The Forge Archives

Having gotten a serious good-roleplaying high from Dogs at Dreamation, I gathered together some friends in my gaming group to start the buzz going locally.  Those who managed to attend were Eric Sedlacek and Sydney Freedberg.  

I had spent several hours agonizing in indecision over the many possibilities in the town creation.  Experience shows me where I went wrong, so that's nice.  Here's what I had:

Pride:  Brother Wiley is an ex-Dog.  When his wife died giving birth to a daughter, Constance, he determined that she would be a Dog just like her papa.  As a result, when the Steward's son, Hezekiah, came a-courting young Constance, Wiley put a stop that that right quick.

Injustice:  Hezekiah and Constance now have to choose between pursuing their love or obeying their elders.  Rough choice.

Sin:  They eventually succumb, enlisting the aid of Hezekiah's sister, Sybrina, to cover up their wholly innocent (except for the secrecy) courtship.  

Sybrina gets ideas and ends up in an affair with married man, Jackson.  She, in turn, demands that Hezekiah cover for her.  [ Note:  Weakest link, as exposed later. ]

Demonic Influence:  Jackson's wife, Prudence, knows about the affair.  But she's expecting their first child, and decides to play mum, assuming that the birth will bring him back to his senses and her arms.  So, naturally, the child is still-born.  It's a harsh winter.  They can't even break ground for a grave.  The newborn corpse is left in the town's ice-house.  Prudence runs mad.

False Doctrine:  Prudence concludes that the King of Life has abandoned Dry Gulch.  She rants.

Cult:  Sybrina and her mother pray with Prudence on sundays instead of the congregation.  They start off from sheer charity, but Sybrina is a sinner, and is quickly drawn into the false doctrine, and is in the process of convincing her mother.  The Dogs' behavior will probably be grist for that particular mill.


Sydney played Brother Jeremiah.  Jeremiah went Back East for college.  Perilous times.  He's still trying to shake off the moral uncertainty.

Eric played Brother Matthew.  Matthew questions his own calling, but is willing to be pushed into the role by his teachers.  He assumes that they know better than him.

Initiations went splendidly.  Jeremiah's attempted Accomplishment is "Prevent a possessed woman from harming her daughter".  I quickly shifted the tenor from harm of the body to harm of the soul.  He ended up escalating further than he wanted to.  His Accomplishment is "I prevented a possessed woman from harming her daughter".  His fallouts?  "By shooting her stone-cold dead."

Matthew wants to gain the respect of his teacher.  A teacher observes other students bullying him.  Matthew too felt obligated to escalate further than he intended.  Only when he brutalizes the other students does the teacher seem to see something Dog-like in him.  Naturally enough, the fallout from this goes straight into increasing his concern about his calling.  Now he's not only unsure whether he's being called, he's unsure if such a calling is anything he wants.


The Dogs roll into town on a harsh winter night, and see the Ice-house all draped in black.  A strange, and disturbing, sort of notion.  At this point I sketch in the blood kinships that turned out to dominate the game:  Wiley is Matthew's uncle.  Cyrus is Jeremiah's uncle.  This makes Constance, Hezekiah and Sybrina all cousins of someone or other.  God bless small communities with wide extended familes.

They make their way to the warmth of the Steward's house, where most of the town (conspicuously missing Wiley, Prudence and Jackson, but including Hezekiah, Sybrina and Constance) come around with gifts of food.

They immediately jump into "Make people spill" conflicts against their own relatives:  Jeremiah gets about everything Cyrus knows.  Matthew specifies that he wants to hear what Constance thinks of her father.  So they both get the spill on how Wiley is blocking the courtship.  They get very, very concerned when they learn that Cyrus has "Authority as Steward, 2d4" and Constance has "Relationship:  Wiley, 1d4".  Dice-wise, this does not look like a healthy community.

Matthew has a followup conflict where he wants Constance to go home and get out of the path of the Dogs until they come to deal with Wiley.  She counters with a desperate plea for Matthew to hear her confession of sin and forgive her.  Matthew desperately scrambles not to have to hear what he suspects (which is, in fact, much worse than the truth), and sends her home instead.

Then they decide to corner Sybrina in order to get info on Hezekiah.  Getting her alone, they determine to make the stakes just "Spill everything you know about everything".  So I ramp Sybrina up, and slap them both silly with her spectacular social skills ("Sweet disposition, 2d10").  They end up getting nothing but shame.  Lots of shame.  How dare they make such accusations against an innocent young girl?

They go after Wiley the next morning, and the players have clearly gotten the system under control.  They double-team Wiley with a cascade of follow-up conflicts:  "Assert Authority as Dogs" melding into "Get his opinion on happenings in town", blending into "Agree that if the Dogs tell him to let Constance marry Hezekiah he'll agree."

