Trollbabe

Trollbabe is an indie tabletop role-playing game designed by Ron Edwards, cofounder of the indie design community The Forge, and self-published as a PDF through his own Adept Press in 2002. All players take on the role of trollbabes, large, horned female beings existing somewhere between humans and trolls, each defined by a single numerical stat. Success is decided by rolling a ten-sided die: a player rolls under their trollbabe's number to succeed at fighting, and over it to succeed at magic, with social challenges resolved against whichever threshold is worse for the character, modified by circumstance and by relationships with non-player characters. Every adventure opens with a trollbabe setting out on foot, and when several players' trollbabes are active at once they need not travel together, with the game master switching between their separate storylines. The game master sets the stakes for each session in advance, and adventures typically begin at a small, personal scale before escalating between sessions, at a player's request, up to a scale where a trollbabe's actions can affect all humans and all trolls. The game is built on Edwards' Narrativist design philosophy.