I see that action type is usually determined by goal, regardless of methods used-- i.e. a fight with the goal to protect the companion would be a Social conflict, whereas if the goal was to decapitate the king would be Fighting.

But in the cases of "making sure nothing is there" or "avoiding anyone trying to bushwhack me", I'm guessing the action type would be derived from announced actions, rather than hinging on the stated goal. So if I use magical sight, it's a Magic conflict, but if I survey the area using my military training it's a Fighting conflict. Is that right?

Skah had been dragged away by a big spider, but it was quick work getting herself untangled and dispatching the beast; on the final roll, I narrated that an arrow came out of the darkness and hit the spider's abdomen at the same time that she dashed it's brains out. Thus, Skah met Vaadish again, now in his true form, and they set off together. I allowed Skah to take Vaadish as a relationship, which gives her a stake in the Stakes and a chance to learn more about the conflict from his perspective.

What is the etiquette regarding actual play reports? What information is useful and what information is overkill? It's lucidly clear to me how the rules have given rise to the direction and content of the story, but I don't want to be oblique about that if there more mechanical detail is needed.

Ron wrote: Quite a few things you're struggling with, or at least bumping up against, are altered and clarified in the book version. Please email me your mailing address, and I'll send you a copy as a Christmas gift for the family.

Ron wrote: I think you've answered your own question here, which is to say, if bushwhacking is mentioned in the Goal, then bushwhacking is now effectively (potentially) part of what might happen. Or more simply, "Yes."

But in the cases of "making sure nothing is there" or "avoiding anyone trying to bushwhack me", I'm guessing the action type would be derived from announced actions, rather than hinging on the stated goal. So if I use magical sight, it's a Magic conflict, but if I survey the area using my military training it's a Fighting conflict. Is that right?

Yes, that's correct, but I think that your point applies to "make sure nothing is there" - not to "avoiding anyone trying to bushwhack me," which (if I were to call that conflict) I would instantly peg as Fighting.

Ron wrote: This is, if not abominable, at least a little bit suspicious-sounding. First, let me make sure I understand correctly: Vaadish's arrow was not brought in as a "sudden ally" re-roll item, right? If it were, then that's fine. But if not, then I think you might be relying on some play-tactics that aren't necessary in Trollbabe.

Ron wrote: I'm basing that judgment on my old tactics when GMing Champions and similar games. I often relied on within-action opportunities, specifically moments when I narrated the outcomes of rolls, to introduce characters, information, and "open doors" for characters to walk through. In other words, there was no mechanism in these games for simply introducing such things on their own. If you did, i.e., had a guy walk through a door and get introduced, everyone would turtle up and go passive. So in order to bring someone into play with the tacit message that he or she wasn't a trap or a Trojan Horse, I had to do it during the action, showing the players that this new person was "really a friend" through narrations exactly like your arrow.

But before I go on, do you think I'm on the right track so far?

ooh, ohhh, I wanna try!

First of all, to John: COOL Setting.  I want to play in your game.  And how cool that you are getting your wife and daughter to play -- in some other thread maybe we could talk about how those relationships affect play (I also play with my wife and my daughter is old enough now to start playing).

To Ron:

Again, I think I made all of this much clearer in the new rules, honing the issue of the unknown into more usable form

Thanks, stingray! There's a whole lot I'd like to respond to in your message, but I won't have time to write until later. I wanted to at least mention this bit:

stingray20166 wrote: Regarding Vaadish's arrow - IIRC, the new rules are much more explicit about not introducing new elements in this way.  It violates the "clear" part of free-and-clear --- you're springing a new element on your players with no possible way for them to react to it.

stingray20166 wrote: There already exists a way to bring new elements in through the re-rolls.

Tr wrote: The player states that she seizes a (heretofore unmentioned) dagger from her belt and uses it to stab a crucial part of the (heretofore unmentioned) map on the table, to emphasize her point.

Oops, Nick-- I missed your name. Sorry about that.

stingray20166 wrote: First of all, to John: COOL Setting.  I want to play in your game.

stingray20166 wrote: [Introducing Vaadish's like that] violates the "clear" part of free-and-clear...

