[DitV] Massive Supernatural Carnage in Play

[David Laurence]

This is a session I ran last night using this town, for the players I've been running as detailed here. (White Falls was good fun, but nothing I felt was worth writing an AP post about.) Brennan, Todd and Tonya were playing today, as Brs. Jackson and Jebudiah, and Sr. Augusta.

As we'd decided we were going 5 sessions, and this was the fifth, I thought it would be fun to go out with a bang, as it were, hence the supernatural carnage. It went well - it was a fun session, satisfying and challenging, and very creepy. A good cap to the series - there are things I'd do differently, given the chance to run Dogs again, and I'll mention them briefly at the end of the post, but overall it's been a great run.

There's not much to say about the town - they ended up burning it to the ground, of course. Some high points, though:

I started right off by having some laughing happy children come up to them, introduce themselves, and give the Dogs gifts: necklaces, like leis, made (enthusiastically but not very skillfully) of the skulls of cats and rats. I was getting some "oh my god" vibes from one of my players, so toned back the description, leaving a lot unsaid - and kept it that way for the rest of the town. I think it worked very well, leaving everything up to the players' imaginations. The players were definitely creeped out by this scene (cheerful but slightly-hurt child: "Aren't you going to put them on?"), and there was a lot of good role-playing as they tried to determine just how deep things were:

Br. Jackson: Were these animals, ah, dead when you found them?
Little Hosannah (completely nonplusssed, still cheerful and smiling): No.

A quick trip to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre-esque schoolhouse (with its schoolmarm, like the kids, smiling obliviously to the hellishness of what was going on), then the Temple with its Tree of Life of bones and glistening red cloth on the altar, and they got the idea. Sr. Augusta was met (alone; the others had gone to the schoolhouse) at the Temple by Sr. Waitstill and the prayer group, and led (somewhat reluctantly) to the Dogs' lodgings with Br. Bart. (Tonya, a little freaked: "How does the house look?" Me: "Normal enough. Neat and clean." Tonya sighs. Me: "Of course, you haven't seen the basement.") I didn't have the congregation try anything, because I figured they still all thought they were worshipping completely normally, and wanted the Dogs to be involved and helping as full-on authority figures beside "Steward" Waitstill.

A couple nice scenes followed - Sr. Clementine, more-than-half out of her wits, accosted the Dogs, asking them to bring her husband back. They went to the cemetery and called up his ghost (a very nice conflict with shadows over the sun and the Steward appearing, all shade-y and Frodo-with-the-Ring-on, with black tendrils trying to pull him back from the circle of sacred earth) and got more-or-less the whole story, as much as Josiah knew anyway and could tell them with his ghostly perspective. Br. Bart (meaning well) asked them to check on Br. Nathaniel, who hadn't been to service for a couple of weeks, and they went out to the farm to find the poor fellow huddled up in a ball in a corner, matted blood on his hands and in his hair, his family ("pretty much all of them") nailed to the wall in the darkness. He begged the Dogs to shoot him, they determined that he wasn't possessed at the moment, but had been when he did the deed, and put him out of his misery, then spent the night digging four big graves, and one small one.

They went back to Br. Bart's house, confronted him, found him to be possessed but sure he wasn't, and tried to exorcise him. Losing, Brennan (Br. Jackson) pretty much decided to hell with saving him, I'm going to kill him, and gave, following up with a short but vicious combat with lots of pretty cool descriptions - it was nice for all of us to have enough of a handle on the conflict resolution that it went very smoothly and excitingly. With two Dogs on one man, though, it wasn't much of a contest. Sr. Augusta went one-on-one with Bart's wife in the kitchen, clobbering her with a frying pan.

Neither was the final showdown with Sr. Waitstill, despite her juicy possession dice and getting all the leftover dice I'd had on my proto-NPC sheet. They plugged her, basically. Again, though, it was 3 on 1, which is never much of a trouble for Dogs. Br. Jeb did get shot, though.

In the end, they scoured the town, saved who they could (about 5 folks, I said) and burned the rest. Sr. Augusta returned to Red Clay and her uncle the farmer, Brs. Jeb and Jackson continued as Dogs for a while, they said.

Good fun. Thanks, Vincent!

What I'd do differently: First, biggest thing: Being much more at ease with the resolution system, I'd be much less worried about simultaneous dice-rolling conflicts - I think I could handle 2 NPC pools at the same time pretty well, where especially at the beginning I couldn't have, or felt I couldn't have. We had a lot of difficult moral decisions in our 5 sessions, but whenever the dice came out it was more or less a foregone conclusion.

I'd also be very much tempted to cut back fallout, by a lot. I'd have to think about exactly how to do it, but I'd almost be tempted to keep the characters more-or-less static from character creation on, at least in their raw numbers of dice. Maybe let players swap dice around or rename Traits, that kind of thing, rather than get entirely new ones, which quickly leads to the PCs having lots and lots and lots of dice, which takes a lot of worry out of most conflicts.

