[DITV] We keep stumbling when it comes to the supernatural stuff
Dan Maruschak:
I am GMing a DITV game over skype with two players. After an initially rocky start (the first town I created ended up being pretty lame), I think we've got things going pretty well, but we keep running into problems with the supernatural and with how the demon mechanics are supposed to work. At character generation one of the players indicated that he wanted to play a character who was really focused on demons so I know he's interested in it, but it hasn't been working well in play. My interpretation of how to "follow the players' lead" on the supernatural stuff was to make things like demonic attacks and sorcery ambiguous until they started forming opinions, but in practice they seem to either treat the things I am throwing out as either non-supernatural or try to interact with them in a way that flummoxes me in terms of the rules. I'll give an example:
In the second town I created, the pride came from a lazy pretty-boy type who believed he could have any girl he wanted. Naturally, most of the courting-age girls in town are crazy about him. The guy takes a trip to another town, takes a fancy to a girl there, and decides to bring her back. On the way home, he convinces her that they're already married in their hearts and they can avoid a lot of hassles if they just tell everyone that the steward in the girl's home town performed a marriage ceremony for them. The lies and sex without marriage stuff opens to door to demonic attacks in the form of a disfiguring pox that strikes some people but not others (the demons want the ugly factor to interfere with romantic relationships and inspire cheating, jealousy, etc.). Also, all those girls that wanted the attractive guy to marry them are pretty resentful. The "married" girl is one Dog's little sister, and the other Dog's cousin is a jealous "popular girl" type. They decide to resolve the situation by forcing the lazy guy and the little sister to confess their sins and then performed a marriage ceremony to officially marry them. We had a conflict where the jealous cousin tried to stop the marriage ceremony, and she pressed the "that horrible girl from another town dragged him into sin with her!" angle, and she lost. I figured that the jealous cousin's natural reaction would be to think that the "married" girl got rewarded for her sin with a prime husband. (This was a really engaging town and we had a lot of fun with it -- the "big brother" player was really torn up because the guy his sister was mixed up with was obviously kind of sleazy but his sister was in love).
A few sessions later we decided to do a revisit of this town. Building on the way they left things with the cousin, I figured she would seduce the lazy husband, then talk the steward into a "well, the way the Dogs solved a problem like this was to just make it official" solution and make her the guy's second wife. Emboldened, she starts throwing her weight around, implying that if people don't do what she says, her cousin the Dog will come and force them to. (There's some other stuff, too, but I'm trying to keep this succinct). The Dogs get most of the backstory, and decide they need to do something about the cousin. In the process of discussing what to do, they decide that there's a possibility that she might be possessed (mechanically she isn't, but she does believe some false doctrine and is positioned to become a sorcerer) and want to perform an exorcism on her. Initially I think this is cool, because accusing her of being posessed and performing ceremonies on her seem like it will increase tension. But when they actually start interacting with her, they want to do the exorcism as a conflict, and things fizzle when we try to figure out what's at stake because, mechanically, she isn't posessed so we can't have a conflict about whether or not an exorcism would succeed. I explain what's going on from my POV, and things kind of unravel further when the guy who's interested in doing the demon stuff starts asking me things like "well, can I tell if she's possessed or not?" It seems like whether or not he interprets things as supernatural should be his decision, but there are certain facts about demons and sorcerers that I decide as GM and it seems like that those rules and decisions keep getting in the way of him putting forward his own interpretations. (We eventually settled on doing a conflict about whether she would stop threatening people in the Dogs' names or not, with the understanding that escalating to ceremony was something they could do if they wanted to, but the stumbles and negotiations that we needed to do to get there were kind of deflating).
So, it feels like I'm probably doing something wrong since these sorts of problems have cropped up several times. Is there something I should be doing differently? Is there something the players should be doing differently? (They're both more comfortable with more traditional RPGs, and we've had more than a few stumbles in identifying conflicts and determining what's at stake, so this might just be a particular instance of that more general problem). In general I'm having a hard time figuring out how to use the supernatural stuff effectively, and also how I'm supposed to follow their lead when it seems like I need to "make the first move" in terms of setting up the demonic attacks and sorcery.
lumpley:
If they're interested in demons, which they are, you follow their lead BY making the first move. Make it!
I have a fear! I hope it's unfounded, a mere omission in your writeup. My fear is: the towns you're creating stop short of hate and murder. It would explain some of your problem, though, since before hate and murder demons are necessarily impotent.
Either way, your best and essential next step is to create a town that goes to hate and murder, murder of the ugliest and most occult sort, and has overt possession and sorcery all through it. Since you're the one in control of possession and sorcery, if they want it, you have to be the one to give it to them. Give it to them with both barrels!
- Vincent
Dan Maruschak:
Quote from: lumpley on November 01, 2010, 07:21:26 PM
I have a fear! I hope it's unfounded, a mere omission in your writeup. My fear is: the towns you're creating stop short of hate and murder.
In my first town I went to hate and murder. The town was pretty lame in play because 1) I didn't do a good job of hooking the PCs into NPCs in the town so they didn't really care about anybody, 2) because I couldn't figure out goals for the NPCs to use to push conflicts, 3) because I couldn't figure out how to deliver the town's backstory effectively and efficiently, 4) because we had a lot of breakdowns in understanding how to use the rules to interact with the supernatural stuff, and 5) because the players were taking a very "solve the mystery" investigative game approach instead of a "solve the problems" approach that DITV calls for.
