[DitV] Playing Dogs in a Gamist Pawn stance

[beingfrank]

I'm unsure whether this will make Vincent cry or exclaim with joy.  This is very long, but it's written to give an account of the interactions between the players in the game, rather than what happened to the characters, so it contains lots of social details and asides.  It's more about the players than about Brother Shadrah and Sister Meg.

My regular game didn't run last weekend, because the GM said he wasn't in the right mood.  I offered to run Dogs instead.  The game didn't get going straight away, because we needed to do some last minute shopping and stuff, and so things started off unevenly.  One player was busy putting shopping away, bustling about, and tidying up, and very much not in game mode.  She wasn't listening to the other player and myself.  I stalled, waiting for both players to be ready, but the other player wanted to get going and wanted to read the game book.  I told him not to, and told him that I didn't want him to start thinking about characters until the other player was ready to pay attention.  He bitched; I let him read bits of the setting section as long as he read them aloud so the other player could hear.

He starts off and rapidly exclaims, "Oh my god, it's really slamming Mormonism, isn't it?"  He starts describing some of the setting to the other player and they conclude that the Faith is pretty much the same as middle ages Satanism and go off into a discussion about attitudes to demons in middle ages Satanism, whether the Dogs are equivalent to said Satanists, whether the enemies of the Faith are, or whether they both are.  These are the trials of playing with the son of a minister and his history buff partner.  I really want to stop all this theorizing and pontificating, but one player is still putting away shopping and getting lunch ready, and it's their house and something in me feels really uncomfortable with the idea of telling someone to hurry up getting the food ready, damnit, when I'm a guest in their house.  I'm giving serious consideration to saying "Let's just forget the idea of playing Dogs today and watch a DVD or something," but my resolve is strong, and I push on.

Anyway, we move on to character creation.  I start by saying that they should decide on a general background first, and not worry about any details further down the line until we get to that.  I describe the backgrounds briefly and ask which grabs them.

"How does each change my choices down the line?"
"In very complicated ways that I'm not going to explain just now.  Just pick one that appeals to you."
"But I can't design a character unless I know she can do what I want her to do.  I want her to be well educated and very capable."
"Just trust me on this."
"Ok, I'll pick Strong History then."
"Great, that will be cool.  Write down this by Stat dice..."

I explain what the Stats are.

"So Heart's just the Charisma equivalent?  Ok, I'm putting the minimum in that, and I'll just get around it with roleplaying."
"Um, it's not equivalent to Charisma."
"But it's like the social attribute right?  I'll just play so I never need to roll to see if I succeed in social things.  Vampire does a similar thing with linking the social attributes, but it doesn't make it too much harder to get around."

A few minutes later, "Is there any way to get more Stat dice?"
"You can get extra stat dice through experience in play.  And different backgrounds have different dice."
"Which one has the most Stat dice?  I want to be that one."

And the other player decides to pick Well-Rounded too, because he wants lots of Stat dice as well.  He decides his character will be good at shooting, and that leads us on to Traits.

Through out this, I'm trying to foster discussion of what sort of characters they want to play, just in general terms, rather than game terms, because I know that the general terms will translate so easily into information on the character sheet.  But the players seem really uncomfortable with this.  They don't make eye contact, either with me or with each other.  They both stare at their character sheets (on reflection, I shouldn't have given them to them until later) and grip their pens itching to start writing on them.  The player of Meg in particular seems very reluctant to describe her character to me, instead she asks questions about her specific capabilities.  I think she's just uncomfortable with being asked to be creative on the spot, and it's only on later reflection, well into the game, that I realise that she was avoiding describing her whole character concept to me until she'd got me to agree to the various component parts.  Maybe she was afraid that if she revealed her whole character concept to the GM, it would be nixed or I'd prevent it being as cool somehow?  That was rather depressing.

So we move on to Traits, and both players are trying to pick very general traits that they feel will be useful.  Meg's player still won't tell me what she's aiming for at this point, but goes with traits like "I used to roughhouse with all my brothers," "I taught myself to break wild horses," "Cleanliness is next to godliness" and "medical expertise."  Meg's player explains that her character's father is a doctor and he taught her medical skills.  I suggest that that statement would break into two great traits, but she decides it's better to keep it as the very vague "medical expertise 2d8" rather than two more colourful traits at 1d8 each.

Shadrah's player really just works on his traits by himself, as Meg's player is demanding all my attention and asking a million questions.  But he ends up with a reasonably conventional Dogs character.  The only time my suggestion that they collaborate on their characters had any effect was when they decided to make sure that each characters' weaknesses were covered by the other's strengths.  Shadrah will be good at shooting.  Meg will be incredibly strong and a healer.

Both players decided not to take the normal 'I'm a Dog' as a trait, and put down a Relationship with "The Dogs" instead.  I suggested to both that they might find it more interesting to have Dog down as a trait rather than a relationship, but they preferred to max out traits on other things.

They don't know what to do with Relationships.  When I say that it's a way of indicating what they want conflicts to be about, they don't seem to see why one would want to say what conflicts might be about, and leave most of their dice unassigned.

