[Dogs] Cold Falls

[Ben Lehman]

Rich, you might not want to read this.

So I'm going to be running Dogs for Rich Forest and Martin Frojdh tomorrow.  I have never met Martin, so that's sort of a nervousness.  But regardless, instead of taking an old tried-and-true town, I thought I'd make a new one with the Town Creation rules.

I'll be using this thread to post about the game after we play it, but comments on the town are also appreciated.  I'm trying to decide whether to use "Jane is an athiest" as a seperate track of False Doctrine, and give her some potential converts for a cult of her own.

Cold Falls Branch

Pride:   Calvin Miller doesn't think that he has to help his poorer neighbors
   Steward Archibald think he's a worse steward that Calvin would be.

Injustice:   Folks begin to starve
      The steward knows that the people of the city need to pull together, but he's afraid to confront the Millers.  So he picks an out of town circus and blames them for the problems.

Sin:   The steward jails an acrobat, Jane, for practicing witchcraft on their harvest.  Rest of the circus moves on.

Demonic Attacks: Winter hits hard.

False Doctrine: Outsiders are inherently dangerous to the community.  The Steward preaches "We've all got to stick together, or we'll all fall down. Outsiders are dangerous."

False Worship: While the Steward certainly has the ear of the whole town, there are really only two people who absolutely buy into his ideas -- Sis Relief and Bro Cyrus.  So not quite yet.

Sorcery: Not yet.

What do people want from the Dogs:

Steward Archibald: Wants the Dogs to pronounce Jane a witch and kill her.  Wants them to confirm his stewardship as better than Calvin's and get people to help each other.  The two close members of his cult are Sister Relief and Brother Cyrus.  Potential third members: Jane if she starts to believe that she really is evil, or Derrick.

Jane: Wants the dogs to help her out of jail.  Wants to meet back up with the circus, but most especially wants to stay alive.

Brother Calvin Miller: Wants the Dogs to settle all these problems so he can get back to making money.
Sister Augusta (wife): Wants the Dogs to tell her how to help other townsfolk.
Sister Fidelia (older, unmarried daughter): Wants the Dogs to let Jane out of jail.  Wants them to help her out of this podunk town.
Brother Hiram (older son):  Wants the Dogs not to cause a stir.
Brother Cyrus (son): Wants the Dogs to support the steward.  Wants the Dogs to convince his father to give away the family wealth.

Brother Nathaniel Brown: Wants the Dogs to provide food for his family.
Sister Obedience (wife): Wants the same.  Wants the Dogs to put the Millers in their place.
Brother Derrick (son): Wants to see the Dogs to lay down some furious judgement, if not on his family.
Brother Seth (son): Wants the Dogs to convert Jane, because he is in love with her.
Sister Relief (daughter):  Afraid of the Dogs, as they are outsiders.  Wants to marry brother Cyrus.

Sister Obedience is a cousin to one of the Dogs.

What do the demons want: Witch-trial hysteria would tear apart the town.

What would happen if the Dogs never came:  The steward appoints Brother Derrick as "The Dog of Cold Falls."  He kills Jane.  The town would begin to fall apart again, so the Steward'd have to accuse someone else, this time a member of the community, and Derrick'd gun them down.  Eventually, the town would tear itself apart killing witches.

[Ben Lehman]

So after consulting with my friend Dave (Jinx on these forums), I have revised the town.  I like this better, because both the Steward and Bro Calvin are well-meaning, but ultimately self-destructive.

Cold Falls Branch, take 2:

A little settlement up in the mountains, it has a profitable mill and not much else.

Pride:      Bro. Calvin Miller thinks that he alone must care for his poor farming neighbors.
      Steward Archibald thinks that Calvin would have been a better steward.

Injustice:   Bro. Calvin's family is poorer than they should be.
      The men of the town are prevented from providing for their families.

Sin:      The men of the town begin to neglect their duties to their families.
      Steward Archibald, looking for some way to band the town together, accuses a
      member of a traveling circus of witchcraft.
      Bro. Seth has been stealing food from the Millers to give to Jane.

Demonic Attacks: A bad winter drives a vicious food crunch.

False Doctrine:   Steward Archibald begins to preach about how outsiders are a threat to
         the community, and cannot be trusted, and how the community has to
         band together to stay alive.