But to get him there would have been pretty easy -- during the free-and-clear stage just mention Vaadish is taking part.  Or simply frame the next scene as Vaadish showing up. To me, reading the AP it feels like you kind of had two scenes here that kind of got smudged together instead of being explicitly framed -- is that accurate?

...To me it feels like the players didn't really have a chance to affect his influence on the story.

stingray20166 wrote: 1. Oh noes a giant spider let's OMFG Vaadish is here too WTF do we do about that?

You just turn the screws tighter on the Trollbabes -- and they REALLY start to shine.  :-)

stingray20166 wrote: And how cool that you are getting your wife and daughter to play... maybe we could talk about how those relationships affect play (I also play with my wife and my daughter is old enough now to start playing).

[...]

(Hmmmm -- remember that separate family question I had?  Are you perhaps unconsciously trying to lead them through the story to make sure they have a good time?   I did that the first time I played with my wife -- holding back a bit.  The problem is that TBs always want to be at the center of the storm.)

We haven't gotten a chance to return to this story yet since my last post, but I shall post again next time we play. The book arrived Thursday, which was coincidentally my daughter's ninth birthday. Thank you again! Digesting the new rules has indeed addressed all of my questions pretty thoroughly, including several I hadn't asked. The "Getting Started" section is very helpful! The only thing I can't find is the Example map referred to on page 18.

Ron wrote: Anyway, for this post, I do have one suggestion aimed toward your second post's questions. It is: take some time to share sources which aren't gaming, and probably a little older, which led to Trollbabe. Comics and fantasy novels with a strong mythic/fairy vein, as well as Celtic, Norse, and Baltic myths. A lot of that has strong female voices and characters too.

Here's my preparation notes for the next time we play, following the process in the book. I've changed a few of my ideas about the background, and there are bound to be divergences in play. I'd love to hear any feedback or ideas!

Adventure 2: Trowehaven

Geography (Where?)

Trowehaven is an ancient burial ground south of Fallcrest riven by a smoking chasm. There is an uneasy scent in the air that faerie characters will notice, amid the din of hammers, bellows and churning fire deep below. The entrance to Trowehaven is a crypt below a ruined foundation. Trowehaven is surrounded by a rotten marshland of sunken graves silted in by the south-flowing river that marks its border with the wild Moon Hills.

Example map

People (Who?)

The Trowe are a wealthy clan of Dwarven barrow wights, living amid tombs filled with magnificent treasure. They have a small army of the damned toiling in the mines, whom they have begun to outfit for war. A warlock-king Vordaan has given their chief Rugor a nose-ring that grants him the ability to touch and wield iron weapons whenever he slakes its thirst for human blood.

The Trowe have an ancient feud with the Night Elves of the Moon Hills, but both peoples are bound by a treaty of armistice. The Elf council suspects that the Trowe may move to violate the treaty, and have sent their envoy Mooram-Ah to meet with the Trowe, to remind them of the treaty, and to reconnoitre. The council is neither ready to strike nor authorized to make military commitments for the amphictyony of aloof Elven houses that it serves.

Stakes (What?)

The stakes are represented by Claudiu, a young half-wight human from Fallcrest brought to Trowehaven by his mother, the Princess Adelina. The Trowe have a ritual that can cause Claudiu to pupate, petrifying him as he transforms into his faerie body under a hide of stone; or he could enter this stage by his own will just by inhaling the atmosphere of Trowehaven, and smearing his body with mineral-rich sediment from its marshes.

The fate of Claudiu is infused with larger consequences related to the fate of Fallcrest, Trowehaven, and the scattered Night Elves.

Driven people (Who specifically?)

• Adelina wants to restore Claudiu to his Trowe heritage and inheritance-- she sees his upbringing by the humans of Fallcrest as savage.
• Rugor is wary that Claudiu may bring dishonor upon the clan through his human frailty, and will let nothing stand in the way of his plans to raze Fallcrest.
• Vaadish (provisionally, since he is a Relationship of Skah) wants to bring his family honor, and win favor from his father and mother.
• Natasa and Henric raised Claudiu as their own son and want him returned home safely.
• Amoniel, a Night Elf spy, may be looking in on Mooram-Ah (who is a Relationship of Silwen) on behalf of the council; if so, she might develop her own interest in Claudiu.
• Claudiu has lived his life as a dutiful son to Henric and Natasa. He is a group thinker and hero worshipper, particularly enchanted by the town's nominal protector Lord Dorinell, whom he doesn't know is his father. Seeing the potentials of either the Trowe or Dorinell in himself could catalyze a radical change in his self-image. Pupating would give him a body immune to disease and the ravages of time.

