Br. Phillip's confession....

[jason-x]

Hey guys-

I'm Jason.  I played Br. Phillip in Red Creek.  Anyways...Yeah so, it was kind of problematic.  Luke, your town was brimming with all sorts of cool shit.  There was the steward that was in over his head (Ravi's uncle); there was the amputee who hated me, despite the fact that I saved his life; the runaway bride, and of course lies, lies, LIES!!!!  YES!!  only, well....we didn't really get to all that.  The place I saw shit go completely wrong was when Ravi and Dan started hacking up mountain people.  Here's my problem:

I've read the posts here, and seen people say that all this conflict is what makes DitV interesting.  Sorry, but I have to disagree.  What's interesting, to me, are the difficult moral situations the game puts players in.  Now, I know....THIS situation COULD be seen as a difficult moral situation.  "You let him do the dirty work,"  "Why didn't you stand up to him?" and so on, and so on...Sorry.  Let's just be realistic about all this.  Ravi was playing to "win."  Plain and simple.  He said this.  He built up a powerhouse and just wanted to kill things (and quite possibly....take their stuff...heh) .  At least that's the way it seemed to me.  As soon as they saw that there was a tribe of mountain people it was "Well, they're Pagans...let's kill 'em."  Wow, what a compelling story.  What about all the other RAW, JUICY, MEATY shit?  What about the amputee who felt so INJUSTICED that he got this whole ball rolling to begin with?  How about making an example out of him?  What about Ravi's uncle?  Wait, you want PvP?  Make it count.  Call Ryan's sister a sinnin' slut, and drag her into the middle of town and put a gun to her head.  THAT's dramatic.  Not Johnny Cavalry Sword hacking up a bunch of mountain people.  There was just SO much other shit that was SO much more important than some mountain folk.  THIS is what went wrong for ME.  Everything just seemed so irrational.  It didn't make sense, and quite frankly, I didn't wanna play into it, because I felt it was...well...boring.  And not what makes DitV interesting to me.  And sorry, I'm not gonna get my guy killed so that a powerhouse character can "win."  That's just dumb.  And at that point, one character IS running the game.  Regardless if you stand up to him, you still HAVE to stand up to him.  ME? Jason/Phillip?  In my mind, I didn't wanna kill a brother Dog. 

No, I didn't expect Luke to hold my hand and step in when necessary.  Fuck all that (we did have some cool conflicts--and I think I even lost every one...).  But what about when my bookwormy guy came out of his shell and stood in front of a bunch of drunk, gun-toting fucks?  I made a stand, and it didn't amount to shit.  I think this was possibly a mechanics issue (not necessarily the game's mechanics, but our misunderstanding of them ) as I was in a conflict with the group leader, and then Ravi decided to jump in as well.  It was when he threw in his 800 or so dice that I gave.  But fuck it.  I played my guy, and in the end, as Dogs, we failed.  Because of some irrational behavior, which to me was just completely unwarranted, uniteresting and completely beyond my control.  Someone said that Ravi's guy made a damn fine Dog?  That's funny.  He kind of got an entire faithful town slaughtered.  Yeah.  Smooth.  It was only Chris, Ryan, and I that made any attempt at saving ANYONE at ANY time.  These guys were out for blood.  We were out to save some faithful people, redeem a few sinners, and -if need be- deal out death and judgment.  At least I was.

Look...sorry if I'm sounding like a dick or whatever.  I just wanted to chime in with my 2 cents.  In the end, it's only a game.  Of course I don't hate anyone, and no hard feelings or any of that horse shit.  I just feel like we completely missed the point of what makes Dogs different.  It was played like a hack-n-slash, when (to me), it's so much more.  Luke, thanks for having us over.  I'd still love for you to run a BW demo for us (PvP and all).  Ravi, Dan and Chris, it was nice to meet you guys. Maybe we can play again sometime.  Take care.

JX

[Eero Tuovinen]

Let me again say that I know exactly what kind of session you had, because I've played sessions exactly like that. It's like, man, what's that player thinking his actions make no sense at all now he's already drawing his gun and it seems like he's caring not one whit about all these characters. Well, as I see it, you either have to give his contribution credence or not. Either you go
1) OK, this'll clearly be a story of me dealing with a psychopathic Dog and how that'll break down the system of justice and faith we have here. Will justice win over violence, can I make him hear me?
or
2) Hey, this isn't the story I subscribed for! Get me out of here!

I don't claim that it's easy to get into it when you're expecting a rather different kind of game. My point is that it's rather too early to say that the situation is untenable just because a character is going batshit over the mountain people. If it were a NPC, most roleplayers would take it in stride, I guess. A challenge to the moral fabric of the town and all that. Takes a calm mind to do that when it's a player and everyone else's thinking that he's just not getting it and clearly we'd have to get him to play it right but nobody has the words to make him understand.

Now, I fully understand and accept that taking it in stride isn't going to work in the long run, because it won't result in an interesting and dramatic game. The reason for that is that if the player is really just out to "win", then his decisions will drama-wise always end up the same, and his contributions to the story and imaginary detail will not necessarily be interesting. However, that's something you see by playing through a couple or three moral scenarios with him, tightening the situations, and seeing if he's at all interested in the moral dilemmas. If nothing seems to grab him, then it's pretty safe to say that he's just playing to "win". But for all we know, it just might be that this scenario just happened to look like morally cut-and-dried to the problem player. It might be that it looked like that because he's not yet attuned to looking at it from the story perspective. The way to correct these things is to give credence, not take it away, so that the player can really reflect on his actions. Take him seriously, and he starts to take himself seriously.

That's the one thing I've learned about GMing violent, player-initiated narrativism in playing Dust Devils over and over again. If there's a player who thinks it's a good idea to off the sheriff just because he finally can and the GM seems to not care and he tries to go for the grand slam by robbing the bank as well (real game a couple of months ago), the way to deal with it is to give his contributions credence, to let his decisions matter, and to fully play out the consequences. Because up to the point of those consequences, all you've proved to the player in question is that he can do all that barbaric stuff you'd do in a teenage rampage game. When you get to the consequences and do not flinch, whether the shit's falling on the character or some NPCs, then the player has the opportunity to care. Up to that point you haven't really even given the player a chance. That's why I think that it's important to get in, not back away, when other players surprise you. Respect their contributions and make your own spins off them. If you're playing a single character, express your dismay through the character's actions. That way you take the contribution of the other player seriously.

So, Jason: what I'm getting from your post is that you're entirely unappreciative of Ravi's contribution to the game. That's cool. His actions were "irrational, unwarranted, uninteresting and beyond your control". That happens. It's even possible that you're creatively incompatible. The risk in giving players real control over a game is that another player doesn't dig what a player does with that control. DiV chooses to subsume creative differences into the game and make them in-game conflicts. Other games, like Universalis, has players saying it straight to each other when they don't like their decisions, and you can just stop the other player from acting by sacrificing your own resources without all the in-game rigamarole. Perhaps that'd be more suitable for you?

For the record, I don't believe for one instant that you can "game" Dogs in the Vineyard to get an impossible advantage in dice over another player character in one session, assuming somebody isn't cheating. And two dogs will run over one anytime as far as I know. So I don't really see how one player can be any more of a force of nature than any other, except if the player is much more certain about his goals than the other players.

[Adam Dray]

Jason meant to post this as a reply here. Probably should keep discussion over there.