The Gaming Philosopher

I played another session of Trollbabe yesterday, and I would like to take the opportunity to write a little bit about GMing this game (and similar narrativist games). This is not a worked out manifesto so much as an attempt to think through an approach that I've been taking more or less instinctively. First, some context. This game was online, with two people I had never played with before: Judith and Katy. Actually, it's not quite true that I never played with Judith. I've known her for some 38 years, and possibly the first roleplaying I was ever engaged in was on a vacation with her family and my family. She acted as a kind of story guide, and I and her brother Adriaan played characters in an unfolding short story. I was thrilled by the possibilities inherent in such an activity, but it would take more time before I really discovered the world of tabletop RPGs. Both Judith and Katy played a bunch of roleplaying games before, though as far as I can judge they were all fai...

This is a post about Ron Edward's RPG Trollbabe (2002) and Vincent Baker's RPG Dogs in the Vineyard (2004). I'm not completely sure which of the two I played first, though I think it was Dogs . It has definitely been the case that I've seen and played Trollbabe in the past as if it was a somewhat simpler version of Dogs , though of course set in a rather different setting. Why would you think the two games are closely related? Well, Trollbabe is acknowledged as an important influence in the text of Dogs . But looking at the games themselves, we can see three very important similarities: The protagonists of both games are outsiders who come to a community in trouble, will influence that community throughout what is probably a single play session, and will then leave for a new "adventure". In both games, the GM prepares by thinking up something that is at stake or going wrong in the community, and preparing a couple of characters that have views about th...

Last weekend, I finally got to play a game of the second edition of Ron Edward's Trollbabe . I played the original version several times, but never with huge success. This new edition, though, was something I really wanted to try. What we usually think of as "the system" hasn't changed a lot; but what has changed is that Ron now gives a lot of detailed description of how to actually play the game. For a moment, I was tempted to call the new stuff "GM advice". But it's not advice . It's rules, it's system. It may not be about rolling dice and writing things on character sheets, but it is about things like: Who gets to start scenes. What information you can and can't add to a scene once a conflict has been declared. Who gets to declare a conflict. What the maximum stakes for a conflict are. How you prepare a scenario. How you share narrative control over NPCs. What arc the narrative development of an adventure follows. In other wor...

Remko van der Pluijm and I got back online on Google Hangouts this week. We decided to play Trollbabe , a 2002 role playing game by Ron Edwards. I played one or two sessions with Jasper Polane once, way back in 2004 or 2005. Remko had never played it before. Introduction to Trollbabe Trollbabe is set in a fantasy version of medieval Scandinavia. There are islands, wooden ships, forests, mountains, villages that raise sheep, men bearing axes, women bearing children, ghosts, magicians and, of course, trolls. Trolls sometimes eat humans, and humans sometimes hunt trolls, but they mostly live together in uneasy peace. It is a setting full of conflicts. Humans versus trolls, humans versus humans, trolls versus trolls, humans versus humans with trolls caught in the middle -- you name it, and it's there. That's where trollbabes come in. They are big women with horns, not quite humans and not quite trolls, but half-feared and half-trusted by both species. As a player, you play...