Hi all -

I am definitely enjoying reading this game. I also groove on the gradual working in of dice to the narration of conflicts, and of course on the wonderful Escalation mechanics. (Vincent, I'm another one who thought the escalation was universally one way until I read the threads here clarifying that point.)

I'm curious as to whether there are any 'tricks' people have perceived to playing one's 'hand' of dice well in a conflict. Is there any reason to Reverse the Blow right away, or to save one's best dice for down the line, or anything like that? I suppose skillfully narrating one's traits and relationships into it is the main thing, which is one reason I like the system so much, but I was wondering if there was any particularly dice-driven stuff to keep in mind alongside that.

I think if I were to play this I might enjoy doing it with the dice rolls blind (only the player who rolls them sees what they get, including the GM), so you don't know what other people have. That may be in the rules - I didn't catch it but I'm still reading it through for the first few times. That would increase the suspense and maybe make decisions of whether to escalate more dramatic for the player who was deciding. Any thoughts on that?

P.S. One other bit. If you were doing a fantasy variant you could let guns = magic, have characters take a magic trait ("fire magic", "illusionist", "odd bits I've picked up in ancient scrolls", "I have fey blood in my veins" etc.) or two if so desired, and throw in that extra d4 for all conflicts with magic or magic items in them. For a setting: Quaesitors in the Covenant, anyone? For this one I think I'd want to tweak the Ars Magica setting so that Christianity, the Code of Hermes, and Bonisagus' codification of magic were much more tightly intertwined; then the demonic influence rules in DitV and the idea of magical transgression being linked to the social order and to metaphysical evil could hang together better. Well, it's not perfect, but you could do something with it.

Sean wrote: I think if I were to play this I might enjoy doing it with the dice rolls blind (only the player who rolls them sees what they get, including the GM), so you don't know what other people have. That may be in the rules - I didn't catch it but I'm still reading it through for the first few times. That would increase the suspense and maybe make decisions of whether to escalate more dramatic for the player who was deciding. Any thoughts on that?

Thanks for the thoughts, Yokiboy. Reading over the examples it does seem like some of the 'skill' involves assessing the possibilities of your dice relative to the other people's, though I think too much focus on that might be unhealthy. But if that's important to the game (Vincent's text suggests it is at one point) then blind dice would actually decrease the skill element and that would be an argument against doing it. Just food for thought at this point from my end, until I get a chance to play.

Reading over the examples it does seem like some of the 'skill' involves assessing the possibilities of your dice relative to the other people's, though I think too much focus on that might be unhealthy. But if that's important to the game (Vincent's text suggests it is at one point) then blind dice would actually decrease the skill element and that would be an argument against doing it.

As a note, since we play sitting around the room well-separated in comfy chairs, no table, we're mostly playing 'blind' as-is. At most, you can see how many dice of what sizes your opponent has left, and even then that's obscured and we've been tacitly 'not noticing' that for the most part.

And it has worked well. Removes some of the calculation element, and reduces things down to a more raw narrative level. Far from being a problem, I would recommend it.

I can't yet, however, address the 'dice tactics' question. My gut as a math geek says that the 'best' strategy is to save a really high single die result, if you've got one, for mid-to-late in the conflict (when the Raises are low enough to Turn), while Taking once with mid- and low-rolling dice fairly early, before any Escalation takes place.

- Eric

I, on the other hand, always call out my highest dice whenever I think anybody's forgotten about them. I think that everybody knowing how the dice lie contributes a lot to the pacing.

-Vincent

lumpley wrote: I, on the other hand, always call out my highest dice whenever I think anybody's forgotten about them. I think that everybody knowing how the dice lie contributes a lot to the pacing.

Honestly for our style it's not that there's a reason to keep it secret; it's that making it public would detract from play, by adding more verbiage of numbers where right now it's almost purely interaction.

However, I would still support that in a group with math-geeks or the like (which ours has, me being one of them), the element of calculation permitted by public dice numbers would not be healthy for Dogs play. If it were, say, a game about science, or something, where the feel of calculation were appropriate... then I'd agree. But this is Dogs; it's about trust and faith, not calculation and certainties. When I make a late Raise of thirteen, but I don't know anyone else's numbers, I'm putting my faith in those dice. So on the thematic level, I'd support blind dice here as well.

Sounds like the lesson is that this is a preference issue which Vincent was correct to not address in the text. You'll play it how you read it, and learn to like it that way.

- Eric

Harlequin wrote: Honestly for our style it's not that there's a reason to keep it secret; it's that making it public would detract from play, by adding more verbiage of numbers where right now it's almost purely interaction.

'Not looking' is a GNS trap, though. If the dice are right there, and you could look, and you could gain (Gamist) advantage, then your GNS spectrum is automatically affected. Even if you don't look, you had to consider it; you had to make the conscious decision that your Nar priorities are better served by sacrificing the Gam edge involved. Which requires both a strong degree of awareness of your Creative Agenda, and an expenditure of willpower and attention which could both have been spent on something else.