Corrupt Worship:   The worship is increasingly inward-focused.  The prayers are all about
         "the people of cold falls" and no reference is given to outside authority or
         to personal need.

Stop.  We are not yet at False Priesthood, because the Steward only has two real followers: Bro. Cyrus and Sis. Relief

What people want:

Stwd Archibald:  Wants the Dogs to pronounce Jane a witch and kill her.  Wants the Dogs to turn over the stewardship of the town to Calvin Miller.  Failing that, wants the Dogs to tell him that he's doing the right thing, after all.

Jane: Wants the Dogs to help her out of jail.  Wants to meet back up with her circus.  Wants to never see faithful territory again.  Most especially wants to stay alive.

Bro Calvin Miller: Wants the Dogs to get people to care for themselves, so he can go back to making money.  Wants the Dogs to praise him for his faithfulness.
Sis Augusta (wife): Wants the Dogs to tell her how to properly help the other townsfolk.
Sis Fidelia (daugh): Wants the Dogs to help her escape from this podunk town of losers.
Sis Laura (daugh): Wants the Dogs to pick a suitable husband for her.
Bro Hiram (son): Wants the Dogs to get his father to stop giving away the family fortune.
Bro Cyrus (son): Wants the Dogs to take away the family wealth and give it to the poor.  Wants the Dogs to bolster the Steward's faith in himself.

Bro Nathaniel Brown: Wants the Dogs to provide food for his family.
Sis Obedience (wife): Wants the same.  Wants the Dogs to put the Millers in their place.
Bro Derrick (son): Wants to see the Dogs judge fiercely.
Bro Seth (son): Wants the Dogs to convert Jane, because he is in love with her.
Sis Relief (daugh): Wants the Dogs to go away and leave the town alone.  Wants to marry Bro Cyrus.

Bro Ezekial Pine: Wants the Dogs to tell him he doesn't have to work.
Sis Cornelia (wife): Wants the Dogs to put her husband in his place.  Wants the Dogs to name her new daughter.
Bro Josiah (young son): Wants the Dogs to leave his dad alone.

Sis Obedience, Bro Ezekial, and Bro Calvin are all possible relatives for the dogs.

What the demons want:  The demons want Bro. Archibald to appoint Bro Derrick as a false Dog, and to drive the down apart with witch trials, paranoia, and executions.  The demon's name is Chill.

What would happen if the Dogs never came:  Jane or Derrick would form a third worshipper for the steward's false doctrine.  Derrick, possessed by the demon, would begin to police the town himself.  Jane would be executed.  Derrick's policing would become more and more vicious, until he kills Bro Calvin dead, with the steward's blessing, and opens up his granary for the town.

[Judd]

Ben,

You have an extraordinary amount of NPC's there.  Seriously.  That is fine but be ready to just leave most of them out, including only the ones the players really take a hankering to.  Perhaps making a few of 'em players' relatives might be a good idea too.

I like Jane.  I can see playing her as really rational and cool and see how they react.  Ya never know with these dogs.

Can't wait to see how it plays out.

[Ben Lehman]

So we just played the game.  I may or may not end up doing a longer play report later, but on the whole play was very interesting.

As Judd predicted, only a few characters actually entered into conflicts: Calvin, Archibald, Jane, Cyrus, Relief and Darrick.  Seth showed up but never actually rolled dice.  This is pretty expected, and nicely conformed to the 6 proto-NPCs that I generated.

Things ended up pretty bloodily.  Cyrus, Darrick, and Archibald all got killed, the last in a cold, last minute execution right as they were leaving town.  Jane left town on one of the Dogs' horses, and they made Relief the new steward (after killing her brother and the man she loved in front of her.)  Calvin got off with a scolding.

I want Rich to write some about his experience of the game.  I got the feeling that it was deeply, deeply connected to his experience growing up religious in the US, but I don't want to speak for him about it.

yrs--
--Ben

[Rich Forest]

I have plenty to say here, especially about the resonance of Dogs for me, but I'm going to start by passing the ball back to you, Ben. There's something interesting in how Hezekiah (my dog) interacted with Jane, (especially in the barn) and all the stuff that led up to Jane's stakes of "does she get you to care about her" (the wording of that might be off – feel free to correct it if it is). I'm fascinated by that stakes and where it came from. I have a pretty clear analysis of what I think was going on, and it'll bring us back to my religious experiences, but I want to hear you talk a little bit about it first.

