Trollbabe session reports; techniques for characterization

Spoilers for the scale 1 Burning Shores and Ice Palace locations in Martin's Trollbabe game!

I've played two sessions of Trollbabe with Martin and Eero. Martin is GMing and Eero and I play Trollbabes, very large and powerful troll-human women. Our job as players is simple, to play the Trollbabe honestly and to advance her interests. My Trollbabe is Honea, initially defined as follows:

Forwarded

Honea the Smart (5) Trollbabe Start with Xena, Warrior Princess, but 7 feet tall, purple hair with a side and undercut, all teeth slightly pointed, a row of short horns on the shaven side of her head. Purple lip-dye when she can get it. Fancy earrings. Wears an armored bodice, mail skirt, and a smile. Fighting 4-, unarmed: naturally graceful, without training or a killing instinct. Magic 6+, troll magic: confident, brash even, meticulous, long traditional trollish sitting-ceremonies and quick little hexes too Social 5+, perky: confident, loud, happy when all eyes are on her. Items: 1 pair troll earrings, agate; 1 human loadstone with bowl for navigation.

Eero made two pictures of Honea with a locally-trained LLM, and it's hard for me to decide which I like more:

At first glance, Honea is a cross between a manic pixie dreamgirl and an NSR dungeon tourist. She's wandering around in search of novel experiences and adventure. In practice, things have gone poorly for her.

Simple recollection of fictional events 

In the first session, Honea went to the Ice Palace. She met a troll guard, an elderly housekeeper, and a fantastic ice queen, the latter of whom is a magician who claimed to battle a demon, with the help of a local young man who serves as an apprentice, every seven years. Invariably, the queen said, the youth dies in the attempt. Honea was a sympathetic listener and offered to help the queen find a new apprentice, and hopefully to help defeat the demon. (Naturally I the player do not think there is a demon lurking below the palace; if there is a demon at all, it emerges from the queen, and otherwise she is a simple vampire.) She befriends the housekeeper. They descend to the nearby village to pick a youth, and find that most of the young men have deliberately scarred their faces to avoid being picked. Of the two remaining youths, one is a girl in disguise, who plans to assassinate the queen. The other is a boy who is in love with the girl, and wants to assassinate the queen while protecting the girl from taking on that responsibility. Honea feels that she cannot directly move against the queen, who has shown her hospitality. She wants to choose the girl, and tries and fails to convince the boy from exposing the girl (more on this decision later); the boy shows the housekeeper that the girl is in fact a girl, after which the housekeeper chooses the boy. The girl privately decides to try and kill the queen anyway. Honea wishes the girl and the housekeeper well, and departs.

In the second session, Honea went to the Smouldering Shores to swim and see the lava floes. She found a tower of magicians, who told her that the lava is the blood of a great giant, imprisoned in the earth by their tower, which is a dagger in his heart. Their binding spell requires a troll to sit chained at the tower's peak, and their current troll is dying. They think they have magically summoned her via her dreams, but she quickly disabuses them of that notion, and tells them that, while she will enjoy their hospitality, and help them if she can, she has no intention of remaining at the tower for longer than a day. She tries and fails to commune with the spirit of the giant, and is injured. When she returns, a troll has arrived. She explains the situation to the troll, and they meet the old, dying troll, who is in rough shape indeed. She unchains the old troll. The giant wakes, which pleases her. She orders the young troll to pick up the old troll and carry him out, while encouraging the magicians to flee. Meanwhile the giant rises and lifts the tower hundreds of feet into the air. She leaps. Both trolls are injured and unconscious in the water. The giant squashes the magicians, one by one. Honea tries to save the young troll, but fails. She is knocked unconscious by falling debris and drifts off in the surf.

In both cases, Honea ended the adventure thinking that she could not have acted differently, but that things have not turned out well for her and hers. She might have been happier if she had never come to these places. 

Resolution in action

In the first session, I rolled: to convince the troll guard to let me explore the palace without leave from the queen (failed); to commune with the spirits of the place (succeeded); to convince the boy to keep the girl's secret (failed). I didn't raise at all. I was content to leave people to their fate, though not happy. In hindsight, especially after the second session, "commune with the spirits of the place" should not have required a roll.

In the second session, I rolled: to commune with the spirit of the giant (failed, raised with a remembered spell, failed again); to convince the young troll to carry out the old (succeeded); to convince the magicians' guard to evacuate without a fight (succeeded); to convince a magician to leap from the window (failed); to save the young troll from drowning (failed, raised with a relationship with the young troll, failed again). Here I felt as if I was repeatedly smashing my head into a brick wall, in a productive, compelling way.