Developing Things generates probably the first excitement of the session.  Getting to write down as many things as seems reasonable to the group is very popular.  Again, they both want to do this mostly insolation.  And again Meg's player keeps asking me questions about items to test if I'm going to say no to her.  They seem bemused when I'm excited about one of their Things, rather than concerned that they're abusing the system or taking the piss.  But isn't the idea of a Dog riding about with a truly massive and excellent parcel of soap that's practically bigger than the rest of her baggage put together very cool?  I could see that coming into play in some extremely fun ways.

Meg's player seemed to really get into this and added a number of touches that made the character seem a real character, not just a façade designed to win conflicts as effectively as possible.

And so on to initiations.  I'm not particularly happy with how this went.  I wasn't as fluid in explaining as I'd have liked, and things were a bit confusing.  Picking initiation stakes was really challenging.  We got through it, and that's really the way I think of it.  The players were still thinking in Task Resolution terms, I was saying 'it's not quite like that, it's about conflicts not task, just relax and let's give it a go' and stressing that it would turn into a 45 minute digression on the theory Conflict Resolution vs. Task Resolution (not in Forge terms but in the terms of these players' experience and beliefs) with the foregone conclusion that conflict resolution was crap and any game based on it was not worth playing.

Shadrah's initiation was straightforward, but not inspiring.  Oh well.  Meg's initiation only happened after a bit of a debate, because the first ideas that the player came up with were simply not challenges.  Then the player kept picking personal growth things or attempts to change the character's behaviour/attitudes, but really didn't like the idea that she'd have to play the losing side.  She only wanted to play to win, and didn't think there was any interest in playing to win when she was taking the stasis side of a conflict about personal growth.  In the end we found something she and I could both accept.  So we rolled our dice.

"Don't look at my dice!"
"What?"
"Don't look at my dice, you're not allowed to look at my dice."
"That's not a problem in this game.  The game works best when everyone can see the dice, and can jump in with suggestions and cool ideas to help."
"But if you can see my dice and I can see yours then we'll know what each other will do.  Then we can't strategise and play the best dice.  And if you can see the dice you'll know who's going to win, so what's the point in actually going through the conflict?"
"To see what'd you'll be willing to do in order to win?  And you won't know who's going to win because the dice can change during the conflict as new things come into play."
"I don't see the point, unless it's hidden."

So we play with hidden dice.  Letting this happen was a probably a mistake on my part.  Or maybe not, because without this I don't think Meg's player would have got into the game at all.  I'm still thinking about it.

I draw on what I know of these players and decide to play out visiting a town without Something Wrong first thing.  Both players like to get an idea of their characters before leaping into conflicts where their characters are put under pressure or called on to make judgements.  So I devoted twenty minutes to a happy town, and wandering around talking to NPCs happy to see them and all nice and straightforward.

The players spontaneously played out a scene on route to the next town, discussing their character's reactions to first being called to act in their religious roles as Dogs, how intimidating the idea of it all is, and so on.

The town I'd designed was supposed to be quite freaky.  I'd decided to set the supernatural level quite high, but fairly early in the progression of Pride, in order to get greater buy in from the players for the setting's premise that Dogs should interfere in sin and make judgements.  So they arrive in a town where the demonic influence is harming innocents, but the cause isn't too complicated.

The Steward isn't at home to greet them when they arrive, in contrast to the previous town, and this makes them really worried.  From the Steward's daughter they learn that there's been an unnatural rash of pregnancies, and the children from these have been born sickly and some have died, and that there's at least some adultery going on.  The players want to use conflicts to extract information, and seem disconcerted when I have the NPCs tell them stuff without calling for dice to be rolled.

Then something interesting happens that I'll need to return to in further play.  They decided that the Steward's absence 'working in the North field' is worrying.  The players really like the idea of Three in Authority, and since they're only two Dogs, they need the Steward to form the Three.  So they start worrying that if there are any evildoers in the town, their first response to two Dogs arriving will be to off the Steward in order to prevent them acting as Three in Authority.  This never would have occurred to me, but it's something that seems to interest the players, so I'll have to develop it.

We have another conflict, with a woman who comes to them wanting the Dogs to agree to declare her marriage invalid and punish her husband for being a bad father, to get her to admit that she really wants her marriage dissolved so she can marry her lover.

So Brother Shadrah heads off to talk to the lover, Amos, and Sister Meg goes to find the Steward.  So far neither PC has taken any fallout in any of the conflicts.  This was very frustrating for me, because I really like the way Fallout works.

Meg's player wants to turn everything into a conflict, so she can then win the conflict.  She asks for a Physical conflict over whether she can free a sheep that's tangled in a fence.  There is nothing at stake.  It's a sheep.  Who cares?  Not me, certainly.  I point this out and say that this approach to trying to do things through conflicts, rather than thinking of conflicts as about things, would lead to a really boring game where she says "I want a conflict about this," and I reply, "Eh, nobody gives a damn, you succeed, have a cookie," over and over again.  I got grumpy, and said I was disappointed nobody had taken Fallout so far, as Fallout was cool, and I'd been hoping for an example so the players could see how it worked.

So she calls for another conflict, with the Steward this time and the stakes are 'Whether Steward Isaac has really done his best for the town' and the game kicks up a gear.  Meg starts out just talking; her player gets creative about brining traits into play; both sides take fallout, it quickly escalates to Physical, where Meg has some very kickarse dice, and in the end the Steward runs out of dice.

