[DitV] Actual Play: Red Clay Branch

[David Laurence]

Background: This was our second session of Dogs, and likewise our second as a group. The group consists of myself, Brennan, Todd, and Tonya. We've all known each other since college (already more than 10 years ago now), and Brennan and I have roleplayed together before, both back in school and in a long-term play by e-mail game of Exalted. Brennan, Todd and Tonya have been roleplaying together steadily since then (I've been out of the country), using quite a few systems, especially Savage Worlds. Nobody really has any experience with indie games – I read the Forge a lot and own quite a few games, and we've even played a session each of PTA and the Roach, but that's about it.

We had our first session of Dogs a couple weeks ago, doing character creation and Tower Creek Branch from the book. Brennan is playing Brother Jackson, Todd is Brother Jebudiah, and Tonya (a Civil War re-creator who is the go-to woman for information about verisimilitude) is Sister Augusta. Tower Creek went well – we were getting a handle on the system and the style of game, and it was a little halting but there were no major hang-ups. If anything was especially weak, it was my own gm-ing skills, made rusty by a long hiatus from face-to-face play. The important thing for this report is what we learned; in Tower Creek, the Dogs came down heavily on the side of duty, with no thought of breaking up the Steward and Edie's marriage, Sister Bethia getting a dressing-down about her duty to her husband and her marriage, and Brother Cyrus sent away to ease her temptation. (Sister Wilhelmina was killed in a very-supernatural showdown, with furniture flying through the air, hellfire engulfing the building and everyone taking quite a bit of dangerous fallout, but that's also beside the point.)

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So, for the second town, I thought I would hit them with a more nuanced idea of duty, and came up with the following town, Red Clay Branch.

1A: Pride: DUTY: A young woman, Sister Hope, is being properly courted but isn't interested in marriage at all.

1B: Injustice: Her aloofness means the boys who want to court her are being prevented from fulfilling their role in the community. Most of the boys who were interested in marrying her gave up and got married, but two, Brother Jonas and Brother Elijah, have kept up hope despite being well past the age when they should have married (all three are 20-21 now).

2A: Sin: Tired of their and her parents' pestering, she ran away, trying to hide with the local Mountain Folk. They let her stay, but eventually (after about a month) she was found out and brought back.

2B: Demonic Attacks: The demons poison the ties between the Faithful and the Mountain Folk. The former decide that she must have been kidnapped, quite possibly worse. They lynched the Mountain Folk man she had been living with (White Cloud) in restitution. He's still hangin' high when the Dogs arrive.

Sr. Hope wants the Dogs to find out the true story. She doesn't want to tell them. She wants them to make her not pregnant. She doesn't want to marry.

The girl's parents (Sr. Waitstill and Br. David) want the Dogs to find Sr. Hope a good husband and marry her off while they are in town, before word gets out that she's pregnant. The girl's mother wants her to still be a virgin.

One of the young men who wants to court the girl, Br. Jonas, wants the Dogs to put in a good word with her.

The girl's father and one of the other young men who wants to court her, Br. Elijah, are still thirsty for revenge. They want the Dogs to help them get a mob together and burn the Mountain Folk camp to the ground.

The Mountain Folk don't especially care about the Dogs, but they want revenge for the killing of their number. They want to be allowed to kill the girl's father, who was at the head of the lynching, in the same way White Cloud was killed.

The demons want the Dogs to support the mob. Eventually, the non-humanity of Mountain Folk will become a False Doctrine and things will to to hell in a handbasket from there.

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So: The Dogs arrived late on a rainy summer night to find a lynched man hanging from the tree in the town square. Brs. Jackson and Jeb spent a minute examining the body to determine the extent of the lynching, and we had a humorous moment where a cranky Sr. Augusta (who stayed cranky pretty much all session and picked up a "cranky" trait in the end) just wanted to get inside and get dry. They met with the Steward, who (naturally) was not too concerned – he went along with Br. David's interpretation that it must have been captivity and rape, and was tacitly supportive of the lynching.

Next morning, then, was Sr. Hope. At first her parents wouldn't let the Dogs alone with her, and she was quite meek, hands on knees, not making eye contact, lots of "it's just as my father says" and so on. Br. David didn't want to let them alone with her, being over-protective (2d8's worth, in fact), but Br. Jackson, promising that Sr. Augusta would talk to her alone (while he and Br. Jeb went to get the Mountain Folks' side of the story), talked him into it. There was going to be a "make her spill" conflict between the two of them, but Tonya's dice were many and high, and mine were few and low, I just gave and she spilled.

