[DITV] We keep stumbling when it comes to the supernatural stuff
Noclue:
Yes. It's perfectly okay for a player to say "This isn't Demonic, it's the King's will." And it's perfectly okay for you to turn to them and say "Neat. He touches you and you feel waves of evil unmooring your soul. That's my Raise. The stakes are do you pass out!"
Noclue:
Quote from: Dan Maruschak on November 08, 2010, 10:09:38 AM
I assume it's an extrapolation from the idea that Dogs have authority to speak on what is or isn't correct doctrine.
They have total authority to speak on doctrine. Getting authority over demons is gonna take dice.
Dan Maruschak:
Quote from: lumpley on November 08, 2010, 10:53:06 AM
However, it IS your business to make sure that conflicts' stakes are really at stake, so somewhere down the line, often, yes, you'll want to make sure that the player knows that her Dog is mistaken about what's going on.
So... I guess I was doing it right all along, just inartfully? The game seems to be a lot more engaging when everybody's interacting with it through the fiction, and it seems sort of flow-breaking to interrupt and say, "it's cool if you want your Dog to believe that, but the woman's not actually possessed" (I also find it sort of flow-breaking when I have to say things like, "you know that's not within a woman's role in the faith, right?" when the players don't pick up on things I had intended to be divergent from the normal). Bringing it out to that very mechanical level seems like it leads to deflating logic-puzzle-style play, but if it's a necessary part of the game than maybe it's just an issue of skill -- we stumbled in those situations because I'm not good at doing it well. As I hypothesized earlier, the problems could also be related to our stake-setting in general: when stakes are limited to things that you could realistically get from your opponent if/when you win it's easier to keep the scope/specificity of the stakes in a place where there's lots of mutual understanding about what the story outcomes would be, but throwing the supernatural into the mix removes some of those "realism" constraints and you need to more consciously balance abstractions when figuring out good stakes for conflicts.
More AP, in case anyone's waiting for the conclusion
We had another session last night. Brother Nathaniel roused himself from his freak-out, and he tried to hold Renee still while Brother Phineas shot at her (a conflict with Renee with stakes of whether she would live or not). She called on the spirits to protect her (some of which I had appear as ghosts of people the Dogs had killed in previous towns, to make them suitably spooky and morally weighty). I rolled pretty well, but they chose to push as hard as they could and eat a lot of fallout rather than giving early. Michael (playing Phineas) had to give when the ghost of a woman that Phineas had suffocated in a previous town (basically, euthanasia since she was suffering from a debilitating chronic disease) started suffocating him, but Simon (playing Nathaniel) was able to hold on long enough to give a raise I couldn't match and shot Renee between the eyes. They rolled fallout and both ended up with the medical attention conflict, but they had so much fallout that neither one made it out alive (although Simon was one or two dice away from doing it). In general we really enjoyed DITV, despite the hiccups, even though it was a bit more gut-wrenching than the games we usually play. Since all the PCs died it was a natural break point and we decided to switch to a different game next week so I could take a break from GMing for a while.
Mathew E. Reuther:
What I'd hope to see (and it's your game group) is a return to DitV with the same players after you've had a break and to see if the next run shows any differences.
Having read bits and pieces of Dogs it seems to me that the atypical setting makes for an experience which would improve with experience.
If you do end up revisiting the game, please do let us all know if this is the case, or if the same kinds of issues are arising. It's quite interesting to read your accounts.
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