summercomfort | Single for 5 days...

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Single for 5 days...

So Jono is in Chicago, which means I'm single for the next 5 days!

"Single" things I've done already:

1) Post on Facebook demanding Friday Night Boozing

2) Get home from work at 11pm

3) Post on LJ

Yes, why post on LJ when I can just talk with Jono, and then he posts on his blog?

But now he's not here, and I want to talk about Trollbabe. Specifically, last week I GMed for the first time! It was just a Trollbabe session with Jono, who'd always GMed Trollbabe, and haven't played. He decided to be Frey, a sexy Trollbabe who is always eager to use her not-so-good magic. So I started by dropping her in a pit and hoisting her to a village where she had to defend the village from a troll that keeps taking the village's women. But then it turned out that the troll (Grogg) was taking the village's women because he'd lost his wife, and so Frey took it upon herself to find Grogg a wife, meeting a rather mean-spirited she-Troll along the way. Grogg's vegetarianism gets in the way.

It was a really weird session because by the end, Jono was super-sad and kinda giving up, saying that Frey's presence just messes things up for Grogg, and the she didn't know enough about Trolls to meddle. I gave Grogg a nice epilogue, but it was kinda sad to see Jono so sad and moved about Grogg. So it made me wonder: did I mess up as a GM?

As I was GMing, I felt like I had 3 basic choices at any given time:
- give the player what he wants (allow his plan to succeed, or at least play to his character's strengths/desires)
- give the player challenges (throw stumbling blocks in his plan, make the character's life complicated)
- do what I think is interesting (and let the player make of it what he will)

I think I mostly went with the second or third option most of the time. I started with a village with an Evil Troll, because I thought it's a pretty open setup for figuring out what Jono's reactions. (Type 3) Then, when Jono wanted to talk to the Evil Troll, I decided to make Grogg a sympathetic character (Type 2). When Jono wanted to get Grogg out of the village, I just went along with it (Type 1), but when Jono wanted to find Grogg a troll wife, I at first went along with it, letting him easily find a group of she-Trolls (Type 1), but then I made them bitchy she-Trolls (Type 2). At the same time, I hinted that one of the kidnapped women had actually started caring about Grogg (Type 3). When Jono gave up on the "Get Grogg a Wife" plan, I narrated an epilogue where Grogg eventually accepts the human woman and that there are wee trollbabes* in their future (Type 3).

So in the end, I got what I thought was interesting, and Jono had a given up on his plan. :( Maybe I shouldn't have thrown so many challenges to his plan? Or maybe I should have created challenges that were more tangible and engaging for Jono? Part of the problem, too, was that Jono kept coming up with these elaborate plans that involved trying to convince the she-Troll through role-playing, whereas I think it would have worked better if we just rolled for it as a social conflict. So maybe what I should have done was to be assertive and actually say, "Jono, you should roll for this" instead of just hinting at it by saying things like "You know, she might change her mind if you do a social roll...."

Anyway, GMing was fun, I'd definitely do it again, but I definitely need to improve mah skillz -- being assertive at the right time, identifying the right conflicts, and providing interesting, open-ended scenarios.

Hopefully I'm on the right path? Any comments welcome.

-----------------
* probably on the smaller side because the mother is human. Yes, I actually care about this. If I want a big Trollbabe, the mom would have to be the troll.

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I wasn't there, so it's hard to say what was what or why on anything. But, if you're doing 1, 2, or 3, based on what you find interesting, then that's good.

Also, when I hear "elaborate plan", I immediately think of this thing gamers do, which is, come up with elaborate plans that are implausible, have a lot of weak links, etc. Dunno if Jono did this or not, but it's a gamer baggage thing I see often enough.

It's a combination of the tendency to a) want to pull off the complex trick thing, like a theme magic deck, and b) the weird implausibility of it usually is because they do it in disjointed sections, which historically was because if you straight up told the GM your full plan, then they'd outright mess it up (if you're used to playing with railroading GMs).

I wonder if Jono was more sad that his plan wasn't really the cause of the success in the end?

