[DitV] The Steward of Respite

Posted at a http://esotericmurmurs.blogspot.com/2005/02/dogs-in-town-of-respite.html">little gaming blog Joe and I have put together, here's my impressions of my first game of Dogs:

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I played Dogs in the Vineyard Friday night for the first time. All I can say is it's everything that you've heard it is. Unless you've never heard of it.

4 players spent about 2 hours total on character generation, including initiatory conflicts. My character, "Brother Jude," had a "Complicated Community" origin. We never established precisely what his family was like, but telling traits on his character sheet included "knows hypocrisy when he sees it," "knows cruelty when he sees it," and "to all appearances, does not feel pain." The other characters included a pious healer named Sister Ruth, a faithful intellectual young man named Brother Josiah who, unusually, went to university Out East, and Brother Everett, the most unusual of all of us, who actually lived Out East as a functional atheist till age 12, and was kidnapped and brought to the land of the Faithful by his crazy uncle, and who had outwardly learned to conform to the Faith but was inwardly an atheist -- or was he? Is it that the Steward was blind to his hypocrisy when he chose him as a dog, or that he knew Everett's heart more than Everett himself did?

This episode happened to focus on Jude and Everett heavily, though Ruth and Josiah both played key roles -- largely in bringing some sanity to the table in the face of the extreme actions of Jude and Everett. (In particular, Ruth's decision to follow Everett when he went on a dubious investigative mission is the only reason he's still alive, and Josiah's decision to publically defy Jude is the only reason Jude did not shoot his own brother -- the town Steward -- dead in the street.)

Jude and Everett's initiatory conflicts were "Jude learns to trust authority," and "Everett maintains his complete inward disbelief in the Faith despite the teachings of the Temple Stewards." Both failed dramatically, and both those failures colored the story dramatically.

I don't want to go through the whole story, but from Jude's perspective, what happened was this -- he was challenged on his authority by his much older half-brother, the town Steward, who never thought he'd amount to much. He decided to assert his authority ostentatiously and somewhat arrogantly to put his brother in his place. Having done so he found himself exaggeratedly supporting the authority structures of the Faith and in doing so alienating his niece and childhood playmate Serafina, who had gone to him for help and comfort from the injustices she felt her father was perpetrating on her -- he supported her father's authority over her, feeling he had to to be consistent in the authority he had asserted over her father. Finally he ended up seeing that the Steward, had badly, badly abused his authority over the his young son James, using him as a proxy in a crime of arson that nearly turned into murder.

In the end Jude was filled with fury at himself for buying into the system of authority that he never really trusted himself, which to him was now exposed as prone to corruption and abuse, and he turned that fury outwards against the Steward, and was barely prevented from executing him in a summary act of judgment (and it's a good thing for Jude that he was prevented, because I think that would have pushed him even farther down the dark path he'd set foot on at the beginning of this game.)

Jude ended up angrily consigning the situation to the other Dogs to wrap up and riding out of town.

He has vowed to himself never to trust the authority structures of the Faith too much again, not even his own authority, but to look to his heart and what he knows of the good and evil in each person -- and himself. (In the reflection segment of the game he added two six-sided dice to his Heart trait, which started out at the lowest possible value.) Whether he will be able to carry out that vow in the face of his basic anger and mistrust and coldness remains to be seen.

The rest of the post is more a review/reaction to Dogs than an Actual Play report. I like Dogs a lot.

As for the players, we were all long-time, fairly sophisticated gamers, but only two of us (Joe and I) were particular fans of self-consciously Narrativist RPGs. Everett and Ruth's players had played in the Fastlane game I reported on here before under the title "Cyberpunks of the Caribbean," and Josiah's player has played nothing but complete freeform games for most of a decade, so to him this was an incredibly rules-heavy game, and he was really inspired by how much he could *like* a system this rules-heavy (that is, a system that uses rules in play at *all*). He was muttering about using a system like that in *his* games from now on, which was really surprising to me -- he had always been the King of Systemless Gaming.