[Dogs in the Vineyard] Our Dogs Set Forth

[Christopher Kubasik]

I start a new job in a few hours, so this will be quick. I believe others will nail down a larger chunk of the game.

There were five of us: Mark, Josh, Judson, Alex and Myself. Josh and Judson had played before. Judson was the GM.

We created Dogs, did our trials, and decided, what the hell, let's play.

I want to touch on two points before crashing:

1) The first conflict caught me off guard. I was "roleplaying" it with Judson, sort of hoping to get the truth from a young scalliwag who might or might not have murdered the the husband of a woman with whom he was now living with in sin. I said something forcefully, and then realized -- This is now a conflict. Why? Because Judson wasn't going to give me jack unless I started rolling dice!

This may seem obvious ot the rest of you, but to me it really was talking the train down a line I'd never gone before -- because it wasn't a matter of making a single die roll and seeing if I intimidated the guy. Once I started the conflict I didn't know where it was going to go! And that was great!

I bumped my head on the same confusion during the conflict as well. I'd nail Judson with some zingers, and stare at him, watching him blink or look away as he revealed to me that the kid knew something he wasn't telling -- but nothing would give.

I kept expeting to unlock the secret by impressing the GM with my roleplaying. But that's not the same game. There's be this pause and he'd snap out and go -- "Great intensity! But you need to role the dice!"

2) .... and this is the point.

After checking around online here and at RPG.net, I kept bumping into this notion that Dogs was going to "break" the roleplaying, that it was "a game about a game."

This wasn't my experience at all.

Yes, we didn't run straight through long stretches with "no die rolls" -- which is sort of a default condition of "roleplaying."

And yes, I had to manipulate dice during the encounters.

But...! I found that though I didn't sit there mouthing off in character for a long stretch, the encounters were STUFFED with SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS for the charcter (and myself).

I have no idea if this was immersion or what. But as far as I'm concerned, althouth the moments were chopped up by the dice rolles, the choices I had to make to narrate Sees, Raises and the introduction of Traits provided much, much more meat thant the standard, "We hold forth at each other a while and see if a single die roll or the GM's whim gets me what I want."

By forcing me to justify again and again each of my character's thoughts or motivations or words or actions as the Conflict escalated, I got to go through the journey of my Dog ending up in places he never meant to go. And I had to see each one of them CLEARLY because each Raise and so on was a discrete unit.

By the time my Brother Josiah (who has among his traits, "Wants things to work out well d6") said to the young man, "Some times the King of Life wants us to kill to make the day good," both my character and I (if you will), were like "Whoa. Where'd THAT come from."

I'd like to contrast this to the game of Rest & Relaxation mentioned elsewhere on this board, where I was able to play an exiled dictator reading real newspapers and translating them into stories about my homeland. Pure immersion roleplaying was possible: no one was going to interupt me, and I could say anything I wanted.

But it wasn't engaging for me. Where as the "choppy" roleplaying of Dogs really engaged because each beat was a turn or a twist or a deepining of a moment, held up in the light, revealing something unexpectd almost every time.

This is why I'm putting "roleplaying" in quotes. I think there are a lot of assumptions about what it means, when it's real or whatever. But my experience over this last week seems to run counter to the assumptions of many.

For some it means immersion, lack of interuption, staying true to the course with as much honesty as possible.

For me, it's about that honesty -- but I'm willing to give up happily the run-on roleplaying for those highlighted moments that are a revelatory about a character as a precise bit of description from a novel.

Another example. Once the boy admitted guilt, one of Brother Josiah's fellow dogs (Brother Jent) pointed his gun at his face and was about to blow him away. The other three dogs tried to stop him. As the conflct went on, Jent wanted to pull in more dice. He uses his "Shamed in the Eyes of Others." Which is thought was amazing. Suddenly, he wasn't trying to shoot the boy out of religious rightousness, but out of feeling shamed because his peers were trying to stop him. That's great!

The game, a little like the Pendragon Traits, really, forces your PC into behaviors and points of view that are consistant with the character, but which, in different contexts, reveal unexpected pathos, grace, violence and mercy.

But this idea of the revealed internal life is the one I wanted to make:

One style of roleplaying seems based on the Dramatic Arts. We only know the character from what the player says, but the internal life is closed off from us. This kind of constraint is in part what defines the good roleplaying.

The other seems more from the Prose Narrative tradition. I had to get under the skin of Brother Josiah -- revealing in well defined moments, what was happening to him during the conflcit and sharing these details with my fellow players. Loved that!

I don't know if either one is "more" roleplaying. But I know I respond more and engaged more to one than the other.

Christopher

[dunlaing]

I think one thing that mitigates the amount of dice in Dogs as far as "getting in the way" of roleplaying is that you know what the dice have come up already.