Meg takes fallout, we rolled the dice, and I explain how it all works, and the player seems really enthused.  She likes experience, and the way fallout makes things change.  She happily sets about deciding what experience she's going to take.

Shadrah's player hasn't been playing a huge amount of attention.  I should have picked up on this at the time, but the energy zapping between Meg's player and I was so strong that I didn't notice.  And we'd moved around during this to start preparing dinner, so we ended up with Meg's player and I standing either side of the kitchen bench while she chopped herbs, rolling dice and slamming down coriander covered dice in a row on the bench top next to the chopping board.  Shadrah's player stayed sitting at the table, and I had my back to him.  That was bad placement physically for keeping him engaged.

Shadrah's confrontation with Amos was much less successful.  The player started off talking, and kept shying away from conflict.  So they talked.  This NPC was designed to be the most selfish and ruthless in the town, and there was no way he was going to give anything away.  Brother Shadrah keeps going to push him, and it plays out like this:

"Cool!  Sounds like a conflict, what's the stakes?"
"Oh.  No, no stakes.  It's not a conflict."
"Oh, well, if that's what you want."
And then doing exactly the same thing when Shadrah tires to push from another angle.
"I'm trying to avoid conflicts.  I like to roleplay in such a way that I never need to get into conflicts."
"Nothing will happen in this game unless you have conflicts.  Conflicts are good in this game.  Conflicts are how you grow.  Conflicts are what is about."
"Oh."

I wouldn't say this was totally unsuccessful, as I got to test out my basic skills in playing NPCs, which is good for me as a new GM.  And I got to do a cool bit where Shadrah's player thought that Amos was setting him up to drop a millstone onto him, (which I thought might kick-start a conflict, but no joy).

But as soon as I tell the player that he can avoid conflict as much as he likes and all he'll get is more noodling (didn't tell him the town would continue to fall apart around him, I kept that in reserve) Shadrah launches straight into a conflict.  The stakes, Amos confesses his adultery and admits it's a sin.  And we leap straight to gun fighting.

"Get on your knees and repent, sinner!" yells Brother Shadrah and fires his gun just above Amos' head.  But Amos fights back, just with words and his own arrogance, and Shadrah takes the blow.  The player fails to narrate an opportunity for the consequences of this to manifest, and, at the time, I miss it.  Bad me.  Shadrah wins in the end, and Amos admits that he's sinned.  However, Shadrah's taken fallout and should be seriously injured.  Except that nothing happened in the conflict as so far described that could lead to him being seriously injured, and I really don't think the player's going to buy into the idea of a spiritual injury being life threatening.

The player is not happy.  He won, but he didn't want to get into any conflict in the first place.  He took fallout and now he's character's going to die without medical attention.  And as far as he can tell, there's no good in game reason for why that should be the case.  I suspect he's rather hoping I'll say we can brush aside the fallout results.

But then!  Follow up conflict.  Lover-boy may have admitted his sin, but he still thinks he can get away with it.  Just as long as he can stop anyone else finding out.  And the stakes of this conflict are whether he can stop the Dog getting away to tell anyone else about his confession.

"When you've put your gun away, he makes a quick grab for the wrench he was using on the machinery before, swings it up, and, smack!, clocks you in the side of the head."  And dice go out
"I dodge and step back so he doesn't hit me."
"Not for this one, you took the blow in the last conflict and didn't get injured.  You need to be injured, so you can't avoid this one."

In the end, Amos takes sufficient fallout to dent even his self-confidence and he gives and runs off.

Brother Shadrah staggers into town, but doesn't make it all the way before he collapses.  Horrified townsfolk bring him to Sister Meg and she sets about trying to heal him of his depressed skull fracture and keep him alive through the night.  Meg's player really enjoys this, as she gets to bring her healing stuff into play.  She remarks that this will have to be the pattern for future sessions, Shadrah gets injured, and she patches him up.  Shadrah's player doesn't look too thrilled by this prospect.  He gets annoyed at me exclaiming over the conflict to heal him.  I rolled really well in that, and it was hard work for Meg to win that.  She took fallout, and the player was thrilled.  She sat there happily working out how much fallout she could take and still win, so she stood the best chance of getting experience.  This didn't seem to please Shadrah's player much either.  He complained openly after the conflict was over, and I explained that I'd exclaimed in order to invest the conflict with more tension.  I got the feeling that he'd have liked that conflict to be over as quickly as possible with a yes/no answer on whether his character was going to live.  I also explained that I'd rolled unusually well, and healing normally wouldn't be so down to the wire.  That seemed to satisfy.

Meg's player was full of enthusiasm for what she's going to do next, which largely involved setting up a big ceremony to get the whole town to pray for Brother Shadrah's recovery, and taking all the married couples and physically joining the hands of each couple, in order to make any conflict a physical conflict.  She was full of questions about how conflicts with groups worked, and how she could bring elements of ceremony into this.  I said there were rules for group conflicts, but that I needed to read them more thoroughly before I was happy to run anything involving a conflict with a group.