Still, as I say, good fun. I'll invite my players to weigh in as well.

[ffilz]

By two pools of NPC dice, are you meaning if two NPCs are in a conflict, they each get a pool of dice? Problem with that - it gives the GM twice as much power in the fiction as any other player (actually more, since he's also set up the situation, and gets to pick his NPC traits and relationships to be most relevant to the situation at hand). One pool of dice for each player (regular player or GM) means each player has equal opportunity to do "cool stuff".

On fallout and PCs gaining more dice: Are your players ever reducing things with long term fallout? I would expect players to realize that if they just pump their dice up the wazoo they will eliminate the suspense from the game. One angle is to create situations where maybe they don't want to use their trait. Got 4d10 shooting? Are they gonna shoot that little boy to pull in their 4d10? Are you revealing the town quickly so you get your 5d10 demonic influence dice? Throwing some good possesions at them? Catch them in bed without their gun handy.

If it's really a problem, talk to the players. Perhaps they haven't actually realized how much of a problem it is.

Oh, and get the players into conflict with each other... Then you don't need to use your own dice at all, just sit back and watch the fireworks... Watch for differences of opinion between the players and poke at them. Drive a wedge in if you need to get their attention.

Frank

[oliof]

I wouldn't be too worried about multiple NPC's - you only have the advantage of the choice of traits in the first conflicts (which leads to a nice flow in narration - topic for another thread).

Don't forget the group rules. Having a united front of 30 heretics is bad news for the dogs. It will be a costly massacre. Except if you learn to love giving early. Which also leads to less fallout.

And Frank is totally right on PvP conflicts. Don't force them, but give air for them. They're awesome for the players most of the time, and they're the big show for you.

[David Laurence]

By two pools of NPC dice, are you meaning if two NPCs are in a conflict, they each get a pool of dice?

No, no - I meant two simultaneous conflicts - say one PC on one NPC and two PCs on one NPC, with different stakes, cutting back and forth very frequently. I'm not worried about it giving me too much control - 3 PCs against one NPC (even a gang of them - my 3 PCs faced down a murdeous gang of a dozen drunken miners without even escalating to shooting), no matter how many dice they have, is simply not a contest (in my rather limited experience, I admit). Where's the fun in that?

Same thing with PvP conflicts - my players are an easy-going bunch, and just didn't come into conflict with each other too much. In the first sessions especially, I would suggest "how about going to a conflict?" and they'd decline. I took this as a sign that they weren't interested and chose not to force it.

I see what you mean about reducing Traits, but I didn't want to tell my PCs how to use their Fallout - the whole point was to give them a taste of the empowerment Dogs gives players, and telling them how to "play it right" didn't seem right to me at all.

It's not like any of this was a full-blown problem - just something I noticed playing - namely, that the Dogs get lots of dice, really quickly, lots more than the proto-NPCs give you as GM.

[ffilz]

Ok, cutting back and forth between two separate conflicts could work well, though I'm still not sure about it from the extent of the GM getting two turns effectively - even though if you play out the conflicts sequentially, with no overlap in players, the GM effectively gets two turns for each player turn, it will just be less apparent. A possible risk is that the players don't get invested as much in each other's conflicts since they're busy thinking about their next raise.

On the other issues - I think a post game discussion might be helpful. The players might not have realized how their constantly increasing dice affects the game. As to PvP, they may again have not realized the potential. Or they may really want to stay away from PvP. The important thing is to make sure they understand PvP in Dogs doesn't have to be a bad thing because the system supports it without people having to kill each other's PCs (unless their rift is that big). Whatever they want is fine of course.

Frank

[Brennan]

Still, as I say, good fun. I'll invite my players to weigh in as well.

Well, Dave asked me to contribute, so I thought I'd weigh in. I played Brother Jackson. It was definitely an interesting mini-campaign and the finale was pretty intense.

The majority of the towns so far had been mostly faithful, but pride and sin had led to some problems that needed correcting. Our group had been getting pretty good at routing out the source of sin and trying to correct it in a mostly peaceful way. My fellow players have historically been pretty quick to draw weapons and cause much violence in my previous gaming experience. There was something about the responsibility they had as Dogs, though, that seemed to inspire us to go to greater effort to try and find a non-violent solution to problems. This wasn't always possible but often was.

This last town, though, pretty much creeped us all out and led to us going all righteously hardcore. The part with  Br. Nathaniel, for example was really creepy.
We ended up imploring him to beg forgiveness for his sins (which he did), then Br. Jackson and Br. Jebudiah drew guns, Tarantino-style, and executed him on the spot.
For me, it was pretty freaky in the sense that we were doing what needed to be done,  killing sinners and taking out the demon-possessed, but I was kinda disturbed by what we were doing at the same time, which was a pretty cool gaming experience now that I think about it.