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I had been somewhat skeptical of Trollbabe for quite some time, owing to the Troll part and the Babe part of the title. My friend Jim (he goes by Supplanter when at the Forge) bought Trollbabe though and once I looked at the rules I realized that I really wanted to play the game.

So Jim ran Trollbabe last week for me and one other player. We had a good time but ran into a few problems which I'd like to ask here about. These were problems for us in play, some of which we think we've worked out, but for which I'd like to hear about whether they really are problems with the game or whether they're problems we're having grokking the game and Narrativism in general.

Now that we're done with the "We the people" part,...

1) The Fair and Balanced Step: (ok I know I got the name wrong) I liked this step as I thought it could go a very long way toward eliminating some issues I've seen in roleplaying before. For the most part, it worked as designed very well. We ran into a problem with it in one specific instance. I had declared a contest in which I was trying to get our band of hearty explorers to a certain cave before our rival explorers could get there. I lost all but the last roll and got to narrate my incapacitation. As part of my narration, I said that we get there just as the leader of the other band is coming out of the cave. This seemed reasonable to me as we must not have gotten there in time given my failure in the contest. The GM was a bit flabbergasted though, as this meant that the villain had the opportunity to destroy the Macguffin. I thought that that should have been freely disclosed in this step. What should a group do if one side just doesn't consider a possible outcome during this step? Should the GM roll with it and just apply consequences that weren't agreed to before the contest? Or should the GM strictly abide by what was agreed to and change things around sufficiently that those consequences cannot come about as a result of the contest?

2) Injury: We agreed that cool bits of Trollbabe are the re-rolls and the fact that you determine, while going through a contest, how important it is to your Trollbabe (Is this important enough to risk Injury? Is this important enough to risk Incapacitation? etc). We felt that the Injury rules got in the way of both of these cool bits, though. You could no longer engage in any contest that wasn't worth Injury since all contests had the chance to cause you further injury from that point on. Likewise, your potential number of re-rolls was lower once you were injured. Was this intentional? I can see from a certain perspective that one might *want* Trollbabes to become more picky about what contests to enter once they've been injured. It's not my perspective, but I can see it, so is it intentional?

3) Endgame: This is related to the injury issue. Trollbabes become less competent as they become injured. This means that at the climax of the story (a point at which most protagonists in stories are at their most competent), the Trollbabe is likely at or close to her least competent. Is this right? Is the intent for a Trollbabe session to have this degradation of competence effect?


One "fix" I thought of was to allow a Trollbabe to check off a re-roll in order to start her contest at the normal starting point in the flowchart. This would leave in the penalty for being injured, but also give the Trollbabe a chance to try some things without risking further injury and especially allow the Trollbabe to go into the climactic contest with the full flowchart to play with. Does this "fix" work in the right direction? Or does it run counter to some element of the intended design and/or Narrativism in some way I don't grok?

Hello,

Welcome!

QuoteWe ran into a problem with it in one specific instance. I had declared a contest in which I was trying to get our band of hearty explorers to a certain cave before our rival explorers could get there. I lost all but the last roll and got to narrate my incapacitation. As part of my narration, I said that we get there just as the leader of the other band is coming out of the cave. This seemed reasonable to me as we must not have gotten there in time given my failure in the contest. The GM was a bit flabbergasted though, as this meant that the villain had the opportunity to destroy the Macguffin. I thought that that should have been freely disclosed in this step. What should a group do if one side just doesn't consider a possible outcome during this step? Should the GM roll with it and just apply consequences that weren't agreed to before the contest? Or should the GM strictly abide by what was agreed to and change things around sufficiently that those consequences cannot come about as a result of the contest?

I'll run this through the checklist: (a) the goal failed - check. (b) No serious troubles with logistics (who could have gotten where when, that sort of thing) - check. So yeah, the GM has to roll with it. I think the real issue in this question is the Macguffin problem. You rolled to get there in time, right? And you failed. So you didn't get there in time, no matter what. If you didn't get there in time, then that necessarily means the villain got there in time (from his point of view).

So everyone needs to be clear about what's at stake for this roll.

Here's some good news about that that will help. It's about narration. Narration in Trollbabe isn't "I go on while everyone sits and takes it." It's "I'm open for suggestions, clarifications, and objections, although the buck stops here."

