[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

[bryant]

I'll have a formal Actual Play post at the 20' by 20' Room later, but right now I just want to say that Dogs in the Vineyard rocks hard. Whoa, but that's a strong game with a beautiful clarity to it.

At first glance it maybe doesn't look like the setting and the system are so tightly linked. But they are, maybe not so much in the details of place and time but certainly in the moral certainty aspect. The key aspect of the system is the ability to escalate: the ability to slap down a bunch more dice and say "I'm willing to go this far to make this thing happen." That is reinforced by the moral correctness of the player characters and creates a very powerful dynamic at the table.

I had probably too many people -- five is more than is recommended -- but I wouldn't have wanted to lose any of the PCs. There's this nice touch in character generation where you don't say "My character prioritizes skills over stats." Instead, you say "My character had a complex upbringing," and the prioritization of stats, skills, and relationships falls out from that. It encourages one to think about one's background. My PCs were great. Also, you get to use the conflict skills during character generation, so you're used to the system by the time it's time to start thinking about shooting people.

"My father was a Dog, but he was also an alcoholic and I learned growing up that you fend for yourself or you go hungry." "I'm an orphan, and I loved the Temple, and I'm wearing a coat that was made for someone else because I have no family to make a coat for me." "I'm a sinner waiting to happen, because I want to be with another woman and I'm slipping over the line from 'I do what is right' to 'It's right because a Dog does it.'" "My mother was a Dog but I got lost as the youngest sister to six brothers, and I'm looking for people to stick up for." "My father was a Dog, and of course I'm a Dog, and of course Dogs are better than others, and of course I'm going to be the best of them all." See? Awesome PCs.

I'm head over heels with this system. I imagine that'll fade but the immediate reaction is huge. Oh -- here's my town writeup, which is OK for players to look at if they're curious. Wow, but it's easy to run Dogs.

Comments

[peaseblossom.livejournal.com]

I definitely had a good time, but I agree that there were probably too many players, not that I would've wanted to cut anyone out at the time. I'm also not sure if I would want to play it too many more times; it seems like (for me anyway) I've played it, I've got the gist, and there's not really anywhere to go from there as far as character development/exploring the setting. Although I'd certainly play another game if it involved more shooting.

I did like the system itself, which was very intuitive, easy to pick up, and effective.

[bryant]

Interesting. It totally presses all of my player buttons -- there's nothing that makes me happier as a player than moral problems to solve, over and over and over again. But yeah, in terms of exploring the setting? It's all there up front. Maybe some fiddling around with demons, and ceremonies, which you guys didn't get to use the first time round. But it's a sparse game on purpose. Not a huge chunk of setting to distract from the MORAL DILEMMAS.

[peaseblossom.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but the moral dilemmas are too pat. What I had thought was that you discovered the religion's morality through play, but it's actually pretty much laid out for you already (Jere tells me that I'm thinking of earlier versions of Dogs that didn't make it to the final version). And, to be honest, there's only so much righteous religious asshole morality that I can stand to play.

[bryant]

Well, but yes and no. If you guys had said "Your training program rocks, and you need to make sure you don't slip into actually training them but we're really happy to take all the kids from this town back to Bridal Falls," that would have been the right thing to do. The game is less "discover morality through play" than it used to be, but there's a lot there.

Also I didn't want to get too thorny in a session which had to have char gen stuffed in it as well. If we were doing a campaign, though, there absolutely would have been a town pretty early on in which the same-gender issue was front and center, and I would have couched the situation in such a way so as to make breaking up the couple a bad thing for the town. At which point the options are a) establish some doctrine of exception, b) hurt the town knowing it's the wrong thing to do, or c) hurt the town for the sake of keeping the faith pure. The faith in the game is very very much a religion of revelations -- in retrospect, I shoulda pointed out that it /is/ possible for the Steward to have a relevation when Jeff was raising that point.

On the flip side, it's still never gonna be anything but a frontier religion with a lot of righteous religious asshole morality going on. One can argue about the necessity for that sort of thing during frontier times, with lots of references to Deadwood, but I'm not really qualified to have that argument and even if I was it doesn't change the fact that playing a righteous religious asshole is not always fun.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

This sounds like something that's come up in a couple of DitV threads on the Forge: players say at the end of a session: "moral dilemna? what moral dilemna? it was so obvious what we had to do!" but different play groups faced with the same town will do totally different things, and still feel that way.

[bryant]

It's also possible I railroaded a bit -- it's one of my bad GMing tendencies. I tried not to but I think I overplayed Sister Hannah some. Hm. At least in post-play comments, when I was all like "she put something over on you!" That was wrong of me.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

Sr. Hannah's angle was something we didn't much touch on.

In retrospect it seems odd that none of us had any interest in interviewing Br. Daniel's wife, since we all agreed early on that Br. Daniel was the problem. I'm not sure why we made that decision.

[bryant]

I think it might have been a time issue. Also I didn't foreground her much, but that was on purpose, because she didn't want to be foregrounded. More time with Hiram might have revealed her -- but there's the time issue again.

[bryant]

I gotta get the Actual Play written up for context. But while I was showering, something hit me: Sister Jael is going to be one of the best Dogs in existence. She is going to absolutely kick ass. While she would have been a Dog without Brother Daniel, she wouldn't have been as good -- Brother Daniel actually did come up with some incredibly strong training methods.

But now he's a farmer. Which was the right decision, because that's the decision PCs made. But if they'd said "we gotta redeem this guy and make him a trainer," that would have been right too.

I was wrong: it's not easy to run Dogs. It's really hard at first, because you have to overcome that sense of "there's always a right answer to the problem." You have to make sure the players know that they have the power to determine morality.

It's a weird mirror of the old GMing trick where you listen to your players speculating about the conspiracy and go with whatever linkages they come up with. In this game, you listen to your players speculating about morality and go with whatever they come up with -- but they're supposed to /know/ that's what's happening.