Revisiting Towns

[NickHollingsworth]

(Disclaimer: I am reading through Dogs, but have yet to play).

Assuming I have it right that the GM is forbidden to input any external judgement on whether the Dogs actions are good by any scale of judgement...

then is it desirable for the Dogs to revisit towns?

This would surely force the GM to improvise what happened as a result of their actions. Which would be cool by traditional RPG standards. But by its nature would have to reveal, to a greater or lesser degree, whether the GM though the Dogs solutions were 'correct'.

Comments?

[TonyLB]

That's a real interesting question.

One way to do the towns without being (too) judgmental would be to simply assume the judgment worked exactly as they intended it too, and then say "In this new, wholly sin-free (for the moment) town, where are the opportunities for pride?  For injustice?  For sin?"

I agree that it'd be real easy for that, in itself, to become a judgment upon the player's choices.  It's a tricky proposition, and I'll be reading the thread with interest.

[Mark Woodhouse]

If it was down to me, I'd say that a part of the post-Town reflection might well be "How do you think it'll work out?"

That's your springboard. If the Dogs have their doubts about their judgment on a Town, maybe that's fertile ground for a revisit down the road, after they've got some more experience under their belts. On the other hand, if the players are pretty confident they did right by the town, it seems a bit too much of injecting the GM's judgment into things to come back to it later and say 'nope, you missed a spot.'

[Adam Dray]

It all starts with Pride, right? Not Sin.

What's to say that, after the Dogs leave, more Pride doesn't rear its ugly head and one thing leads to another and you have more demons mucking about in Town?

[lumpley]

Hey Nick!

I've been trying to figure out how to answer this question so that it sticks for pretty much a year now. Maybe this time!

Here are four things that as GM you are NOT allowed to do:
1. Have a best solution in mind for the town.
2. Say what God thinks about anything.
3. Say how a PC's conscience feels about anything.
4. Grant or withhold dice to a player based on her characters' conscience.

For examples of the last, you aren't allowed to say this:
"You don't inflict ceremonial fallout on the demon, even though you did ceremony, because of your sins."
or this:
"You don't get to roll your relationship with the Dogs, because of your sins."

Here's a thing that as GM you MUST do:
Have all the NPCs in the whole game respond to the PCs just exactly as they would.

So, for instance, you're allowed to say this:
"The Prophets and Ancients organize a murder squad to hunt down and kill the lot of you, calling you blasphemers, sorcerers and renegades."

But you're not allowed to say this:
"God tells the Prophets and Ancients to organize a murder squad to hunt down and kill the lot of you, calling you blasphemers, sorcerers and renegades."

Now, when you revisit a town, as GM, you create the town anew following just the same old usual town creation rules: pride, injustice, sin, etc. The only thing you aren't allowed to do is make the pride or the sin be the PCs'; they have to be the pride and sin of NPCs.

For instance, you're allowed to have this:
"Pride: Sister Anabel feels that the Dogs' judgements were uinjust and thus shouldn't stand."

You're not allowed to have this:
"Pride: The Dogs judged unjustly."

Make sense?

A last word: as GM, you absolutely will, you will judge the characters' actions. Everybody at the table will. The only thing is, you aren't allowed to make your judgement mechanically significant. It's as simple and as dumb as "the players suffer no dice penalties for their characters violating alignment."

-Vincent

[TonyLB]

But "exactly as they would"... that's a freighted question, isn't it?  It has to do with interpretation of stakes, and how stakes stick over time.

Say, for instance, your Dogs declare that they've judged person X free of sin, and cleansed their soul, and you then decide that "exactly what that NPC would do" is to go out and commit multiple acts of heinous ritual murder in the name of a false god.  Doesn't that make your judgment mechanically significant?  What if the Dogs had won a conflict where the stakes were "person X is cleansed of sin"?  Does that make things different?

[lumpley]

It's easy to tell.

Does the player feel that the NPC has betrayed her PC?

If so, you're fine.

Does the player feel that you have betrayed her?

If so, knock it off.

-Vincent

[Eric Minton]

Say, for instance, your Dogs declare that they've judged person X free of sin, and cleansed their soul, and you then decide that "exactly what that NPC would do" is to go out and commit multiple acts of heinous ritual murder in the name of a false god.  Doesn't that make your judgment mechanically significant?  What if the Dogs had won a conflict where the stakes were "person X is cleansed of sin"?  Does that make things different?

