The Dogs totally blow it - then what?

[Vaxalon]

What happens when the Demons get their way?  When "What the demons want" is what actually happens?

Do you hold onto that town, on the offchance that the Dogs decide to revisit it, so you can show them that the Demons got their way?

Or do you keep pushing it while the Dogs are still in town, making sure that they're aware that "Something's STILL wrong" before they leave?

[Eero Tuovinen]

How could you do the latter when the players have already decided otherwise? I usually have to explain to everybody why it's OK for the GM to have the NPCs have real opinions about moral issues, but this time we have a pure and clear situation of GM morality. If the GM "pushes it" even after the choice has been made, it's pretty clear that he has an agenda of his own. This exact behavior is warned against in the oft-quoted part of the rules dealing with GM playing God.

The only valid pushing is if there's NPCs in the town write-up who haven't yet got the opportunity to spill their guts. If so, let them. If there's still an ancient, secret and evil temple under the town after that and the players don't know about that (or whatever), then the GM isn't doing it right - this is not a mystery game of trying to figure out what the GM thinks is wrong. It's virtually against the rules to have "something wrong" that is explicitly hidden. My point: if the players DO know about it, but decide it's fine as is, then whatever you'd need GM pushing for? If the players don't know about it, then WHY don't you have a NPC tell them?

Other than that I'd like to quote Vincent here: "When returning to a town once visited, create the town again through the town creation rules." Pretty clear, I'd say. So you don't so much "hold onto that town", but resample it with the new issues attached. If you can't make a rules-legal town out of it (say, the demons killed everybody), then it's not a town anymore and thus not subject to GM preparation. You'll have to "revisit" it in a prologue or epilogue of a session, instead. The same works the other way around, too: if it is fit to be a town, then you have to prepare it through the town creation rules if the players choose it as their next destination.

When resampling a town, I imagine you use the original town and the events of the previous session as creative constraint, but otherwise work normally. Which means, you make the same creative choices you make when normally creating a town. What happened after the Dogs went away? Well, what would be interesting? What would push the PC issues further? Which of the unresolved issues are interesting to keep, which can be discarded? Business as usual.

[Eric Provost]

Crazy talk!

What do you mean 'what happens'?  I mean, by the rules, the story is over when the players of the Dogs say that everything is good & done.  So, that means that either the Demons wanted the same thing that the Dogs wanted or the players are all up & cheering over their Dogs' failures.  In the first instance that means that the Demons were right, because the Dogs are always right, and there's really no issue.  In the second instance, everyone gets to stand up and applaud a really fantastic session.

It really sounds to me like you're talking about the GM trying to overstep his authority in the game.  The GM cannot insist that "Something's STILL wrong".  That would be in violation of the rules, assuming that the players have already declared that the town is fixed and they're riding off.

-Eric

[Eric Provost]

What Euro said. 

(crossposted)

-Eric

[Ron Edwards]

What Eero and Eric said.

Best, Ron

[Levi Kornelsen]

I would check my own stuff very quickly to make sure I've done my job, first, and have actively shown off the situation.

Assuming that I have, it's time to carry on; they've made their judgement, and questioning or pushing them on the spot doesn't fit the game to me (though that's just a "ditto", now, with clear reasoning shown).

Finding out what the players think this tells us about their characters, though, that's what I want to know next.

[lumpley]

Fred, are you asking about what if, or are you asking about a specific instance of real-live actual play?

-Vincent

[Frank T]

I don't want to hijack this thread, but an actual play of mine comes to mind. I wrote up a town with a little genius girl. Twelve years old and much too bright for her own good. Her parents just couldn't handle her. That's what they kept telling the Dogs: "She is too clever for us. We tried to punish her, we beat her, we locked her up, but she still keeps forgetting her place, playing at intrigues and disrespecting her parents and teachers."

The Dogs decide that the parents are at fault. They tell the parents: "You are not trying hard enough. Now do your job!" And they leave the town.

So what now? Are they automatically right? Will the parents try harder and succeed at showing the girl her place? Am I deprotagonizing if I have something terrible happen, in a while, so the Dogs find the town all screwed up upon their return because they were asking the impossible off the parents?

Is this the sort of thing you are aiming at, Fred?

[lumpley]

Okay, so the Dogs say "shape up, you morons," and ride out. Later they come back and they find that everything's all screwed up.

Do the Dogs feel betrayed by the NPCs? Then you're fine.

Do the Dogs' players feel betrayed by you, the GM? Then you've cheated.

Easy.

-Vincent

[Vaxalon]

Frank: Yes, that's the kind of thing I'm getting at.

Vincent: You seem to be saying that the measure of what the GM ought to do, is how the players feel if and when they find what the GM has decided the consequences are.  Have I got that right?

[lumpley]

Well, not really.

Whether the GM betrayed them, as a co-player of the game and a co-collaborator of the fiction. Very specifically "betrayed," not just "how they feel."

-Vincent

[lumpley]

Along the same lines, Frank, what did you do?

-Vincent

[Frank T]

It was a one shot. I didn't get to revisit the town.

- Frank

[Anna Kreider]

Actually, one of my favorite towns from our long-running Dogs campaign was a town where our GM created a town where the Dogs had "failed". Instead of adressing the situation that was causing demonic attacks, they basically made things worse. So at the point where *our* Dogs came in, most of the town had died of plague and those that hadn't had gone criminally insane. The steward was killed brutally by his own sherriff, who admitted to killing the deed while he was in the act of assembling a posse against the dogs. And we had a fantastic gun battle with a sorceress and her evil cult. (Oh, and we also got tricked into eating soylent stew...) And all of it was fantastic. At no point did I find myself thinking 'hey! The GM cheated!'.

Granted, this was not a town that we had been too before. But Vincent's point stands: all that needs to be done is to run through town creation, then assume that everything happens the way the demons want it to and run through it all again.

It definitely isn't the sort of town that I'd want more than once or twice in a campaign, but overall it was fantastically gritty and that town wound up evoking some of our best roleplaying of the campaign. And it also made our Dogs more cautious in their decisions, because we all kept in mind what *could* happen if we didn't deal with situations properly.

So just because the rest of the Faith doesn't have the right to judge a Dog's actions/judgements doesn't neccessarily mean that the Dogs can't still be wrong in some instances. Or at least that's my two cents.

~ Anna

(This is Solamasa's wife. I've been hijacking his account for a while, but finally got my own...)

[lumpley]

Oh, yes, definitely. NPC Dogs, no holds are barred. The GM can have NPC Dogs be heretics, sinners, sorcerers - no problem.

NPC Dogs aren't protected from the GM's judgement by anything.

-Vincent