That means that when you narrated the leader coming out of the cave, either the GM or anyone else could have said, "Hey, wait, I'm not really ready for that, does it have to be that way?" And depending on whatever you perceived about that, and whatever you really wanted, the buck stops with you.

Donjon, a game written by Clinton Nixon, is very much a GM-vs.-player narration tug-of-war, each one trying to give the other a hard (but fun) time. Trollbabe isn't like that - the goal is for everyone to contribute when they want, just knowing who's got the permanent magic marker when the talking is done.

I'm pretty sure most or all of your questions about injury were addressed in Trollbabe injury and Trollbabe questions and comments.

Quote3) Endgame: This is related to the injury issue. Trollbabes become less competent as they become injured. This means that at the climax of the story (a point at which most protagonists in stories are at their most competent), the Trollbabe is likely at or close to her least competent. Is this right? Is the intent for a Trollbabe session to have this degradation of competence effect?

Going by some of the stuff in those linked threads, there's lots of opportunity for a trollbabe to recover from injury during a session. The "degradation" doesn't have to happen, although a couple of bad defeats and perhaps a time-constraint can certainly have that effect for a pretty grim, furious run. The scene and conflict rules make it likely that if that happens, it's based on agreement. But the real point is that the degradation doesn't have to be an issue at all, which means that no "fix" is necessary either.

Best,
Ron

Thanks Ron!

I'm heading over to read up on those threads right now!

Just wanted to let you know that Jim and I both really like Trollbabe. He's thinking of how to modify it to play a Melnibone game (I think he changed Fighting and Magic to Law and Order--which goes into more of a Nine Worlds thing from my perspective, but different strokes, you know?) I'm thinking it can handle Conan with almost no tweaks.

Thanks for the advice on narration in Trollbabe. I like both Trollbabe and Donjon, but the narration rules in Donjon are more the sort of thing that fits easily inside my head without having to carve some room out. That doesn't mean I don't want to do the carving, just that I haven't finished yet.

I also remembered another thing we had an issue with:

Our two Trollbabes were attacked. The badguys' Goal was to drive us off of the longboat. How should this be resolved? If my Trollbabe succeeds and the other fails, is there any way for me to help the other Trollbabe? Particularly in a blow-by-blow contest if I win the first 3 and she is 1-2 after the first 3?

Another time we wanted to raid a village. My Trollbabe called down fire upon the village and my friend's Trollbabe leapt to the attack. I was thinking that I would have a Magic contest and he would have a Fighting contest. The GM ruled that since I had declared a Magic contest, we both needed to use Magic.

I guess what I'm saying is that it wasn't always clear what should happen in a situation where Trollbabes are cooperating. (Hmm, maybe I should call my old Amber group together to avoid the issue of cooperation)

Since my name has been invoked . . .

Picking up on Bill's last message, I'll confess to some confusion about handling conflicts with multiple trollbabes on the same side. All the text examples, IIRC, are solo trollbabes, and the default play paradigm seems to be "Trollbabes in Parallel." We happened to throw Bill and Dave's characters together last Wednesday, and they stayed that way. Real basic matter I could easily have gotten wrong, for instance:

Two trollbabes are in conflict with the same antagonist over the same issue. In our case, the captain of a longboat has ordered his crew to toss the trollbabes overboard. As defined in "Free and Clear," if the captain's side prevails (I, GM, initiated the conflict), the longboat will have successfully jettisoned the trollbabes and escaped. I set a pace of Action by Action, which Bill and Dave move to Exchange by Exchange.

So, two failed series is a victory for the Captain; two successful series a victory for the PCs.

So, the questions:

1) Do both trollbabe players roll?

2) If both roll, do their rolls count together? That is, if Dave's first series is a success, and Bill's first series is a success, are we done?

3) Or do both trollbabes tally separately, so that Bill needs two successes or GALINA is thrown over, and Dave needs two successes or BABSAH is thrown over?

If it's "sometimes 2 and sometimes 3," depending on the nature of the conflict, what are good guidelines for determining it?

Historical Note: I had actually read the Trollbabe Q& A thread before playing, but not the Injury thread. Injury thread was very worthwhile. Something else I wonder, recovery-wise: couldn't players call for "recuperation scenes," a la Corwin's layover in Lorraine at the beginning of Guns of Avalon?

