[DitV] The End of the Dog in the Black Coat

[tj333]

Okay, this is the second half of a town that we played but didn't have the time to finish. It was a short session and it just wasn't working so rather then push we decided to finish it off next time we played. That is mostly my fault as GM since I just didn't get the town started off right.
The players are Micheal and Iain.
Micheal played ax nosed Eli (Sister Elspeth ). She is Kinda Ugly (2d10 by this point), quick to anger, and  through play has been seen just trying to do the right thing.
Iain played Brother Issac. Brother Issac is a replacement character for one that died in the last town. He is from back east but found the faith and eventual became a Dog. His initiatory conflict had him shoot his farther before leaving home. He is kinda creepy but seems to have his heart in the right place.
We have played a number of games before but the dogs game is the one that has been going the longest. We had 2 players have to drop out of it
Now for the recap.
In the town before this one it Iain's previous character had died. So to start this one we have Sister Elspeth  in her room (Iain added the touch that she wasn't wearing her coat) mourning Iain's previous character's death. Convincing Sister Elspeth to come along turned into a conflict with the line from a previous town "Don't try to be a good Dog, just be a Dog." coming back up.

Heading to the next town they find the town folk in the middle of barricading the town to protect themselves from the mountain folk that had begun to attack them. Once in the town they are asked by the Steward to see to his daughter who's husband had died in the attacks. But doing that they find she was involved in her husband's death and had little remorse about it. They have begun to wonder since it turn out many of the mountain folk who were attacking the town were faithful up until a short time ago. So they head out to the mountain folk camp to see what is going on out there. I really couldn't think of what to do here so here, I just didn't expect this.
Talking between us we deiced that they would take them to a sacred grotto where they heard the spirit that told them to go to war. Going into the cave they find the Dog in the Black coat who they have been following up till now as a kind of recurring villain in the background. They found out his name was Derrick Culver in the last town but so I'll just call the Dog in the Black Coat Derrick from now on.

We started with a Death Stakesdrill to get warmed up. I feel that this really helps me get into the game. I also use it to create little snippets of stuff that might make it into the actual game.
From this Death stakes we used:
   Gave the dog in the Black Coat Fast Shot
   A Book of Life with pages torn out
   Demonic possession with huge strength to pick up a character an cut his head off with an axe.
   Plus a few other little things.

You stand in the remains of King's Gate branch as it burns down around you. A woman from the town stands across the street from you pointing her gun at you.
Iain (her had a lot more here then I remember.): I kicks the Gun out of the woman's hand then dies from rescuing a young girl from in the building.
Me: Close but not quite good enough. As you go to kick the gun out of her hand  a band of Mountain Folk ride down the street and kill her before you get to her. Screaming and swinging their weapons they ride straight at you.
Micheal: We gun down most of the mountain folk as they ride toward us. Their leader is unharmed by the bullets and continues to wards us. He picks Issac up by the head and then chops his head off with his Axe. I  tear some pages from my book of life and jump up to him to shove the pages into his mouth. He bites off my hand but chokes to death on the holy pages. I bleed to death before anyone can come to my aid.
No, before the leader gets to you a single shot rings out and he falls from his horse with a bullet wound in the back of his head. The Dog in the Black Coat steps out from a burning building. He says that he will kill both of you then everyone that has escaped this town for his vengeance.
Iain: I step in front of Sister Elspeth. He begins to fire his guns unholy fast ripping me and my coat to pieces. I draw my knife and say "I'll kill you with my own hands for what you have done.". UI advance towards the dog in the black coat as he continues to fire one me blowing pieces out of me until I collapse dead in front of him.
Me: Lets go with that.


We now return to Dog in a Black Coat where...
You have gone through the sacred goto to find the Dog in the Black Coat at the end. The mountain folk that had brought hear to show you he power of his spirits does not see the him but some kind of spirits.
Free form role playing back and forth that lead to the stakes of Issac shooting the Dog with opposed stakes of the Dog keeping them their so he could go back to the town before they got their. I didn't have much in mind for what would happen then.
During this conflict it came out that the dog didn't like what the steward had done years ago and wanted revenge for that. Everyone agreed to drop the initial conflict (We also ignored the fallout from this conflict though I think going into the next scene and conflicts with Issac and Derrik about to die would have been interesting. But Micheal and Iain didn't seem to like that.)
In town they were let in through the barricades. The town folk recognized Derrick and didn't like him.