The second town, which I described above, went to Corrupt Worship and was really fun and engaging.
In the third town I had intended to have the Dogs witness the sorcerer escalating to hate and murder as they entered the town, but I was off my game that night and screwed up the description so the "sorcery" aspect didn't really come through to them, and I scaled back to a lower level in the sequence rather than retcon the fiction once I realized my mistake.
In the fourth town I went to Corrupt Worship and made it very explicit (a group of people chanting in the town square). I planned to have the cult leader start using sorcery if the Dogs decided not to endorse his view of how to solve the problems, but I rolled well early in the conflict they started with him and thought I was going to win without using full-on possession, and then late in the conflict when things started to turn in the Dogs' favor there wasn't enough mechanical benefit from possession to justify prolonging the situation. We all enjoyed this town a lot, and I think they were satisfied by the level of supernatural stuff, although the gunfighter was more involved in the resolution than the demon guy, because the gunfighter's player was the one that wanted to force the issue with the cult leader.
The fifth town (which we're going to resume for the next session) is the revisit to the second town, from my first post.
Quote
It would explain some of your problem, though, since before hate and murder demons are necessarily impotent.
Either way, your best and essential next step is to create a town that goes to hate and murder, murder of the ugliest and most occult sort, and has overt possession and sorcery all through it.
I'll try, although it seems to me that taking a town to hate and murder makes the towns less interesting (maybe the less-than-stellar experience of that first town is coloring my perception too heavily). I also still have a hard time understanding what kind of things are reasonable stakes to have supernatural conflicts about. In one of the towns, the demonic attacks were manifesting as unnatural wear and breakage at the sawmill, and the players wanted to have a conflict to keep the demons away from the sawmill. Is that a reasonable conflict to have? My interpretation of the game is that the demonic attacks are more like a symptom of a problem (and a way to increase tension in the town) and shouldn't be directly combattable, but it also seems like the Dogs ought to be able to drive demons out of a mill, so I didn't know how to handle that. I suppose that will be less of a problem if I'm really overt about the supernatural stuff, but I am reluctant to lose the element of ambiguity and less flashy "magic".
lumpley:
I have lots to say about this stuff! It's a great topic.
Have you read this thread? [Dogs] What are the demons for? If you haven't, I recommend it highly; Simon was struggling with some of the exact stuff you're struggling with, and I think I laid it out pretty clearly for him. So if I can ask you to, go give that thread a quick read? Come back and let me know what you think and I'll be happy to pick up from there.
-Vincent
Dan Maruschak:
Yes, I've read it (and I just gave it a quick re-read). I think I have a lot of the same concerns that he had initially, in that I'm not sure I know how to reliably take a town to hate and murder without the town becoming less interesting (the murders would tend to start taking out interesting NPCs, for example), and the "oh, so you're the bad guy!" effect. The players in my game, having more experience with traditional "investigative game" type scenarios, have a tendency to slip into "we've got to find the root cause!" mode, so I am reluctant to throw too many things at them that can be easily mistaken for "keystones" that can be removed to tidily wrap up all the problems of a town. Making the "wronged party" into the sorcerer may help with that, but that seems like it may not be as easy to do as it is to say.
On top of that, I think that once my players start seeing overt supernatural stuff their reaction is to try to deal with it as its own thing:
Quote
With everything else in place, you can feel free to give the coldness in Obedience's heart, for instance, a vivid hyper-reality, or a symbolic manifestation, or its own creepy voice, if you want to. Make Roberts' guilt and self-justification into a thing, capable of touching the landscape of the game directly, visible and isolate, if you want to. You'd do it for artistic reasons: atmosphere and tone, emphasis, the inscrutable dictates of your taste and vision. Or you wouldn't do it, for the same.
We're playing Dogs right now, and we're playing with no supernatural special effects. Nevertheless, you can BET that when Brother Swanson is in a conflict, I roll 5d10 in on his side. He's a vicious bastard, is why, with a heart full of murder. The rulebook says "add the current Demonic Influence to his preferred side of any conflict ... by introducing demonic special effects into a See or Raise." In our game, a casual contempt for the Faith counts as a demonic special effect. In games I've played in the past, it wouldn't, I'd need to bring in shadows, voices, blood, empty hollows for eyes, elongated teeth, the smell of brimstone. Either way, it's really his viciousness, desperation, and murderous heart that give him those dice.
Make sense? What do you think?
I think the "it's really his viciousness, desperation, and murderous heart that give him those dice" is the part that's breaking down, because the overt supernatural stuff can maybe make it seem like it isn't him -- it's this separate thing that should be dealt with in a separate way. I think this is the problem I was having with the "we want to perform an exorcism on the cousin" thing -- I was ready to roll with the idea that they could use ceremony in the course of getting her to stop doing what she was doing, basically leaving the level of supernatural as an element of approach, but they were hoping that her bad behavior was a result of being possessed and that they could get an "everybody wins" solution by performing an exorcism to remove the evil influence.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page