Thanks,


Jim

Hi everyone,

Geez, this is a little hard to sort out ...

Okay, first thing is, there is absolutely no intended way for Trollbabe play to go in terms of whether characters team up or not. If they do, that's great; if they don't, that's great too. Here are the outcomes I've seen a lot.

- team up and act together in conflicts (as you describe)
- meet up but operately pretty independently in the same adventure, crossing paths but not really teaming up for rolling
- stay apart with entirely separate adventures
- stay apart, but narration and re-roll details create cause-and-effect between the two adventures that the characters rarely see

Now for the resolution issues. All trollbabes have their own individualized goals during a conflict scene they're sharing. Even if the two goals are identical, they are different things in the game-mechanics. That means they both roll.

However, since it's the same conflict, then whatever Conflict Type applies is what's happening. Incidentally, I get the impression that you guys pick Conflict Type based on whatever the trollbabe says she's doing within the conflict ... which isn't quite right. Whoever names the conflict names the Type before the fair & clear stage begins, and that's that.

(Well, OK, if the conflict begins due to a given action being stated, then it could work the other way. Don't let me confuse you.)

Back to our two trollbabes on the boat. The outcome, if both the goals are the same, suddenly fragments into a variety of possibilities. Succeed-succeed, fail-fail, succeed-fail, fail-succeed; that's the easy part. Add in all the re-rolls and so forth. Adjudicating what happens, for whoever's narrating, is quite wide-open, as long as you keep the constraints of who succeeded at the goal. Note also that you may have more than one narrator, in which case the rule is consensus.

This is all exactly the same as when two characters are rolling simultaneously in The Pool. It's actually easy as long as you keep the foundational constraints in place.

The key is not to combine the two rolls under any circumstances. So Jim, that'd be your #3, I think - one of the trollbabes had to get two successes, in order to get the guy off the boat.

Bill, as for the helping business, that's pretty much a matter for narration. Your character tosses the bad guy off the boat, and the other trollbabe failed to do so (with whatever consequences got narrated along the way). It's kind of hard to advise you about this without being there and knowing the details of the scene, but the point is that anyone who narrates can have the winning trollbabe help the hurt one (maybe get her back on the boat if she'd been tossed off, for instance).

The exception to that is if the trollbabes have a formal relationship between them, in which case direct help via re-rolls is allowed across them; see the rules for all that stuff.

Oh yeah, Jim, yes indeed, requests for "recovery scenes" are perfectly valid. Truth to tell, I thought that was so obvious that I didn't even put it in the rules, and therefore was surprised when people tended to run their characters into the ground every adventure.

H'mm, but that puts me in mind of the real last thing. One of the key features of Trollbabe, as a game, is that sometimes the character takes a real ass-kicking. It's OK to do that in this game. I think that a lot of people are used to taking it light on player-characters, for a wide variety of historical reasons (the simplest being "if his guy gets killed, he can't play"), but Trollbabe is built differently.

Best,
Ron

QuoteThe key is not to combine the two rolls under any circumstances. So Jim, that'd be your #3, I think - one of the trollbabes had to get two successes, in order to get the guy off the boat.

Glory be - I did it right then.

QuoteH'mm, but that puts me in mind of the real last thing. One of the key features of Trollbabe, as a game, is that sometimes the character takes a real ass-kicking.

Oh, check. We had that too. I had read the message in the Q&A thread about how the game isn't called Trollbabe Triumphant  and I was prepared to let them lose if it came to that. It was a weird experience after months of MURPG and years of diceless play, seeing ultimate success or failure come down to a die roll. This was my first evening of serious diced roleplay since like 1989. (One session of Donjon and one of Pantheon in the meantime.) But like Bill says, we both enjoyed the game a lot, and it really had that Nordic feel about it. I'd definitely play it again, and I'll probably use it as a "gateway game" for introducing newbies to the hobby.

Bill, BTW, really liked the provision for specifying the consequences of a conflict. He compared it favorably to HeroQuest, where, as he explained it, the consequences come out of the resolution mechanism and can be anticlimactic.

Me, I want more Trollbabe talk in the Adept Press forum! There's got to be some room between Sorcerer threads . . .