They cycle him gradually around from "You young pups oughta be doing what I tell you" to "I guess it's your time to be Dogs now, and I gotta let my past be the past".  At the end he agrees that they're the Dogs, they make the call.  Says Wiley "Boys, I'll tell ya, it doesn't feel good to be on this end of things."

Now during that whole thing, Wiley spilled his take on what's happening in the town.  And his take very much does include the fact that Sybrina is having an affair with Jackson.  Wiley interprets this as Hezekiah and Sybrina both being willing sinners... the Dogs naturally enough doubt how unbiased he is.

Jeremiah, however, says "I really, really hesitate to take on Sybrina again, in any manner at all, without learning more of what's happening."  The reference to their severe drubbing of the previous evening is heeded.  So they grab Hezekiah and tag-team him with the stick of eternal perdition and the carrot of wedded bliss.  Eric rolls something like five sixes, and the moment I see it I have him fold like a house of cards.  He tells them everything, including what he knows of the three women and their misguided doctrine.  This gets the Dogs... concerned, to say the least.

Unfortunately, we were also very much at the end of our inflexible time-slot.  I abbreviated the end by having Sybrina (who they chose to confront) be the Sorceress.  It was less thematically satisfying (see below) but much quicker and tidier.

They set out stakes "Neutralize Sybrina as a threat to the community", which was... nicely vague.  She ended up knifing Matthew (though it turned out to be a lot shallower than it had looked at the time) and holding a gun on both of them.  When she escalated to guns, Matthew did likewise, bringing in something like 6d6+4d10 of shooting-oriented skills.  He plugged her for 3d10 of Fallout.  That really took the fight out of her, and she collapsed bleeding all over her cousin.  "Help me," she begged, and they did their best to de-demonize her (again, abbreviated).

They rolled Fallout and she ended up only gruesomely disfigured and shamed.  Quoth Sydney:  "You shot her precisely enough to save her soul."  Quoth Eric:  "No.  I got lucky."

Jeremiah takes Fallout of "I let Matthew do what had to be done".  Matthew takes a growing tendency of "Violence toward women", which I think disturbed Eric a great deal more than it did me.  Dogs are pretty violent critters.

They are bound and determined to take Sybrina to the next town and leave her there in the custody of that town's Steward.  After all, without the influence of the rest of the cult she's no danger.

And there's no chance that the next town might have problems of its own.  Nope.  I think I would call it "New Eden".


Loved, loved, loved DitV's resolution mechanics.  Every time I saw the Dogs getting into a spot where they were really, genuinely overmatched and in trouble, I'd just remind them "Well, you can always shoot her".

Sydney had way too much fun with his "Big-Ass Book of Life".  In his initiation he had said "Well, I haven't written Book of Life down as a possession yet, so I guess I don't have one."  When he started thinking about how useful it would have been, he decided that his character would go whole hog with a big, gilt edition.  One of my favorite visual moments was him walking into the Stewards study, where Cyrus's Book was on the table and just plunking his own down on top of it, completely swamping Cyrus's more standard-sized folio.

Eric also went wonderfully gonzo with his "I'm a Dog" things, of which he had something like 2d6+3d4 (from the whole "calling" thing that got pulled in every single time).  It worked exactly as predicted:  He was a powerful and compelling Dog, but it was never, ever simple.  Always with the huge piles of Fallout.

My own preparation... I could have done better.  Sybrina turned into "the bad guy" for a couple of reasons:[list=1][*]I flubbed the pacing, and didn't give them enough time to explore the moral quandaries and start wondering "Hey, is Sybrina really a victim here"?[*]I didn't make Sybrina a victim... she was responding to observing the injustice, not having had it perpetrated on her.  This, I think, was my huge, galling mistake.  Luckily it's one I can correct in future.[*]I didn't pull in any of the people whose sins were entangled with Sybrinas... particularly Jackson, whose guilt (though clear and unambiguous) never got discussed.[/list:o]That jump from "Injustice" to "Sin" is a killer for me.  I've got a bad tendency to cast the pride and injustice stages as black and white ("Wiley's full of himself, Constance and Hezekiah have a perfect, pure love made in heaven itself").  This leaves me with no immediate jump to sin for the victims.  Having the prideful be the sinners would only increase the black-and-white boredom of the situation.  I'd be thrilled to hear of ways that other people conceive of that particular step, because I imagine it must be easier than I'm making it.

Still and all, for a first session I am extremely proud of both myself and my two wonderful players.  We definitely have to do this again, real soon.

