Divergent Worship, Opposing Doctrines

[TonyLB]

We were chattering about Dogs at DEXCON, and talking about how interesting whacked out takes on the Faith can be... how compelling, how entrancing.

And I said (and stand by) this:  "It shouldn't be 'False Worship', or any other such judgment.  The problem with the town should be that two groups of people are worshipping differently.  It's opposing worships, opposing priesthoods.  It's a people-problem, and it can be solved by anything that gets everyone on the same page."

I think the only change in the rules would be that if you have two opposing priesthoods they must each have at least three members, and that sorcery is demonic influence that can apply to anything that will drive the two priesthoods apart.

Thoughts?

[Eric Provost]

Very interesting.  I'm all for it.

Attaching the 'False Priesthood' label is a bit of judgement on the part of the GM.  Taking it away makes the decisions more difficult for the players and their Dogs.  Taking the position of 'differing worship' also grants some new avenues to the GM.  Such as presenting two perfectly within-the-faith standpoints that are opposed to each other, threatening the town with a split.

So, in other words;  If you look at the rift between the worshipers as the way the demons get their grip on the town then you've got something more interesting than the easy questions of Good vs. Evil.

-Eric

[lumpley]

Hmph. Buncha relativists.

Deciding what's false doctrine is an important duty the GM must not shirk.

-Vincent

[Lance D. Allen]

It's also important to note that the False Doctrine tag does not necessarily get carried into play.

The GM is allowed to have preferences, judgements, etc. What he's NOT allowed to do is try to enforce his standards on the play group. He may set something up, label it with big, bold black letters as FALSE DOCTRINE: KEEP AWAY!!. He can have every sympathetic NPC in the town against this false doctrine, and every obvious villain for it. This may be a little heavy handed, but he's within his rights to set the town up as he chooses.

The Dogs now, if they come in and decide that this False Doctrine makes way too much sense to be anything other than the King's Own Revelation, and the players decide that their characters are right in making that determination, then guess what? All of those sympathetic NPCs are wrong, all the villains have been right all along (though they may have other sins that need fixin', those villainous NPCs..) and the GM has to take it with a smile, and try to make it interesting. As a player he can argue that the book says this, and that their previous judgements say that, but if the players and characters agree, then the King has Spoken.

[Eric Provost]

Deciding what's false doctrine is an important duty the GM must not shirk.

Why?  No really.  Why?

Vincent & Wolfen,
If I, as GM, decide that one faction is False and one is True then, no matter how hard I try, that judgement of mine is going to bleed over into the game.  It's just going to happen.  The players will see who I think is right and who I think is wrong.  And when that happens it makes the decisions of the rest of the players easier.  Maybe it's the carry-over from 'finding the GM's plot' that might still be stuck to my player's shoes.  Is that still an issue in your group?  Because it sure as hell is in mine.

Now, to be clear, I'm not talking about which way of playing is right and which way is wrong.  What I am talking about is a method for forcing my players to make tougher decisions than I'm currently making them... make.

Can the players judge against the True doctrine and for the False doctrine?  Hell yes.  But then... that just means that the doctrine that I thought was True really wasn't.  That just means that my lables were wrong anyway.  As a GM playing DitV I don't want to know what the answers are.  I don't want to talk about what the Dogs can and can't do.  We've been over that.  What I do want to talk about is making things tougher (and therefore more interesting) on the players.

-Eric

[Solamasa]

But the GM is not making a personal judgment.  He's making a judgment based on the way the Faith is set out in the book.  This is a Faith that is sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and isolationist.  Naturally, NPCs sometimes don't like these sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and isolationist doctrines, and so try to come up with their own.  So the False Doctrines could often, from the GM's standpoint, be the "right" doctrine, but that's completley irrelevant.  What's relevant is that the Dogs must cope with figuring out how to ease the troubles this break from doctrine has created because, make no mistake, deviating from this wonderfully offensive doctrine causes all hell to break loose!

[lumpley]

The way I see it, the kind of hard decision that Dogs supports best is the one where it's clear and undeniable what you have to do, but the consequences of doing it are hard to face.

The game, the genre it's part of, the moral demands they make - they call for real villains.

-Vincent