[qoute]As you ride down the street you can see town folk gather on either side of the street watching quietly.
You can hear a few muttering about Derrick being in the town and the sound of guns being loaded andn cocked.[/qoute]

The staked for this conflict are that everyone reveals their wrong doings if the dog's win (They wanted to know the whole story) and if Derrick won his sins were forgiven (by the town, it would have been till open to the Dogs to punish him).I gave the players 8d6 as town folk dice that they could use when ever they wanted to bring the town folk I on their side. When Emiline shouted out that the dogs should do their duty or she would (in reference to having killed her husband) as a threat that she would shot her farther, the Steward who had exiled Derrick and his farther to begin with. They removed the steward from office at this point because they saw him to be unfit.

[qoute]We'll decide who is guilty and what the punishment is. But Steward Chambers is no longer the steward for he has proven himself unfit.[/qoute]

This conflict went back and forth of the Steward saying he had done no wrong and just protected the town from Derrick and his farther. Derrick trying to make the Stewart look as bad as he could. Eventual Iain raised with Issac asking the gathered town folk what sins they thought the 2 were guilty of. Steward Jack's daughter Emiline was on the side of the her lover Derrick in the rest of this conflict.

As the town folk called out sins I turned it into a flash back of Derrick's father's life was the Dog in Angel Canyon Branch that had shot a lot of the town folk before (This is why he had a lot of people that didn't like dogs there). This lead to Derrick's farther losing faith in himself and doing a bad job of being a Dog. Eventual the Elders at Bridal Falls had to removed him from service and send him away from the faithful (He went back east for a time and became a doctor there). A few years later he returned to raise his son in the faith. But the lingering suspicion of him and the medicine from back east he used was not accepted by the town folk and he was outcast with his son. While Derrick learned the ways of the mountain folk to survive as an outcast his farther tried to stay to his Faithful ways and died in their first year as outcasts. Here it also came out that after Derrick came back to the faith he began courting Emiline so Steward Jack sent him away to be come a Dog. He turned to demons and sorcery when he found out that the Steward had forced Emiline to marry during his training time. This was the basis of the sins and pride that lead to his sorcery and murders.

When we got back to the we changed the stakes of this conflict (Micheal's suggestion) but kept the dice and fallout the same.
The new stakes were who would would Derrick take his revenge (Kill his steward and many others.) or would they convince him to give yup his revenge.
Elli drew her pistols and pointed them at Derrick saying he had no reason to live is he had lost his faith so easily but his farther had stayed true to his faith even at the cost of his own life.
This lead to a fast paced exchange of gunfire between Emiline, ax nosed Eli (Used both her ugly trait and ax here), Derrick, and Issac.
When Derrick used his Fast Shot trait (From the Death Stakes game) to shot Elspeth, Issac, and some of the town folk we kicked the supernatural  into high gear.
Brother Issac threw a handful of sacred earth into the air to stop the bullets from hitting the towns folk but took the shot himself. This one also hit Elspeth hard. (She finished the fight with 11d10, 10d4 fallout and rolled 20.). Elspeth was shot off her horse, dropped her guns but drew her ax and threw it at Emiline. Derricks flew from where he was standing to protect his love (Gave her a helping die.), Emiline, and ended up taking 4d8 fallout from the ax. For Derricks raise he flew up to Issac, pulled him off his horse and held him up by his head with mountain folk ax in one hand (From Death Stakes). Issac managed to kick Derrick hard enough that he didn't take his head off with the ax.

To end the fight Elspeth raises 16 to shot Emiline unless Derrick gives up. Unable to see that without Emiline taking a lot of fallout Derrick gives on the conflict. Elspeth dies but redeems Derrick, his Dog's coat turn from a pitch black to having recognizable colors again.
It would have been cool if everyone had died because we all had a lot of fallout and this was out last game of the Dog in the Black Coat Saga.
Derrick lives with an injury (He got really lucky) but Issac goes to dying. Derrick is redeemed by Sister Elspeth death and does the medical conflict to saves Issac using his considerable ceremony based traits. ceremony.
Here we had Iain play the fallout for his character since I as GM was doing the medical conflict with the NPC.