Quote from: TonyLBSydney played Brother Jeremiah.  Jeremiah went Back East for college.  Perilous times.  He's still trying to shake off the moral uncertainty.

Yeah, that one line from the book about going East to school really stuck in my mind. The whole character grew from that.

Quote from: TonyLBJeremiah's attempted Accomplishment is "Prevent a possessed woman from harming her daughter".  I quickly shifted the tenor from harm of the body to harm of the soul.  He ended up escalating further than he wanted to.  His Accomplishment is "I prevented a possessed woman from harming her daughter".  His fallouts?  "By shooting her stone-cold dead."

Key distinction: Jeremiah escalated further than he wanted to. I as a player was just beggin' for him to kill someone and have that on his bookish, bespectacled soul forever. (Kudos to Tony, by the way, for pushing me from that vague intention into defining this specific conflict).

In fact, I wrote this character up with lots of intellectual Traits and then "2d10 I will shoot you dead, God help me." Not "I shoot the gun out of your hands" or "I can shoot some deer if we're hungry." It only works if he decides God wants him to kill someone... which is why he couldn't use it in the final scene, because he desperately wanted not to have to kill his cousin, but there she was waving a gun at him and here he was with this big load of dice he could get if he were willing to shoot for the heart. Which he wasn't, which is why Brother Matthew ended up doing the dirty work.

{EDIT: Your "I let Matthew do what had to be done" is a far better wording for that Fallout than I had on my sheet, so I just went and changed it}.

Quote from: TonyLBSo I ramp Sybrina up, and slap them both silly with her spectacular social skills ("Sweet disposition, 2d10").

Uh, she also slapped my character silly with actual slapping. Jeremiah actually said in the final confrontation, "You keep hittin' me, cousin, but you still haven't answered my question."

Quote from: TonyLBI abbreviated the end by having Sybrina (who they chose to confront) be the Sorceress.  It was less thematically satisfying (see below) but much quicker and tidier.....Sybrina turned into "the bad guy" for a couple of reasons....

But you know what, it worked. Sybrina, by handing our asses to us in the earlier conflict, captured our attention, and you recalibrated your plotline to reflect that. That's precisely what you're supposed to do, GM'ing Dogs, aren't you?

And when I recounted this whole game to my wife (just off the plane from Cincinnati) this evening, I told her, with no doubt in my mind, that Sybrina was the seed of the town's problems, because her sleeping with a married man was the opening the demons needed to kill that man's unborn child and thus drive his wife into madness and heresy. So I saw her as the perpetrator, not a victim, even if I wanted to save her instead of kill her.

{EDIT: And she must've had some Pride of her own going to "get ideas" so easily from her brother's rather mild impropriety (I was convinced, both in and out of character, that the two kids had slept together; when I was proven wrong, I said aloud, "My time back East must've made me cynical")}.

Yes, there were definite loose ends due to time constraints (Brother Jackson has a serious talking-to coming, if not a beatin', and there's the other two women in the cult to worry about), but I felt we got to the heart of the matter, decisively.

Oh, and by the way.... in the course of strong-arming all these poor people, Jeremiah got Fallout resulting, I decided, in the 1d4 trait "Bully." For my experience gain from the final conflict, I decided to turn that into the "1d6 I'm a bully because God needs me to be."

I don't have anything major to add except that it was a fun game.  I agree that any deviation from the GM vision was not harmful to the experience.

On the whole, I do think that the situation was not as gut-wrenchingly difficult as it could have been, but they can't (and shouldn't) all be ultra high octane.  It also demonstrated that scenarios not optimized for every possible ounce of conundrum still can create plenty of angst.

Kudos to Tony for a great session and kudos to Vincent Baker on a fine gaming product.

- Eric

Tony! I'm psyched. You just gave my friend Joshua big "I told you so" rights. After we played at Dreamation, he figured you'd play Dogs on your own, I figured you'd be like "that was interesting, let's never do that again."

It sounds like a good game. I think that second-guessing your town afterward is as natural a part of the game as second-guessing your Dog. I know I do it.

Hey, I've been thinking hard about Lance's problem with the Dogs being consistently outclassed by the NPCs, dicewise, here. Do you have any insights? Even just data would be helpful, probably: how often did the Dogs lose a conflict? How often were they forced to escalate?

-Vincent

The Dogs were consistently edging out victory over their opponents, for a few reasons.  Before I start, let me be the first to say that I think it very likely that these reasons were in part due to my unfamiliarity with the system.  I might have been able to trash them better with more practice.