So what do you think? What was up with Hezekiah there? Total bastard? Just kind of a jerk? Just too inward looking, only caring for people of the faith? All of the above, none of the above, or, what? (Of course, it was a recurring theme, so feel free to range as far and wide from the barn itself if some of the other scenes were more salient for you. I'm interested in that stakes in the larger context.)

I have a take on it, but I want to see what your thoughts are.

Rich

[Ben Lehman]

What was up with Hezekiah, there?  Damn, Rich, I don't know.  I was sort of hoping to ask you that.  The whole situation at the Brown's place went so differently than I expected that I'm still totally thrown for a loop by it.  I don't really think that Hezekiah was a bad person, but honestly it's so much not my place as a GM to be thinking about that that I haven't really come to any sort of judgement about him.

For those playing along at home, here's the situation:

The Dogs have called a prayer meeting at the meetinghouse, disregarding that the blizzard tore the roof off and it's filling with snow.  There's a huge throwdown at the prayer meeting between the Steward and Cyrus, his most enthusiastic believer, and the Dogs about control over the meeting.  The Dogs get control, but then are confronted with a demonically possessed Darrick, the cult's newest member.  After a bloody, vicious fight that leaves Darrick and Hezekiah (Rich's Dog) on the ground bleeding out, the Dogs are driven from the meetinghouse and out into the snow.

They take refuge in a nearby barn, where Jane, the accused witch that they let free, is also hiding out.  Jane helps Ezekial (Martin's Dog) patch up Hezekiah.  The conversation afterwards basically leads to a conflict where Jane is asking for their help to get out of town, Ezekial is backing her up because he's in love with her, and Hezekiah is strongly opposed.

Jane's basic motivation here is that these two guys seem more or less decent, and she frankly doesn't trust anyone in the town at all.  She knows that she needs help to get out of a mountain town in winter, and she pegs these two as people she can trust to help her.  Jane sees herself as a good person because she will help people who need it, but she's also not above emotional manipulation and using people for her purposes, especially if she's desperate.  So she's basically trying to pressure Hezekiah into helping her by trying to form an emotional connection.

The conflict was basically, from my perspective, Hezekiah (Rich) saying "I can't emotionally connect with you because you're not faithful" and Jane (me) saying "then that means that your faith is getting in the way of you being a good person and doing the right thing."

Jane wins the conflict.  After that, the whole tone of the game and Rich's portrayal of Hezekiah changed.  I have no idea why, and I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about that.

yrs--
--Ben

[Rich Forest]

Yeah, this is definitely a key conflict. Partly, I think, it's key because we were contextualizing it differently. There's another level, though. I'll come to it in time.

Here's what Hezekiah's basic motivation is -- he's here to help make things right in this faithful community. Can he emotionally connect with Jane?

Yes. He already does.

But that doesn't mean he can put her first. So if the conflict is, "Can he emotionally connect with her?" I give. But what I was seeing at that moment in the game was something more like, "Is his connection to her enough for him to put her before the town?" And I'm saying, "Nope, not a chance." She can go -- in fact, in every scene with her, Hezekiah was letting her go. Free her, and when she runs, don't try to stop her or chase her. Ezekiel can, but that's not Hezekiah's concern. Seth is stealing food from the grainery to give it to her? He's not a sinner.  He's just helping a stranger in need. That's my judgment. Let her leave town, sure. Help her on her way? Nope. Ezekiel wants to help her leave town? I'm not opposed. He's free to do that. Kill the faithful to make amends over her being done wrong. Yes. I will make amends, and if faithful need to die to make amends for their treatment of an outsider, I will judge them with my own hand. But I'm not leaving town with her, blizzard or no. She leaves town, the King of Life will decide her fate. Not my place.

See, Jane doesn't need my ministry. The town does.