Thanks for the help.

Best,


Jim

Hello,

Jim, that is immensely flattering - "Trollbabe drags diceless gamer back to wicked ways ..."

As I'm sure you can see, the dice in the game are intended to be authoritative in their sphere of influence, but also for that sphere of influence to be extremely well-defined.

Your observation that it would be a good gateway game is well-taken; I had non-role-players in mind when I was writing.

I'm interested in the adventure you guys ran. What were the Stakes? What relationships got formed?

Best,
Ron

Okay, the Stakes I stole from Moorcock, given that he was much in mind as I read the rules, specifically "The Dead God's Book." I suspect it was the "Remembered Spell" checkbox that put this story in mind. I stripped it back to Situation and rejiggered - fortunately, I've forgotten most of the details of the story or else I couldn't use it as the basis for a session.

The first thing that had to go, of course, was the inevitable end. In Moorcock, Elric WILL find that the MacGuffin has been destroyed no matter what. One of the virtues of Trollbabe is the text makes it very clear that That Will Not Do. So, MacGuffin is fine at the start, and would have been fine at the end had our trollbabes won the race conflict.

Then, playing with the halfbreed notion, I changed the "Wingless Woman of M'yrrrh'nn" into a M'yrrrh'nn-human halfbreed with one wing (the left). She's on a quest for the Granite Feather, which is kept in a cave at the top of the world. The "Ice Trolls" and their enemies, the Lapp-like Ice people, feud over its possession continuously. She's hired a boat that will get her as far as Rottenmere, which was where the trollbabes were heading themselves. She's also out of money and won't admit it, so at some point the TB's have to decide, seeing that they're never going to get reimbursed for their expenses, if they really want to bother with her. And she's pursued by her brother, a full-blooded Winged Man, who has to stop her quest because it's taboo. (Think Middle Eastern honor killings.)

Top of the World = That little knob on the north side of Holgaard. "Granite Feather" seemed a more Trollish McGuffin than "Dead God's Book."

So the consequences are, she gets her second wing, or she doesn't. The trollbabes had to sort out the competing claims of Friste (as I called her), her brother Arzael, the longboat captain who has no intention of travelling to the top of the world, and if they go that far, the Ice Trolls and their chieftain, Grote, and the Ice People, none of whom they got to know by name what with all the savage battle. They stuck with Friste to the end, though three crucial conflict losses in a row screwed her out of her wings and her life too.

Relationships they established: Bill had Galina establish a relationship - "Galina's conniving resentful bitch," he called it - with the longboat captain after they prevented him from ejecting them. Bill had Galina enter into a conflict with the captain over taking them to the Top of the World. (They could have hired another ship in Rottenmere, but it pleased Bill and Galina to make this guy do it.) We ran it as Action by Action and we belayed each stage by mutual agreement. IOW, Bill's first victory meant that the Captain would not abandon them in Rottenmere. Between that series and the next, we nested several independent conflicts in Rottenmere itself, and between Bill's second and third victories, another conflict on the open sea with Arzael. This worked out really well, deciding that we didn't have to wrap one conflict up before doing anything else, depending on context.

Dave had Babsah establish a relationship with a Scholar in Rottenmere. This was clever - he did it with an eye toward gaining a "flashback reroll" on the relationship once close to the Feather, and he used it too. (And failed and was incapacitated in that contest. That meant the scholar was dead, even though he was nowhere around, but that was no problem: we simply agreed that, on returning to Rottenmere, the girls would discover that the old man had died in his sleep.)

Dave also established a relationship with Grote, the Ice Troll Chief, IIRC, and possibly someone from the village they raided on the way north. (Raid failed, and the village ransomed Babsah back, but Babsah is "fun-loving" so they were sorry to see her go.)

Best,


Jim

Minor quibble: It was Galina who made the relationship with the scholar/sorcerer in Rottenmere. She did it while Babsah was gambling for provisions.