First, Belongings, particularly Jeremiah's 2d8 Big Book of Life.  "My goodness that's a fancy bible!"  I believe he used it in every single conflict.  An extra 2d8 is nothing to sneeze at.  I didn't really know whether to equip folks with their own stuff... I did give Wiley his tattered Dog's coat, but I bought it as one of his traits.

Second, they teamed up on people, and they were good at using the team rules.  Now that's not a huge difference:  They still had to both see my Raises, but I had to Raise twice as often (off a single character) as they did, and it was generally telling.  Again, I was unsure whether I should be having NPCs jump in on a conflict in order to outnumber the Dogs.  I know I could have, in the rules, but it would be more than a mite confusing in actual play.

Third, they had their constant escalation of traits by way of Fallout.  And they really, really liked taking their conversational fallout, to the tune of 8- or 9-d4 in many conversations.  Did this make them miserable, bullying, dysfunctional characters?  'course.  Powerful, too.

This prompted a neat insight, actually, about follow-up conflicts.  The person who forces a lot of d4 Fallout on another character in Conflict 1 is very tempted to get a lot of Fallout in Conflict 2 (because they've got this whole mess of d4s available to them).  Which is a neat dynamic that we didn't get into enough for me to fully understand.

Overall, however, I definitely felt that my points of control were more about how much the NPCs suffered due to the Dogs than they were about whether or not the Dogs succeeded.  For instance, I had total control of how much d10 Fallout Sybrina chose to take in the gunfight, and deliberately placed it at a level that I thought was a toss-up between her living and dying, with maybe "live" slightly favored.

Whoops... forgot to answer your escalation question.

The Dogs were forced to escalate at least to Physical in most every Conflict they had.  Numerous conflicts escalated to Fighting, though many of those they chose not to escalate in turn (particularly, Jeremiah didn't slap Sybrina back in their first conflict, which is clearly why they lost that conflict).

They escalated all the way to gunplay as soon as the demon dice came out.  Not surprising.  Not even too distressing, in context.  Except to Jeremiah, who was all conflicted about puttin' Sybrina down.

All that said, the GM's ability to assign appropriate traits to an NPC's assorted dice (from the proto-NPC generation process) can be brutal.

Note also that "escalating to physical" in our case usually meant stomping around, storming in and out of rooms, following people who had stormed out, etc. We didn't do that much hittin' -- which is part of the reason we were stumped by Sybrina, who had no problem slapping my character in the course of conversation (one advantage of being the 15-year-old girl in a conflict).

I agree totally:  The ability to assign traits on the fly is a huge advantage.  I thought it would be taxing (all the effort of creating a character, plus all the effort of playing the game), but it's all driven by the town's story and the stakes, so it was actually quite energizing.

I didn't see the pattern of being constantly overwhelmed by NPC dice in our game.  We only really lost once.

This having been the only time I've played, I have no idea how that relates to people's experiences in general.

Something I've not mentioned yet which really merits attention:

When I first read the DiTV rulebook, what struck me was how conflict caused characters to evolve. In fact, given the combination of Fall-Out, Experience, and Initiation Conflicts, conflict resolution becomes chargen and chargen becomes conflict resolution (and all is oneness, and the jewel is in the lotus, and Ommm.... Ommmmm.... Ommmmmm). And indeed, in practice, characters proved pleasantly dynamic over just one relatively short session.

So unlike traditional RPGs, when you get into conflicts, you're not managing your hit points and ammunition, you're changing who you are as a person. I love that. That's brilliant.

As I ranted in another thread altogether

Quote from: I, myself, not being all about me or anything like that,
Maybe "conflict resolution" in terms of who succeeds and who fails (even including "to what extent" and "at what price") isn't the real question, at all. (Isn't the cool factor of Dogs in the Vineyard that the Fallout can be far more important than the ostensible issue at stake? Isn't the cool factor of Prime Time Adventures that it explictly says, what matters isn't the moster-of-the-day or other problem at hand but how the characters approach it in light of their Issues?). Maybe the richer, underlying soil is "change resolution": How the characters try to change the world (including other characters), and how they change in the process.

....

Note that if you could get a "change engine" to work, you wouldn't even need separate rules for character generation and conflict resolution. Every conflict would be explicitly about reshaping character, and every character could be built up by conflicts. It'd be the Holy Grail for Grand Unified Mechanic maniacs (e.g. me...).

I don't think DiTV has quite grasped that Grail yet (stakes and fallout are mostly distinct from each other, and initial chargen is mostly distinct from conflict resolution), but it comes closer than anything I've seen. I think the other hand you need for Grail-grasping may be the ability to break out a situation into multiple goals all being pursued at once -- which I think is the key insight of Tony's own Capes.