[DitV] Five hours of fun tightly packed in five hours of play.

[Eric Provost]

Tonight we played a quick pickup game of DitV with a virgin gamer.  Most of this post will likely be about her.

Maura is in her mid thirties and has never played any form of RPG before tonight.  When I first received my copy of DitV she overheard me talking about it with my regular game group and mentioned that she'd like to play "that Mormon game".  Unfortunately her schedule is pretty tight with a full time and a part time job on her plate so it was near impossible for her to sit in on our usual games.  Now however my schedule is crazy too and I play whenever I can get a body to come over to our house for a couple hours.  Lisa and I have been home all week and itching for a game.  None of our usuals could make it due to other obligations but Maura told us she had this particular Friday night off.  So, on short notice, we decided to get together for a session of Dogs.

We started the night with some takeout southern bbq and a brief overview of the simple things, like polyhedron recognition skills.  About 7:30 the TV was off and character sheets were out.  I had Lisa make a new character because I wanted the discussion between players that comes with multiple PC generation and I didn't want Maura to feel like there was a spotlight on her during the process.  We spent a good amount of time discussing the differences between Traits and Relationships and it took Maura a little bit to get into the flow of authoring the two. 

When we got to initiations I suggested that Lisa go first so that Maura could see how the flow of dice went back and forth.  Lisa did a nice short little conflict where she exorcised a demon from a newborn baby.  (It was born with a full mouth of teeth, what could be more evil than that for a nursing mother?)  Lisa and I took our time as we moved the dice back and forth, explaining every move to Maura as we went.  When we got to Maura's Dog, Zachariah, for his conflict "I hope I avoid loosing my temper and shooting someone" she hardly needed any encouragement or prompting at all.  She took to it naturally. 

Both Dogs succeeded at their initiations.  No surprise to us.

Now, I'd like to say that I took way too much time making this town.  It took me maybe an hour to get the initial notes down and I only went as far as Demonic Attacks.  I kept trying to fine tune it and make it "grabbier".  Spent two hours on that.  Two wasted hours.  Everything I did to tune it I undid by the end of the night.  That's a lesson worth learning.  The DitV town creation rules are very good.  Trust them to give you a good town.  You don't need to push. 

One of the few things I've added into the DitV experience as a new standard (as of tonight) is some slightly more formal scene framing.  I'm tired of the "Then I do this..." informal method of scene framing.  I wanna get to the point.  Don't get me wrong, I like the little scenes where the players discuss what they're going to do next in character, but I don't need or want a play by play of every single event in the day of a character.

So, I had some notes for my opening scene.  I framed out where the Dogs were and who was saying what.  It was revealed that there was a young couple in town preparing to get married and the Steward wanted the Dogs to preside.  The husband-to-be approached the Dogs and the Steward that evening to say that he's having trouble with his fiance who wants to delay the wedding.  Again.  Turns out that this time she's using the excuse of the wrong fabric being delivered for her dresses and she wants to wait for the proper fabric.  The groom wants this wedding to go on schedule and he's very adamant about it.  Maura decides that he's being a bit too adamant and starts questioning him about the situation, taking him aside to do so.  After a great little scrap where B. Zachariah and the goom threw each other around in the street the groom reveals that he's tired of waiting for sex. 

Maura was in the groove during that conflict.  We only paused to discuss what kind of narration Lisa and I like to hear from Sees and Raises.  It'll probably take her a little more playtime to get used to narrating Sees where she takes the blow, but otherwise she was right there.

We talked a bit at that point about how I wanted to move onto formal scene framing after that scene and we moved onto the next day when the Dogs would confront someone else that came up during the first confrontation.  Lisa took right to my suggestion that the players could and suggest framing and started talking about the mercantile where things were going to go down.  I'd started timing the length of our conflicts from first roll to fold, just to see how they compare to our 40-minute FH8 conflicts, and I wanted to note here that this conflict took only 14 minutes!  No one was willing to escalate past physical so the dice were there and gone really fast.