Interestingly, Sr. Augusta (and, talking to her afterwards, it was more Tonya herself than anything) reacted extremely negatively towards Sr. Hope, who I'd been (trying to) play very sympathetically (a scared young woman, in over her head) – she thought Hope was being selfish and stupid, and had gotten a lot of people into a lot of trouble. Brennan and Todd mentioned after the game that they though Sr. Hope was indeed sympathetic – I suspect the players' genders and the fact that I was playing cross-gender (remember, with rusty face-to-face skills) may have had a pretty significant hand in the situation, along with Tonya's own personality.

At any rate, Brs. Jeb and Jackson went to the Mountain Folk camp and got their story, then all three met at the Temple to discuss matters. Naturally, this seemed like a good time to have Brs. David and Elijah get the mob together – 10 men, so I got a lot of dice. We launched a "get the mob to disperse" conflict, which went all the way up to fighting, with Br. Jackson laying out Br. Elijah with a punch to the jaw, and some nice tense moments, both role-playing-wise and dice-strategy-wise. I didn't figure the mob was angry enough to draw on three Dogs, so they got sent home. After that was a follow-up to get Br. David to give up his vendetta, with Br. Jeb doing all the talking – and winning, naturally, with some more great moments.

After that, it was pretty much wrap-up. They hanged Br. David, married off Br. Jonas and Sr. Hope, and made a "life for a life" deal with the Mountain Folk, giving them White Cloud's baby in exchange for not taking their revenge on Br. David. Br. Elijah was given the lion's share of the responsibility for the widowed Sr. Waitstill. All in all, still firmly on the side of duty, especially Sr. Hope's duty to get married – which surprised me a little, but that's what the game is all about, right? Good stuff.

Interestingly, the Dogs have been very reluctant to draw their guns; the only shot fired in two sessions was at a chandelier hanging above Sr. Wilhelmina. Even against the angry mob this session, they were worried enough about killing folks that they left their guns in their holsters. Tonya (Sr. Augusta's player) mentioned to me that she liked that aspect, of not needing to resort to violence; in most RPGs they play, she says, nearly all conflicts are solved by shooting them.

My major mistake this time was not giving the Dogs relationships to townsfolk, which really helped with Tower Creek. It went well anyway, but might have been a bit more grabby if I had.

Overall, I'm very pleased with how well we've all taken to the game. We're having a lot of fun, everybody's engaged and getting into the situations and their characters, and as I remarked to Brennan, how many mainstream RPGs can you think of where you can have a second session where nobody feels the need to look at the rulebook? (I only realized after getting home, in fact, that I'd forgotten to bring it.)

[lumpley]

Terrific, David. That's great to read.

Any questions I can answer or anything?

It's always interesting, and very often surprising, just who the players take to, and who they don't. Don't blame yourself or worry about it - you shouldn't expect to forsee which NPCs your players will find sympathetic. Play them all honestly, that's all!

-Vincent

[David Laurence]

Hi, Vincent,

I wish there were questions! I've been really pleasantly surprised at how well it's gone - I almost felt like not bothering with a play report, since there hasn't really been any angst about the whole thing. And I'm not at all worried about people reacting differently than I expected to NPC's. Tonya's reaction was very interesting but in the best possible way.

Well, actually, I guess there is one thing. I've noticed that my players like to spend a lot of time hashing out the minutae of how they'll dispense justice, once everything's figured out and all the conflicts are settled. For example, for Red Clay it took them a good 15 or 20 minutes to figure out exactly what they were going to do with everybody - there's been a lot of very serious, not-quite-IC discussion about what everybody in the town deserves and so on. The players seem to enjoy it, and definitely seem to regard it as important, so I haven't discouraged it or anything, but I don't really remember reading any other actual play reports where this aspect of the game took on such a great weight. It's very amicable (but I can see glimmerings of how it might open up into intra-Dog conflict in the future), so I almost feel like saying "Yeah, whatever you decide, that's what happens."

So, I guess what my question is, is do you see this kind of thing a lot? It almost seems like not-quite-play, and I'd like to either move it into fully IC play, or gloss over it entirely. Is that instinct on my part best ignored, do you think, or what?

[lumpley]

Oh yeah, I see that all the time.

What I do personally, as player or GM, is I give it 10 minutes or so and then bring it into character. If I'm the GM, I'll say something like, "so where are you discussing this?"; if I'm a player, I'll just have my character get up and DO something.

But that's just my personal tastes. I don't think it's important, it's just what I do.

-Vincent