Trowe names (female)

• Puukah
• Gaurgah
• Tog-asha

Trowe names (male)

• Kurt
• Rourk
• Padush

Fallcrest names (female)

• Estera
• Lorea
• Marica

Fallcrest names (male)

• Hadrian
• Anghel
• Bogdan

Night Elf names (female)

• Mordollwen
• Ithilwen
• Erdolliel

Night Elf names (male)

• Gudrun
• Sigrid
• Vidar

Hello!

I have discovered that three kids under 2.5 years old makes for a very, very busy holiday season. I'll run down some of the specific answers and some of my more immediate responses here, and again, apologize for not giving your detailed posts the full attention they deserve.

1. There are a few first-printing errors in the book. I plan to post a PDF with all of them listed and corrected as soon as I can. The missing example map is probably the most obvious. It's intended to show that something quite sketchy is probably the best and most functional.

2. For Batlic mythology/legendry, I recommend the Finnish Kalevala and the Estonian Kalevide (Kalevipoeg). For Irish stuff, I'm not sure where to begin - the Wikipedia Irish myths page, I guess. For literature, you can't beat the Icelandic sagas, which for colorful wackiness, I guess Egil's Saga would be good, but for raw drama and knockout characters, Njal's Saga cannot be beaten. Do yourself a favor and do not read any kind of summary or commentary about the latter, just read it cold.

3. That is a very, very detailed preparation, perhaps to the edge of what is useful. My first advice is not to add a scintilla more, and to be ready to jettison at least some of it during play if necessary. My other advice is to revisit the Stakes statement. I do not see a binary set of conditions stated there. Stakes are more specific than "what happens to Claudiu." Does he live or die? Does he transmogrify via pupation or not? Does he get laid or not? Anything like that.

Best, Ron

I no longer have kids under 2.5 years old, but our holiday season was pretty busy too. Anyway, your feedback was pretty helpful-- thanks!

Thanks to your comment on the Stakes, I tightened up my notes a little: "Does Claudiu A) stay with the Trowe, or B) not?" A whole lot of other things may happen, but that's the issue that most of the NPCs seem to be bothered about.

I'm also thankful for your source recommendations. Last week I picked up another book of short stories from Norse mythology, and a book of Irish folklore and fairy stories compiled by W.B. Yeats. We've been reading stories about Odin the Wanderer and other adventures in the car during our travels; my daughter has enjoyed them a lot, and it's given us some inspiration for the setting of the story.

We just got back home last night, and I'm hoping we have a chance to play again today or tomorrow. I'll write back when I have something more.

Tonight's session was just one scene, and it ended badly.

We sat down after dinner and everyone seemed excited to come back to Silwen & Skah's story. To get started, I quickly summarized the ideas from pages 58 and 59 about relationship characters, and I asked my wife and daughter which characters would arrive in Trowehaven with them. I wanted to make it clear that this was their choice; although they had previously left their Fallcrest relationships behind, they could narrate the arrival of those characters now if they wanted. They did. We improvised the reasoning for Bela and Demitri's arrival was that they started looking for Silwen & Skah the morning after they disappeared from Fallcrest, and arrived together, Demitri with a crutch.

I also told them some information they would have gleaned from their traveling companions by now: Vaadish told Skah that he was patrolling the border of Trowe lands watching out for any machinations of the Night Elves, whom he blamed for the big spider. Mooram-Ah told Silwen that  she was being sent as an envoy of the Night Elf council to check up on their Trowe neighbors, whom she suspects are planning war. The irony of them meeting such an adversarial pair wasn't lost on my daughter, but I reminded her that the players will narrate the behavior for these characters, not me.

Then I framed a scene on the boggy moors where the pasture-land slopes down into a sunken graveyard near the entrance to Trowehaven, which was just a twisted tree swarming with blackbirds (no smoking chasms this time). I told them they could bring their characters into the scene when they wanted, and they immediately joined the scene with their entire retinues. The tension between Vaadish and Mooram-Ah was obvious, but civil. Their dialogue cued Silwen and Skah to introduce everybody, and this led to a lot of informal table-talk reminiscing about the past events and everything. My wife couldn't remember the characters and events as vividly as my daughter did, and my daughter enjoyed recounting their adventures.

