[DitV] Two towns and no resolution

[Christopher Weeks]

So, a few weeks ago I finally, finally ran a game of DitV.  I ran again today.  Each time we were down one player.  This wasn't a problem for the first game, we still had three Dogs, so we just went.  But we didn't finish the town.  This time I was down a different player and he was going to be a key figure in resolving the town.  After some discussion we decided to play another town with two of the same characters and a new one.  We decided to make it their first town and rewrite their history a bit.  This town I created was supposed to be simpler since I was assuming that the reason we didn't finish was because I engineered a too-complicated town.  But we didn't finish this one either.

I'm wondering what the other experiences are on not finishing towns.  We meet around noon, get started by one and end by six. 

Our group isn't sure if it's my fault or the players'.  They do spend a fair amount of time deliberating rather than doing but I'm not sure that's a bad thing.  (Except that we're not finishing towns in one sitting.)  I think that I'm actively revealing the town (though certainly I'm not just handing them a write-up and asking them how to proceed).  I think that I'm always saying yes or rolling (and mostly just saying yes).  There are two things that I've screwed up both times.  The Dogs haven't been related to anyone in either town, thus far.  After last session I banged it into my head that next town would be different.  And I just failed again.  Also, I haven't figured out how to have all the NPCs just file up to the Dogs with their grievances -- some of them do just approach, but some of them have to be fished for a bit.  Is that standard or bad?  Also, I largely make the sinners pretty likeable folks.  Is that normal and/or desirable?

We're getting great use of the conflict resolution system, though it seems like I'll have a tough time ever beating the Dogs, but maybe that's the point.  And I think we're having fun.  My players (Larry, Steve, Shane and Mark) are all Forgies so they'll chime in too.  I appreciate any feedback we get on this and if you have questions about our play, please ask.

[Larry L.]

Previous session, I felt like we were fumbling around splitting hairs over, "Now should we roleplay this or break out dice?" This session, the mechanics seemed much smoother. Today's town seemed more "grabby" to me, too. Way more Fallout happening too; I'm a little amazed by how quickly my character's stats are building.

I actually thought we were gonna kick out a judgment on the leadership of the town today, and then at the eleventh hour the Mountain People girl piped up and reminded us that we had completely ignored the plight of the town's women. While it's amusing to imagine a bunch of chauvinistic Dogs dismissing this problem as insignificant to the conflicts between the men-folk, that's not actually want I want to put into the SIS.

For my character, I made a real dovish "talk tank." I might be putting the kibosh on a lotta swift executions or something.

This game's not supposed to be like a police procedural, right? Where we interview witnesses, cross-examine testimony, get 'em to 'fess up about their big secret?

'Cause if there's more evil goin' on in these towns than plain ol' sinnin', (demons or sorcery or what not) it sure isn't neatly unwinding.

I think Chris is doing a swell job of making the sinners realistic and justified in their own minds. If they were black-and-white "I'm evil, shoot me!" types I don't think I'd be interested in playing. I think there's just some pacing issue we're missing.

[TonyLB]

How long did it take you from the start of the game until absolutely everyone in town had told the Dogs absolutely everything they know?  That's usually the point where I think "Okay, my main GM job is now complete ... time to sit back and watch the fireworks."

You can do that in as little as ten minutes, but an hour or two is more common.  What was your personal mark on these games?

After that happened, what sort of things did the players talk about?  What (if anything) did they do?

Commonly this is the time when I've seen players start wandering around, hoping that there's a magic mushroom, or demonic possession, or some other clue that will give them an easy way out of the horrific tangle that a Dogs town is.  More often than not (in my limited experience) I end up having to tell the players explicitly "There is nothing else.  You have all the information.  Information gathering phase is over.  Go judge now."

[Christopher Weeks]

How long did it take you from the start of the game until absolutely everyone in town had told the Dogs absolutely everything they know?  That's usually the point where I think "Okay, my main GM job is now complete ... time to sit back and watch the fireworks."

You can do that in as little as ten minutes, but an hour or two is more common.  What was your personal mark on these games?

Thanks Tony.  I guess it's telling that that mark hasn't been reached in either town yet.  It's like, the players have the Dogs doing stuff -- this and that, talk to him, talk to her, talk to each other, bust up a card game, talk to the second wife, yadda yadda and they seem happy and productive.  So I sit back and let them go.  And they whack through 70% of the NPC cards that I've written up during that time.  And if it starts to slow down, I throw an NPC at them -- the mountain folk second wife who ain't being treated right or the girl who thinks that maybe girls can grow up to be men.  Then they go off on that and start forming opinions on judgement and it seems like they're going to get to judging before everything is revealed and that sounds cool too, so I go with it but things slow way down.

What procedure do you use to get all the NPCs to spill everything?  How many NPCs with an agenda do you have in a town?  Do you have any NPCs who specifically want to avoid the Dogs, but are important to the hierarchy of sin, etc?

