Hello all. I'm new around here, and just recently purchased a copy of DitV. Good stuff!

I have a question about relationships - they seem to me to be something that won't come up all that often. Are they intended to be so limited? The idea of assigning them later is useful, but it seems that once they're assigned, they're pretty much good for that town only. i.e. if you have a relationship with someone in a town, you're not really going to be able to use it once you leave that town.

Could you use relationship dice when OTHER people have a relationship to that person? i.e. I meet my brother in Town A, and use my dice there, and then I meet someone in town B who also has a relationship with my brother. Otherwise, when is that relationship going to come up again? It's not like these people by and large are going to follow the Dogs around from town to town.

TJ Howell

I've seen Relationships applied to more general groups, like "The Mountain People." I don't know whether that's kosher or not by the rules, but it clearly keeps the issue more alive across multiple towns.

Remember that Relationships can also be to other things than just people. Relationships with demons, Sins, even locations and the other Dogs are all nice and useful.

Second the relationships with other things, and with dogs. Those are pretty nice.

But I gotta agree that relationships with townspeople seem pretty useless beyond the scope of that single session.

Simon Kamber wrote: Second the relationships with other things, and with dogs. Those are pretty nice.

But I gotta agree that relationships with townspeople seem pretty useless beyond the scope of that single session.

It might also help to remember that folks often have family and connections across the different towns... "Hey, if you help me out, I can send you over to your Aunt's farm two towns back. Besides, there's a young lady you might consider a'courtin' round that ways..."

Chris

Relationship dice are pretty easy to come by, though, since 1d4 is an easy thing to take in long-term fallout, and you can get more unassigned dice in Reflection between towns. And since you can use them if the person is your opponent or what's at stake, it's an easy way to get an extra die when you really need one. If you use lots of d4's, you're more likely to take fallout, which (especially if it's d4 nonphysical fallout) can lead to yet more d4 relationships and experience.

If you run into demons a lot, you could take 1d4 relationship as fallout, lots of times, and then in the later towns use experience to bump that 5d4 (or whatever it is by then, 8d4, whatever) to 5d6, then 5d8, then 5d10, and you can use them when your opponent is a demon! Of course, having a relationship with demons also makes you a sorcerer, which your fellow Dogs may object to, so you may want to invite the demon to possess you so you can use Cunning to add those dice to your social interactions, and then call on the demonic influence for additional d10's, and explain to your fellow dogs why binding demons is a proper tool entrusted to you by the King of Life, to scourge the unworthy.

Or if that's not the path you want to go down, all paved with good intentions that it may be, note that you can take 1d4 relationships with your fellow Dogs, who'll always be there, and get those dice when they're what's at stake (very handy for a healer!), or your opponent (as you try to argue sense into their fool heads), or if they come to your aid in a conflict (pretty common!) Then when things are building to their climax use experience to bump the boatload of d4's to d6, d8, d10, and you're ready for a showdown. Note how it so nicely models a relationship getting more and more intense, and then blowing up? You could do both romantic comedies and stalker movies with it. Beautiful system.

Not that you have to pump things up like that, for them to still be useful. Even if you have a scattering of single dice for people you may not run into again any time soon, and you're not rolling the dice, looking on Brother Jabez's character sheet to see "Crippled Sister Philomena 1d6" and "Scarred Brother Daniel 1d4" gives insight to his approach to problems.

Bankuei wrote: It might also help to remember that folks often have family and connections across the different towns... "Hey, if you help me out, I can send you over to your Aunt's farm two towns back. Besides, there's a young lady you might consider a'courtin' round that ways..."

Chris

Hi Simon,

Conflict: Get the young fellow to help me
Raise: I can get his Aunt, whom I'm on good terms with ("Well liked by Aunt Patience 2D6") to give him a place away from his troubles.

Seems like a reasonable dice bonus to me.

Then- Fallout either comes in extra dice with the guy liking my Dog, or disliking my Dog.