So that's one level. There's more going on here, though. Remember when I lost that conflict? I gave on my go, and I had a 6 to carry over to a follow up conflict if I wanted, and you were totally taken off guard that I didn't follow up with a conflict to convert her to the faith. It was such an obvious follow up. I keep saying I'm committed to the faithful, now I gave and accepted that I'm putting her first, so the obvious follow up conflict is to convert her to the faith. All of us know it. But I didn't follow up with it. What was that about?

Hezekiah had a whole lot of Baptist in him. That is pretty much a given, 'cuz I have a whole lot of Baptist in me. Going to Baptist school five days a week from Kindergarten to 11th grade, going to Sunday School and Church every Sunday morning, evening worship every Sunday night, Awana on Tuesday, prayer meeting on Wednesday, and youth group activities on the weekends until you graduate from high school, that will put a lot of Baptist in you. Going to poverty stricken neighborhoods with your youth group to minister to the homeless and try to bring them to accept Jesus.  That'll put a whole lot of Baptist in you. Teaching children bible stories and helping them to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior, actually praying with them when they come to Jesus, actually converting them, that'll put a whole lot of Baptist in you. It's been a long time now since I believed in it myself, but you can see why Hezekiah had a whole lot of Baptist in him. 

But there's something he didn't have in him. He was not evangelical. He was not a missionary. He was not going to be converting anyone to the faith.

And I kept trying to let that athiest Jane go so you couldn't corner me into converting her into the faith. Because that is the line I will not cross with him. When that well-meaning fool converts that girl to his fundamentalist religion, when he prays with her and brings her to the King of Life, that is when I judge that dog. 

_{edited to fix names}

[Ben Lehman]

Rich -- that makes a lot of sense to me.  I'm sad that we had a miscommunication about the conflict -- I saw it as "Do you help her" rather than "do you help her instead of the town" or "do you help her before the town."

I have some other stuff I want to talk about, but I want to know if you're comfortable continuing this conversation in public and online.  Let me know.

yrs--
--Ben

[Rich Forest]

Don't be too worried about the differences of contextualization -- they're fairly ordinary in a lot of conversation, and I have a very high threshold for ambiguity in my fiction. In any case, where there was a significant enough difference in contextualization to potentially be problematic, I generally noticed it (not clearly recognizing the specific differences, but noting that we were orienting to different cues somehow). If any of those had been make-or-break differences I could always have pushed through a little harder on it. None of them were.

You can feel free to continue the conversation here. I can't come up with any follow up at the moment that I'd consider a "I don't want to go there" kind of thing.

[Ben Lehman]

Okay, cool.

I'm seeing a direct tie to how you played Hezekiah and your religious background, at least as far as you've talked about it with me.  Particularly, Hezekiah is a Baptist in the manner that you were raised, but he doesn't convert people.  This rings to me, although you can tell me whether or not this is true, if you trying to redeem that part of your life -- "I'm going to be that sort of religious person, but I'm going to be really good and righteous" -- and not converting people seems like a big part of that.

After the conflict with Jane where, more important than the stakes, she made you take several conversational blows about your moral bankruptcy, the whole tone of the game and your portrayal of Hezekiah changed.  All the deaths in the game -- even though you didn't initiate most of them -- happened after that conflict, and very thick and fast.  It seemed to me like you switched into a mode of "okay, I guess I can't be good and be religious" and began to play Hezekiah with faith very much shaken.

That's my perception, at least.  Is that accurate at all?

[RipperDoc]

I'll just stumble in here and give my view on the play session and Dogs...

About me: I'm Martin "RipperDoc" Frojdh (http://blog.nogo.se), a computer scientist and RPG author from Sweden, living in HK. In Sweden I spent hours and hours each week gaming, writing or preparing, but in HK I haven't played much at all. This session of Dogs was not only my first time playing that particular game, it was also my second time since August I got to play any RPG at all.

I've read this and that about Forge games and indie games previously, but never really played them. My speciality in Sweden was free form gaming. So, in Dogs I was confronted with a very different set of rules than I'm used to - although I was prepared, having read and discussed conflict based systems before. And it worked out fine in the end. Conflict based rules are excellent at producing the dramatics and the dialogs of good movies or books, and this almost automatically. Other rules completely put this responsibility on the gamers themselves. The back side was the extensive use of dice and tactics - it was hard to get the flow of the game when constantly interrupting play. As immersion is one of my highest priorities when playing games, this will be a major draw back with Dogs, and I guess, most similar games. I would however love to use elements of the rules and incorporate in my own play or writing, without losing the immersion.