[TonyLB]

First, I make it explicit that "The NPC spills everything he/she knows that is relevant to the game" makes for perfectly valid stakes for a conflict.  Got that one from playing with Vincent.  The players say "He's seeming sort of secretive.  I start a conflict, stakes are he spills."  They win, they're done.  They know they don't have to come back to that NPC for any more information.

My last town had (count, count) seven NPCs.  I believe I spilled the whole town in a little under an hour of play.

NPCs should never, ever want to avoid the Dogs.  NPCs want something from the Dogs, remember?  They don't get what they want by avoiding the Dogs.  They might give the Dogs space, let them investigate something else first, but they should always be shooting appraising glances, wondering "Is this the right time to approach the Dogs?"

Overall, though ... yeah ... if the players don't have all the information yet, then there is really no way that they could be judging the town.  You say you sit back and let them go.  I'd recommend that you're entering that phase to early in your GMing.  While there are still NPCs who haven't made their pitch, you have to be throwing them constantly in the face of the Dogs.  When all the NPCs have spilled, then you can sit back and let the players do things.

I'm glad to have contributed something helpful!

[Sydney Freedberg]

This time I was down a different player and he was going to be a key figure in resolving the town

How did you know he was going to be a key figure, though? Do you mean

1) "because I thought what he did last time was really interesting, so I designed this town to push him even further on those questions"? (Vincent's "even this? even this?" way of hooking the player)
2) "because his/her character was related to lots of key people in the town?" (More traditional "hook the character"GMing)
3) "because I had a specific plot in mind?" (uh oh)

If you're doing (1), yeah, that's just too bad, you were doin' the job Brother Vincent laid out for you in the book, and the guy didn't show. If you were doing (2) or (3), though, that might be at the root of a whole lot of your troubles.

[Christopher Weeks]

Nah, we were still in the middle of that same town and an interesting dynamic had formed between all the players.  Mark, who was absent yesterday, was the hell-fire and damnation bad-cop to Larry's "how do we know the King didn't reveal himself to this apparent sinner" good-cop.  They were in the middle of things.  All the players agree that Mark's Dog was vital to the situation.  That's all.

[Mark Woodhouse]

And I powerfully regret missing out on the endgame, too. I half expected one of the other Dogs to shoot _me_ before I just uncorked a seething bottle of retribution on Shepherds' Crossing.

One thing that I think did slow us down a bit... getting that social dynamic settled. The Dogs game was only the second time I have played with these guys, and I know I was kind of feeling my way on "How aggressive can I be without making everybody else back down or being a spotlight hog?" Brother Zebedee is kind of a Presence, and I'm a pretty aggressive player, so it definitely felt to me like I was feeling out a comfortable level of PvP conflict for about half of the first town.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I guess I'm not quite understanding the basic expectation that one town = one session in the first place. What's that about?

Best,
Ron

[lumpley]

And even if you really, really do want one town per one session, I'd give it at least two or three sessions with a consistent group before I'd worry.

The technique I use for one-shot play is this: ten minutes before time's up, I say "we gotta wrap up. You have all the info you need - let's just summarize what you do about it."

You can see where that's non-ideal.

-Vincent

[Larry L.]

Regarding the expectation that one town is a session's worth of material... I guess I had gotten some vague idea of this from Actual Play posts I'd read concerning Dogs. That the pacing was almost like a TV series where there's a new town each week. I don't believe I impressed this notion on the others, though, so I don't know if that was a mutual expectation.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Isn't there a passage in the Town Creation rules that says, rather as an aside, that having multiple Prides, each giving rise to its own chain of sin & injustice, creates complex towns suitable for multi-session play? The implication being that a standard once-up-the-ladder process should create a one-session town, although that's never stated explicitly.

[lumpley]

There's some text in the "what it's like to play" section up front that says one town, one session.

It's episodic. A town per session, a town per two sessions if it's a big deal town. A good model here is a traveling TV series, like The Fugitive or Farscape: each town presents a situation for the characters to deal with and becomes part of their ongoing story.

Is the first town "a big deal town"? I don't see why not, especially if you start the session with character creation like you're supposed to.

Certainly the GM doesn't get to decide beforehand which towns are big deal towns and which aren't.

Are we helping, Chris?

-Vincent

[Larry L.]

There's some text in the "what it's like to play" section up front that says one town, one session.

I just got my book back, but I'm happy to know I didn't just hallucinate that bit up.

As counterpart to Chris' worries about running the game, I've got some concern that we're "playing wrong" or something too. Like Bad Gamer Habits or whatever. That first session seemed a little too similar to a game of Call of Cthulhu (Do you make your Library Use/Interrogate Sinner roll? No? I guess we're just stuck then! Guess I gotta lead you by the nose then.) Sunday's game, less so.

This seems different than both traditional games where the GM drives the plot and the players mostly follow, and director-stance games where the players author in setting elements well outside just their character's capabilities.

I think we all know where we're going, we're just trying to figure out how to drive this thing to that point. Without stepping over the line into illusionism, or zilchplay, or any of that crud.

[Christopher Weeks]

Are we helping, Chris?

Absolutely.  I guess the main thing is that I shouldn't have been sweating the two-session town.  I'll relax now.