[DiTV] First Session - chargen and initiation

[ffilz]

A local group has gotten together to play Dogs (yay Find Play!). Joe is GMing, Paul, Jeremy,myself, and one other fellow whose name I've already forgotten are playing.

We chatted a bit about our expectations for the game and chose to set the supernatural dial low (though I don't think anyone felt strongly about it). One thing I wish he had done was spent more time socializing first, but we had a tight schedule (only about 2 hours).

I think I should have made more notes so I knew more about the other players, but I can at least share my character (and perhaps Joe or some of the other guys are here and will chime in).

I got stalled a bit during character generation, partially because I'm the quite sit back and watch and pick the right moment to jump in sort of person (so my initiation conflict was also last).

Bartholomew has a well rounded background. He grew up on a farm outside the town one of the other dogs (Jeremy or the other guy) was the doctor's son in. His father was a dog and died when Bartholomew was young so Bartholomew was raised by mama and grampa.

Stats
Acuity 4d6, Body 4d6, Heart 4d6, Will 3d6.

I deliberately chose a lopsided approach here.

Traits
Run up a tree by a pack of wolves 1d4, My grampa taught me to shoot 2d6, knows his way around a farm 1d6, learned the word by the fireside with mama 2d8, listen to mama 1d6.

I came up with the 1d4 trait having to do with wolves pretty quickly, but really struggled to define it correctly. Everything else grew pretty organically, though I spent a fair bit of time on it. As I was going through this, I was defining grampa's and mama's place in Bartholomew's life and that dad was dead.

Relationships
Look up to grampa 1d8, Lived on the outskirts of the town Nathanial (Jeremy or the other guy's dog per the background - I wanted some level of relationship with another player's dog), 3d6 and 1d8 uncommitted.

I really struggled here, except for look up to grampa 1d8 (which rolled right out of the traits, in fact I wrote it in before finishing the traits).

Belongings
Dad's old coat (worn but lovingly cared for) 2d6, shotgun 1d4+1d6, the best horse on the farm 2d6, the book of life 1d6, beaten up old hat that's always catching sticks and burrs 1d4, jar of earth 1d6.

Hmm, did I actually need to explicitly list the book of life and the jar at 1d6? Seems like a lot of belongings.

The other dogs are a doctor's son, an ex-bandit, and an orphan (Paul). The ex-bandit's initiation was a dream sequence where he struggled with a demon trying to hang him (I think this turned up the supernatural dial from our initial discussion, but I think everyone was way cool with it). The orphan's initiation was dealing with a gang of bullies picking on another young dog. The doctor's son's initiation was a confrontation with a classmate who was less well off (he ended up loaning the guy his book of life). I'll get to mine in a moment.

As is probably expected, we struggled a bit with the conflicts. Paul may have got cheated out of an experience pip (we forgot that he had to take fallout). The doctor's son got 7d4 fallout he got some 1s (experience) and an 8 (almost expected). These conflicts were pretty lively, and the poor doctor's son rolled a bucketfull of dice, but rolled lots of low rolls (his 2d8 trait got him a pair of 1s for example).

I wanted my conflict to deal with my father in some way. I started to set a scene of Bartholomew making one last visit home before graduation, in a snow storm. Then the idea came up that he was on his way back, having been given his dad's old coat. Ok, now we're cooking. We decided what was at stake was if Bartholomew felt worthy of wearing his dad's cloak and we set a physical conflict. I rolled my 10d6 (body+heart) and rolled quite well. In fact, I think I rolled too well, and perhaps I should have used some of my low dice. I should have also pulled in the wolves and the hat (both would have been quite reasonable to pull into this conflict, and would have given me more opportunities for low dice). Joe was suggesting the possibility that Bartholomew put on dad's cloak to keep warm, but Bartholomew resisted. The trait he gained at the end was respect for tradition 1d6.

I felt my initiation fell a little flat. The imagery was really cool, but it didn't seem like a real struggle (I think I also faced the lowest opposition die rolls of all the conflicts - I had a 5 left to reverse a blow).

All in all though, a good session. As is probably expected, we stumbled a bit, and folks definitely were a little unsure of how to play such a different game from their previous experiences. I know it will take some getting used to narativist play on my part, but the cooperation to get a cool initiation scene was awesome.

Frank

[Joe Zeutenhorst]

I was the "Joe is GMing" above.

