My group just ran a second session of Dogs in the Vineyard, continued from Wisdom's Ghost. This game is tight, Vincent. It works as promised in great ways.

I decided to do exactly the amount of prep recommended by Vincent in the game text, and it worked out well. I've got a town, Broke Canyon Township, that has the following problems:

- Bro. August is past marrying age, but isn't marrying anyone. His mother, Sister Malvina (great-aunt of one of the Dogs) is controlling his life ever since his dad, the previous Steward, died.

- He has a kid, though. He got a girl, Sister Relief, pregnant about seven years ago. He was courting her and she slept with him after his dad died. She married someone else, though, because she hated his mom. This woman is the cousin of another Dog.

- That husband, Bro. Hiram, has become a drinker because he thinks his wife is still sleeping with August. (I don't even know if she is. The original plan is that she was and that she got pregnant with Wiley, her son, after she got married, but that changed in play. A player guessed the above, and I liked it.)

- Malvina believes August should be the Steward, and has her preaching to him.

- The demons have now entered town, and knocked down Hiram's barn on top of him, breaking his leg. Demons often take the form of freak winds.

- Not really a problem, but: the Steward's daughter is dead (Sophia from "Wisdom's Ghost") and one of the Dogs has been tasked to bring her body back to town. (We managed to establish the entire body preparation rituals for the Faithful while discussing this. Way cool. They salt bodies to preserve them so they can be buried on home soil, although this has gotten mixed up with belief in "perfect bodies" and the afterlife.)

In one session, we got most of the way through the town. The session culminated with a great scene in Temple with August confessing his adultery with Relief, and Hiram trying to start a fistfight in church. (The Dogs held him back.) August made a valiant theological argument that he and Relief were rightfully married, since he impregnated her before Hiram married her, but Relief's cousin, the Dog Perserverance, shot this up.

My favorite scene, however, was breakfast. Relief was making the Dogs breakfast and they just came out and accused her of adultery. She threw a cast-iron skillet full of flapjacks in the middle of the table and got huffy. When one Dog took a mouthful, she said "How do you like eating my flapjacks while you call me a whore?" Hiram, later, warned off the Dogs, saying "If I catch you calling my wife a whore again, I don't care how you are with the King; I'll shoot you in your goddamn face." Strong stuff from a Faithful.

Resolution went really smooth, except in multi-person conflicts, which were a little confusing. We got it in the end, though.

One question if you're reading, Vincent: with short-term fallout, you can get a trait at 1d4 for the next conflict. Does it go away after the next conflict, or the next conflict in which you use it? It reads like the former, but I like the latter.

Resolution went really smooth, except in multi-person conflicts, which were a little confusing. We got it in the end, though.

One question if you're reading, Vincent: with short-term fallout, you can get a trait at 1d4 for the next conflict. Does it go away after the next conflict, or the next conflict in which you use it? It reads like the former, but I like the latter.

Your explanation of the rule makes sense, Vincent. People were taking traits that fit how they took fallout with really thinking about the next conflict.

We should finish this town up next session. I really like the level of supernatural in this game. There's definitely demons, but it's just hard winds, which means as the audience, the players shrug. "Maybe it's demons, or maybe superstition." There's a ghost, too - Sophia. Then again, maybe that character's just going a little nuts.

Side note: I just had an interesting thought. When we roleplay, we play the characters, and try to think somewhat about how they perceive things. We also, however, think about how we as an audience, not as players, would see things. Neither are our perceptions, and neither's really true. With the one character and the ghost, we can see the character thinking "Holy crap, that's a ghost." We can see an unrelated audience thinking "Hey? Is this a ghost story, or is that guy off his gourd?" And then we know as players exactly what's up, but we kind of revel in seeing it different ways.

Weird.

Would you say that nailing down whether they're really demons is something the group doesn't care to do? The group prefers to have them be maybe-maybe not?

Here's a left-fielder: let's say that you go out of your way to overtly establish that they are real demons. Is there a player in particular who'd be unhappy? Let's say that instead you go out of your way to overtly establish that it's just wind and superstition. Would a different player be unhappy? That is, is the demons' undecided status an agreed-upon (if unspokenly) compromise in your group?

I'm just makin' stuff up, because I'm interested in how groups treat the supernatural in the game.

-Vincent

I think unanswered questions like this are the most interesting parts of stories. Its one reason why I don't like "GM supplements" that answer all the questions.

Reminds me of something I brought up at the end of our accomplishments. Right now, there's not a whole lot, including our accomplishments, that feels particularly post-apoc.. But that's the setting we agreed on. I think that, at the beginning, the idea of demons and post-apoc didn't fit right, but after reading up on all the other Actual Play, I began to feel strongly that demons should be real, if not overt.. Maybe I shouldn't have brought it up in the open, now that I've seen this discussion, but it's a bit late now. For the record, the other players agreed.

So we'll have a similar situation; We as players will know the demons are real, but our characters will or won't, depending on their beliefs, and there'll be nothing really solid to push them one way or the other. I just almost regret that now, we as players will know.