Question about Dogs other duties

[Nev the Deranged]

As I read it, Dogs is an old-fashioned game in terms of GM authority over NPC's.

Okay, see, that's interesting, heh.

Cuz I would have let the player narrate the contents of the letter. Not saying my way is right, what you describe is great, and it's great whether the GM had that planned or just wung it (did I just say "wung it?" hm.. yes I did).

I'm specifically interested in any Actual Play instances of this kind of stuff. I realize there are lots of ways it could be handled. I'm more interested in how it actually has been handled, if at all.

Anybody else?

[olleolleolle]

What?

Are you thinking the Dogs would read the mail they carry?

Or that the Steward would?

Personal mail secrecy... could be a forceful Demonic Influence. A Steward might have to think like that.

All kinds of evil can come from having the luxury of not having one's mail read.

In some towns, the Steward might have to read all the incoming mail (is that too flippant? paranoid?).

Complication: If the Dogs are reading the mail, it sets them apart from the other postmen in the young country. This makes them queer and different (in a True and Apostolick manner, of course - the World is a horrible place, who would not want to be different from it?), and fuck-the-law-esque.

Scene concept: a pack of Dogs meet other Post-riders. Their conversation turns to talking shop. The Differences start showing.

[Jason Morningstar]

Mail is an area for some rich social interaction - something both personal and public.  Sorry not to have any good examples of actual play per the purpose of the post, but I totally want to write a town where the injustice is the Steward reading everybody else's mail and acting on this knowledge to keep things in order. 

This only buzzes if the Faithful have any expectation of privacy, which I suppose my players can tell me. 

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

In a recent one-shot, I used mail delivery as the basis for a trait as well: I read other people's mail, 2d6.

Now, see, that's the kind of thing I'm interested in.  So the Dog reads someone's mail. What does it say? Does the GM have something in mind? Do they just wing it? Do they let the player narrate the contents of the mail and wing that?

To my mind, that's pretty straightforward:

At stake: can you pressure Delia to do the right thing?
Sr. Delia (NPC): I don't know what you're talkin' about.
Br. Aldus (Player): (I've read her mail. (roll)) I know you been seein' that boy.

Vaxalon (what's your real name, anyway?), what you're proposing there seems to be outside of a conflict, but there are stakes. It seems to me that your conflict there would be better stated as the GM saying from the outset that there's this mail you've got....

[Vaxalon]

My real name's Fred.

Actually, it's inside a conflict... a conflict to which I say "Yes" instead of "Roll Dice".

The stakes are "Do we find anything interesting in the mail when we open it?"

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

My real name's Fred.

Actually, it's inside a conflict... a conflict to which I say "Yes" instead of "Roll Dice".

The stakes are "Do we find anything interesting in the mail when we open it?"

I dunno, Fred. Not finding anything interesting is a pretty lousy way to make interesting things happen.

Interrogating someone's mail, that's cool. You get all the human interaction that you get in the "Do they spill?" conflict.

[Vaxalon]

That's exactly why I said "Yes" rather than "Roll Dice".  The alternative was uninteresting, and I saw no reason to roll dice.  Is this discussion getting circular?

Any time there are stakes, there's a potential conflict.  I don't turn any potential conflict into a diced conflict.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

That's exactly why I said "Yes" rather than "Roll Dice".  The alternative was uninteresting, and I saw no reason to roll dice.  Is this discussion getting circular?

Ah, right on.

[lumpley]

I just want to point out that there are probably half a dozen different mechanical ways to use reading the townspeople's mail, some GM-controlled others player-controlled, all legit. There's no sense trying to establish any one of them as "the" way to handle reading the townspeople's mail.

I'm not saying that anybody doesn't already get it, I just want to make sure it's in the record.

-Vincent

[Nev the Deranged]

Yeah, I had kind of forgotten this thread because it didn't yield what I was actually looking for...

I understand that mail or whatever could be used lots of ways mechanically. What I was actually requesting was examples of actual play (okay, I got a few bits, but nothing in depth). And it wasn't so much the mail thing, that was just an example of a convenient way to link towns together. Which is what I really wanted to know about.

Can towns be linked together, storywise? To what degree? Just cosmetically, or can "plots" or conflicts actually encompass more than one town? The Dogs find relatives in nearly every town, it seems safe to assume everybody has relatives in any given town. Surely these people interact in more than casual ways sometimes?

Or does the structure of Dogs discourage that sort of thing?

That's what I'm really after here.

[Vaxalon]

I haven't had a game run long enough to see more than one town... yet.  We will shortly.

I fully intend for events in one town to have repercussions of various sorts in the next.