I think this was the first time with Dogs for all of us, except for Brother Nathaniel's player, who had a couple sessions under his belt (and for the record, he had no interest in the GM's seat). I steamrolled right over the rules on several occasions that I remember, raising twice in a row on Brother Nathaniel, not checking fallout for Brother Jacob, fudging on the fallout die size for Brother Virgil, etc. I also didn't have a great grasp on how long the conflicts were going to go on based on how the dice rolled - for example, with Brother Virgil, my narration was ramping up to "and you're fucked for sure" just about the time the dice were saying "okay, you win." I'll chock it up to it being the first session.

Two of the initiations, Brother Bartholomew's and Brother Nathaniel's, turned out a bit weak in my estimation.

Brother Nathaniel's player wanted the stakes to be "Confidence in myself". He didn't have much else to go on for it. I think I might have made too many suggestions here. It ended up with Nathaniel being confronted by Brother Wiley after Nathaniel corrects his quoting of scripture. I made Wiley into kind of a cartoon character: dumb redneck who adds "boy" to the end of his sentences, easily shamed by logic. How was outwitting this turd supposed to give Nathaniel confidence in himself? Worse yet, Nathaniel's player rolled horribly and took a relationship to Wiley in order to win the stakes. Rat bastard GM in me is seriously considering killing Wiley "off-screen" so he can bring in the dice without recurring the character. Also: did he really want his character's confidence on the table? I'm not sure.

Just like Frank says, Bart's initiation was about him riding back to the Dog's temple having been given his father's patchwork coat, feeling tempted to wear it before he's been ordained as a Dog. I thought a lot about this conflict afterwards.

When Frank proposed it, I had absolutely nothing about where it would go. We passed it around the table, with Virgil's player (I think) came up with the idea that he'd already been given the coat, Frank suggested it was snowing, Jacob's player suggested it he saw a vision of his dead father, and a few other ideas. We were about 15 minutes over our time slot, so we settled on "tempted to wear the coat". I raised and saw with the cold, the wet, thoughts of Bartholomew's worthiness, his teacher praising him for his mastery of theology that his father had never attained. The initiation dice rolled low, and it was over before it really challenged anything about ol' Bart's outlook on being a Dog.

What would have made this conflict better? How about...

1) Talking about it a bit more. I think it got some good suggestions, and would have gotten more, if I hadn't have cut it off for time constraints.
2) Some better internal opposition. Bartholomew's pride wasn't making a very compelling argument to his sense of order. There were plenty of things to bring in here... more dead father stuff, the grandfather who taught him to shoot, the mother who he learned the Book of Life with.
3) Something external. Wolves? Family? High water? Demons?
4) Better definition of who's playing what. I started out as the storm, and ended up as the hand Barholomew pats himself on the back with. I guess that's okay, if I had really been thinking about it, which I wasn't.

Any of that sound good?

[ffilz]

Joe, thanks for commenting on your side.

One mistake I made that probably hurt Brother Nathaniel's conflict was that we were ramping up to it being the second initiation conflict, I interrupted with the point that we had forgotten to deal with fallout from Brother Jacob. I could have held that until after Brother Nathaniel's conflict (perhaps bringing it up the first time Brother Nathaniel had to take fallout).

Hmm, I guess I had overlooked that Brother Nathaniel's conflict was also about self-confidence. I guess one point is that perhaps that isn't a very strong stake. I wonder how much each of us was holding back because we don't know each other very well yet?

Brother Virgil's conflict with the demon seemed to be pretty good though, you pushed pretty hard on a couple occaisions. Of course the GM's ability to push hard is limited by the dice he has in the conflict. Correspondingly, the player's ability to react can be limited by a string of bad rolls such as Nathaniel's. In a real conflict of course, the GM can escalate with the NPC's to bring in more dice. The GM of course can't force the player to use those d4 traits, so the player either has to use them out of desperation, or because they WANT fallout, or just because they want a cool scene (I clumsily tried to bring in learning the book of life by the fireside with my mama - it would have been cool had I actually needed those dice, to both gain support from the word and remembering the warmth around the fire - of course that was a 2d8 trait, but still the player does have some power for cool narration by bringing in traits, d8 or d4).

Hmm, a way that would have pushed Bartholomew harder would have been to have opened the conflict with a pack of wolves leaping at him, opening the conflict as a fight, where I would only get 7d6 for stats instead of 10d6.

Frank