It was an excellent scene.  I didn't have to push, I didn't have to lead. It was totally natural.  The bride to be revealed that she was really delaying the wedding because she was in love with someone else, but her best friend had told her, and all the other girls to lay off this particular eligible male.  During that scene I recieved two "Oooh!"-s, in sterio, from Lisa and Maura as the bride revealed what she knew.  I was impressed and entertained.

The two NPCs revealed were tracked down and confronted in the next two scenes, one of which didn't include any conflict, but the promise of a conflict later on.  Once again Lisa and Maura took a moment to look at each other in shock as the love-object of the bride revealed that he was pretty sure that the King of Life intended for him to be a Dog.  Oh, and would they meet his mother who's already drawn up a pattern for his coat?  They really stutterd and stammered over that one.  It was a great gaming moment.

The final conflict of the night was with the best friend of the bride, the manipulater that kept any single female from accepting the advances of the love-object.  The Dogs double-teamed her and got her to admit that her actions were prideful.  It was a great conflict.  No one really wanted to hurt anyone else, but Lisa's Dog ended up shaking the hell out of the poor girl for 6d6 physical fallout.  No shit, I rolled a 12 for fallout.  So, of course I immediately rolled her Body (4d6) to see if she'd recover on her own.  Lisa and Maura were busy with their own fallout, discussion what they'd like to see for each other's choices there.  I assumed that, with only 12 fallout the girl would probably recover on her own, and I'd just narrate a tummy ache that eventually goes away.  Those four dice gave me 6,3,1,1.  They didn't add up to 12 all together, much less three of them adding up to 12.  She won't recover without medical aid. 

That was pretty much the end of our session.  It was after midnight and Maura was tired. 

It's my intention, and I told Lisa and Maura this, that the girl's followup conflict about her internal injuries, will probably best come up at another dramatic moment, as Lisa fully intends to make sure that everyone get's married by the end of this story.

What really struck me tonight was Maura.  She's the fourth person that I've introduced DitV to and she was by far the quickest student.  Lisa and I didn't have to say hardly anything twice.  Really the only thing was to remind Maura when she was supposed to be narrating a See instead of a Raise ("Hey Maura, that sounds like an attack instead of how or why you're dealing with what just happened here").  We never had to go over what the Stats were for, how to get Trait or Belonging dice into the game, nothing like that at all.  I suppose she took to it so easily because she didn't have to unlearn anything.  No gamer baggage of any kind.  No fan baggage for the setting.

It really was five hours of fun in five hours of gaming.  Granted, some of that fun was explaining the system to a complete noobie, but none of us can wait to see how this story ends.

-Eric

[Eric Provost]

It occurred to me this morning that some readers may be interested in my writeup of the town we played last night.  Also, I'd be interested in anyone's ideas on how to keep things spicy when we get together to play the remainder of the town.

High Rockton

[ScottM]

Sounds like a good, solid session.  Just to be clear, the two hour town creation was something you did during the week (prior to the game), not after the characters went through their initiation, right?

Do you think Maura will play again? Did she seem as pleased with the game as you did, or was she more focussed on shortcomings (like the raise vs. see issue)?

Scott

[Eric Provost]

Yeah, the town-creation snafu pre-dated the session.  I'm a real strong believer in pre-game prep. 

I'm pretty sure Maura is interested in playing again.  She almost stuck around later than she knew was good for her just to see through to the end of the story.  I haven't had any post-gamenight feedback from her yet, but she was raving about the game as we ended the session, so I think she was pretty darned pleased with it.  To be honest, I don't think she was focused on the raise vs. see issue at all.  She seemed much more focused on the story at hand as opposed to the little trappings of system.  Which I think is a very good sign.

-Eric

[Jason Morningstar]

Wow, that sounds fun.  Not to be a big fanboy, but Dogs seems like a great gateway drug for people who have never played a roleplaying game.  It's straight ahead, the game mechanics are both intuitive and meaningful, and maybe most importantly, you can't really "do anything wrong", either in character generation or play.