Suddenly, someone spotted movement on the horizon: two lumbering shapes were coming out of the pastures and beginning to cross the fen. Just then, Skah felt something wriggle in her guts and begin chewing. "I yell for Silwen to help me with her magic," my wife said. When Skah yells, the two giants look up, and Vaadish recognizes them as northern Grave Trolls, "but what are *they* doing here?" And they're holding something under each arm.

Silwen comes over to help Skah, and my wife narrates that Vaadish goes over to challenge the trolls. I say some of what he shouts at the trolls, the giants drop their bundles, bodies, to the ground, and I call a Fighting conflict; they draw their weapons. Skah's goal is to subdue (one of)* the trolls, and Silwen's goal is to make sure (one of)* the bodies is alive (which changes her goal to Social, rather than Fighting). My daughter asks for Action-by-Action Pace, and I agree. (I know it's my purview to set the Pace of a conflict I call, subject to a player's adjustment, but I appreciated her initiative in applying the rules, and in choosing a Pace that allows for more interesting stuff to happen.)

* one of: This was a point where we talked about the Scale rule, that only the goal could only determine the fate of a single individual at this Scale.

They both roll simultaneously, and Skah has rolled lowest, so we resolve her actions first. Skah's roll is a success, and I narrate how she charges the troll, knocking it down into the mud, hitting its head on one of the gravestones. For the second series, Skah and Vaadish jump on the troll's chest and team up to get her grappling hook around it's neck-- this is successful too, but the troll starts thrashing and he bats Vaadish off him, hurling him about fifty yards. My wife says he turns into a raven in mid-air and lands gracefully. Cool! For the final series, she tightens the noose she has created until the troll stops thrashing. Her third roll is successful, and she makes sure it's not dead before I cut back to Silwen.

Silwen isn't so lucky; her first roll failed, and my daughter narrates that she trips over a tree-root and falls in the mud, face first. I mention she has four more series to get three successes, and I ask if she'd prefer to reroll, or to move on to the next series. She calls for a reroll with geographic feature. She grabs a low-hanging branch while falling to stop herself, but she fails the reroll too, and I ask her to narrate her injury.

At this point, my daughter is visibly very frustrated. She holds it in a little by griping about the game, but she's getting so red that I can tell she's about to cry. I stop the game to talk about it. My daughter normally seems very secure and mature for her age, but at this point she gives her character sheet to my wife and says "you can play Silwen, I don't want to play her anymore." Then she does begin crying a little, while trying not to. At this point I went into full-papa mode, without any concern for the fiction.

We love storytelling a lot and the game is so vivid to her, especially the failures, which she gets to narrate. Based on what she said, she remembers the failures so vividly that they seem to have eclipsed her sense of success in the game. I reminded her of all the successful conflicts she's been in, which I remember pretty vividly since I've been journaling the game here. But bringing that up didn't give her any emotional support.

She spoke up though. I can see three things she is frustrated with:

* We've talked several times about using "failure" to be the author, but she doesn't have the habit of making her failures heroic-- her imagination immediately jumps to the most embarrassing thing that could possibly happen; in earlier scenes, she used failures to hose her character with good humor, but at this point it seems clear that she also takes it seriously, maybe personally. We could talk about this and work on brainstorming more satisfying options in future conflicts, but that could be tough. We're both so inclined to go with the first thing that comes to mind, as an actual piece of the fiction. Maybe it's impulsive.

* She's frustrated with the way magic works in the game. She made Silwen so strong in Magic that her chances at action-scene conflicts are pretty poor (she needs to roll 1-2 for Fighting, or 1-3 for Social). I told her she is free to adjust Silwen's number, but she sees little assurance in that. (Any odds carry the risk of failure.) My wife said that a character so good at magic should have spells ready for action scenes like this, and should be able to roll Magic instead; I reminded her it's possible to bring magic into action scenes using reroll items, and we read the section on Magic from pages 34-35: "This Type takes time; it's not an 'action scene' type of thing."

