[DitV] A wife by any other name, + two rules questions
Paul T:
Having some fun with Dogs!
But a few questions came up during our first session:
1. How do the Faithful refer to two wives who are married to the same husband? Is there a term for this, like "sister-wife"? Is there a convenient word that would go in the following sentence?
"Oh, yes, I'm Brother Abel's first wife. And Sister Adelia is his second wife. That's right, she's my _________."
2. Initiation/accomplishment hiccup!
We had a player whose Dog had been assaulted a long time ago by some ruffian. He said he'd like the scene to take the form of him confronting the ruffian and possibly beating the crap out of him. What he wanted to be at Stake would be, "Can Brother Clyde learn to forgive a man?"
We decided to do it as a growth conflict, with him taking the side of the character is he is (unforgiving), and me, as GM, taking the side of pressure on him to be forgiving: in this case, my Raises were proofs of the ruffian's currently miserable existence, or justifications for his earlier actions.
However, it didn't quite fly. I got the impression that the player really wanted to *find out* whether his character would forgive the guy or not. However, this being a growth accomplishment, he could just Give at any time, so he had the ability to decide how it turned out, which was at cross-purposes with what he wanted to learn about his character.
Is there a better/different way to handle this? Or should he just have put his blinders on and tried to play the dice as hard as possible (which is more or less what we did)?
3. One-sided Conflicts
We had a Dog threaten a townperson in order to get information out of him. He said he was physically pushing the guy around--fine--so we went into a Physical conflict. However, the townperson wasn't willing to fight back, so his Sees and Raises took the form of talking back at the Dog.
The way we handled it was to have the townperson escalate to Talking on his very first See or Raise, then keep playing it out with the Dog making (mostly) Physical Raises and the townperson making Talking Raises.
How do you handle conflicts where one party is pretty clearly participating in one arena and their opponent is acting within another?
Jim D.:
Re: the physical vs. verbal, I am not Vince Baker, but my first instinct would be for your PC to roll Physical (Heart + Body) and the NPC to roll Verbal (Heart + Will) at the outset. I mean, the townsperson was talking from minute one, so I don't think that counts as an escalation from physical because he was never in physical.
That said, I confess I like the way you handled it, because if eventually your Dog calms down and starts talking (escalation to Verbal, roll Will), I don't think he should necessarily have the advantage. The opposite could be argued, too: the townie just had the crap kicked out of him, so he may be more willing to submit.
Either option seems within the spirit of the rules, which is more important.
Re: the growth conflict, I think you guys did the right thing. Clyde has a vested interest in not changing; the narrative is best served by your player trying his damnedest to roleplay Clyde's inertia -- i.e. resisting change, and only giving when he's been proven wrong (out of dice).
Noclue:
I believe the arena was set by the Dog on his first go. It's a physical conflict and the Dog rolls Heart + Body. The townsperson is perfectly justified to escalate immediately to talking on his go, rolling (Heart+ body + Will) and narrate talky things in response. I've seen some posts where the GM decides not to roll Body at all to make a statement about the character avoiding getting physical, which is cool and probably what I would do in the situation. I think it's technically drifting, but it would play nicely. I think Vincent has responded that it would be okay on a previous post, but I may be wrong and he'll smack me when he gets around to it.
lumpley:
I like rule questions!
1. "Sister-wife" is the one, yeah.
2. Forgiving someone is pretty much just something you can decide to do. There's not really any sensible way to go to dice over it, in Dogs. I think you probably did as well with it as you could.
3. You did it exactly correctly. Don't mix and match arenas.
What Noclue describes -- choosing not to roll body [or any given stat] in order to make a statement -- isn't in the book, but works fine in play, when that's what somebody wants to do.
-Vincent
Jim D.:
*bows to Vince's superior opinion*
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall the idea being bantered about that escalation doesn't have to be two-sided; that is, one person could escalate to physical to push past the other guy who was still talking, but he didn't have to counter physically himself. That's where I got the notion of "mix[ing] and match[ing] arenas". So the intent is for the conflict to start in one arena for both (or all, in multi-sided conflicts) participants, but from there forward they can take it anywhere they like, assuming it makes sense?
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