What does it mean for a character to be free of sin?  Are the Dogs giving out spiritual lobotomies here, scrubbing away every part of someone's soul that mught give way to temptation?  Succumbing to pride is just plain human nature.  Unless you allow the Dogs to change human nature, I can't see how they can keep new Pride and Sin from ever arising again.

Maybe if you give an example, this discussion can move from the abstract to the concrete?

[TonyLB]

Sure... example time.  At the end of my run of Kettle Lake, Makepeace declared that he didn't love Mariah, and he didn't think he ever could.  Mariah still loved him.  The Dogs decided that the King of Life wanted them to be married, so they married them.

Now there was some idle talk along the lines of "Well, the King might awaken love in his heart for her,"  but that one sentence was about all the discussion it ever got.  My way of figuring things is that this is about the harshest punishment I've ever seen meted out:  He's got to live with the woman he loathes, and pretend that everything's fine.  She's got to live with the man who loathes her, and try to survive in the face of the constant tiny ways that his disgust will show itself.

Of course, God approves the marriage ('cuz the Dogs said He does), so she's going to get with child right quick.  And my sense of "What would happen" says that will make everything so much worse.  Completely separate from any second hierarchy of sin I could write up for the second trip to the town, my sense of continuity leans toward Mariah being absolutely miserable.

So what do I do on a second run through the town?  Do I make Mariah happy (the way the Dogs hoped she would be)?  Or do I make her miserable (the way I think she would be)?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Vincent: great stuff. As I've noted previously, this one seems to be the big sticking point for anybody who reads Dogs.

So what do I do on a second run through the town?  Do I make Mariah happy (the way the Dogs hoped she would be)?  Or do I make her miserable (the way I think she would be)?

Make her miserable, why not? Pride: Makepeace is ignoring his stewardship over his wife in multiple little ways, or something like that. Or perhaps the Pride is Mariah's, and causes Injustice in the form of exactly the situation you describe, an unhappy marriage. But as far as the doctrine's concerned, the problem is not the judgement of the Dogs, it's Pride in the people who have to carry that judgement out. If both Makepeace and Mariah and the town they live in were good and sinless and perfect, the marriage would be happy.

As far as I understand, a very good reason for using the town creation rules is that they bind the GM into the theological dogma of the Faith. Even if the particulars can be interpreted (heretically) to stem from some other causes, by using the town creation rules you make sure that it's always also possible to explain everything in terms of Pride, Injustice etc. So while the Dogs or somebody else might think that the marriage is unhappy because the two weren't good for each other to begin with, that's their problem, not yours. As far as you're concerned, there's a theologically valid answer waiting for anybody who's brave enough to recognize the Pride that causes it all, even if it's unlikely or even inhuman in our eyes.

So, the answer to the problem seems to me to be that you can shovel any shit you like in the town, including any repercussions from the earlier visit, as long as you stick by the theological structure. Explain the situation in terms of townspeople's sins, and you can do no wrong. Then the question is very much about faith: can we ourselves believe that Makepeace/Mariah is at fault here, or do we doubt ourselves as Dogs?

[lumpley]

Great example!

First a wha huh?

...God approves the marriage ('cuz the Dogs said He does), so she's going to get with child right quick.

Wha huh? Did you just act for God, having God give her a child? Knock that off!

Okay but that out of the way, she gets with child right quick, because as GM you get to say she does. Cool.

Pride: He doesn't put his heart into his right marriage. He thinks he knows better than God and the Dogs, and hardens his heart against his wife. You're the GM, you decide who's proud and how.

Now, up above, you're very right that it totally matters how the conflicts play out (you knew you were). Did anybody say "what's at stake is, does he fall in love with her after all?" and did they then go on to win that conflict? No? Then you're in-bounds. If they had, you'd be bound to that, because that's what resolving a conflict means. (You knew that too.)

So continuing...
Injustice: She has to live with his disgust, just as you say.
Sin: ...She takes to drinking. She hits him with an axe. She runs away to a man she doesn't love. She curses God. She laments and weeps and will not work, so her children take to stealing. Or whatever, do your worst!

All's fair.