* Maybe this is a proactivity thing, or maybe it's a failure on my part to demonstrate how conflict works in the game. Talking about Magic as a leisurely-paced action-type, she expressed reluctance to initiate Magical conflicts in the game. She doesn't want to "start" a conflict, or bring one into being entirely-- she'd rather see what's going on in a scene and help out with her magic when she can. I'm not sure if this reluctance is consistent with her actual play-- a couple times she initiated magic without any external pressure, but other times it was somewhat reactive.

Anyway, we decided not to press on with the story, or even continue rolling on the conflict at hand. I was happy and I'm still happy with the way we eased into the scene, and the story that happened-- but the unfavorable mood got everyone out of having fun. Needless to say, the GM side of me is a bit disappointed that we didn't get to see what happened.

This shifted into a conversation about what other story-rich roleplaying games we might explore, but I don't want to delve into that right now. We had fun brainstorming some character and magic item ideas for recasting Skah and Silwen in another game.

After bed-time, my wife said that I should go easy on them as new players, and maybe stick with something "easy" like D&D, which gives them clear goals and a chance to practice rudimentary math almost constantly; Trollbabe was harder, she said, because it demands getting more into the role and motivations of characters, whereas the D&D character sheets were premade, and their roles were clear. Storytelling games seem more intuitive and satisfying for my daughter, but my wife is more comfortable with the board-game feel of playing D&D with miniatures. I guess this may shed some light on Nick's questions about how those relationships impact the social aspect of the game.

I don't see these as rules issues as much as expectation issues. At the time of this writing, I'm not sure what to think, or how to further process all the foregoing.

Last night I was so taken by surprise that I didn't fathom the reasons my daughter may be stressed out right now: Yesterday was her first day back at school after two weeks off. She also has a bunch of other activities that include violin lessons and girl scouts picking up again this week, and she's especially anxious about her violin practice. I didn't think about it yesterday, but she actually mentioned her frustration with violin after we quit playing.

This morning I offered to let her redo Silwen's part of the scene if we play again, remembering that achieving Silwen's goal isn't as important as having fun, and she doesn't have to escalate the conflict to injury and beyond if she doesn't want to. For my part, I should remember not to prematurely commit myself to options that come up in the table-talk while she's narrating, giving her a little more time to safely form her ideas.

Hi John,

First, that’s a bummer, and I sympathize.

Second, I need to disclose some views which ordinarily, I bite my tongue and stay silent about. I am not keen on the common perception that Trollbabe is a distinctly romance-friendly, family-friendly, and parenting-friendly game. My viewpoint is that it’s actually distinctly risky, thrown into heightened chances of stress, when played in these contexts. You’ll note that I never recommend such play anywhere in the text or on the cover.

Narration of one’s own failed rolls is arguably the most challenging feature of the design, in terms of experiencing play and having one with it. In part, I wrote it as a solution to the very common problem of GMs narrating players’ failed rolls in the most undignified and embarassing ways possible for the characters. Also in part, I wrote it as a way to get adversity into play which one feels is the right kind of adversity for that character.

I often muse about a little-discussed event in The Two Towers, when Aragorn has stayed behind too long during the fallback into Helm’s Deep, and is sprinting toward the gates, pursued by maddened orcs. As his friends watch helplessly from the ramparts, he runs up the steps – and trips, falling on his face, very painfully, in full armor. And this, for the character whose nickname is Strider! He recovers, even though the orcs gain on him, and makes it to the gates even more barely in the nick of time. In addition to his pissed-off complaint at the end of the first book, “Everything I do goes amiss today,” I think this bit of action which only takes a few sentences endears Aragorn to me more than anything else he does.

The word “failure” requires a close look. I think it is often constructed entirely in regard to the actual person. We might talk until we’re blue in the face to explain that it applies to the character’s goal at the moment and nothing else, but because this is a game, anything you do is either successful or unsuccessful, and the latter means you lost points. It is, quite likely, an intrinsic tendency toward Step On Up, and is probably why that particular Creative Agenda is so immediately accessible given a minor opportunity.

I suggest that is why your wife is gravitating toward D&D4, which is a dedicated Gamist engine written by a participant in and follower of GNS discussions since 1999. It’s not a matter of the degree or detail of rules. I think your distinction between “storytelling” and “board game style” is false.

