[Dust Devils] Fun with emergent stories
toddjank:
This is Todd, the dealer for the Dust Devils game.
We finished up the game on Wednesday with some fairly dramatic story endings for some characters and some fairly non-dramatic story endings for others. I should state, first off, that I love this game. On some levels, this is my dream game. A cinematic western with card based mechanics. I love it.
Having said that, I do feel there's something a bit awkward about the chis/harm mechanics. I agree with Ron that the best way to play would probably be to explore the world you're creating together for a while. However, I feel like the mechanics send you shooting towards The End pretty quickly. Even with the chips, that is, because in order to get the chips you have to put yourself in harm's way AND (especially when getting chips from the Devil) lower your chances of winning. That means that even if you wind up getting a chip or two out of a conflict, you might also wind up taking some severe harm.
This isn't to say I don't LIKE the mechanic, just that I feel there's some tension between the way it operated in our game, which seemed to me to be right out of the book, and the possibility of fully exploring a world and characters.
For example, one player, Charles, playing a trader named Javier/Jay (depending on which side of the border he was on), met his End at the beginning of the second session. I think he had three, maybe four, total conflicts. He lost big in an early social conflict and never was able to rack up enough chips to recover. His story was interesting, so no one had a problem with him going out early, but there would have been no way, any of us could conceive at least, to get him enough chips to save himself without probably taking himself out in the process.
Now PERSONALLY this doesn't bother me. When I read Dust Devils, I came out of it thinking the same as Timo and the rest of our group: The End is the interesting thing. To me, and this is part of what I love about it, this is a game where you create a western movie. Western movies are very much about The End, in the book's sense. They set up a tense situation, then you watch how everyone deals with it or doesn't, and usually either dies, retires, or rides off. The book says that Unforgiven and Once Upon a Time in the West were the two biggest influences. Unforgiven gives you five minutes of Will Munny as a pig farmer, then two hours of him in the revenge business, a sizeable chunk of which he spends sick, which, in the game's mechanics, would probably be a hazard overcome by a stud hand. Once Upon a Time in the West is decidedly about characters at their end. Three of the five main characters die, one rides off into myth, and the camera pulls back off of one of them content in their new life.
For my purposes, and based on my reading of the rules, that's what we were creating. It almost seems to me like you would have to play very differently to really allow for some long term exploration. Characters would have to avoid more conflicts, get into conflicts more strategically (to win chips) and do a lot of betting chips, to rack up enough of a stash that they could actually do things like heal themselves and redeem other characters. That doesn't bug me, but it's not, to me, what the game seems good at doing and what I personally wanted to get out of the game. I wanted a Leone movie, and that's roughly what we got.
Ron Edwards:
That's fair, definitely. I do not want my posting here to criticize you. The game sounds like it was a hell of a lot of fun. The topic as I see it is talking about what the game itself can do.
My concern is to point out that the game does not have to be over before it begins, and I've pointed out some details of character creation that keep that from happening. Yes, it's about characters meeting their End, but the question is how to avoid a character's arc being nothing, nothing, nothing, oh my God, something, wham, The End.
In my experience, it's possible to play a solid series of sessions which take on that weird, surreally slow but menacing feel of both the films we're talking about. I don't really know how to describe it, but to me, both Unforgiven and Once Upon a Time in West have a floaty, "never gonna end" feel through most of their middles without losing tension. Dust Devils does that really well, if that's how people's desires go, and without the Dealer playing softball either. As I see it, it also throws the question of who is going to end up how very much up into the air, which I think is a strong feature of the system.
Anyway, with any luck, I'll be seeing you guys at Adventure Games myself not too long from now, and we'll have some fun playing some more stuff.
Best, Ron
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