He: "The King of life is not done with you here. What is you name so I may call you back?"
Iain: Issac whispers,"Issac Descaroit."
Me: "Then rise Issac Descaroit. And serve the King of Life for you have saved this sinner's soul today."

We ended the game there since it made a good ending. We forgot about Steward Jack at this point but  like to think he was shot in the fight.

[tj333]

The rest of the Dog in the Black Coat towns are here. There are 2 that haven't been posted yet.
I brought this game to an end sooner then I intended to (Skipped 2 towns of the planed 9.).
Some of my thoughts as the Gm of this game.
I had too much trouble engaging the characters at the start off the towns so we always played for a while before we really got anything happening.
I second problem I see with this is when making the towns I went towards authority based sins. These are what I was comfortable running but none of the characters in the game had anything to do with authority troubles.
In this last town we changed the stakes once in the first conflict and twice in the second one. It worked really well for us to do that, though not pushing the initial conflict as hard on my end would have made doing multiple conflicts with different stakes easier. We didn't want to give due to the amount of fallout we had taken on both sides but the starting stakes didn't seem entirely right after we played a bit.

But over all it was a fun and enjoyable game. not every game was rocking out but every now and then we really did. If I felt that I could bring the games together like those few more often I would want to keep playing Dogs but now we are looking at something else.

[Mike Lucas]

I played Sister Elspeth, or "axe-nosed Ellie" as her nickname went.

This was a fun campaign and was my first 'campaign' of Dogs; before this I'd only played 1 or 2 sessions of Dogs. It was neat to see the characters grow through different towns, especially when new traits came as a direct result of something in a conflict.

I can't speak for the whole group, but for myself I sometimes had trouble totally getting into the game ... I think the episodic nature of it, where each session is a new town mostly unrelated to the old town, had to do with that. We also probably didn't use relationships enough.

I also think we didn't have enough Dog vs. Dog conflicts. Whenever we did have those, it was really fun. Especially if they came early in the session, they really got things going. However, even the conflicts we did have rarely escalated to violence when it was Dog vs. Dog. I guess our characters were just too reasonable.

THE BEST MOMENT FOR ME
Without a doubt, the very best moment in the campaign came about 3-4 sessions before the last session that TJ describes above. The final conflict in that town felt somehow meaningful and I really enjoyed it. We had discovered that the Steward was guilty of making some very poor decisions, but we judged that he still deserved to live (and in fact I think we decided he could remain as Steward too). There were certain townsfolk the Steward had wronged above all others, so we visited each of them to ensure they didn't bear a grudge. One woman, I can't recall her name, promised us that she didn't harbor any resentment towards the Steward, and we believed her. Yet she was lying to us, and while we were visiting the next person, she shot the Steward dead.

I played Sister Ellie as utterly livid: angry at the woman for lying to her, but even more angry at herself for having missed the signs, for failing to stop the woman and prevent the Steward's death. Think about it: we had just Judged that the Steward could redeem himself for his crimes, and if we had Judged it, it must have been the King's will. So this woman had thwarted the King's will!

Sister Ellie immediately drew her guns, pronounced quick judgement on the woman ("it is the King's will that you must die for this"), and aimed to shoot. But Sister Marika (played by Iain) was completely against this judgement. And so began our coolest conflict of the campaign! No need to "set stakes" - the conflict was obviously Does Sister Elspeth kill the woman? After several raises and sees, Marika ended up taking a bullet for the woman, and was incapicitated both in the fiction - writhing around on the ground - and in game terms, since Iain was almost out of dice.

Then came the turning point. Iain pushed forward some lame dice - like two 3s or something - and had poor Marika quietly say "Don't try to be a good Dog. Just be a Dog."

That Raise had such an effect on me personally* that I found myself speechless, and through me Sister Ellie was too. I looked at the big pile of dice I had left and couldn't see any way to play them without invalidating the meaning in Iain's words. So I pushed my dice aside, and said the best two words in DitV: "I Give."

As experience fallout I added Iain's Raise word for word as a 1d6 trait. I used it a lot later on, too.

