The problem with low-key towns

[Frank T]

I ran my second game of DitV yesterday (report on the previous here). I had about 5 minutes to prepare, so I just randomly picked one of the branches from this forum: Kettle Lake. The common thing between this one and the one I ran before that: The sin was not something that seemed terribly bad to the players. The players normally haven't read the book themselves and I can't explain beforehand every little bit about, y'know, Stewardship and the Faith and so on. So they sort of look at me like: "So what? These little girls have been lying and their teacher got suspended. This girl has had pre-marriage sex. That's not so bad, is it?"

I brought up the issue of demonic attacks, and that worked, too. No mistaking, in the Kettle Lake scenario, the Dogs handled the town well. They sentenced upon Sister Mariah forty days of prayer and abstinence and took Brother Thomas to Mariah's fiancé Makepeace to have him decide the punishment. In a nice conflict they also convinced Brother Makepeace to forgive Mariah's sin. (Picture the large smith's son running away, up the steep rocks by the lake, an Brother Ebenezer (the Dog), about half his weight, calling upon God to give him strength ("my faith makes me strong 2d10"), easily catching up, grabbing and shaking him, shouting: "If God can forgive her, so can you!", and the large man collapsing and sobbing heavily into Brother Ebenezer's black and blue cloak.)

So all's well, you would say. Yeah, the game was fun, everything worked out nicely. But the scenario, just like the one before, failed to provoke real emotional engagement from the players. I think that rape and murder just get people better. Even if they make choices more easy.

- Frank

[lumpley]

I think rape and murder get people more reliably. I bet you could find sins short of rape and murder that your players would react strongly to, if you looked hard. Consider adultery.

But! Rape and murder don't make the choices any easier. Dogs is a game that can absolutely include real villains, with no lessening of its moral impact.

Unless you go out of your way to make a simplistic town, rape and murder are going to make the town more morally complicated, not less.

-Vincent

[Eric Provost]

I bet you could find sins short of rape and murder that your players would react strongly to, if you looked hard.

I'm going to second that sentiment. 

There are the sins that most people get riled up about, like rape and murder, then there are the sins that fewer people get riled up about.  Part of it is reading & knowing your players.  I've got one player whom I know will get fired up anytime we bring out rigid social expectations between the sexes.  In a very recent town the only thing really wrong was the hubris of one young lady wanting a particular young man for her groom.  The effect being that there was a small contingent of youth getting married to the 'wrong' perons.  My wife, Lisa, got totally riled up about that.  She decided that she was going to tell everyone just exactly how they're going to get married and that's that.  There was originally some rape and potential for future murder in that town, but once Lisa got hold of the wrong-marriage issue I dropped the bigger sins.  I didn't want them to overshadow the stuff that my players had already decided was cool and interesting.

So, that's my advice;  Come up with lesser & greater sins.  Hit the players with the lesser sins first and see how, and if, they react.  If they don't jump on the small stuff you've always got the big stuff in reserve.  And if they do jump on the small stuff... then you can choose to leave the big stuff out if you think it'll only hurt the story.

Works for me anyway.

-Eric

[TonyLB]

I'll actually go out on a limb and disagree with everyone including Vincent.  I don't think that the magnitude of the sin has much direct connection to how it draws players in.  What has a connection is how important the GM thinks the problem is, and how he conveys that.

When I ran Kettle Lake, the way I got to the players was by playing to the hilt what the characters want of the Dogs.  These people are desperate.  Getting what they want will give them their lives back.  Not getting it will all but kill them.  Everything about their future is in the hands of the Dogs.

The Dogs thought they had it pretty well figured without visiting everyone.  But they're thorough.  A Dog went to visit Brother Thomas, even though they pretty much knew his part in the story.  I leapt out of my chair, fell to my knees in front of the player and cried out "Thank God you've come!  Please, PLEASE, I need to know whether God can ever forgive me!  I can't live like this any more!"  The player was totally flummoxed.  I think he'd expected some sort of shifty denial of guilt, a nice satisfying "stick it to 'im" conflict where he forced the truth into the open, and then walking away having done his job, everything right with the world.  What he got instead was a young man on the verge of suicide, drowning in his own guilt, looking to be thrown a life-line any life-line ... and him in no position to throw that life-line until he'd well and truly judged whether the boy should be saved.

Thomas and his fate became the whole crux of the Dogs judgment.  I feel strongly that this was because I thought that Thomas was the one to whom the Dogs judgment was most important.  When you think that, you convey it, and people believe it.  They say "What we do here, it matters," whether it's a case of having stolen an afternoon of passion years ago, or having just raped and killed everyone in a convent yesterday afternoon.

I haven't seen it actually happen, so this is hypothetical, but if you played a town like Deadwood, where nobody really gives a hoot about their own sins, I don't think that the Dogs could get emotionally engaged, even if the crimes had escalated to ritual cannibalism.  You, as GM, would be putting on the brakes, saying "Well, maybe it's important to you, but it's sure not important to me."

[James Holloway]

I haven't seen it actually happen, so this is hypothetical, but if you played a town like Deadwood, where nobody really gives a hoot about their own sins, I don't think that the Dogs could get emotionally engaged, even if the crimes had escalated to ritual cannibalism. 

One of the things I like in Dogs is that a big problem -- False Doctrine -- comes from the fact that people know what they're doing is wrong and do worse things to try to justify it.

"People with guilty consciences live in fear," someone said. "And they hate most those whom they have wronged."

[Brand_Robins]

When playing Dogs, my experience is that you need to screw the players to the sticking point, and then boil them until they explode.

Tony can obviously do this with his frantic portayals of NPCs, which his players apparently feast upon. Not all GMs have that as their strength (or something they want to do, for that matter), nor do all players get into the What's Eating Gilbert Grape of it. So in that case you need to find out what your strength is, a way to play it into your players, and the kinds of things that will kick them (and you) into frothing action.

My main point for making this post is that there is a slight shifting I've noticed on the Forge towards Dogs towns -- with (in my perception, I'm sure I'm probably wrong) a favoring of "low key" towns that are based upon the lower levels of the ladder of sin only. While I'm sure this came from the realization, and then desire to reinforce, the fact that Dogs can play rich and powerful without sorcerers and demons, I also think its important not to turn it into a bias against the fire-and-brimstone play of demonic possesion and sorcery that Dogs supports equally well.

In short: if it works for you, cool. If not, get some sorcerers and hate and murder action going on. Neither is better than the other, nor will either work for every group with every GM. If you're not happy with the low key, then kick next game off with the Dogs riding into town while a woman is hanging from a gallows, slowly dying in front of them while no one else is on the street or even looking out their windows.

[Brand_Robins]

Ahem. That should be "Tony's fantastic portrayal" not "frantic" -- though the NPCs may well be frantic, I doubt Tony is.

[Frank T]

Hey Tony,

The best reaction I got from my players in the Kettle Lake scenario was in the scenes with S. Mariah and B. Makepeace. Those were also the characters I portrayed as desperate and coming to the Dogs for advice and guidance, rather than to demand something. Nice one. I'll keep that in mind.

- Frank

[Vaxalon]

Actually, having met Tony, and seen a number of his NPC portrayals... frantic is a good word.