Aunt Patience relationship dice gave a small bonus for this conflict, which then produces new relationship dice.

Chris

Bankuei wrote: Hi Simon,

Conflict: Get the young fellow to help me
Raise: I can get his Aunt, whom I'm on good terms with ("Well liked by Aunt Patience 2D6") to give him a place away from his troubles.

Seems like a reasonable dice bonus to me.

TJ wrote: I have a question about relationships - they seem to me to be something that won't come up all that often. Are they intended to be so limited? The idea of assigning them later is useful, but it seems that once they're assigned, they're pretty much good for that town only. i.e. if you have a relationship with someone in a town, you're not really going to be able to use it once you leave that town.

Hmm, if that's so, wouldn't a player creating a new character after retiring the old one want to take advantage of the ability to move dice from relationships to traits, since traits are used so much more often?

Try it and see!

-Vincent

Hi Simon,

Oops, guess you're right.

Chris

Simon Kamber wrote: Hmm, if that's so, wouldn't a player creating a new character after retiring the old one want to take advantage of the ability to move dice from relationships to traits, since traits are used so much more often?

Ul wrote: Just me that considers the talk about dogs and game balance completely off?

Ul wrote: If a powergamer wants to abuse the system, so he can. Easily. Play it however you like it, although I do prefer the way lumpley describes it, makes more sense to me.

Simon Kamber wrote:

Ul wrote: Just me that considers the talk about dogs and game balance completely off?

Might be off, but not way off. Most of the things that seem wildly out of sync at first glance make sense when you take a second look. You could concievably recreate characters over and over, but it would cost you more storywise than it would gain you stat-wise.

I'm just trying to figure out how that works with relationships, because it seems to me that a trait at 2d6 would earn you far more influence on the game in the long run than a relationship in the same size. I'm asking mainly because I have that "it makes sense, I'm just not seeing it" feeling.

Mike Holmes wrote: Not that I've played a ton, but when we did, we didn't see even one relationship die come into play. Not one. Now, in part this is because we didn't assign any in play. But it's also because the conditions in which they can come into play seem somewhat limiting.

The Rules wrote: Don’t create very many, and leave most of your character’s Relationship Dice unassigned! You can assign them to the people your character meets after play begins, so save a bunch of them for that.

Yokiboy wrote:

Mike Holmes wrote: Not that I've played a ton, but when we did, we didn't see even one relationship die come into play. Not one. Now, in part this is because we didn't assign any in play. But it's also because the conditions in which they can come into play seem somewhat limiting.

Why did you not assign any during play? And what stopped you from putting some of their selected relationships in the town played, character generation comes before town creation? In order to make a "grabby" town, is there a better way than filling it with NPCs that the characters have relations with? The rules say the following regarding the allocation of relationship dice.

Yokiboy wrote:

The Rules wrote: Don’t create very many, and leave most of your character’s Relationship Dice unassigned! You can assign them to the people your character meets after play begins, so save a bunch of them for that.

Remember the automatic 1d6 for all blood relations as well, it is quite easy to have relatives pop up in just about every town.

joshua neff wrote: Because I, the GM, wrote up the town before character creation, so that we'd have a town we could start playing in the same session as characters were created. The town didn't have anyone the Dogs had relationships with for that reason. They could have assigned Relationship dice to any of the NPCs at any time, but I don't know if all of the players remembered that, and I didn't think to remind them.

Yoki: I always bring a prepped town to the first session. No need to wait to see the characters.

Mike: I have two answers. Answer one: try assigning some relationship dice next time and see how it goes. Answer two: bringing relationships' dice in as though they were traits is a bad idea, but I'm very comfortable with implicating distant relations in the stakes of the conflict. "What's at stake is: do I win the spitting contest? I'm gonna let Jake down if I lose to these yokels."

What's important is that it be genuinely at stake. Not "what would Jake say?" but "what will Jake say?"

