Seeing when everything depends on the future
Jasper Flick:
We're having a little trouble with narrating a See ahead of rolling dice for traits and things. Here's an contrived example:
GM raises with the guy punching you in the face. You haven't got the dice to See. So you escalate to gunfighting. This happens to be the last escalation, so the only dice that matter are that of the gun.
You must first say what you do, and only then roll the dice. But you have no clue whether you can reverse, block, have to take the blow, or have to give. What do you say? If you say anything now, chances are high you need to revise it.
This isn't an issue with Raising, but when Seeing people are stumped whenever everything is riding on the dice yet to be thrown. A solution has been to roll first in such situations, but it doesn't feel right to me.
An example from actual play was when a player wanted to discipline fellow Dogs in training during initiation. He caught them drinking booze. He soon got a snide remark in his face he couldn't See with just talking anymore. He decided to See by shooting the bottle the guy was holding. He escalated to physical and rolled crap. He said "I shoot the bottle." and rolled his good shooting trait and big gun. He rolled crap again and had to take the blow. He revised his narration to include him losing his cool instead of remaining ice calm, but wasn't happy with that backtracking solution.
This rolls over into a related issue: the See that is actually a Raise. The escalation example in the book is one of these too. The GM Raises with an accusation the player can't See, so the player reacts by escalating and punching. In the book, this single description gets used both for the See and the next Raise, basically folding the two into one action. The flow is like this:
GM Raise: "...Maybe if you’d been in his life he wouldn’t have gone this way."
Player See (block): "I punch you."
Player Raise: ...
GM See (take the blow): “I’m surprised and you catch me right in the jaw."
It's a neat little trick. So neat actually that it's a pity it didn't get any special attention. It begs the question though: what if the player rolled absolutely crap, and found out he had to give or take the blow directly after saying "I punch you."?
Anyway, Dogs is awesome!
lumpley:
Going back and re-doing a see to take into account the crappy trait roll has never bothered me. It's the official solution, in fact. It doesn't even bother me if the re-done see DOESN'T invoke the trait in question. Leave the dice as they are and go forward, don't sweat it.
But if you don't like that, then to be safe you just have to make a see that doesn't depend on the dice you're about to roll. Basically you have to take the blow.
-Vincent
Jasper Flick:
:) I was afraid you'd say something like that. My poor "traditional" players have much trouble with their perceived disconnect between the fiction and the dice, this was nearly a gamebreaker for them. They're still solidly into "I don't wanna see the GM's dice, yuck metagame!" territory, so to speak.
I guess what didn't help is that it came up all the friggin' time during our first play. The dice really were wonky. They rolled crap a lot, while I rolled complete straights. Still, they enjoyed it, I think more than they dared to admit. Stuff actually happened!
Funny you say re-doing is official, because I can't remember re-doing is written about anywhere. Did I miss it? It might be a "duh!" thing, but not for everyone.
jburneko:
Jasper,
For what it's worth, I tend to not use the See then roll rule. Especially in light of Vincent's "do over" clarification. Instead when players roll in traits I just make sure they announce them out loud. Then when they see I basically mentally check them off to make sure they incorporated them. And if they miss something I just say, "What about X that you rolled?"
But that's because I have honest and creative players. I know they can work whatever they roll into whatever kind of See they can pull together.
Jesse
Filip Luszczyk:
Jasper,
Quote
Funny you say re-doing is official, because I can't remember re-doing is written about anywhere. Did I miss it? It might be a "duh!" thing, but not for everyone.
It's not in the book, as far as I know. Many official rules are not there, though. It's only official in the "official web supplement" sense - as a game manual, the book is somewhat lacking, I'm afraid. I advice reading this forum to anyone who approaches running this game seriously (especially old threads, there's plenty of rules questions threads there that cover a lot of the "not necessarily obvious in the text" ground).
As for the re-doing rule itself, unfortunately it's one of the major flaws of the game (or maybe fortunately, given that, official clarifications taken into account, there aren't many such flaws). The timing on Sees is somewhat wonky.
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