You're incorrect, but only because you're missing a rule.

If you give, or loose a conflict where your life is the stakes, you don't loose your Dog immediately.  In fact, you only take 4 dice of fallout.  It's easier to survive giving than fighting in most cases.

-Eric

[edited for clarity]

Vincent is right, as usual. Here's a bit from my last session. Some of the PCs were off in the wilderness with a band of runaway slaves, and the Territorial Authority and all kinds of bounty hunters were after them. The stakes of the conflict were, "Do the people hunting you capture and lynch you and all the ex-slaves?"  So, this went on, with raises and sees being things like clever ruses and overwhelming numbers of searchers, and then one of the players made a Raise like this: "As the army closes in, I ride off alone and meet them, delaying them long enough for the slaves to flee our camp."  At that point, everyone was like "Wow!", so I had the TA Take the Blow, and then on my next go I just Gave. So the slaves got away, because Brother Exhumations heroically offered himself up for capture to delay the army.

Remember that what actually happens in the conflict is determined by the raises and sees that people make.  And that can change how badly you want the outcome to happen.

So in the ambush, a Dog can make a Raise like, "It's a red day, a bloody day for the enemies of the King! I ride into battle and each shot I take, takes a life, until the hammers of my guns fall on chambers as hot and empty as Hell." And if he's got dice to make me Take the Blow, then unless I Give a dozen ambushers are going to be dead. Do I really want him that badly?

Or the Dog can say something like, "I call out, 'Caleb, I know you're there. You and your men come in peaceful, and I swear on the Book of Life that I will stand beside you at your trial and take your punishment in your place.'" And now it's going to be so damn tempting to Take the Blow and then give, because jeez, this is a once-in-a-lifetime get-out-jail-free-chance.

Page 54 of the pdf:

"There’s another way to die than by taking bad Fallout. What’s at stake is: does my character kill yours? It’s possible for you to lose the conflict without taking any Fallout a’tall, let alone rolling a 16+.

When that happens, treat it exactly as though your attacker hit you with four dice Fallout, of the size appropriate to his weapon— d10s for a gun, d8s for an axe, etc.— and you rolled a 16. If you get medical attention, we roll over into this new conflict: are you dead? If you don’t, we don’t: you’re just dead."

So you're automatically at 16, but the four dice are used for the healing part, I believe.

Check page 46:



I think the rule xenopulse noted, where the die size depends on what happened, makes more sense.

So, now that everyone is finding this rule, I highly reccomend this:

Is your Dog murdered in his sleep?

It took us two attempts to figure out how one can run such a conflict, but once we got it... golden.  Fantastic.   Brilliant.

-Eric

It's 4d(appropriate) plus demonic influence, whatever the circumstances. The "4d6" is a relic.

Simon, if you still aren't convinced, give it a try.

-Vincent

Um...I think you've got to try it to believe it.  I'm really of the belief that, if a Dogs player is unwilling to let their character go, then they will live.  That's it.  In the last session we played we got into a very bloodly gunfight.  17d10+4d4 fallout for my Brother Divid.  It was close, but I survived it.  I don't think that 4d10 fallout has any chance at all of killing any Dog.  Period.  You could skip rolling and just say that all the dice came up 10s.  [edit:  I was meaning in the follow-up healing attempt.  If you give in the conflict, then you don't roll the d10s, you just have 16 fallout]  The Dog will still live if the player wants it to.

I do not think that there is any way for the GM in Dogs to kill off a PC without it being something the player wants too.

-Eric