Anyway, I'd be down to play some Trollbabe too, if you want to GM next time.

I agree with Chris, and would also add that you should feel comfortable going, "okay, Jono, now you have to make that social conflict roll." Well, in a lot of games, at least. I don't know about Trollbabe, having not yet played it.

I remember the rules say that either the GM or the player can call for a conflict roll at any time.

In that case, yeah, it's probably a good idea to not be shy about calling for conflict rolls.

Yeah, I really should have. There were times where it was obviously a direct social conflict of "I want this, they want that", where I felt comfortable calling for a roll, but I suppose I should also feel comfortable calling for a roll when it's just a "wait, I've got a plan that will make Greee like Grogg!" I think it's partly an question of of how "big" the issue is before it's too big to solve with a roll.

Jono's elaborate plan involved convincing Greee to go back to Grogg's cave, getting Greee to help break in to the cave, and then try to use the captive women in the cave as an example of Grogg's fearsomeness, then waiting for Grogg to show up. Greee was unconvinced. (That's when I should have made Jono do a social roll).

One-on-one roleplaying is hard. :( Most of my roleplaying has been done that way, because in general my game group is me + my brother, and the issue is that there are at most two creative minds at work on the world and story. If the player runs across a challenge ("get Grogg a girlfriend"), then that player assumes almost the entire burden of figuring out how to resolve it. That's because, in an open-ended game, the GM usually shouldn't be the one to suggest how the problem might be solved. So Jono has this elaborate plan but no backup from the rest of the group on how to improve the plan or what to try if it fails, and he doesn't benefit from the collective enthusiasm of a charged group of players.

In spite of GM'ing a lot for my brother, I'm not sure enough about "do"s and "don't"s of GM'ing to try to lay down general principles and say they should be your principles too. But if I lay out a challenge for my bro, and it's turning out to be quite difficult (or poorly designed) and he's getting frustrated or disinterested, I don't like prolonging the scenario. I'm very likely to let him get away with whatever crazy solution he comes up with -- usually without a resolution roll, since if it fails he'll have to start over -- and move on to the next challenge, which hopefully will be more interesting. On the other hand, if it's a juicy problem that he's really getting into, I'm likely to throw complications into his path, make him roll at each stage of his plan, and let him deal with setbacks creatively. Again, I'm not saying this is the right way to run a one-on-one game; it's just one I've found to work okay for this particular GM and that particular player.

That's really helpful advice! Thanks, Brian!

Did you mess up as a GM? No no NO you got it all WRONG! That was an amazing game, from my point of view. I think you played it perfectly. I guess I didn't succeed in communicating what I was feeling at the time, so let me try to explain here.

I started playing Frey with the idea that she rejects her troll side and wants to distance herself from it. Thus the emphasis on her spellbook: it's the symbol of the highest levels of human learning and civilization.

So when this bestial troll comes along causing trouble for the town, it's the perfect opportunity for her to prove her superiority to this dumb, primitive creature, right?

Having neutralized Grogg with a spell that finally actually worked, she moved on to proving her superiority by fixing his problems. Like, with this idea that trolls are so dumb that of course whatever is wrong for him will be really easy for me to solve, right? Frey would get to be the big damn hero.

As I found out more about what happened to Grogg's wife Streeey, I/Frey started genuinely feeling bad for him. (You did a great job of expressing the depths of his sadness and helpless frustration, even with a monosyllabic vocabulary. The way he had kept Streeey's room in their cave set up the way she liked it... No, I'm not crying, I've just got something in my eye...) So at this point it's like half "prove superiority by easily solving dumb troll problems" condescension and half genuine sympathy.

(continued...)

So Frey comes up (I come up) with this totally stupid plan based on the idea that all she has to do is get a female troll to be impressed with Grogg's strength and then he'll have a new "wife", boom, problem solved. As if it was as easy as breeding animals with each other. Again, coming from a position of arrogance and condescension.