Instead, I suggest that it’s a matter of why we play. If one combines (i) the authorship responsibility, audience enjoyment, and thematic risks of Story Now with (ii) the absolutely necessary personal nature of loss/failure in Step On Up … then the potential for hurt feelings is very high. The loss/failure in untrammeled Gamist play is personal, but it is not dishonorable; whereas in untrammeled Narrativist play, a character’s failure is at the least like Aragorn’s undignified fall and grades up from there to actual tragedy, all of which is successful play in Narrativist terms. But the combination of the two is disastrous. (This is arguably one of the reasons why Gamist play has unfairly received so much resentful trash-talk and vilification from some sectors of role-players over the years, particularly among players of earlier forms of D&D.)

You point out quite clearly that not only does failure mean “Silwen doesn’t get what she happens to be shooting for,” but also “Silwen looks stupid and incompetent,” “Silwen is a screw-up and no fun,” “I am messing up and failing,” “I am embarassed.” I am not surprised that a younger person feels this way, and I’m generally uncertain about children playing any of my games, because they are all rife with higher chances of failure than most modern role-playing designs. I don’t mean this as a criticism of your judgment in choosing Trollbabe, but I can’t say I’m terribly surprised.

Making failures heroic – and thereby enhancing and deepening heroism – is a developed skill in authorship, and I can understand that any number of people have no intention of doing so, and that a child in particular simply didn’t come to any game-situation with that in mind. With older people, I get annoyed with players who try to make their characters into Wolverine or Batman in the most adolescent sense possible, i.e. ultra-cool because he never loses, never gets surprised, never fails, and is never scared or unprepared or taken down a peg. But a kid isn’t yet at the point where he or she should be getting out of this kind of gratification-only experience. Role-playing design for kids in particular is terra incognita, and I have never ventured there.

Best, Ron

Ron, I'm sorry for not writing back earlier. Your message was about the most helpful thing possible-- I shared it with my wife and we talked about it extensively.

When I saw their combined interest in D&D as an opportunity to introduce Trollbabe, it didn't occur to me that they wouldn't enjoy the Creative Agenda of Story Now over Step On Up, since we all enjoy elements of both play styles. I admit it was a foolish oversight.

Another thing that I think plays into this is that my daughter is an advanced reader and together we enjoy delving into fantasy/adventure literature written for older young readers and adults-- we're almost finished with Watership Down now, and over the past few years she has devoured Peter Pan, Tuck Everlasting (Babbitt), His Dark Materials (Pullman), Lord of the Rings, the Inkheart series (Funke), and dozens of others books that address relevant moral themes, and in which the protagonists suffer or face ; the name "Silwen" comes from her independent reading of the Silmarillion.

As parents, it's hard to know how to appropriately nourish and challenge her imagination without placing unrealistic demands on her maturity. (It's like you're rules for Boost in Sorcerer: you don't know the limit of your comfort until it hurts a little.) If you have kids, you might experience this too-- it's easy to honestly and innocently overestimate your kids' social/emotional maturity when you know they are smart.

For the moment, it's clear that my daughter wants more gamism than narrativism from roleplaying, and I'm cool with that. Gamism can be fun too. Given her interests, though, I expect that she may become more interested in Story Now over time.

Earlier, you wrote that there's "a whole ton of possible discussions to come out of playing Trollbabe in this fashion", and I'm interested in what you had in mind. Was Creative Agenda trouble one of the first things that jumped out at you? I guess it depends on what you meant by "playing Trollbabe in this fashion", since I deviated from standard Trollbabe in several ways, starting with Setting and Color.

Thank you again for your welcome, guidance, and support! Someone got me a copy of Sorcerer as a belated Christmas present, and I'm thinking about organizing demos of Trollbabe and Sorcerer at my local game shop. This is to say that I'll be sticking around.

Warmest regards.

Oops. I left an unfinished clause dangling in there:

books in which protagonists suffer or face challenging thematic dilemmas;

Kind of a relief to read that post. I was concerned I'd stepped too far over the line even for the tequila forum.