If I decide that looking at the dice won't suit the experience, I'll ask to have them kept secret. I don't want to spend my Dogs time wrestling with Gamist temptations, I want to spend it kicking butt and calling Names. (Grin).

Not that I disagree with your other points, but "You could just not look" - or its equivalent - are trapped arguments which undermine the CA, and I prefer to catch those lest they propagate.

- Eric

Harlequin wrote: 'Not looking' is a GNS trap, though.

Hmm. I'm not sure I entirely follow you, there. Indeed I think it's linked to the original question of this thread.

The Frank Miller character I understand. That's a good example of making the mechanics serve your vision, and I can see where it would be easier with 'open' dice than the other way. (Not impossible with blind dice, though, just less calculated.) Cool.

The rest I don't understand, though.

How would a 'clean-cut good guy' select Raise and See dice differently than, say, a ruthless doctrinarian?

Note that I exclude Escalate and Call, here, and I'm not talking about how he'd narrate the Raises and so on, nor about the cases when he selects his dice based on a narration idea that had struck him. Those could clearly be different, fine, and I'd contend that those differences would be equally easy to portray with 'blind' dice as with 'open.'

But how would you make the mechanical process of selecting which dice to use for Raises show characterization? And would it matter whether or not you could see the other guy's dice? (Note that these are not rhetorical questions, I'm interested in the answer. Making mechanics serve other ends - such as characterization - is something I delight in, so if Dogs contains that on this raw-mechanical level, I'd love to have it pointed out.)

As for the Gamism, the thing is that I'm not looking to play Gamist. It's not the only style I enjoy. I just have this deep-seated competitive streak in my nature. So when playing Nar - deliberately and consciously, and reveling in it - I prefer to have temptation placed as far from me as possible. Not only will I personally have more fun if my GNS is on-message, the group as a whole will be more coherent.

I would contend that I'm far from alone in this; that placing an opportunity to gain an advantage (being more likely to win the conflict than not), whether perceived or otherwise, in front of your average player will bias his play. Most people just won't realize that they might benefit by suppressing that level of detail.

Whereas the thing I like about playing Dogs "blind" is that I don't know. This lets me disconnect the Gamist instinct, and stay focused on characterization and visualization. It... changes the shape of the shared imaginary space.

(A local... LARP/PBEM hybrid (?)... called Sovereign used this to excellent effect, showing the outlines of the rules - more of X will increase your chances when doing Y - but concealing the actual numbers. They found that play improved, because gaming the PBEM was not the point, the point was the emergent intrigue. Other examples exist as well, Cell Gamma being perhaps an extreme case.)

You say you don't see a reason not to have the dice open. I see one, from here. No reason why we aren't both right, unless we maintain that the other viewpoint isn't valid.

So I think we're just clarifying the ground around my earlier contention. Groups have the option to have the bones of the mechanic (the actual die numbers) tucked away more, or out in the open more. If having access to the bones lets you make the skeleton dance better, cool. If having access to the bones makes it harder for you to enjoy the skin, that's cool too.

Makes sense to me.

- Eric

Just for the record, the text does not leave this unaddressed. Vincent says clearly to leave the dice on the table where everyone can see them.

I of course agree that from a narrative-building point of view leaving them in the open is best. It appears from this discussion so far that this is also best from a strategy point of view. If there were interesting gains of either type to be had by 'playing blind', then that technique would maybe be an interesting variant for that purpose. Right now the only thing I'm seeing as potentially coming out of playing blind is a feeling of suspense and uncertainty, which does have a kind of value. Of course, not knowing the traits etc. of your opponents, or the interesting ways they're going to bring them into play (the really important thing), provides that too, so I'm not sure that's much of an argument.

It seems that a big part of skill in these mechanics is bringing in your traits, and maybe features of the environment as equipment, to get dice during the conflict.

Any other thoughts on the original post title's topic, that of what skilled use of the Dogs mechanics looks like?

Hey Folks,

FWIW I think leaving the dice open is pretty important, for exactly reasons of pacing and the narrative. With the limited play experience I have I can already see that it's pretty simple to see how a conflict is going to go. This leaves the player (or GM) with a lot more flexibility in determining the flow of the conflict. It gets the question of escalation, which is pretty core to the game, right out in the open. You're not thinking, "Will I have to escalate to beat him?" you're instead thinking, "Do I want to escalate, because I can't beat him." It let's you determine all sorts of things about the narrative. It's one of the things I really like about the game in fact. In a lot of games with shared narration the power ends up in a single player's hand at a given moment. Dogs in contrast forces the give and take in any conflict. It's a really powerful tool.

As for the idea of gamism, the dicing in Dogs just isn't complex enough IMO, to create much in the way of step on up. There are few situations where the way the dice have fallen doesn't pretty clearly dictate a proper strategy, and that situation is death for real gamism. I'd actually say that hidden dice provides for much more gamism since you could in theory present traps and pitfalls for your opponent in terms of how you play your dice.

Yours,

-Tim