-Vincent

With the implication being that your relations bring you strength because they are constantly judging your actions. Right?

...Yeah, I guess that's the implication, isn't it? Cool.

-Vincent

I think the thing that makes Relationship dice viable is, that people in general, such as the players of the game, care more about what happens to the people than they do about thier character's shtick.

'Course, there are some players that couldn't give a damn about npcs and wouldn't let anything get between them and their shtick, but the system allows for that by distegarding relationship dice altogether.

Yokiboy wrote:

joshua neff wrote: Because I, the GM, wrote up the town before character creation, so that we'd have a town we could start playing in the same session as characters were created. The town didn't have anyone the Dogs had relationships with for that reason. They could have assigned Relationship dice to any of the NPCs at any time, but I don't know if all of the players remembered that, and I didn't think to remind them.

I think the creation process in the game is listed in the order it is for a reason. You wouldn't create kickers and start playing Sorcerer in the same night would you? Anyhow, this is one thing that I have a hard time with narrative style games as well, the prep work before the first session means less playing right away, but obviously leads to a more interesting story and less prep-work as the campaign takes on a life of its own.

Yokiboy wrote: One suggestion though, could you not have simply taken a few of the players' relations and swapped out the names of the people in your town? Who would've known the difference except for you?

I have a player who loves to use relationship dice. Just loves the hell out of them. He took the "Complicated Community" background at chargen, and has decided to play the hell out of the fact that his family is the most FUBARed family in the land.

He'll sit collecting fallout dice into his unassigned pool and grabbing them up left and right in reflection phase. Then when we come into a new town he waits for the first half hour or so as the Dogs go through the "everyone in town tells us what is wrong with everyone else in town" phase. He'll select the person that sounds the most screwed up of all, the one he bets money will be a sorcerer, and then says "Yea, well what would you expect? She's my cousin" and plonks down 1d6 for Blood and usually something like 2d8 or 4d4 from old fallout/reflection dice.

The result is that in every town we've played so far (a whole 6, I'm the most experienced GM in the world!) that character's relationships have ended up in numerous pivitol conflicts, because even when he doesn't get the sorcerer he'll get one of the NPCs most involved in the town's sin, and they tend to be related to most of the other big sinners -- letting him play on the web of judgement, sin, and degredation to work that relationship into contest after contest.

The other players, however, horde their relationship dice like they were gold nuggets and as a result tend to have maybe one or two blood relations per town (because they get them for free and I tend to design towns with blood relations anyway). They haven't yet found a way to make the relationship dice work in a solidly protagonizing/conflict generating way for them as of yet, and don't seem to value them as much -- despite having seen what "Mr. FUBAR Family" does with them regularly.

Yokiboy wrote: Why did you not assign any during play?

Like I say, make it part of the stakes, not part of a raise or see, and it's by the rules.

-Vincent

Well that seems to contradict what you've said above. You implied that "what would X think" isn't stakes. If I said, "Where would my pride be at if I did something that X would disapprove of?" would that suffice?

I feel that I'm being made to jump through some semantical hoop in order to get to roll that die. :-)

Mike

I will note, for the record that it is possible to mess up a relationship without the other person in a relationship ever knowing that anything happened. If you care about something enough, put enough weight into it, and blow it then it can mess up your ability to relate to someone even though they remain ignorant.

Putting that kind of weight into it is making it part of the stakes. "I'm doing this because my Pa would never love me if I didn't" becomes useable when you put your relationship with your Pa on the line, even when your Pa isn't there and will never know.

Why? Because you'll know. You'll know all your life that your Pa told you to live one way and when the crap hit the fan you didn't have the strength to see it through. Every time you think about him, about him raising you and protecting you, every time you think about going home, about your brothers and sisters and how they always listened to your dad more than you did, you will remember it.