And you, again, played it perfectly, just by making the trolls behave believably. The trolls have social expectations and gender roles which Grogg is failing to live up to; Grogg's got hobbies that make him kind of a weirdo they've got kinship relations and past history that complicate things; Grogg and Greeey have personalities like oil and water, Grogg rightly feels that his privacy has been violated; and so on. They have culture. So of course you can't just pair them up like animals. Predictably, the plan didn't accomplish anything except embarassing Grogg and making him feel even worse.

You did a wonderful job playing Grogg's there - hurt, embarrased, confused, and betrayed. When he said "You said you'd help me get moss", you know, I wanted to cry right there. Because even after I had bruised him up in that fight in the town, and talked down to him, even then he had still been willing to trust me. And I had taken that used it to manipulate him for my stupid plan. Right then I wished, oh how badly I wished, that I had kept my word and helped get Grogg moss, that I had offered genuine friendship and respect to this sad, gentle creature.

So that part when I was "super-sad and kinda giving up", as you said? It's not because I had lost interest in the game, oh god no. Quite the opposite. I was having this intense in-character epiphany. Frey had just discovered what happens when you insert yourself uninvited into a society you don't understand and assume that since they're "primitive" that their culture and feelings must be trivial. For the first time, she started taking trolls seriously, and seeing Grogg as an equal - or seeing that Grogg had been the better man, in a lot of ways. As she understood what she had done, Frey just realized that she was not the big damn hero/superior intelligence that she thought she was. She was having that moment where she says to herself "Am I... am I a bad person?". Am I, in fact, the villian of this story?

That's what was going through my head right then, and I'm sorry that I wasn't able to express it better at the time, because you probably weren't seeing what an amazingly intense and carthartic emotional story climax I was experiencing.

(continued...)

So when Grogg was like "Everybody out of my cave!", I gave up on the "get Grogg a wife plan" because that's the only thing that made sense in-character. Frey needed to go off and reconsider her life; it would be too painful to stay in Grogg's presense any longer.

You gave me one last chance to do something before he pushed me out of the cave, so I took that as a sign that you wouldn't be satisfied with everything ending like that. So I thought, well, maybe before she leaves Frey can try to at least salvage something from the situation, something to try to start to make amends. Oh yeah! The five captured human women, who I ignored before (because they weren't part of proving my superiority)! Maybe at least I can rescue them, as the start of trying to be a better person! That's why I was willing to take an injury in order to succeed there.

Frey's last words in the game were simply "Grogg... I'm so sorry" becuase that's what the game was about, for me; I had never really focused on the captured women. So I found your epilogue surprising, since I had not really picked up on the hints you had dropped about the possible Grogg-human relationship. Surprising, but an entirely appropriate and fitting contribution (in such a strongly player-driven game as Trollbabe, NPC-NPC relationships are one of the few places the GM can sensibly inject her own story ideas) and it made the story end on an eyebrow-raising and bittersweet note, instead of the total downer ending it would have been without the coda.

If you wanted the possible Grogg-human relationship to get explored during gameplay, then you should have given her a name and some dialogue; I think that would have been enough for me to pick up on it. But that would have been a totally different game.

Other than that, I don't think you did a thing wrong. You GMed it with a very light touch, which for Trollbabe is good. You played the troll characters well, sincerely and with integrity, and let the relationships develop naturally. You might have expected Grogg to just be a monster-of-the-day and the real story to be about the men from the villiage drafted to fight the King's war (actually, can we play again to follow up that plotline?) but when I veered off course you did a great job of improvising and fleshing out Grogg's situation to make it interesting.

So! Great game. Thanks so much for running it.

Thanks for sharing what you (and Frey) were feeling! I guess one problem that I was having was distinguishing Jono the player and Frey the character -- Where Frey the character was feeling sad and depressed, I mis-interpretted to be Jono the player to be sad and depressed. So I guess this comes back to the different player stances. In other games where I've seen you roleplay, you seemed to alternate between actor stance and author stance -- sometimes doing things because you, the player, think it'd make things more interesting, and sometimes doing things because that's what your character would do. I guess this time I just wasn't clear -- I thought Jono was coming up with the ridiculous plan, and not Frey.