Imagine an alternate reality in which you only roll the dice that are part of your raise, leaving all the other dice in the conflict unrolled. You'd narrate some cool description of how you're forcing the other guy to really react hard or Give, push forward your 2d10, and roll two 1s. Splat. The roleplaying falls down as the dice don't back you up. Even if you narrate after rolling those two d10s, you wanted to make a big statement with this Raise, and now you can't.

In our, more perfect reality, we have a Dogs where you roll all of the dice first. So the uncertainty of the dice is behind you by the time you're planning your Raise or See.* This means that you can plan your actions, you can react with an appropriate amount of force in your narration, etc.

Anyway, that's why the dice don't get in the way for me the way they might in other games.

_______________________________________
*Note that Dogs does throw that uncertainty in your face for Escalation and Trait usage. Which is cool. You have a good idea of how well the conflict will go if you don't escalate, and escalation is a risk. It works for me.

[Supplanter]

If you take creative agenda theory seriously, it only makes sense that some people are going to find more system-driven games like Dogs or Burning Wheel extremely satisfying compared to more mimetic games and vice verse. Christopher's post is moving testimony of the former happening.

What fascinates me about Dogs is its status as a "crossover hit." I've run into some people who find it "breaks" for them, but I've run into more people who love it, even if they don't love other obtrusive-system nar games. There's a small population of "I don't like it because it's about the dice." Other than them there seem to be two kinds of people in the world, People who won't even *try* Dogs because it's icky immoral so we're going to stick with playing assassins and vampires instead, and people who really really really like it.

I think Bill's onto part of the crossover appeal. I think the kinesthetics help too - I like pushing my raise dice forward the same way I like moving my red stones in a MURPG game. I can "talk mimetic" while "moving mechanically" But I'm sure there's more to it than that.

Best,


Jim

[HenryT]

I've seen that same attitude on RPG.net--that having to roll dice interferes with roleplaying.  I think it comes from a misconception about what the role of system is.  When I'm playing in the Storyteller system, the system isn't very committed to respecting either the conceptions of the characters or the flow of the story.  It tends to throw out random results based on a vague notion of realism.

Consequently, many people who want something other than gamism or pure setting simulationism get in the habit of cutting the system out of the decision process.  It becomes an either/or issue: either we're using the system to do something or we're roleplaying, and these are two distinct, unmixable, modes of playing.  I run a Vampire LARP, and I've noticed that every time there's a significant fight, I just propose an outcome to the players and come up with a mutually acceptable outcome (usually this involves the PCs beating any NPCs they're fighting, perhaps with some side effects).  When I don't care about what happens, then I let the dice handle it.  But I don't trust them on important fights, because they take a long time, sometimes throw out really arbitrary and inappropriate consequences, and aren't likely to produce an outcome that's better than what I can invent.

My first game of DitV was very different--I began looking forward to conflicts because they drove the game forward instead of distracting from it.  But it's a very different relationship--the two separate modes of play are now intimiately interwoven.  And if you're used to playing your character a certain way, some people may be uncomfortable with the shift.

Henry

[dunlaing]

Even with good systems though, the dice can derail you. Take Burning Wheel for example. If you're in a Duel of Wits, you might script a Point, come up with the best roleplayed point ever (and one that makes a lot of sense) but then not roll any successes. In Dogs, you can just put your two highest dice forward when you want to make that well-roleplayed point.

It's the advantage of Fortune in the Middle. The narration matches the system results because the system results are evident before the narration.

[Josh Roby]

Hey yo, Josh in the OP here, player of Brother Theodore.

I found myself last night wishing for the same thing that I wanted in my prior Dogs game, a more explicit and easy means to determine when a conflict should begin.  It seems that in "freeplay" we just sort of noodle along, meeting people, having some idle chatter, wander around the town, et cetera.  How we transition from that and into "oh it really matters, now" conflict needs, it seems to me, a little narrative-minded executive decision making that I don't see mirrored in the procedures of the game.

Or on the other hand, this may boil down to Say Yes Or Roll Dice territory if we approached it from a different means.  We all narrated what we were doing, but until somebody called down a conflict, we didn't really say why or declare our intentions.  So while we would be talking to a character that we became slightly suspicious of, we just kept roleplaying and asking more questions; we did not tell the GM "Okay, I want to find out what he knows."  If we had done that, I suppose the GM could have Said Yes Or Rolled Dice.  So if the character in question didn't know anything more, the GM could tell us as much (Say Yes), or if he had more, we could have started up a conflict (Roll Dice).

On a related note, I also wanted some stronger scene-framing, but I don't know if that's something that the system-as-published didn't provide or just something that we didn't do at the table.