The conflict with the Captain over taking us to the Top of the World was great. I initially started the conflict with a stated goal of "getting Lars to like us" or some such nonsense." Jim rightly told me that that wasn't really a goal and what was it I wanted? I explained that I really wanted Lars to take us to the Top of the World, but I also wanted him to be bitter and resentful and to keep trying to get out of it, so I wanted to play it as multiple contests. That was when Jim suggested we could do it at a slower Pace and just have the series happen nonsequentially. It was a real "kick ass" moment, to steal from Clinton's introduction to Donjon, as I saw how the contest resolution mechanic could stay true to the concept of resolving Goals, not Means without throwing away the sort of give and take over long periods of time that I was looking for.
Kudos.

Hiya,

I've never drawn out a Conflict like that before, but it's perfectly viable within the rules - even to the point of running "smaller" Conflicts between its steps.

It's similar to the HeroQuest rule of allowing Simple Contests to be run within Extended Contests. You know, it also strikes me that the HQ rule of "do not nest Extended Contests within one another" (which makes perfect sense for that game) is unnecessary in Trollbabe. Even if an "inner" Conflict injures a character, that just rolls right into the next step of the "outer" Conflict with no particular difficulty in record-keeping or contradiction in the currency of the resolutions.

Jim, you were right to disallow Bill's original goal of "make the captain like me." One thing that's pretty clear throughout Trollbabe is that players have no authority, roll or no roll, over the feelings and attitudes of NPCs. The re-stated goal, though, is great - (a) a concrete thing (take us to the top of the world) and (b) a suggestion about the NPC's attitude, for you as GM to work with.

Another thing I like about Trollbabe is the potential for tragedy. In the short game I ran at GenCon, everything ended really badly, with one trollbabe flat-out incapacitated, another injured, and the central NPC dead and cursed, with various secondary NPCs all killing or maiming one another.

The frustrating thing about that game for me is that Trollbabe makes most sense to me over a series of adventures, such that the players' reactions to a tragic event have meaning in terms of how they deal with the next thing. The whole game is about the evolution of ethics, at the personal level. So "Oh bummer" regarding a single-session single-adventure which won't continue is just a tiny shadow of what the game can produce over many adventures and (usually) an increasing Scale.

So I'm really looking forward to the next one you guys do.

Best,
Ron

Quote from: SupplanterDave had Babsah establish a relationship with a Scholar in Rottenmere. This was clever - he did it with an eye toward gaining a "flashback reroll" on the relationship once close to the Feather, and he used it too. (And failed and was incapacitated in that contest. That meant the scholar was dead, even though he was nowhere around, but that was no problem: we simply agreed that, on returning to Rottenmere, the girls would discover that the old man had died in his sleep.)

As a Trollbabe rules wonk, I need to point out that the old guy is just fine.  Page 30:

QuoteIf a re-roll based on a relationship fails, no matter how the whole series turns out, the person in question will wind up at one "consequence" level worse than the trollbabe does, if he or she is physically present during the conflict.

Not being physically present, the scholar is not at risk.  The downside for the Trollbabe in using a relationship that is not physically present for a reroll means that relationship cannot be called on again in the current session, whereas physically present relations refresh at the end of the current scene.

Points at Rafial and makes circular motions with other hand, in a fist.

Translation: "What he said!"

Best,
Ron

Quote from: rafial
Not being physically present, the scholar is not at risk.  The downside for the Trollbabe in using a relationship that is not physically present for a reroll means that relationship cannot be called on again in the current session, whereas physically present relations refresh at the end of the current scene.

Oh crap! That poor old guy!

Anyway, thanks for the reminder. That rule got away from me, but as soon as you pointed it out I did the forehead slap.

Now, let's talk about the big stuff I got wrong, and how, even here, Trollbabe was useful.

When the trollbabes lost the race to the ice cave against Arzael, and the narration of the failure established that Arzael had been in and out of the cave, I decided that he smashed the Feather. There were good IC reasons why he would do this, centering on the fact that the feather being destroyed would save him and his sister both from all sorts of taboo trouble at the minor cost of breaking her heart. (All adventure I had played with the irony that the Winged People were free of the ground but tethered by a tangle of self-imposed taboos.) Upshot: as of the lost race, the Consequences have been determined at the intraworld level.

Okay, no prob in itself. The trollbabes got to pick their side and get their chance at prevailing. There were two possible ways of getting what happened next right, and I missed both of them.