We ended the session at that point, because it had been going for a good 6 hours by that point and I was pretty exhausted.  It was a bit earlier than we usually finish a session, and Shadrah's player turned around an offered to run the game he GMs for an hour or so.  I'd have been as happy to drive home and go to bed, but Meg's player was really keen, so we played out about 2 hours, in which rather upsetting things happened to my PC out of the blue.  I don't think this was a conscious decision on his part, but the timing intrigued me.

Another social dynamic thing that may be of relevant: I'm pretty physically active when I GM.  Part of it is that I think better on my feet than I do when completely sedentary.  But a good part that I freely admit to, is that it's much easier to control a group and assert dominance when I'm standing and able to walk around and everyone else is sitting.  If someone's talking and I want them to stop, I can walk up them and stand next to them, and they'll almost certainly stop.  I'm not being physically aggressive, but I am being assertive in occupying the space in which we play, and that's got to have an effect on the social side.

Things I'm aware of for us to work on next time:

The rhythm of raise and see.  I've got to reinforce to the players that Turn the Blow, Block/Dodge and Take the Blow need to be qualitatively different things.  And that if one Takes the Blow in a Physical, Fighting or Gun fighting conflict, then it's the player's responsibility to provide an opening for the consequences of Fallout.  This is not a game where I as the GM cause bad things to happen to you.  It's a game where you choose to allow bad things to happen to you in order to achieve your ends.  I really have to make it clear that there will be no damage rolls to tell them if they got hit.  They get to decide that, and if they chose to Take the Blow, something bad happened to them, and failing to narrate it doesn't stop it happening, it just breaks continuity and the flow of the game and makes me get shitty.

I need to keep an eye on whether all the players are engaged.  I need to be strict about ensuring that the game happens when everyone is there and able to pay attention.  Someone going to the loo is one thing, sitting and drawing pretty pictures on their character sheet and paying no attention to what's happening with the other player in the game is another.

Meg's player is totally getting into it from a Gamism angle.  She's setting up conflicts that play to her strengths, she's strategising with her dice, she's deliberately taking fallout when she doesn't need to in order to try and get experience.  Shadrah's player seemed to get less enjoyment from the game.

I encouraged the players to make suggestions, and throw in ideas.  I did it myself.  However, the only times they did this was to help out the other player against the GM.  Neither player ever suggested things to me in a conflict with the other player.  Very much the players against the GM.

I came away from the session feeling that the players wouldn't really want to play again.  That Meg's player had enjoyed the moment, but not enough to persist with a game that she felt was flawed.  And Shadrah's player really seemed quite bummed by how it all went.  But the next morning, before I was even half awake, I got a phone call asking if I had anything planned that Sunday, and if now would I like to come over and run some more Dogs.  That invitation, to come and run some more Dogs, has been repeated twice in the intervening week, and I've offered to run it again next weekend.  I'm not sure whether they're both keen to play again, Meg's player is keep to play again and Shadrah's just going along with it, or whether they're neither keen but have decided that I'm set on it and so they might as well get the town over with ASAP so my creative energy can focus back on something they're more interested in.  I'm not fussed.  I'll run the rest of the town and then see.

Have other people played Dogs in this way?  Am I doomed?

[TonyLB]

I'm a little confused as to how you got your nonsensical results of Amos talking Shadrah into an injury.  If Amos was just talking, Shadrah takes d4 Fallout, whether he himself is gunfighting or not.  So how does the best 2 d4 ever total more than 8?

On "Don't look at my dice"... I'd just laugh.  We always look at our dice.  In fact, "Okay, what's your best single die?" is the question we most often ask before raising, because nobody wants to get a blow reversed on them.  "Oppositions highest die plus one" is our standard raise.  In our games, reversing the blow works mainly as a threat, keeping people from raising low, encouraging people to keep their high dice as a deterrent, and so on.  All of that would get so much uglier if we weren't watching each other's dice.

As for the overall feeling, though... I've come to believe that avoiding conflict is a passive-aggressive control tactic for some players.  Rather than just coming out and saying "I want the Steward to repent his sinning ways" they'll wheedle and wheedle, always on the edge of an interesting conflict, never getting into it, until the GM gets so frustrated that she gives them an easy opening, just to get them to shut up.  Then when they take the easy opening they've been given, they congratulate themselves on being bold and daring, without the attendant risks of actually being bold and daring.

Once I started playing Dogs, I recognized this pattern retroactively in a lot of my earlier Vampire play (where, if my games are any evidence, it's absolutely rampant).  Dogs casts it into stark relief because the system makes such passive-aggressive behavior absolutely ineffective.  Your players split exactly down the two solutions to that issue that I have also seen:  One of them embraced conflicts and changed their style of play to be more forthright about declaring what they wanted, and the other retreated from the game and let the forthright person handle the game, while contributing only safe narrative color.

Does that sound like what you're seeing, or am I just projecting my own experience?

[Ginger Stampley]

Claire, I found we were doing a lot of dice strategizing and discussion in our last session of Dogs. There was a lot of "we can run her out of dice by [x]" talk: Michael and Avram (Bro. Pleasure) took a very Gamist approach. Having the dice on the table actually helped a lot, particularly for Avram, who was noticing how heavy talking conflicts brought him lots of fallout but minimal damage.

