The Forge Archives

I'm bringing a question and followup over from the Tale of Three Trollbabes thread in Actual Play, since it represents a digression into some detailed rules hashing.  There, it was alluded that once a Trollbabe becomes injured, the road to incapacitation becomes fairly swift.  Ron responded:

Quote from: Ron EdwardsMost injury and incapacitation are not quite as limiting as I think some people are seeing it. Check out Trollbabe Questions & Comments if you haven't seen it.

Ron, I'd really appreciate it if you could expand on that comment.  I participated in the thread to which you refer, and I didn't see how it addressed this issue.  It's not how injury is described that we are referring to here, it is the purely mechanical effect that it has on play.

Once a trollbabe is no longer beginning her series in the first box, every failed roll marches her inevitably toward incapacitation, regardless of the success of series.  This is especially harsh if the conflict pace is set to exchange by exchange or action by action, since in those circumstances, it is normal to accept a failure or two while advancing through the conflict.  This is not a theoretical concern, this is what we see happening in play.

Ron, is perhaps what you are suggesting that clearing any injury should be the normal state when proceeding to a new scene?  We've already taken to awarding (in my opinion) aggressive recoveries very quickly if it can be at all justified within the narrative.  What else would you suggest?  How do you address this issues in the games you run?

Hello,

The issue is recovery. Jesse very accurately identified recovery from injury as the Big Loophole, and everyone should know about it. Usually the GM is the scene-framer, with the one exception being the "final escape" at the end of a Series.

So - for whatever reason, injured or not injured to start, your trollbabe has ended up incapacitated. Roll for the right to narrate - this is your big chance. It's your one chance, as player, to frame the next scene with the all-important privilege of stating how bad the incapacitation is. This is linked, of course, with your previous privilege of stating how bad the injury is.

See? The difficulty/plausibility of full recovery (a) from incapacitation and (b) from injury are a direct function of how bad, in-game, they are. So if you want your trollbabe laid up, narrate injury and incapacitation that necessitate major help and rest. If you want (as implied by this and the previous thread) her to be a bit more fightin'-ready sooner, narrate accordingly to set it up. Whoever frames the scenes in which she has recovered (usually the GM) has to work with that setup, and as I say, if we're talking about the end-of-Series scene, it's all you again.

The thing to avoid, and I suspect that the habits I mentioned in that previous thread are at fault, is to back off at every injury, which usually results in limping from Conflict to Conflict in an injured state. Playing it through to incapacitation every so often is the best way to end up with a fit-and-spunky trollbabe later.

Too many players and GMs are trained to the idea that a maximally-injured character is out of the game (i.e. dead) and that the player of such a character is out of the game (i.e. no fun). Trollbabe reverses the whole idea.

Best,
Ron

Ron,

That makes sense.

Wilhelm (rafial),

It reminds me of the end of our last Trollbabe game where Kweli was finally getting through to the troll tribes, and then was (socially) incapacitated as the rogue troll youngsters came home. By describing Kweli's incapacitation as a complete inability to affect the trolls, you let her recover within seconds to smack the human archer that was going to use the trolls' fighting amongst themselves to take one down.

Thanks Ron, I appreciate your taking the time to lay out the details here.  I definitely begin to see how this can be worked with.  A few reactions:

Quote from: Ron EdwardsRoll for the right to narrate - this is your big chance. It's your one chance, as player, to frame the next scene with the all-important privilege of stating how bad the incapacitation is.

This makes total sense, but I do want to point out that they way you have stated it here is slightly at odds with the way it is expressed in the rules proper:

Quote from: In Trollbabe, on page 20, Ron EdwardsHowever, the player may not initiate a new scene, merely narrate the trollbabe's exit from the scene containing the conflict which incapacicated her.

I also think in a way you've suggested alternatives for another issue I brought up in the actual play thread, which was "how do you deal with a trollbabe who is overreaching herself, i.e. 'I kill the army'"  When you say:

QuoteSee? The difficulty/plausibility of full recovery (a) from incapacitation and (b) from injury are a direct function of how bad, in-game, they are.