* I'm not sure why it had such an effect, I guess it was because it was so applicable to the situation; it could have meant "Just because the King's will was thwarted doesn't mean you can forget your duty. Dogs must act without vanity." But maybe what got me is that her actual words were so damn understanding. I had just shot her, she utterly disagreed with what I was doing, but she spoke without any condemnation.

ADVICE?
Anyway, we weren't always able to get that kind of satisfaction in our games, although we did come close on a couple conflicts afterward (including the last one where the Dog in the Black Coat was redeemed, as TJ described above).

I think part of the problem was we didn't always setup conflicts properly - often they weren't really 'giveable', and I felt like often our Raises weren't powerful enough. (Most conflicts would start with talking, and I'd often Take the Blow using up all my 1s and 2s until it escalated, since any d4 fallout is a good thing. I had a lot more fun when a talking-Raise was something I didn't want to accept, but I think it took me a while to realize this, and I had trouble communicating this idea with the other players.)

So if you look at my example "best moment" does anyone have advice for achieving that sort of thing on a more consistent basis?

[Web_Weaver]

Hi TJ,

To clarify, did you have all of the towns pre-written before you embarked on the first one?

I ask because this may have been a contributing factor to your feelings about finding it hard to engage the characters. I strongly recommend writing towns with at least one or two of the players previous judgements in mind. It's integral to the "OK you think that, so what if these are the circumstances, even then?" flow of the game. Once the characters are engaged in a cycle of judgements they are much more directly engaged as players in the process of difficult decision making, which itself should encourage character progression.

In this way, Dogs has a direct application of the Bang concept, in that it is your job as GM to confront the character/player decisions by reacting to them and asking more difficult questions. Even when the decisions seem easy and straight forward it is a good idea to confront the decision makers with the consequences.

Mike's example is an excellent example of how dogs can work out, as when players are in that "character development mode" they are more likely to play out conflicts as an exercise in "lets see what happens here" and be genuinely interested and invested in the results as they pan out. Note in this example the narration of actions in the conflict were not based on who was winning or specific dice tactics, but instead were based directly on character confrontation based on the essence of "being a Dog". That is a win for the game text, as this is specifically the type of outcome that I believe it wishes to encourage, the idea that every action taken is a raise that asks meaningful questions and offers the option of giving.

[tj333]

The towns were not pre-written.
But I know that I had problems targeting the towns to the Dogs. I'm not sure how to describe it; it was just hard to make a town that work fore the Dogs. but that is to a large extent what the problem was.
I think if I do another Dogs like this I'll talk to the players before/during character creation and try to have them help me more with that part of the game.
Also feedback was lacking due to time constraints on the game. In out next game of Wild Talents we are going to try and fix that problem.

[Web_Weaver]

Tell me about it, I hardly ever have time to properly do the reflection phase, so I can't preach, but a few words about how the players feel their characters are changing or reinforcing their attitudes will reap massive reward.

I try and keep an eye out for disagreements between characters on judgements or theological issues then talk to one of the players with an eye to whether the issue is important to either character or player. If so, I then grab that idea and run with it. I like it when players express their characters opinions in the game as it helps me see how their ideas for the character are being formed and where they might be heading. The fallout system supports this to some extent, and the reflection fallout especially.

Luckily nearly all the mechanically driven fallout in our games are focused on character development and the premise of judgement.

[Mike Lucas]

I try and keep an eye out for disagreements between characters on judgements or theological issues then talk to one of the players with an eye to whether the issue is important to either character or player. If so, I then grab that idea and run with it.

That's good advice Web_Weaver; as a player I remember that Dogs was always more interesting when the PCs didn't see eye-to-eye. Having the GM push those issues should really help add to the fun.

TJ, I really hear ya about the lack of proper feedback at the end of game sessions, I was usually trying to get home in time for dinner with the wife & kids, while Iain needed to catch his bus, etc. You're right that we should really try to make sure we have time for session debriefs at the end of each game. On the occasions where we don't have time we could also try to use email more. Online discussions are rarely as fruitful as in-person, but still, some group feedback is better than none. (Also, email has the advantage of being recorded for posterity, so you can check back on a previous conversation when prepping a game months down the road.)

Cheers,
Mike