[Tobias]

I would just like to say that that AP post was an eye-opener for me in terms of clarity and social issues that can really be going on, instead of game(mechnical) details.

Kudos - I'm inspired.

And good luck on the continuing games - and good on you for not trying to 'fix the game', but 'make it fun for us'.

[Bankuei]

Hi Claire,

For most games, I try to find or write an "intro point" that summarises what play is about.  Dogs, has this wonderful 3 paragraphs in the front about the shopkeeper/pimp, the prostitute, your brother and your nephew, culminating in "What do you do?"

If people don't get that- then nothing else is going to fly with them.

And the "best strategizing" becomes a different issue when you point out that only by taking Fallout can a character grow...  

Chris

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Claire, I think you're falling into a common trap in GNS terms:

Meg's player is totally getting into it from a Gamism angle. She's setting up conflicts that play to her strengths, she's strategising with her dice, she's deliberately taking fallout when she doesn't need to in order to try and get experience.

I don't see any Gamism. I see a lot of strategizing and a lot of System. But in social, creative terms, it reads like rampant Narrativism to me.

Best,
Ron

[Simon Kamber]

I don't see any Gamism. I see a lot of strategizing and a lot of System. But in social, creative terms, it reads like rampant Narrativism to me.

How's this? I don't think I entirely get that. Is it because there's not an actual challenge to Step On Up to, so the player's efforts are directed towards the premise?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Simon,

The text you quoted and your paraphrase seem like exact synonyms to me.

Remember what I just said about social interactions and CA in the GNS forum? This thread is exactly about that.

Best,
Ron

[Simon Kamber]

The text you quoted and your paraphrase seem like exact synonyms to me.

Allright. Another question:

Meg's player seems to be primarily focused on gaining experience. Since the definition of Nar is closely connected to Premise, where does Premise play into all this? Is premise being adressed as a result of Meg's player's attempt to gain experience, purely because of the established system? And if so, how can you say that Meg's players' "agenda" is to adress premise?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Simon,

The single most important aspect of System in all role-playing is the reward component. In fact, you can think of character creation as a chassis for applying the reward, and resolution as a mechanism for determining how and how much. All of Dogs in the Vineyard is explicitly designed for this process, which is why it is so clear and usable. (Many other games gum up and hide this process, textually.)

"Getting experience" and "improving the character" are only associated in most people's minds with Gamism because they have been brainwashed by the existing "bad-Sim meets bad-Gamist" in the context of D&D and White Wolf games.

Improving one's character is only one of many possible tangible rewards, but even if we stick with this one thing, I strongly suggest removing the connection between "improve my character" and "Gamist" in your mind. Systems like Trollbabe, Dogs in the Vineyard, Nine Worlds, My Life with Master, Dust Devils, and Shadow of Yesterday are all based on explicit character improvement via Addressing Premise. If you haven't seen this stuff for yourself, nothing in pre-2000 role-playing history does a good job of modeling it for you (possible exception: Prince Valiant).

Best,
Ron

[Harlequin]

Getting back on topic a little, it seems to me that your general analysis of Sharach's player's choices is probably correct, but that there's one specific pattern here worth pulling out.  It's the overlap in:

"But it's like the social attribute right? I'll just play so I never need to roll to see if I succeed in social things. Vampire does a similar thing with linking the social attributes, but it doesn't make it too much harder to get around."

"I'm trying to avoid conflicts. I like to roleplay in such a way that I never need to get into conflicts."

This is pretty familiar ground to me from pre-Forge theory talk... and I find it comes from one of two places.  Yours sounds like it's the resource-maximization one, where the social mechanic gets minimized because it's supplemented by the "shadow system" of interpersonals, which doesn't cost points.  This is pretty easily dealt with, in much the manner you have done - say to him that he'll get lots of stuff via straight roleplaying, but he won't ever get the true dirt and best results that way.  You could add that this isn't even because you're reticent... it's because the system (when used for social conflicts) pushes everybody to see that the beans get spilled faster than we lazy sods would usually get around to it.

However, you might also want to watch out for bias in your analysis, I dunno... because there's a second version of the angle I'm hearing here, which would be addressed a little differently on your part.  This part is the disdain of social mechanics because of gut-level theory/elegance issues with the existence of a "shadow system."  By which I mean two completely different mechanics (in the Lumpley sense) for doing the same thing in the SIS.  It bugs a lot of people; hell, it still bugs me, in many (even most) games.  It may be that this is why his back is up over social conflict.  If so, I suggest you lay it out in these terms, and tell him that there are features of Dogs' "social" system that just aren't there in un-diced RP... the temptations of escalation, the way Traits kick in and move the conversation around to different angles, and the way it works to shove the truth out into the open so as to make this a game about "so what now?"  Let him know that because of these bonuses, rather than two systems overlapping, one of them simply has bigger guns in terms of creating the experience than the other... and that therefore going with the "shadow system" of pure talk is just going to get both he and you less of what you want.

[Fallout in a Just Talking conflict is a clear instance of this.  Why not do it?  RP with you with the dice added, and get maybe some short-term and experience out of it.  It's a bribe; it's a bribe to get us all to play it truth-out, trigger-fingered, the way it's meant to be played.  It's an everybody-wins bribe.]

