I just got through doing character creation for a couple of my players.

Karri and Joey are friends of mine. Karri is about 33 and Joey is 17. They were novice roleplayers until they started gaming with me and my group (which is composed entirely of freinds, almost all of whom were novices when we started.) They've played two games of Sorcerer with me, several sessions of Inspectres, some Uni, a MLWM game, a Pool game using the setting from Eden Studios Witchcraft, and a short Riddle of Steel game which folded due to setting pressure (I have a hard time doing Tolkein in RPG's) Anyway, most of my other players are out for a couple of weeks so I thought it a good time to pull out Dogs, which I've been itching to play ever since I bought it at GenCon (#15 of the first 50! And yes the binding is fine, though I 've been dragging the book everywhere with me for weeks.)

I did just as Vincent suggests. I read the backgroud section to them that follows the Character Creation and then we got into Creating Characters.

Karri chose a Complicated History and Joey chose a strong History.

Karri ended up making a Dog, Flying Raven, who was a half Mountain person girl whose parents died. Her father was Mountain, coverted to the Faith and her Mother was Faithful. They were killed by hostile Mountain People. She was sent to live with her Uncle (her mother's brother) who is prejudiced against mountain people and never approved of the Marraige. She was treated badly in the town because of her heritage. She was rebellious and hostile as a youth because of all her mistreatment. Running away several times, she made contact with Mountain people near her Uncle's town and made friends and learned from them. This caused even more trouble with the Uncle. Eventually she was chosen by the town Steward to be a Dog. Her Uncle's family didn't even take up the responsibility of making her a coat. Instead her Mountain people friends, even though they didn't understand the Faith, went through the work of making her coat for her. The Temple let it go.

Joey made Jacob, son of the Steward of his community, and quite the scholar of the Faith. Wanting to live up to his father's expectations he studied everything he could get his hands on. I will say that Joey is less vocal a player, in general, than Karri so we tossed some ideas at him for his characters life. He decided that his father was a Dog and that he was trying to live up to that, to prove himself worthy of his family.

We ran through the initiatory conflicts. Karri wanted to gain another student's respect. She decided she wanted it to be a more physical conflict. We decided that she had been constantly put down over the course of the training by some of the other students. Mainly by some of the other initiates. We set up a conflict where during a final fighting class, with all her fellow initiates watching, she challenges the leader of the group that were putting her down. The conflict pretty much started and stayed in the Fighting but unarmed realm and this is where we all got our first taste of the system.

I made a mistake that I didn't realize until later. That is I forgot that you can use a one die see again as a raise. It would have changed things a little, but no harm done. Karri was actually a bit distressed about the numbers and the dice she had vs mine until I let her know that she could use her other traits. The conflict system plays very very well. (Great work Vincent.) Raven ends up clobbering her tormentor and then holds her hand out in freindship to him. He accepts. After the conflict Karri said "that was so cool."

Joey's initiatory conflict was that he wanted to exorcise a demon. We talked about it a little and decided that because he had taken an antagonistic relationship with one of the Dog Teachers (we decided it was his demonology/theology teacher) the teacher thought that Jacob had too much pride in all his knowledge of the faith. His conflict was to prove himself to this teacher by exorcising a demon.

This conflict ended up being harder but we saw the Escalation part of conflict for the first time. We decided that they pretty much threw him in a room with a possessed person with his teacher listening through the door. I didn't remember most of the stuff about ritual through this conflict, and I really should have, but we talked it over later. He called on the demon to come out in the name of the King of Life. The demon denied the call, calling Jacob's faith in the King weak. The demon then escalated (even though I had the same conflict die no matter what) to physcial but not fighting. It basically started trying to destroy its host by running it into the walls of the room. Joey saw by haveing Jacob grab the demon to prevent its running into the walls and raised by anointing the man's face with sacred earth, drawing the tree of life. The demon saw by biting Jacob's finger and breaking away, leaving the tree incomplete (reversing the blow) and raised by smashing the host into the doors with inhuman force. Jacob saw (taking the blow) by cradling his wounded finger and dropping his sacred earth. He raised by smacking the man across the face with his book of Life while reciting a verse from the book. The demon was out of dice and came out. Jacob's teacher came back into the room and said "You might make a Dog after all."

It was much harder to think of 'reversing the blow', 'dodge/block','and 'taking the blow' things for this conflict for some reason. Most of the conflict played out in the physical but not fighting realm so I played that as the demon trying to destroy the host, but when the take the blow see that Joey ended up doing we had a hard time deciding what that was going to be because the demons raise was to damage the host some more. Finally I said that taking the blow might mean that for whatever reason, Jacob was unable to respond to the demon''s attempts to damage the host for the moment, Joey thought that was okay. It felt, at the time, like an odd stretch but reflecting on it , it seems okay. I think its going to take some getting used to.

Are there any particular tips for thinking of stuff like this?

Overall I was impressed with the easy understanding of the game and how quickly they latched on to what was happening. The conflict resolution really creates interesting and rich dynamics. I look forward to actually playing a town next week.

best

Trevis