Recall that, in Trollbabe, the GM says what happens on a successful roll, and the Trollbabe player says what happens on a failed roll. I think we both added texture and literary interest through our narrations, but I don't think we significantly changed the situation; we both would have said similar things in the other person's place. (Martin, please correct me if I am incorrect!)

Characterization scheme

Following are four extremely abstract ways of looking at a character's choices in situations throughout a story. Same choices, similar circumstances, simple repetition. Same choices, different circumstances, showing consistency. Different choices, similar circumstances, showing change. Different choices, different circumstances, simple variety.

Simple repetition and simple variety are useful tools, though I won't talk about them at length. (If I were writing about Eero's character, Pessi, I would talk about them at length. Eero's character is a fully-formed adult, and her two adventures have served to display her character, not to challenge and change it.) In Honea's adventures, we've seen simple repetition in her enthusiasm for new experiences, her curiosity, and her informality around powerful people. 

Now to change and consistency. In one simple plot structure, a character displays a trait or belief, comes to a crisis which challenges this, and either reaffirms her prior actions or changes her ways.

In the first adventure, Honea tried to stay friends with everyone she met. Obviously this ended poorly for all involved, even if the details are undetermined. Thus, in the second adventure, she was quick to challenge the magicians in every part of their plan and actions. She hoped not to feel any debt of obligation to them, so that she could move against them if she needed to, as she in fact did. She changed her ways about being nice to everyone.

In the first adventure, Honea tried to keep the girl's plans intact, though she failed. She was operating on a Romantic principle, that only I can say what my life is worth, and if I have decided to sacrifice it somehow, nobody else gets to simply negate my choice. The girl had decided she could risk her life, and probably lose it, to save the young men of the town. (It was her idea for them to scar their faces.) The boy who loves her could only say, in his favor, "I want her to live and for me to die in her place", which is not enough; in Honea's eyes, the boy does not get to negate the girl's choice.

Compare this to Honea's Romantic principle in the second adventure, when she freed the giant: "The world should be wild". Honea knows a wild world is not a safe or a nice world; the giant was imprisoned because he killed so many people, and, as soon as he was freed, he began killing again. But Honea would rather live in a world where giants roam than a world where they are imprisoned. Likewise, she would rather live in a world where brave people can boldly stake their life on their ideals, than one where a brave girl can see her plans disrupted in the name of her protection.

How much of this was intentional or planned?

Little to nothing was planned; I have no way to do that. I can recognize trajectories as they form, and affirm or deny them, that's it.

I started with the description at the top of this page. This initial description was inspired by a friend of mine; if she ever reads it, I hope she's flattered! Since I made a young, untested, brash character, I expected that she would be tested, and that her optimism would be challenged, but I necessarily did not know if it would stand firm or crumble. (I still do not know; her arc is far from over!) Before the second adventure, I reviewed the events of the first adventure. I could immediately see that she would be more guarded, bitter, and suspicious, but that's as far as my thinking took me.

In fact I have been downright surprised by Honea's evolution; under her modern feminist attitude and informal style, Honea has a traditionalist, Romantic, mystical streak. I've already spoken of her Romantic ideals above. Her mystical streak comes out in her appreciation for natural beauty, desire to commune with spirits, and interest in magic. She may act a bit like a tourist, in that she travels far and wide looking at cool things, but unlike a tourist she takes these things deadly seriously. The first conflict I raised on -- the first conflict anyone in the game raised on, in fact -- was Honea's attempt to commune with the spirit of the giant. This shit mattered to her.

Likewise I was surprised in the first session, when I realized I couldn't bring Honea to act against the ice queen. It turned out, Honea felt strongly about a guest's duty to their host, and once I saw that -- once the idea popped into my mind -- I couldn't gainsay it. It was just there, undeniable.

And again, when Honea freed the giant. I was searching frantically for a solution. (On the other side of the adventure, Eero's Pessi is a cool cucumber, elegantly moving through complex social problems, spending a lot of time on tactics.) But there was no easy solution. Honea couldn't simply freeze while I considered matters. We had to act. The sentence came to my lips unbidden: The world should be wild. Honea's not just angry about the old troll and the magicians' trick, she's angry about the giant, she wants it freed! (It helps that earlier in the session we had expressed sympathy for the giant's plight. What could justify such unimaginable suffering?) And Honea is willful. Once she makes up her mind, she acts. So she freed the giant and the old troll.

In the last scene, as she watched the giants squash the magicians, I mused out loud that maybe it was all worth it to see the giant moving free. I wonder if Honea believes that. I hope to find out.