These two come down to the same thing, but address slightly different concerns.  Higher effectiveness if you do use Conflict, even if you didn't spend any Traits dice on social stuff, that covers one side.  Comparing the two systems - "real" and "shadow" - and pointing out how the game's system is tailored while the other one is not, that should cover the other.

Meg's player sounds like he "caught" it here.  Go straight to the heart of it, get a Conflict that gets you there.  It sounds kind of like Shadrach's player has yet to get his hands on a conflict which really lets him take a power-drill straight to the town's core.  If I can suggest something, arrange matters (choose your Bangs) next time so that it is he, unsupported, who ends up in a position to cut straight to the heart.  It may be that he just needs to get a feel for how to do so, as the other player has.

Hope that helps.

- Eric

[Lance D. Allen]

What I personally see as the single defining problem of play is a common mistake for DitV.

Tony points it out, but I'll reiterate: Fallout is based on the action being narrated, not on the "level" of conflict. Shadrah may have been gunfighting (dubious, though. I'll get to that in a minute) but if Amos was talking, then the fallout should have been talking fallout.

I'd get pretty bent if all someone did was talk at me, and I end up needing medical care, and I'm at least *fairly* cool with the idea of damage being more narratively based than simulation based.

Also, though this is a much more minor point, IMO.. I wouldn't have even called that conflict between Amos and Shadrah gunfighting. Shadrah obviously wasn't intending to shoot Amos. It was a talking conflict, in which he could roll whatever dice he'd assigned to his gun. Vincent mentions a similar situation where a Dog might intimidate someone by putting his gun to their head.

The biggest things to keep in mind, in my experience, with Dogs are the following:

1. Stakes! Make sure the stakes are clearly defined. Make sure that the win condition is a real victory.. don't ever try to trick or bully the players into accepting stakes that are less than what they want. Not saying you would, but it can happen. Frex, in my own game, the GM tried to state the stakes as whether or not my character kept the Steward's daughter from leaving the room. I nixed that quick, and stated that the stakes were whether or not I managed to get the truth of the situation out of her. I don't think my GM was purposefully trying to screw with me, so it's something you'll have to keep in mind.

2. Raises and Sees: Make sure every raise is something that cannot be ignored. If the other person's instinct is that the raise can be safely disregarded, and they want to "See" with some unrelated action, then the raise was probably insufficient. Make sure also that any See actually negates the Raise (unless of course you take the blow). You've already mentioned that taking the blow needs to actually BE taking the blow, so I don't imagine that needs to be reiterated.


3. Escalation and level of conflict: Escalation doesn't automatically change the fallout die size. Mechanically, so far as I can tell from Actual Play posts and my own actual play, it's purpose is to bring more dice to the table. This by itself raises the stakes, because the other person will often have to escalate to stay in the conflict. Also, it's possible to escalate to talking from physical, or even gunfighting. Make sure you never roll a given trait or attribute more than once in one conflict, though. Finally, Fallout dice size is purely determined by the narration that accompanies the dice, as stated before.

4. Last, but not least.. It's okay to Give. This is a lesson I'm hard pressed to learn as a player, and I think my GM has a similar problem sometimes. Giving only means that the stakes of the conflict are lost.. but sometimes, it's a lot more interesting to lose than win. And something I learned after a bit of confusion brought me to the boards; Giving isn't Taking the Blow. It's like Seeing the blow, but losing the conflict.. So if I raise with 2 10s as I declare my intention to blow someone's head off, and they Give, then their head isn't blown off.. Unless, perhaps, that was the stakes of the conflict.

[beingfrank]

I'm a little confused as to how you got your nonsensical results of Amos talking Shadrah into an injury.  If Amos was just talking, Shadrah takes d4 Fallout, whether he himself is gunfighting or not.  So how does the best 2 d4 ever total more than 8?

That was a stuff up on my part.  I thought Fallout depended on what you were doing, not the other person.

As for the overall feeling, though... I've come to believe that avoiding conflict is a passive-aggressive control tactic for some players.  Rather than just coming out and saying "I want the Steward to repent his sinning ways" they'll wheedle and wheedle, always on the edge of an interesting conflict, never getting into it, until the GM gets so frustrated that she gives them an easy opening, just to get them to shut up.  Then when they take the easy opening they've been given, they congratulate themselves on being bold and daring, without the attendant risks of actually being bold and daring.

Once I started playing Dogs, I recognized this pattern retroactively in a lot of my earlier Vampire play (where, if my games are any evidence, it's absolutely rampant).  Dogs casts it into stark relief because the system makes such passive-aggressive behavior absolutely ineffective.  Your players split exactly down the two solutions to that issue that I have also seen:  One of them embraced conflicts and changed their style of play to be more forthright about declaring what they wanted, and the other retreated from the game and let the forthright person handle the game, while contributing only safe narrative color.

Does that sound like what you're seeing, or am I just projecting my own experience?

I think that could be part of it.  But I also think that there's a desire to avoid resolving conflicts with dice, in case the dice stuff it up.

Claire, I think you're falling into a common trap in GNS terms:

Meg's player is totally getting into it from a Gamism angle. She's setting up conflicts that play to her strengths, she's strategising with her dice, she's deliberately taking fallout when she doesn't need to in order to try and get experience.