If they're leaving town with "...well, maybe God'll see to the loose ends," they want to have to deal with it again. They're telling you so.

All of this, by the way, falls under "even now? Even now, still? You'll stand by your judgement even now?"

Eero: not everybody who reads Dogs, but some who do.

Can somebody point me to the piece of text that people are sticking on? I can't figure it out.

-Vincent

[TonyLB]

Okay, cool.  Thanks!  I'm satisfied here.  Don't know about anyone else.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Can somebody point me to the piece of text that people are sticking on? I can't figure it out.

I think it's page 91, "Playing God?" If you read it, it's not saying what you say above in this thread, not exactly. That chapter outlines a theoretical position wherein the GM as an authority figure shouldn't do in-game actions that weight in as moral judgement. The God thing is used as an example, but the chapter sounds like it's talking in principle, not in specifics, because it uses general argumentation. A wholly different rhetorical effect than your consise list, above. The reader assumes that you mean to forbid any morally relevant in-game action initiated by the GM, which quite reasonably includes the NPCs as well as God, even if the latter "isn't an NPC".

It's a seemingly consistent and justified position to say that the GM cannot pass moral judgement over character action. Indeed, what you're writing in that chapter says exactly that. A straight eye of course realises the inherent problems in sidelining the GM in that way, but it's perhaps more common to either ignore the chapter - usually for the best, because it's not that usual for GMs to abuse their authority anyway - or to tie oneself into a bunch about it and come ask here how you're supposed to be doing anything without passing moral judgement.

What you're meaning in the chapter should perhaps be expressed better by saying that the GM doesn't have any more social authority to police the game's morality than the players do. As far as in-game goes, he has no right or cause to initiate action based on his own values at all. So socially he's just another player, while in-game, he's simulating values of other people, not injecting his own. And God isn't a NPC, so he doesn't need to figure that particular person out at all. If the GM wants to put his own values in the game, he'd better create a NPC to express those values, then.

[lumpley]

Wow, that's strange. What that section says is that the GM can't award or withhold dice, that's all.

In Dogs, the GM has no opportunity to pass effective judgment on a PC's actions. Talk about 'em, sure, but never come down on them as righteous or sinful in a way that's binding in the game world. The GM can't give or withhold dice for the state of a PC's soul, and thus never needs to judge it.

I say "effective judgement" and "...in a way that's binding in the game world," and maybe people aren't connecting those to "give or withhold dice" in the next sentence. That's all that effective and binding mean. Everything wholly in-game, like NPCs' reactions and towns' outcomes, are subject to conflict and resolution - not effective, not binding.

And they're taking "the GM has no opportunity" as prescriptive, not descriptive! There I'm just stating a consequence of how the rules are built, not saying how you should play it.

Well huh. Thanks, Eero.

-Vincent

[NickHollingsworth]

I am satisfied with the answers. This is what I think was said:

* Abide strictly by what was established by the conflicts. These are the Rules based constraints.
* Use the group post-Town reflection as a means of feeling out things that might spoil the players enjoyment of their Judgement. These are Social constraints.
* Also use this reflection as a springboard for ideas about what the consequences of their judgement might be.
* Within the Rules based and Social constraints, play the NPCs true to what is known about them. Feel free to make the outcome dreadful as long as you are posing the question '... and even Now?".
* Dont even think about what God thinks about the Judgement. And don't apply any mechanistic penalties anywhere that somehow reflect what he thinks.

All of which falls under "Identify and challenge the PCs' moral grounds, by provoking their judgment." (p57) as well as, you say' "... and even Now".


As far as locating the text in the rules that sparked this fear of revisiting towns, Iv'e had a good look and the closest I can find is p94

In Dogs, the GM has no opportunity to pass effective judgment on a PC's actions... Which is, in fact, essential. If you, the GM, can judge my character's actions, then I won't tell you what I think. I'll play to whatever morality you impose on me via your rulings.

In retrospect the text fits in with what's been said here, so its fine. I had read it as saying more than that. I can now see it actually says "dont feed your opinion on their judgement back into the game world in a way that treads on the players toes or suggests its somehow backed by God or truer than the players opinions"; I had read it as saying "don't feed your judgement back into the game world at all in case they infer some of the above from it."

Thanks everyone.