Persuasion rules
Mark Causey:
Never mind, I found my answer.
lumpley:
Fixed link.
-Vincent
David Artman:
Quote from: lumpley on February 06, 2008, 09:22:35 AM
In Dogs, you can be like, "what's at stake is your conviction about polygamy," for instance, and then you can roll dice on me, and we raise and see back and forth, maybe escalate, and let's say eventually that you win. My character's conviction was up for grabs, you won it, so I'm obligated to play my character convinced. For the most part this works out fine, because a) my character's conviction is probably a minor point between us, overall, and b) all those raises and sees were an argument. Your character presented her case, and sometimes my character admitted her point. At the end, even if your character's argument didn't convince me, I can see how it might have convinced my character, and play accordingly.
Possibly an aside, possibly highly salient (still not sure as I write this):
In our Dogs game last night, we had two "persuade" conflicts:
* A three-way Dog-on-Dog argument about how we'd dispense with a town that's about 40% steeped in generational heresies (i.e. "kill 'em all" wasn't on the table, and we wanted to preserve some notion of a Faithful town, if not Right Here In This Valley--AP might follow)
* A conflict between us Dogs and the Main Sinners as a climax conflict.
My Dice Say You Agree
In the Dog-on-Dog conflict, we basically threw dice after we'd been in normal discussion, about when it started turning into exasperated argumentation about "no, we DON'T have to kill every sinner, even if we can" and such. No one was Saying Yes, so we Rolled Dice; fair enough. I won, FWIW, and my plan was ratified: distribute the Faithful families to three or four "solid" Faithful towns while taking the Main Sinners to Bridal Falls so that the Prophets and Ancients could figure out how sin and heresy can be missed by Dogs and Regional Stewards for generations(!).
You Can't Handle The Dice!
In the Main Sinners versus All Dogs, what was at stakes was "Do we Dogs agree with their interpretation of The Book?", which included, but was not limited to, the notion that a girl should be in wedlock before her first period, else she's "unclean" and should live apart, unmarried and in squalor. Pounds of dice fly because this is a group of Sinners, demon dice were set to Heresy, and they had half-a-town's worth of free dice, here-to-fore unused. And we're REALLY good at invoking our Traits, now. Net result: I win the conflict, but only after both other Dogs have to give, which opens up my first question:
1) Two Dogs give on "do we agree with their interpretation" but the remaining Dog wins the stakes. So, do NONE of the Dogs now agree, in spite of Giving (remember: the stakes were "WE agree"), because I won the entire conflict?
Now, post-game, another player and I are pondering some slightly "unfun" feelings he'd gotten during the game. We managed to ferret out his feelings as follows:
He is accustomed to his character's beliefs being inviolate. However, he Gave in both conflicts because (a) he wasn't willing to harm other Dogs to win the first argument and (b) he wasn't willing to do violence on old, deluded men to win his convictions about The Faith (sort of befitting his convert, Mountain Folk character). And that was my epiphany (which might be bullshit, but it felt epiphanic):
Dogs put him into a player-versus-character, internal conflict over "I always control My Guy" versus "My Guy just wouldn't go that far!" THIS--I tried to tell him (ranting and slurring a bit)--was The Good Shit about Dogs: "It put YOU, the player, into a moral quandary, through your belief not only about PLAY MODE but about in-character RIGHTEOUSNESS." In short, the mechanics forced him to deal with a non-fictional issue of play tradition versus a fictional ethos, which in turn fed back on the mechanical. He COULD have pulled a lot more dice, but he wouldn't, so he had to suck up the jar to his character's beliefs and how he'd have to play the character henceforth (or at least on the second conflict, if the answer to 1 above is "Correct, none of you are persuaded, in spite of two of you Giving").
2) Am I full of shit?
I mentioned that he was kind of at a disadvantage because he didn't realize that he could have requested a Line against such persuasion conflicts, basically making them verboten for his character, so that he could play the way that he liked / wanted / was used to doing.
3) Is that horse shit or apple butter? (Why does talking about Dogs bring out the Southern in me?)
So, I'm still not sure if this is salient to your thread or a thread-jack--split it, if need be. But I felt like the use of persuasion backed by mechanical force in Dogs is possibly it's best element for pushing a player to decide What's Right, not only in fiction but in play mode. I've never seen other games do it so well--sure, even Hero has a Persuasion skill, which can be aimed at a PC; D&D has friggin' Charm Person. But only Dogs gives you the means to push and say, "No way, Jose!" but those means REQUIRE you to take fictional actions that could be far, far worse ON YOU, the actual person, emotionally or in terms of personal pride.
Heck, if I'm wrong about how that all works together, I don't wanna be right....
David
David Artman:
Slow weekend, I guess... anyone can answer, if you got citations!
David Artman:
PLEEEASE, can I get an answer to those questions? Pretty please? (If we run Banthas, I expect a lot more Persuasion stuff to crop up, as Jedi are primarily diplomats, in all but the mid-Classic period.) I'll... I dunno... I'll do an editorial pass of the next revisions for free, or whatever. Walk your dog? (heh)
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