[DitV] Alternate setting: Dogs of the Military. A Full Metal Alchemist setting
dindenver:
Hi!
You are absolutely right. At first blush, FMA seems like steampunk ditv.
But, the closer you look, the harder it is to say that FMA fits the actual mechanics...
For instance, look at the Flame Alchemist. What he is fighting for is totally different from what Ed and El are fighting for. You just don't have that in ditv.
In ditv its clear that the town is being destroy from within. In other words, the people you have to stop are the people you have to save. Where as in FMA, the victims are not the villains, right?
That is the beauty of the ditv setting, it supports the mechanics beautifully. But I don't think it supports FMA as well.
I think you could make it work if you set up some sort of FMA sin progression where the actions in a town leads to heavy handed alchemists to make the town worse, and task the players with fixing both. But I think that might end up with one dimensional play pretty quick.
To recap, there is overlap:
The heroes of both have something worth fighting (even dying) for
The heroes of both are trying to save the little guy
The religious themes are strong
But there are key differences:
The victims are not in fact the villains in FMA
There is no overriding theme that is driving all of the characters (like religion is for ditv) in FMA
FMA is a dystopia, while the landscape of ditv is rotting from within
I am not saying it can't be done or even that it won't be fun. I am just pointing out that the support for the setting that you enjoy in ditv may not be as strong for FMA...
Good luck and good gaming!
dyreno:
Well the driving force is what you make of it in the end. I've played about twelve sessions of Firefly using the DitV and it was a blast. There was no religious influence at work or even anyone that was religious (like shepherd book in the series). The driving force was very simple, keep the ship afloat and your belly full. Now when I played traditional DitV, the fun just wasn't there. Our views on what the faith stood for was just too spread out. We had two who wanted to help the people, one who wanted to bible Nazi, and two who wanted to shot and kill everyone in the name of the faith. So it wasn't that enjoyable in the end.
I've ran two sessions of my FMA game using the DitV dice mechanic, and i must say it made for an intense game. Just like in the books description of The Untouchables game, we replaced the faith with the law of the land and moral responsibilities of alchemy. We had two state alchemist (one ice/water proficient and the other was rock/metal proficient) placed under a Lieutenant Colonel who had an auto-mail (or mechanical) arm and heart. The Lt. Col. had no alchemical ability and was more trusting of his sidearm in the end. He was almost killed while jumping on a grenade to save some refugees. The fourth player was an auto-mail technician who not only performed the surgery that saved the Lt. Col. during his initiation scenario, but was also assigned to him to ensure his auto-mail kept working. Which was very important to both players seeing as his heart was one of things replaced. The player who built the Lt. Col. gave him a fun little trait. "A lion born to fight in the wild, but kept behind bars at the zoo like a relic" He wanted to return to the northern war zone, but was paraded around as a perfect P.R. war hero to keep spirits high with the people.
Their first assignment took them to a town to attend a diplomatic dinner with eastern kings. During which the wine was poisoned and then they were attacked by Chimeras. The group kept themselves and two of the three kings alive. They then set out to find out who wanted to kill them and the kings, and who was the alchemist that sent the Chimeras after them. It got all their hamster wheels turning, not to mention they had a nail biting stand-off with the kings guards over weather or not they were involved in the assassination attempt. Which they managed to survive.
KuroFluff:
I agree that DitV system could be used for a variety of settings which are not as bound to moral ambiguity as the DitV setting, Firefly and FMA being great examples. Both series contain a lot of difficult moral questions but trouble arises with the pure evil element present in the shows but mostly absent in DitV. In DitV there are demons and few Dogs would ever show mercy to these foul creatures. However, most Dogs would show mercy to the human the demon possesses, thus creating difficult decisions with how rough to be on the possessed in hope of not killing them but not wanting to spare punishment for the demon.
FMA and Firefly on the other hand, both have pure evil elements. In Firefly there are the reavers, and to some degree the men with hands of blue (from Blue Sun corp right?), who can be killed without a second thought. In FMA the chimeras and likely the homunculi are the pure evil force unless the "human" sides of the homunculi are revealed. In either case, I can see the DitV system working fine in these settings as long as these elements are somewhat marginalized and the issues of morality brought to the forefront. For both shows this may mean eliminating some of the themes exposed in the show but if the GM is up to the task then I hope things go well. Serenity, the Firefly roleplaying system, balances like a see-saw in a hurricane and fails to capture the essence of the show. I believe using the DitV system for these settings would be a challenge for creating plot but would actually work quite well. I'm totally going to run FMA with DitV if I get the chance. :D
Danny_K:
Neat idea. I think there's enough similarity to the DitV structure to make it doable -- the State Alchemists are empowered individuals sent forth by a morally ambiguous authority to both defend the state and to investigate things. Although they aren't explicitly given portfolios by the state as far as I can tell, in practice they're an elite that hovers somewhere above the law, answerable only to their peers and the supreme leader.
I'd like to see someone hack the town creation rules to make them more suitable -- I think that's the key to DitV hacks, switching out Traits to suit the setting is trivially easy.
Also, how would you handle Escalation? Talk-Physical-Fighting-Alchemy? A lot of the characters in the anime go straight from talking to glowy circles of doom. Maybe it would be better to borrow from a superhero hack of DitV I read and distinguish levels of Alchemy (fighting) and Alchemy (lethal).
Marshall Burns:
Nah, nah, the glowy circles of doom is just part of the color of the escalation. As they're throwing down their circles, what are they doing? Sometimes they're still just talking.
Try the escalation from Afraid: Talking, Physical, Fighting, Murder
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