About the session: I played Ezekiel Gore, a southerner that fought in the Civil War, and then converted into the faith. He takes his responsibilites as a dog very seriously and he is also very deceisive. He see his serving as a Dog as the only way to pay for the sins he commited during the war. Paired up with Hezekiah, he was the apparent authority while Hezekiah would be the one with the most knowledge of the scriptures. My traits were the following:
I'm a dog
I lost the war
I was a lieutenant
I converted in blood
I lost love
I'm sorry for what I did (this came from the introductory conflict)

I will not write the details of what happened, but Ezekiel quickly took deceisive action when the session started. The steward seemed to tell lies, and when he had a poor woman tied up in the basement, Ezekiel lost his temper and assaulted the steward. However, the poor woman, Jane, ran away, to Ezekiels great anxiety. After that, Hezekiah took the initative and Ezekiels role was more as a physical backup, to say "Yes, he is right" with a big rifle in his hand. And as Derrick attacked us, things turned really ugly. To Ezekiel, this was a war against the demons, and therefore casualites were expected. He shot Derrick, and when Derrick didn't die, he went to his home and shot him again, in front of his sister. He would probably have shot the sister too if she hadn't been a woman. And when they got back to a new meeting to find a new steward, Hezekiah wanted to shoot Cyrus, for reasons that weren't apparent to Ezekiel. But Ezekiel is loyal, so he shot Cyrus too when requested. And finally, he shot the old steward, for the crimes he had done to Jane. And he left as a broken man, because Jane was lost and all they have done seemed to have been done for now reason at all - just like the war...

In the conflicts, Ezekiel often found himself forced to escalate to violence as he had no relationships with the people of the town. He had good use of his traits, because to Ezekiel, everything seemed to connect to the war. Two times he had to face the decision of actually backing away or giving up, in order to save himself, Hezekiah or innocent people. He hated every time he had to give, but if he hadn't things would have ended earlier and bloodier.

Coments, thoughts, insults? :)

/RipperDoc

[Rich Forest]

Hi Martin,

I'm glad you stopped by the thread -- I was getting ready to write you an email in case you hadn't spotted it. Feel free to give your take on Hezekiah, too -- I'm interested in where you may have been getting the same vibe as Ben and where you may not have. I think in some ways that between Ben and me there are some interesting intercultural differences in our interpretations of  the conflicts and their meanings. Ben, I'm going to come back to your questions, and I'll give you my interpretations for comparison, but it's been a very busy day and I need rest for tomorrow.

Martin, I'm going to take your arrival as an opportunity to hand over the spotlight to you for a bit. I wanted to say that I loved it when Ezekiel stepped in to take down Cyrus just because he was backing up his dog. Also, at the end of the session, when Hezekiah was walking out of town in the blizzard and Ezekiel executed the steward although Hezekiah had already judged him forgiven? I didn't get it at first. But then, I'm sitting in the train on my way home and I made the connection to the first scene, and I saw how it brought Ezekiel's relationship with the steward full circle, and it totally worked for me.

One thing that stood out for me about Ezekiel was that you incorporated some really excellent changes to your character sheet with your fallout. What was the scene that gave you the cynical trait? I didn't notice it when you added it, but I sure did notice it when you used it.

[RipperDoc]

To me, Hezekiah seemed easy to interpret in the beginning, but as Ben said, everything turned at one point and to be honest neither me nor Ezekiel had a clue why :) But even though Hezekiah made no sense to Ezekiel, he supported him out of loyalty for his fellow soldier. Could you explain why Hezekiah seemed to loose interest both in converting Jane and in accepting that we were murderers rather than dogs when Relief said it?

And the steward, yes, it has all to do with the beginning. Ezekiel could have excepted that the steward was not responsible for being a bad steward or a cult member (because Hezekiah apparently did so), but he couldn't just forget what had been done to Jane. Of course, death is maybe a grim punishment for the crimes the steward had made, but cynical has Ezekiel had become, it didn't matter much. And, the best thing is that we finally could turn the "I am not worthy" trait of the steward back at him - because by asking the steward if he accepted death, he had not much choice than to answer yes.