In regards to Christopher's scare-quotes around roleplaying, I think this jives with what we were talking about after the game, that in Dogs you approach characterization and immersion and the story as a whole from a different vector.  You don't just sit there in pure reaction mode, doing your little character dance with little to no impact on the situation and setting around you.  You do that characterization and immersion by manipulating these tools you've got called Traits, and in the act of characterizing your character, you are also making an impact on the world around you.  But it's the difference between, say, dancing and capoeira, where you are doing something beautiful either way, but in the latter the action has an impact beyond aesthetic considerations.

[Brand_Robins]

Hey Josh, have you checked out Matt Snyder's audio files of his Skype Nine World's game? It's an interesting thing to hear, especially when you compare his procedure of play to that which we used to use in our old Tribe 8 games, and that which we use in our Dogs game. The degree of deliberation and narrating rather than acting is significant, I think, to a lot of the assumptions about how people play.

Check it out, then compare our OTT Dogs session and the way we'd "act/pose" the characters into conflict with the way Matt starts at the conflict. It's some interesting stuff.

P.S. Where did you play this game? Online or face to face or phone or what?

[Brand_Robins]

As to the OP and the idea of Dog's dice breaking RP, I have found in actual play that isn't the case.

My wife (spaceanddeath) is a big immersivist and character-centered player. She also likes to plug into games on a gut level of emotionality, rather than having to think through the procedures all the time. (She's a bussiness analyst, and gets enough of that in her day job.) However, she loves Dog's system and has found it both intuitive and supporting where she does find most RPG systems to get in the way.

The things she's said about it break down into a couple of areas, some of which others have touched on. Because she rolls ahead of time and has a pool of dice that lets her visually see how much "steam" her character has she is able to intuitvely feel where the conflict is going and can steer herself in that direction.

Also, the fact that traits come in when you narrate them in works very well for her because it makes the traits serve characterization rather than the other way around. So, unlike in games like Exalted, there is no argument about whether this test should be Performance, Pressence, or Socialize -- when you show your character doing something, you bring the dice in.

Next on the hit parade is the fact that as a player Dogs gives her the ability to move her character and the world around her in powerful ways, using the mechanics, without being complex about it. You raise with two, see with two, take with three or more, and reverse with one -- easy. There isn't huge math, lots of charts, or many difficult permutations. It's about, once again, making the system serve the story rather than the (more common) reverse mode. And because she can say "I DO THIS" and push forward dice that she knows will let her do that, she feels more control and understanding of what is going on. The system lets her drive, rather than be driven, and that lets her feel more in tune with the game rather than like a passanger in a ride .

And finally, the structure and premise of a Dogs town (JUDGE THEM SINS!) sets up inherently emotional and volotile situations that let her get her drama on.

Put it all together and you get a game that looks really system heavy and intrusive, but which plays pretty fast and easy and supportive.

(Issues like joining ongoing conflicts aside.)

[lumpley]

Joshua: "Say yes or roll dice" is, yes, supposed to be the "now we're in conflict" rule. I bet you're right that if you start saying why, conflicts will happen sooner, cleaner and stronger.

You're also right that the game doesn't provide any scene framing a'tall, which is my bad.

-Vincent

[Josh Roby]

I bet you're right that if you start saying why, conflicts will happen sooner, cleaner and stronger.

We'll try that next week.  Rockin'.

[redivider]

My initial reactions from the first session:

character creation was fun. I  like inventing traits (likes the circus, haunted eyes, hunted rabbits, etc), and assigning different dice sizes & quantities to them based on which ones i wanted to bring into conflicts most frequently was a nice twist. Relationships didn't come up much in the first session.

I enjoyed my character's initiation/ accomplishment (convincing the sister of a dog from a socially prominent family to let me woo her), and thanks to other players' helping me shape the stakes, the outcome determined an important trait ('man among half breeds,' aka I feel superior to the other dogs in our group). However, since conflicts can stretch out and take a long time, I was edging towards boredom during some of the other players' accomplishment trials.

I second Joshua's comments on how the game felt bifurcated. The wandering around town felt like call of cthulhu- investigate corruption in an insular community -  while the conflicts were like heroquest on crack.

The conflict rules and dice system created an enjoyable challenge to drag in relevant traits, possessions etc. I like how the game tempts you to escalate from talking to fighting. The fallout & experience rules seem absolutely necessary. If characters didn't get new traits frequently then the patterns of traits that we used would get tedious quickly. I would always bring in man among half breeds to inspire brother cyrus to outperform the other dogs (or try and fail) and kick in haunted eyes in emotionally charged situations and when death showed his face. The length of conflicts was a plus and minus, allowing the pulse of the scene to develop and shift, but also potentially being a drag if there are too many solo (one dog vs. npcs) conflicts. After our only solo conflict Christopher displayed game etiquette by drawing his character away from the action so the other 3 dogs could take over the conflict. (A withdrawing that also made sense in the story since his dog had escalated a conflict beyond his starting comfort level.)

