[DitV] Multiple opponents and high stakes
Dr_Pete:
I played in an awesome game of Dogs, my first, over the weekend. A point came up which seemed like kind of a tough call, and I was curious to hear feedback/feelings about it.
The situation:
A four player game, with lots of intra-party conflict. Two dogs want to kill an NPC, one is willing to fight to defend him, and one is a bit on the fence, but siding with the defender PC.
Conflict starts out talking, with 2 Dogs vs 2 Dogs. The one on the fence drops out of the conflict when he runs out of dice, rather than escalate.
The conflict between the other 3 escalates to weapons, and to firearms. Once it gets this vicious, the one who had dropped out earlier, seeing the implicit stakes in this new level of conflict wants back in to help/defend the lone Dog. He's now willing to go to weapons to help his fellow dog, but it's not so clear he's invested in the stake itself.
Should he be able to sit out a period of conflict, then escalate himself back into it, or is out out? We ended up playing with "he can roll, but only assist" but in retrospect, I'm not sure I liked that compromise. Any thoughts?
lumpley:
Dogs' rules don't handle this situation perfectly, alas.
My solution: when he wants back into the conflict he's already dropped out of, treat him as an improvised thing. Is he normal, excellent, big, both, or crap?
-Vincent
craggle:
Curious here: would the Afraid options of escalating be able to apply to Dogs in this case, the ones where dice are discarded, the new ones rolled, and there are options for others to join the conflict?
lumpley:
Yes. If you're playing by Afraid's rules, a character who dropped out earlier can rejoin a conflict when it escalates.
I don't know whether Afraid's rules are any good! I don't endorse them for Dogs in the Vineyard.
-Vincent
Paul T:
In my recent Dogs game, we used that rule a few times, and it seemed to work pretty well.
Once, we even allowed a Dog to join a conflict under way *even though it was already a Guns conflict*. He just didn't get to roll any Stat dice at all. It worked really well in that scene, and with a lucky roll he saved the day (so to speak). As a standard practice, I think that one could be problematic, though.
Where it gets complicated is if there's a large multi-way conflict. In those situations, it's hard to put a label on the entire conflict, and probably better to break it up into smaller conflicts. That's where it can get messy: for instance, if you allow someone to make a single Talking Raise, and then move to Guns, they suddenly have a large dice advantage over the others that's not really reflective of what's happening in the fiction.
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