Is GM-lite a thing?

 I’ve written about GM-free systems before (and I will again!) And I’ve written about how there is a lot of responsibility placed on a GM, which is one of the reasons I like GM-free systems. 

 

However, there is a middle ground where players provide a lot of narration and overall story structure. I think of them as GM-Lite. If that’s a real term, grams to liters has kept me from finding it via Google.

The idea of breaking up the GM duties is one that can be found in a lot of games these days. The GM controls the story, the setting and all the NPCs is a paradigm that doesn’t have to be a sacred cow that’s never slaughtered. 

One of the earliest examples I’ve found is Trollbabe from 2002. I don’t know if it’s the earliest example (I’m actually sure it’s not) but I understand it was a very influential one. I haven’t played Trollbabe but it is very high on my stack of games I want to play someday. There are a lot of interesting design choices in the system.

It definitely takes an improvisational approach, with the idea that you sit down at the table to collectively tell a story without hours of prep time. The mechanics are simple so everyone can focus on the narrative.

One touch that really stuck with me from the design is that the game master narrates player successes but the players narrate their own failures. Some of the core elements of the traditional, old guard game master are blatantly passed out to the players.

Man, I really need to reread that rule book.

As I have mentioned in the past, I have had game masters who spent hours upon hours working on the game. It was practically their second job. And, quite frankly, that’s a kind of time commitment that I don’t want to ask for anyone. Yes, GM-free systems are clearly a way to avoid that. However, I forgot that there was a middle ground as well. For some groups, that might be the ideal solution.

The scale of epic adventures

The other night, as I was falling asleep, I found myself thinking about how Trollbabe did have a level mechanic. The characters are basically made up of one number, plus some adjectives and relationships.

But then I realized that scale is actually the equivalent of levels in Trollbabe.

When an adventure is completed in Trollbabe, one of the options players have is to raise the scale of the adventures. Interestingly, if one player chooses to do this, it affects everyone. You also can't raise it more than one increment, by the way.

Scale is literally what it sounds like. The scope of what the players can affect. A starting Trollbabe has a scale of personal. Their direct actions can only affect a couple people. However, as players choose to increase the scale, their actions and therefore the scope of the adventures can become bigger and broader. At the top of the scale ladder, you can affect whole lands, which can mean continents.

This also helps determine what kind of relationships characters can have. With greater scope, villages or armies or whole countries can become allies or adversaries. This isn't quite as power gaming as it sounds. Using relationships to reroll failures can damage or even kill the other party. So, with great scale can come great sacrifice and loss.

Scale, while a very important concept of playing Trollbabe, isn't the most brilliant or innovative idea in the game. No, breaking up the usual responsibilities of game masters so that the players have a hefty part is really what makes Trollbabe so impressive and innovative.

However, as I sat up in bed, thinking about Trollbabe's use of scale, I realized that this was an amazingly simple but effective way to handle epic level adventure and campaigns.

Epic level campaigns can be really tough. I've known dungeon masters who don't like to run Dungeons & Dragons past tenth level. Epic means more power, bigger scope and probably higher complexity. 

Mind you, the Trollbabe method wouldn't work for Dungeons & Dragons system. In D&D, every action is a discrete one. Combat, for instance, tracks every blow and spell and any other kind of action. (Which is why I have seen epic level fights last three several hour sessions) 

Which is a big part of why epic level D&D can be so tough. Even a narratively simple action like slugging it out with a demon lord becomes very complicated mechanically. In a broad strokes system like Trollbabe, it has the same level of mechanical complexity as fighting some goblins. In fact, that is why one of my friends switched a campaign to Dungeon World when the characters got high-level and it worked very well.

Furthermore, using the system that allowed more broad strokes actually about more complicated narratives. In my experience, the more discrete systems ended up getting bogged down by the mechanics. We had to spend so much time on the minutia but it was tough to get around the big picture.

What is nice about Trollbabe and handling those big, earthshaking  storylines is that you set the scale and you have the scale as a guideline. Honestly, I can see using the Trollbabe rules for other genres or at least porting the scale system.

Trollbabe: Breaking apart the narrative

I had been hearing about Trollbabe by Ron Edwards for years, how it was an important and influential game and had a big impact on RPG design. But no one ever told me how or why. The theme, which can honestly be described as female Conans with horns, didn't interest me that much. It just sounded like playing Dungeons & Dragons with only one race and class.

Then, years after I actually picked up the game, I open up the PDF and started taking a look. And then, it all started making sense.

This is Trollbabe's claim to fame and why it is genuine important: it was one of the first games that really said that the game master shouldn't plan anything out and that the adventures should be created on the fly with the collaboration of the players. Trollbabe breaks apart who takes care of what in the story telling and reassigns it. It was one of the first games that formally took apart who was telling what part of the story.

This isn't an entirely new idea. I remember, back in the 80s, seeing charts for rooms and wandering monsters so that a dungeon master could make up a dungeon as they went along. But no one involved had any creative input at all. Doing something like that isn't a collaboration, it's running a computer program, only without a computer. And, to be perfectly fair, there are games before Trollbabe that used on the spot improvisation creation collaboration. Baron Munchausen came out four years earlier, for instance.

However, Trollbabe does not just tell you to do it, does not just give you a process to do it, it actively discusses how to do it. Trollbabe didn't just help break new ground, Trollbabe is a treatise on how to do it.

It is a denser read than I expected. But that is to its favor. Ron Edwards goes to great lengths to make sure you understand the process of collaborating on the spot to create an adventure, including the pitfalls.

Over the last few years, I have read a lot of RPGs and written a number of book reports on them. There have been some that have moved me or fascinated me more than Trollbabe. However, Trollbabe has given me more to consider about the nuts and bolts of RPGs, particularly narrative driven ones.

As Edwards himself points out, a lot of the meta ideas in Trollbabe aren't exactly new. (I'm going to spend some time looking over all the games he references) BUT it codified and explored them. Trollbabe casts a long shadow.

There are games that I'm interested in trying because I think they would be meaningful, like the Grey Ranks. Others, I'd like to try because I think they'd be fun, like Shooting the Moon. Trollbabe, I'd like to try just to see what would happen.