As others have mentioned, constantly focusing on character sheets and dice led to a roleplaying style that Judson, our Gm, described as 'looking over your character's shoulder.' I usually play this way, regardless of system, so I enjoyed it.

The moral choices and escalation that I had read about the game showed up early. The young man who finally admitted to murdering brother 'fell out of the barn onto a pitchfork' at the prompting of brother pitchfork's wife must have gotten threatened with summary death half a dozen times, with or without guns being pointed his way. Though my dog pitched in to help convince Alex's brother jent to not shoot the young man, I don't think I would have minded if we had lost the conflict and Jent ferally slaughtered him. Either outcome would be interesting and complicating.

It will be interesting to see as play continues whether ditv works better as a game of heroes rooting out evil or as a game of characters stressed to point that they have a chance of waking up from fundamentalism's dark hallucination.

[Josh Roby]

So we got to the 'Judgement' part of our first town, and I was surprised to find that Dogs has a sort of Endgame, without ever designating it as such in the rules text.  Very abruptly the focus shifted from "Dogs dealing with Town" and into "Dogs dealing with Each Other."  Of our four identified sinners, we agreeably exiled the octogenarian steward, shaved bald the two adulterous women, and placed the jezebel of that pair in a household that would keep an eye on her -- but then we came down to the murderer, and the dice came out.  We had two conflicts (Do we kill him?  Okay, since we're not killing him, can we mutilate him?) which were the most hard-fought and engaging conflicts of the entire town.

We did run up into some issues -- specifically, some means by which people can jump into conflicts that have already started, some means to switch sides in a conflict, and how to shift the focus of a conflict if the need arises.  We had one Dogs stay in a conflict to prevent the other Dogs from escalating to violence, and all but abandoned the stakes of the conflict.

[JonasB]

When I don't care about what happens, then I let the dice handle it.  But I don't trust them on important fights, because they take a long time, sometimes throw out really arbitrary and inappropriate consequences, and aren't likely to produce an outcome that's better than what I can invent.

My first game of DitV was very different--I began looking forward to conflicts because they drove the game forward instead of distracting from it.  But it's a very different relationship--the two separate modes of play are now intimiately interwoven.  And if you're used to playing your character a certain way, some people may be uncomfortable with the shift.

I've had the same exprience, only wanting to use the rules for the less important stuff. And my conclussion is completely contrary to yours. The role of rules in my games is to have quick ways of deciding things when you don't find it important enough for a full in character scene. A often used phrade is "A game should have rules for what it is supposed to be about". I actally want to reverse that to "A game should have rules for what it is not supposed to be about". Not that the first alternative is wrong, it is a perfectly resonable way to reason, but could this be one of the things dividing people when it comes to "how roleplaying is supposed to be"?

[HenryT]

I've had the same exprience, only wanting to use the rules for the less important stuff. And my conclussion is completely contrary to yours. The role of rules in my games is to have quick ways of deciding things when you don't find it important enough for a full in character scene. A often used phrade is "A game should have rules for what it is supposed to be about". I actally want to reverse that to "A game should have rules for what it is not supposed to be about". Not that the first alternative is wrong, it is a perfectly resonable way to reason, but could this be one of the things dividing people when it comes to "how roleplaying is supposed to be"?

I'm not sure it is.  I said the same thing before I'd seen Dogs and similar games (indeed, many of the early games I played were diceless Amber derivatives, and I was very skeptical of system at all until I saw systems that actually complemented the main part of the game).  What I found so compelling was that the system complements an in character scene rather than replacing it.

I've seen plenty of systems where the mutually exclusive options are, basically, "use mechanics" or "have an IC scene."  Given systems like that, I would agree with you that the system should be simple, fast, and focused on incidental aspects of the game.  (Indeed, the danger is exactly when the mechanics supplant IC interactions but become involved and time consuming, which is what encourages players to focus on them in order to gain more impact on the game--that's much of where the adage about rules focusing on the important parts comes from.)

The choice Dogs gives, though, is what Vincent calls "Say yes or roll the dice."  If something isn't important, then let the PCs succeed (not an option in all games, but one that fits well in Dogs)--and what resolution can possibly be faster than "say yes."  When it is important, you have an in-character scene and use the mechanics, together.  The mechanics keep the tension up and push the scene along, but you're having a scene as well--the point is to enhance the scene, not supplant it.

Henry

[JonasB]

I said the same thing before I'd seen Dogs and similar games ... What I found so compelling was that the system complements an in character scene rather than replacing it.

But I say it after playing games like Dogs in the Vineyard. I find the system obscuring the in character scenes and offering nothing in the "quick but not predetermined" area. So, clearly there are different way of experiencing the rules, and I dare say my experience is as valid as anyones. I give that dogs is both elegant and fun, great for telling stories, but it do not give me what I need when I want to play a character.