I don't see any Gamism. I see a lot of strategizing and a lot of System. But in social, creative terms, it reads like rampant Narrativism to me.

I would agree, except that at this point she doesn't care what the conflict is about.  I think that in time that will change, but at the moment she'd be as happy with stakes I picked out of a hat at random.

One thing I didn't put in the write up, because it was getting hugely long, was that I was getting a very strong feeling that she was pushing at me and wanting me to push back hard, but in terms of challenge rather than anything else.  I remember thinking that I wasn't very comfortable with the idea of pushing back in terms of challenge, but quite comfortable in other areas.  That's probably what made me think in GNS terms.

Getting back on topic a little, it seems to me that your general analysis of Sharach's player's choices is probably correct, but that there's one specific pattern here worth pulling out.  It's the overlap in:

"But it's like the social attribute right? I'll just play so I never need to roll to see if I succeed in social things. Vampire does a similar thing with linking the social attributes, but it doesn't make it too much harder to get around."

"I'm trying to avoid conflicts. I like to roleplay in such a way that I never need to get into conflicts."

Eric, I should have made this clear, but couldn't think of a concise way of doing so.  Those are two different players.  The first is Meg's player, the second is Shadrah's.  Though I don't think Shadrah's player would disagree with Meg's player's statement.

This is pretty familiar ground to me from pre-Forge theory talk... and I find it comes from one of two places.  Yours sounds like it's the resource-maximization one, where the social mechanic gets minimized because it's supplemented by the "shadow system" of interpersonals, which doesn't cost points.  This is pretty easily dealt with, in much the manner you have done - say to him that he'll get lots of stuff via straight roleplaying, but he won't ever get the true dirt and best results that way.  You could add that this isn't even because you're reticent... it's because the system (when used for social conflicts) pushes everybody to see that the beans get spilled faster than we lazy sods would usually get around to it.

However, you might also want to watch out for bias in your analysis, I dunno... because there's a second version of the angle I'm hearing here, which would be addressed a little differently on your part.  This part is the disdain of social mechanics because of gut-level theory/elegance issues with the existence of a "shadow system."  By which I mean two completely different mechanics (in the Lumpley sense) for doing the same thing in the SIS.  It bugs a lot of people; hell, it still bugs me, in many (even most) games.  It may be that this is why his back is up over social conflict.  If so, I suggest you lay it out in these terms, and tell him that there are features of Dogs' "social" system that just aren't there in un-diced RP... the temptations of escalation, the way Traits kick in and move the conversation around to different angles, and the way it works to shove the truth out into the open so as to make this a game about "so what now?"  Let him know that because of these bonuses, rather than two systems overlapping, one of them simply has bigger guns in terms of creating the experience than the other... and that therefore going with the "shadow system" of pure talk is just going to get both he and you less of what you want.

That's a good idea, I'll try that, thanks.

What I personally see as the single defining problem of play is a common mistake for DitV.

Tony points it out, but I'll reiterate: Fallout is based on the action being narrated, not on the "level" of conflict. Shadrah may have been gunfighting (dubious, though. I'll get to that in a minute) but if Amos was talking, then the fallout should have been talking fallout.

I'd get pretty bent if all someone did was talk at me, and I end up needing medical care, and I'm at least *fairly* cool with the idea of damage being more narratively based than simulation based.

Also, though this is a much more minor point, IMO.. I wouldn't have even called that conflict between Amos and Shadrah gunfighting. Shadrah obviously wasn't intending to shoot Amos. It was a talking conflict, in which he could roll whatever dice he'd assigned to his gun. Vincent mentions a similar situation where a Dog might intimidate someone by putting his gun to their head.

That's one of the reasons I'm so unhappy with that conflict.  I didn't want to call it gunfighting, but the player insisted that he wanted a gunfighting conflict, and then refused to shoot anyone until well into the conflict.  I told him it wouldn't work, he insisted.  I fell back on a technique that I use as a Brownie Guide leader when a 7 year old refuses to take my advice, of letting them try it their way and see it all crash in a heap.  Which it did, and the effects increased when I messed up the Fallout.  But I'm not sure this is an appropriate technique to use in this situation.  7 year olds may cope better with being let to crash and burn than 30 year olds do.  Or it may simply not be appropriate for a roleplaying game?  But that suggests that as GM it's my job to stop players doing stupid things, when the player has been told it's stupid and still wants to do it, and I'm not happy with that level of abrogation of personal responsibility in 7 year olds, let alone fellow adults.

Thanks for the other advice, it sounds really good.

Thanks to everyone, I didn't get a response to everyone I know.

What's the best way of telling players 'I stuffed up that ruling, it should have been like that?'  I guess we can redo it completely, or just move forward from that point.

[John Kim]

Meg's player is totally getting into it from a Gamism angle.  She's setting up conflicts that play to her strengths, she's strategising with her dice, she's deliberately taking fallout when she doesn't need to in order to try and get experience.  Shadrah's player seemed to get less enjoyment from the game.
...
Have other people played Dogs in this way?  Am I doomed?