I'm a fairly new father - twins (boy and girl) at two years four months, another boy at ten months. They're already scary-smart, and I want to introduce them to literature and myth much the way you're doing with your daughter. I was lucky as a kid: deprived of most TV, little if any contact with traditional kid-movies, and generally not close to consumer culture. Plus there were lots less intrusive elements, no constant-cable, no home movie viewing. I say lucky because I encountered Pooh, fairy tales, Norse and Greek mythology, and more through the written word, and knew "the movie" was always an adaptation, often fun or excellent but a given person's take on the actual thing. Plus it was a really long time ago - no Star Wars yet, no Alien, no Bladerunner, et cetera. I was reading Harlan Ellison's The Glass Teat and John Gardner's Grendel in the sixth grade, to give you an idea of where my head was.

Anyway, my kids aren't in the same zone; I don't see how they can be unless I somehow manage to live in a way in which they chop wood to burn it to heat the house, or can go to the corner stables instead of the corner Starbucks, or if I successfully pretend that cell phones and the internet don't exist. That doesn't appear to be an option. All of this is a very long and stupid way to say that your example comes to me at a very opportune time.

It seems the task is to find a solid-Gamist RPG which is not based on killing and piling up the corpses. Tunnels & Trolls might do it if you focus on problem-solving, funky/thought-puzzle traps, and interactions with really solid NPCs.

You wrote,

Earlier, you wrote that there's "a whole ton of possible discussions to come out of playing Trollbabe in this fashion", and I'm interested in what you had in mind. Was Creative Agenda trouble one of the first things that jumped out at you? I guess it depends on what you meant by "playing Trollbabe in this fashion", since I deviated from standard Trollbabe in several ways, starting with Setting and Color.

Hello,

I have been following this thread rather closely with interest.  With the current turn of the conversation I feel I have some personal experience that may be relevant.

When I was 8 years old (aprox. 1984) my mother bought Red Box D&D at a Toys 'R' Us.  She had been hearing about the game from sources I'm not completely sure of to this day.  My mother has this phrase she always says, "the way you keep a young boy happy is you give him monsters."  This is why Ron's "Naked Went The Gamer" article made me smile.  A lot of what he said in there about monsters, my mother said to me when I was a kid.  Although, *boy* was always explicit in her ideas so I don't know how much she would have applied this to a young girl.

Anyway, I'm a very unique case among gamer culture because (a) D&D was a *family* game and (b) it wasn't taught to us by anyone already entrenched in the hobby.  We had to puzzle the whole thing out ourselves from the books.  My mother greatly enjoyed drawing maps and was very good at crafting encounters.  That's what our games were like.  We very rarely went into huge sprawling dungeons.  We usually went to much smaller areas peppered with about six or seven very interesting encounters.

In particular these encounters were often very evocative and full of "Ooooooooooooooooooooooo...." factor.  I remember many of them to this day.  I remember walking in some hills and coming across an Ogre.  I think this was the first time we had encountered an Ogre in the game.  He was swinging his club at nothing.  Then all of a sudden he reached up to his shoulder and it started to bleed as if stabbed from nothing.  It was only when we got closer that we saw he was under attack by a swarm of Pixies.  The image of an Ogre being swarmed by Pixies like mosquitoes was really, really neat at the time.

Also we often had ethical decisions to make but they were usually at a very high level campaign branching level rather than the scene-to-scene character-to-character interaction level.  The main villain of our campaign was a Magic-User (!) named "The Cobra Woman" (again !!!) and there was a point where we found out she was actually a cursed Silver Dragon.  We found this out right as we had a chance to strike against her.  We had the choice of attacking her now or trying to break the curse which involved several steps and likely further adventures.  The choice was real.  Had we attacked we would have gone into a set piece battle.  If not then we would have ended up in an adventure trying to find the item we needed to break the curse.

It wasn't until around High School that the purely imaginative qualities of these "encounters" began to wear off.  I started craving something more unified.  Something more intimate.  And I think something more self-reflective or introspective.  I won't go into the details but the transition from "reveling in pure wonder" to "craving *story*" happened rather naturally and without need to cultivate it.  Once that transition happened is when things became rather arduous, complicated and painful because of the complete and utter lack of tools suited to the job.

That struggle is well documented in all my posts on The Forge since I first came here.