...it occurs to me that potential in-game result of incapacitation in a given conflict ought to be made explicit up front as part of "free and clear" so the player can decide with their eyes open if they are willing to risk it.  i.e. if you decide to take on a gang of well armed brigands single-handedly, things go badly, and you don't manage to snag the narration in the fourth roll of the series, don't be surprised if they put some major hurt on you you!

Hi Wilhelm,

I agree with you regarding the exit/frame distinction, which I glossed over in my post. The reason for that was that the player's "exit description" usually includes the degree and nature of the incapacitation, as well as who (there's usually someone) has taken over the circumstances of the character's fate.

So if a trollbabe is incapacitated, and if the player gets the right to describe her fate, he might say, "Garrch the shaman arrives on his spirit-owl and swoops her away from the savages as they close in, stabbing with their saw-tipped spears."* This pretty much forces the GM to have the character's next scene framed into the shaman's cave, with the trollbabe comfy under a blanket and sipping bear soup, rather than (say) waking up with infected sores, chained up under the floorboards of the savage chief's hut.

Regarding the explicit text, I have found that many role-players really have a terrible time with the concept of a "free and clear" announcement phase. It's central to playing Sorcerer, for instance, yet time after time, people play action-by-action, announce + roll sequential, just as in most games, and then whine about how there's no initiative rule. Then you say, "But here, look," and they say, oh! I guess I didn't read that part.

Thus to me, yes, I agree with you about the necessary understanding of potential consequences. I usually imply them strongly given the opponents' goals, even stating those goals outright. "They shriek blood-oaths of hatred, charging with their saw-tipped spears!" I've never seen a player have any trouble with narration/injury specifications given such cues during the free&clear phase, nor a GM have any trouble given such cues from the players. But I'm not sure at all whether more text or more examples will help anyone get over the necessary conceptual shifts that lead them actually to play this way.

Best,
Ron

* free fun tip: if Garrch is a pre-existing relationship, and if the player failed at this role rather than succeeded, Garrch would necessarily die during the GM's narration of the trollbabe's fate.

QuoteBut I'm not sure at all whether more text or more examples will help anyone get over the necessary conceptual shifts that lead them actually to play this way.

I'll tell you what really helped cement the concept for me. Reviewing the logs from the indie-gaming IRC Trollbabe campaign, with the side by side IC/OOC threads, where you can see the OOC narration as GM and players negotiate the parameters of a conflict, and what is at stake, and then following the impact of that consensus through to the IC narration.

I do think that the ideas that underlie this style of play can be explained through other methods than "the knowledge that is transmitted from mind to mind."

Hi Wilhelm,

QuoteI do think that the ideas that underlie this style of play can be explained through other methods than "the knowledge that is transmitted from mind to mind."

I agree and have for a long time. Three role-playing games (and three supplements for one of them) later, I'm still trying to develop such textual methods, and still encountering fascinating ranges and types of resistance that I never dreamed possible.

If you'd like to develop such text, whether for Trollbabe or in any other way, please feel free. If it works consistently across the range of readers that I've experienced, I'll be first to cite it and give you five-star credit.

Best,
Ron

Be careful with that Trollbabe log though...

I was doing the conflict 'damages' wrong at the time, and only found out about it after we finished.

I was treating Discomode as Injury 1, Injury as Injury 2, and Incapacitate as Injury level 3.

This left the characters on a fast track to megahurt.
If  they were Discommoded I was having them go straight to Injury on the next series Roll1 failure, which is wrong. They should be Discommoded again.
I was also wrong about going straight from Injury to Incap on a next series Roll1 failure.... they should be Injured again. Only after having double Injuries do they go to Incap on a series Roll1 Failure.


ReRolls are something else of course...

I've got that right now, I think.

Right Ron?

All correct, Bob. You are fast becoming Trollbabe-GM meister, along with Clinton.

Best,
Ron