The very next thing that happened after the trollbabes met Arzael and his Ice People allies at the mouth of the cave was twofold: Arzael directed the Ice People to attack the trollbabe party (including Galina, Babsah, his sister Friste and, I believe, a couple of Ice Trolls) while he flew off. I declared a conflict in which the goal of the Ice People was to "kill everyone." Obviously the trollbabes couldn't die except by their own choice, but the NPCs in tow would, if the humans won. Again, no problem.

Meanwhile Bill declared a succession of conflicts between Galina and Arzael. First a social conflict in which Galina threatened to kill Friste if Arzael left. That one didn't make it out of Free and Clear, since I said that it wasn't a conflict as Arzael had no interest in protecting his sister. (I was almost certainly wrong about this too, but maybe he just called Galina's bluff.)

So Bill switched to a declared conflict for all the marbles - a combined Magic/Social to open a mindlink with Arzael and convince him to help his sister use the feather.

Yup. I let this one get past Free and Clear, and held the revelation of the Feather's destruction until Bill's victory in the conflict.

Dumb dumb dumb. I got overly wrapped up in the question of IC information, and reverted to treating conflict resolution like task resolution. I could have done two things that would have been better:

1) Allow the Conflict declaration to define the world. That is, since the players don't know about the feather's destruction, it hasn't actually happened yet. Retcon away what only I "know" at that point anyway. This would make hardcore "no myth" people happy, I'd think, but I'm not a hardcore "no myth" guy. (For the purposes of Trollbabe, I'm a softcore "no myth" guy.)

2) Reveal the Feather's destruction at the Free and Clear stage. This can even be done IC as well as OOC: As soon as you touch Arzael's mind you discover. After all, the conflict roll is not to see if the spell works. The conflict roll is to see if Galina is convincing. I could have the spell succeed, obviating the initial conflict declaration and giving Bill a chance to declare a new conflict between Galina and Arzael or join Babsah in her conflict against the party of Ice People.

All things considered, I prefer Option Two. Instead, I compounded the problem as follows:

By the time Galina "won" her sham conflict against Arzael, Babsah had lost hers against the Ice People. That meant that the Ice Trolls and Friste were dead dead dead, since that was the declared goal of the IPs. Bill was clearly bummed by the way things were going, and asked for a chance to get Galina into Babsah's conflict, since "another character can join at any time." Well, not when it's over, right? But I let him, because I had an instant sense that I had wrongfooted things and I was compensating.  ("Here Bill! Have this nice bone!")

Anyway, Galina herself lost, but Bill pushed things to incapacitation and took a Sudden Ally reroll so he would get to narrate the outcome. He had Grote the Ice Troll chief come charging in after all and drive off the Ice People. He also had Arzael, filled with remorse, charge in to protect his sister and fall under the spears of her human attackers. That is: Everybody dies.

Now thanks to the guidance in the rulebook, I had, as I said, an instant sense that I had allowed things to go very wrong. So we discussed and did an instant retcon that everyone was pretty satisfied with:

1) The Feather had not been destroyed.
2) Since Bill had won Galina's conflict, he instilled in Arzael a change of heart.
3) Since Dave had lost Babsah's conflict, that change of heart came too late, as it meant Friste was too dead to get her wings anyway.
4) The outcome of the last conflict stood pretty much untouched: Arzael, reconciled to his sister's wishes, dives back into the fray and dies with her. The trollbabes fall to the Ice People; Grote and the Ice trolls appear; and the story ends with the trollbabes recuperating under the care of Grote's tribe, which has regained custody of the Feather Cave.

So we ended up with a retroactive option one, IOW. (At least, I think that's what we did. There's an outside chance we went with a retroactive option two.) That was better than ending the evening with vague discontent all around, if not so good as getting it right the first time. And again, my antennae were so sensitive because of the way the text gets across the principles of the game.

Best,


Jim

Hi Jim,

That is one of the best reflections on an actual play session that I have ever read. It makes me consider including testimonials of play in the print copy of Trollbabe, including that one.

You all are playing again, right?

Best,
Ron

Thanks, Ron. We will definitely play Trollbabe again at some point. Our ongoing MURPG campaign fills just about every Wednesday night, and other commitments (Family! Work! Weblog!) make the timing of our next Trollbabe session uncertain. But we'll get to it, maybe over the holidays.

When will this print edition be available?

Best,


Jim