Cynical came from the conflict with Relief, or somewhere around there. After using murder and assault as our only preferred method of solving problems, I thought cynical was a highly appropriate trait :)

[Rich Forest]

Alright, I'm going to try to shake out the Hezekiah thing.

It could turn out to be a little anticlimatic, though.

The main thing is, looking back at it, Hezekiah did bring to my attention just how awful I think missionary work and converting people to your religion is. I think it's a pretty deplorable behavior. It's made up of a mix of arrogance, ignorance, and concern, but doing it requires that you think you're just acting out of concern (the ignorance of course helps here). That is the dramatic story I can tell about Hezekiah.

But I'm not sure I can tell a redemption story in light of it. Mostly, I can look back and think, "How stupid and arrogant and awful that behavior is and was, in retrospect." But I can't say, "I want to redeem it; I want to make it right." I don't really think about my past actions in terms of redemption. I think accountability is a better frame. I'll be glad to own it. I did it. And I'll be glad to comment on it, judge it, and basically say it was stupid, arrogant, and generally kind of terrible behavior. But redeeming it just doesn't parse. I'm not torn up about it, wracked by guilt, or anything that fits into a redemption frame.

Also, as far as the question, "Can I be good and religious?" or even "Can I be good and a fundamentalist Christian?" or even "Can I be good and a traditional Baptist?" Yes. Yes. Yes. It's not even a question for me -- my relationship to the church is pretty well sorted out and has been for a very long time. Did each of the two churches I was a member of have some pretty rotten people in them, and petty backroom politics, and scandals, and hypocrisy? Yep. Did each of the churches I was a member of have some pretty amazing people in them, people I respected and still respect? Yep. Were these the same people sometimes? Yep. Sometimes they were. All this is to say, "Are churches social institutions filled with humans?" The answer is yes.

So it's hard for me to phrase that kind of conflict about being a Baptist. I don't have any real dramatic fall from grace story about religion. No dramatic change that made me hate God and the church. Just the slow, plodding, gradual acquisition of knowledge once I went to university that made me question the  truth and rightness of a lot of it, including and especially the whole "God" thing and eventually led me to just sort of figure it doesn't look all that good as a claim about reality. There are just better explanations out there that don't involve magical father storm gods who live in the sky and care who people are having sex with. Is it unfortunate that a church-based education systematically crippled my understanding of the physical and biological sciences, filling my head with arguments both specious and fundamentally dishonest? Oh yes. Am I thankful that the church taught me how to read, and to read well, to read stories filled with symbolism and think about them intelligently? Yes. I am.

So that isn't at the heart of the matter for me, I don't think. There's nothing new in there, nothing I had to sort out.

I think to figure out the shift in that scene we need to remember that a) I was orienting to a different conflict and b) the shift was co-constructed. Remember, what I got out of it was something like this, "Who am I committed to most, who do I put first?" What I got out of that conflict was, "Can Hezekiah stick by his people and help them solve their problems, make them take responsibility for their actions, or does he take responsibility for their actions for them and help this stranger out of town?" And the answer I got was, "Holding them accountable can't be his first priority." So when Relief castigated them, she was right. 'Cause if he's not a dog, he is just a murderer.

Now as to why everything changed after that conflict, why the deaths all happened after it but not before, I have a theory. This is where the co-constructed nature of RPGs comes in. I'd like to suggest that was a team effort. See, that conflict wasn't just key for the story I was focused on. It was key for the story you just told too. Who died, in the end? The false dog, on Ezekiel's judgment. Cyrus, on Hezekiah's judgment. The steward, on Ezekiel's judgment. Thing is, man, Cyrus and the false dog didn't survive the first prayer meeting because we hadn't decided to lay down judgment. I tried like hell to kill that proud false cultist, cousin or no, in that prayer meeting. I just failed. Why did we succeed later? I think it was because only then had we passed a conflict that resonated sufficiently, even though the particular resonance was different for each of us.

Rich

[Ron Edwards]

I'm liking this a lot. It's rare that I read a Dogs play thread and say, "They got it." You guys got it. Fantastic work.

And Ben, good on you for actually playing the game without flinching. It's easier as GM. I look forward to seeing that in your experience with a player-character.

Best, Ron