In terms of the Grogg-human relationship, it was just a possibility, so I didn't push it too much. One thing that I learned from Ben's GMing of the LaGrange Point PTA one-shot was the importance of planting "hooks" and then letting things happen, so that if the player does want to do something, there's already a hook there. I regret not making some of my hooks obvious enough -- for example, Greeey's attitude might have changed if she saw her sister's room (maybe part of her nastiness is just an act).

Jono, you guys may want to think about writing this up as an AP post somewhere, it's pretty awesome.

Durr, and then I look on your blog, and lo and behold...

Re: complicated plans and not using the social conflict mechanics

I did the same thing both in this Trollbabe game and in the last session of Star Wars: A Galaxy Divided!. I'm trying to figure out why, and I think it's something that happens when I get really immersed, actually. There's a certain kind of immersed state of mind where I forget that I'm playing a game with rules, and I'm just thinking about how I would solve the problem if I was really there and if I was my character. This results in overly complex plans just because I'm the kind of person who overthinks things.

Another thing is that when I'm the GM, I generally take responsibility for being the one to say "OK sounds like a conflict, give me a roll". So when I'm playing a character I am probably waiting the GM to say this, even in games where it's appropriate for any player to call for the roll.

Also when GMing I dislike rolling for a social conflict before everybody has a chance to say what they want to say, because I feel like then the die roll is replacing role-playing instead of supplementing it. I do like having a mechanic there to fall back on, but... how do I put this... you know how in Dogs you can have the NPC Give because the player made such a perfect Raise that the NPC trembles and loses their will to fight? I like that technique and I often use it in other games - reward really convincing role-play by forfeiting the NPC's right to a die roll. Other GMs may use different techniques for deciding when to invoke the social conflict mechanics, and that's OK.

But anyway, combine my personal GMing style with my tendency to overthink things and my tendency to get immersed to the point I forget about the rules (this only happens in games I'm really, really enjoying, so take it as a complement) and you can probably see why I have a tendency to go off on crazy plans instead of just starting a conflict roll. In a trad RPG this would be the "We had an amazing session where we didn't touch the dice all night!" phenomenon. If we're playing a story game where the mechanics are still helpful, by all means just elbow me in the ribs and point to the dice.

Hmm...
This is a problem that I often encounter when I role-play: I would have all this complex character development that is all happening in the character's head, which is happening in my head. I think it was you who suggested that I vocalize these things more, and doing that has definitely helped me.

But yeah, I agree that something seems to be lost if the "juicy parts" are narrated after the conflict roll, especially in a social conflict that can be (and should be) role-played. And there were definitely points in the game where you were making such a convincing argument as your character that I would have just let it happen ... for example, if you didn't do the whole thing of putting Grogg to sleep, he was about to take you to his cave.

Anyway, I will definitely prod you in the future, when we encounter situations where a dice roll might resolve 20 minutes of dithering/elaborate plan.

Something that doesn't get used enough, is that you can have a roll partway through a social conflict, then have everyone involved roleplay that out.

The trick is that everyone has to work together and have the social contract to do that- "Hey, Alice wins the argument with Bill" and then have Player A playing Alice and Player B playing Bill play out the ending of the argument with Player B's role being to set it up for Player A to lay down the winning argument.

(I use argument here, but you could easily apply manipulation, seduction, apology, whatever).

This is rarely used mostly, because players have the bad tendency to try to turn the post-roll roleplaying into a chance to still win the argument instead of coloring it as, "this is HOW I lose".

Agreed. Jono and I generally try to do that. But I think Jono is addressing the situation where you start wanting to just role-play it and succeed/fail based on the strength of your argument instead of rolling. (But Jono might actually mean something else.)

Here's my take on social rolls in RPGs in general. Making a die roll to determine if I can successfully talk someone into something is stupid and should never be done. Making some sort of charisma roll BEFORE I start talking, to get the NPC's baseline first impression of my based on my appearance and manner of speech on the other hand, THAT'S good. Based on that, you can get into the NPC's head, have him take into account who is trying to convince him of something, and how trustworthy they come up, and assess what I end up saying in that context. Oddly enough, I can't name a single game that suggests this method.

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