I don't know if that was helpful or enlightening but I felt it was relevant and worth sharing.

jesse

@Ron: Tunnels & Trolls was a great recommendation-- thanks! It seems to be an awesome fit for the kind of Gamist-positive, Narrative-lite game everyone can dig right now.

Not knowing about your actual play threads, I read up on T&T here, creating a character using the Abridged rules, and taking it through a few solo adventures. Even though I didn't get the power of Saving Rolls at first, I could tell the girls would appreciate this game. I ordered a Mythical 6th Edition rule book, but we got started playing a few days ago using the abridged rules, and we've had a lot of fun. [6e was the only one available from B&N, for which I had a gift card. I didn't know until after I placed the order about the Outlaw Press IP issue. It's no wonder that the book arrived without any cover art!]

Reading your actual play posts was pretty inspiring. It's been so long since I planned a dungeon delve, so we got started using an adventure outline I found online: The Lair of the Wyrm (pdf). Taking a cue from your play reports, I suggested that the girls each roll up two characters, and warned them that it was likely that a character would die. My daughter enthusiastically played a solo adventure with each of her characters first to accumulate treasure and adventure points. When her Elven Wizard was fatally stung by a scorpion at the Wyrm's Lair, she was actually excited to return to town and roll up a new character. She enjoys the aspect of figuring out the game dynamics and putting together an effective character/party-- identifying her desire for a Gamist CA was a good call.

The book arrived last night, and my daughter wanted to run her new character through the solo adventure it contained, with me as a referee. I observed something interesting that I wanted to post about: When posing her level 1 Human Warrior against an MR 30 monster in the adventure, it was pretty much an impasse. The monster consistently got the upper hand in combat points, but never did enough damage to penetrate the fighter's 13 Armor-- only by creatively applying (unbidden) Saving Rolls could she get a purchase, and defeat the monster. Had she played the adventure as written, the battle could have gone on perpetually without anyone giving or taking damage.

Anyway, your post about "the most open-ended, mind-bogglingly flexible task resolution system ever" saved the day. She came up with various feats of Strength and Dexterity, and used her Saving Roll margins of victory as bonuses to her Combat Point Total.

Playing this way seemed to beg for Sorcerer's Currency mechanic, which we adapted to great effect! Here's how we did it:

Once per combat turn she could attempt a feat to gain some kind of combat advantage, giving a creative description and an attribute. If she passed a Level 1 Saving Roll, she would have a certain margin of victory which she could bank as a bonus to her Combat Point Total. But, if she could come up with an even riskier feat that built on the previous feat, she could attempt a Level 2 Saving Roll, and get double the margin of victory as a bonus. In this way, it's possible to continue escalating to higher level, riskier feats to gain greater multiples of effectiveness. Obviously, this is limited by two factors:

1. A combat turn is 2 minutes. You probably can't get to a level 10 IQ check to construct elaborate tripwires all over the place in the middle of combat.
2. Higher level saving rolls must build on the preceding saving rolls, and would be narratively constrained to what could reasonable follow (if anything).

Maybe another limit could be that you could only use each attribute for one SR in the sequence.

She had a lot of fun playing this way. Using sequences of SRs like this with rollover victories giving a geometric bonuses may seem way too formal for the T&T rules, and for most situations it may make more sense to negotiate Saving Rolls ad hoc. But reading Jesse's Sorcerer Unbound essays about Currency bent my mind in a certain direction that led us to this result.

I know this isn't the right forum to post about T&T actual play, but I wanted to update this thread with a word of thanks.

@Jesse: I appreciate your comments a lot! That's so cool that your mom was your first GM-- and the rich encounters you describe remind me about my first experiences with roleplaying and what I enjoyed most then. Thank you for sharing these touching memories! You've inspired me to dust off a few of the quirky NPCs that populated the worlds that my brother and I created in our middle-school era roleplaying games.

Hiya,

I'd be generous about the two-minute limit for a given tactical notion. Gromit built those train-tracks pretty damned fast relative to each of the penguin's chicken's pistol shots.

Don't forget all of the EPs for each of those Saving Rolls!

Best, Ron

Ron wrote: I'd be generous about the two-minute limit for a given tactical notion. Gromit built those train-tracks pretty damned fast relative to each of the penguin's chicken's pistol shots.

Ron wrote: Don't forget all of the EPs for each of those Saving Rolls!