Claire, you talk a bit about how you interpret the other players feeling about the game.  How did you feel about the game?  From the way you say "doomed", I infer you weren't thrilled with the way things turned out.  i.e. Regardless of whether we call Meg's player's behavior as "Gamist" or just "trying to maximize character improvement" (possibly Narrativist), it seems that it didn't sit well with you.  It struck me as similar to discussion in a thread that I read about My Life With Master, http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=143051#143051">First Campaign: Resisting Master, etc..  

I can certainly understand that.  Can you elaborate more on what you liked and didn't like about the game?  Also, what have you played with these two players before, and how did DitV compare to that in your mind?

[beingfrank]

Claire, you talk a bit about how you interpret the other players feeling about the game.  How did you feel about the game?  From the way you say "doomed", I infer you weren't thrilled with the way things turned out.  i.e. Regardless of whether we call Meg's player's behavior as "Gamist" or just "trying to maximize character improvement" (possibly Narrativist), it seems that it didn't sit well with you.  It struck me as similar to discussion in a thread that I read about My Life With Master, http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=143051#143051">First Campaign: Resisting Master, etc..  

I can certainly understand that.  Can you elaborate more on what you liked and didn't like about the game?  Also, what have you played with these two players before, and how did DitV compare to that in your mind?

Heh, I must always remember my sense of humour doesn't translate well in text.

I wasn't thrilled with how some things turned out, but I also thought that it went a lot better than it could have.  This is basically my third ever attempt at GMing, and I'm regarding anything that doesn't lead to the building being set on fire or people running away screaming as a success.

I didn't like that the players got started off on analysing the game before ever playing it or reading the rules.  In the past, when I've brought new games to the group that's turned into 'from our vast experience we can tell this game will be crap' which then sets me up to fail if I ever try to run the game.  And lets any mistakes due to my inexperience be blamed on the game itself, which doesn't seem helpful in the long term.  But I want to try some new things, so I wanted to avoid them thinking it was crap until they got a chance to try it.

Meg's player's behaviour didn't worry me in itself.  What worries me about it is that she's going to be wanting certain things from me as a GM that I'm not able, willing or interested in providing.  I'm concerned that she wanted to keep her character a secret from me at the start in case I mucked it up, because that suggests that she doesn't trust me not to do that.  But I think she'd worked out by the end of the session that I wasn't interested in stopping her having fun, but I did want us to work together on us both having fun.

Shadrah's player worries me more, because I think he was trying to get into the game to please me, and had a bad time.

I didn't like a lot of things about how I handled system stuff.  I forgot rules that I'd practiced to make sure I understood them.  I kept referring to the book when I didn't need to.  Just stuff like that.

I liked it when Meg's player was really enjoying one of her conflicts and she and I were tossing ideas at each other for what could happen next.

I've played alot with these two players, mostly Amber DRPG and some D&D 3.5.  Shadrah's player GMs our Amber game that has been going for years and is up to 150 sessions, each of about 8 hours.  Meg's player prefers to GM D&D and runs a game for the other player and myself.  She also runs a game for the other player and someone else.  The general pattern is that they play a large number of three person games with one of them GMing and various other people making up the third person in the group.  Compared to other games with them, DitV was different because somebody else was GMing.  It was also different because it was a game neither of them were familiar with.  I've pretty much decided that I won't GM a game for them that they know better than I do, because they have stated that they like to know applications of the rules that the GM doesn't (or hasn't thought of) and then spring them on the GM and the GM is forced to go with it because it is in the rules and it really gets on my nerves when people do that to me.  I loath being set up or ambushed into agreeing to something that I might well have been happy to agree to if I'd been asked straight up.  I have said this, but habit can be a hard thing to break.  Not that they've done it to me so far.

I felt a lot more able to throw in ideas, and I liked that the game created an environment where players didn't have to ask me for permission in order to do things.  I got to say 'sure, knock yourself out' a lot, and I liked that.

The game was much less immersed, which is usually a big thing for this group.  Ususually we all like for things to flow seamlessly, with as little OCC system stuff as possible, but still a chance for OOC meta commentary on the action or the characters.  I wasn't fussed by that, because I'd mentally designated this first session as the clunky rules learning session where flow would be difficult, but I think I could have prepared the players more for the change in pace and that things would pick up after we got the hang of things.  Meg's player did, and in her later conflicts there was much less system talk.  That was cool.  I need to work on that with Shadrah's player.  He's still in the mindset of putting out dice and expecting me to tell him what they mean in the SIS.

I didn't like that the players didn't seem to get into each other's conflicts.  I really enjoyed that aspect when I played, and the feeling that everyone in the group cared about the outcome.  I had a player wandering off into another room to look up a quotation in a book in the middle of a conflict.  I'm annoyed about that because I wanted that feeling in this group.

Overall, I thought it was a reasonable start.  The town isn't finished yet, and I don't want to rush that.  I am going to run again until the town is finished, and then have another look at whether we continue.  I'd like to do maybe 6 towns all up, because now I've got an idea of the characters, I can make towns that I think will be more fun.  Like Shadrah's player has set up some stuff about cattle rustling, and being the youngest son that I'd like to bring out in future play.

I did go home feeling like they wouldn't want to play again.  And that disappointed me, because I'd put a lot of effort in, and run the last half of the session with a splitting headache, but they are keen to play again soon, so I was pleased.