So when you have to stop the man who is beating his wife because your father wouldn't cross the street to spit on a man who was on fire if he were the sort of man that wouldn't help a woman in trouble, and you make that part of your stakes then fail to make him stop -- well, you'll know it for your whole life. And it will screw your relationship with your father for a very long time. The fact that he won't know why is only likely to make it worse.

Edit: removed the swearing. I find it ironic that the Mormon is the one that keeps breaking the forum rules about making the place a nice place for Mormons to post.

Given the setting... how would the people whose opinions you value not know every piddling detail of what you've been doing as Dogs?

I don't think the difference between "My poppa wouldn't love me if I didn't save her soul" and "My poppa won't love me if I don't save her soul" is simply a semantic one. The second one is saying "When he hears, and he will hear, he won't love you no more. Period."

Good point Tony.

I'll also note that I just got done watching an episdoe of Law and Order Special Victims Unit in which Olivia used her relationship with her mother for almost every "contest" in the story.

The thing that made it interesting is that not only was her mother not there, she’s been dead for about a year now. And despite the fact that she’s been brought up in about every 4th episode for 5 seasons (or is it 6 now?) she’s never once been on screen.

But that “Abusive mother who hates me because I was a rape child 4d4” relationship keeps a comin’ up, time after time. Because relationships are about more than just our current dialogue with a person, they’re about the whole complexity of having a human relationship. And even when someone is dead your relationship with them, as it matters to you, to the audience, and to the story, can still be both at stake and a profoundly motivational force on human behavior.

Put that together with the inbred nature of Dog's communities, and well, I think you're getting to a place where you can cook those relationships with gas.

lumpley wrote: Yoki: I always bring a prepped town to the first session. No need to wait to see the characters.

Brand_Robins wrote: But that “Abusive mother who hates me because I was a rape child 4d4” relationship keeps a comin’ up, time after time.

Unsurprisingly, I agree with Brand. That is, the quality of a person who is motivated by, "what would my dead relative think if they were alive?" seems to me to be a relationship as well. If you want to call it a trait of some sort, that's fine, too - but I think it's more powerful when portrayed as a relationship. I mean, given that the person in question probably represents an array of specific values for the character, simply having a trait like "Honest" probably doesn't cover everything. And, it doesn't convey the same thing as being honest because you're uncle would expect you to be honest. I mean, you can have the honest trait as well and use them both, when they're both applicable.

That seems to me to be the difference. Most traits you don't have to find these stakes to include. Do I have to be risking my honesty to use the honesty trait? Why then do I have to be directly risking my relationship for it to come into play?

I mean, all contests have stakes. It's not like by using a relationship that I get out of that. I'm just wondering what behavior the relationship limits are trying to avoid? Or what they promote by putting them in.

Mike

Hey Mike. You've missed the bigger piece of the dynamic.

Dogs' relationships aren't Hero Quest's. In a way, they're more like Hero points. You spend (assign) them for a bonus; they're more lasting than Hero points only in that you may be in conflict with or over that person again someday.

Next time, assign only one or two relationships up front (you can even consider these wasted dice for all I care) and save the rest to assign during play, like the rules say. See what you think.

-Vincent

See now, given the setting once again, why would the question be "What would my dead relation think if they were still alive?" rather than "What will my dead relation think when they see me do/not do this?" We're talking pseudo-Mormon, which is a Christian sub-sect, so I imagine it keeps the same general ideals that your dead relatives are watching you from the Kingdom of Life.

Though, as I found out, that's not technically gospel; According to my Chaplain, whom I approached when the idea that Jesus called Lazarus back from Heaven occurred to me, the bible tells us that people don't actually go straight to Heaven or Hell upon death; they sort of go to sleep, waiting for Judgement Day.

If that's true, Heaven and Hell are just about empty, folks... Wonder what that idea would do in Dogs?

Anyhow, slightly off topic there. I still see it, whether it's true or not, that people believe their dead relations can see everything they do.

Maybe this will help, Mike: your starting relationship dice aren't there to describe your character's pre-initiation community. They're there to reflect what your character learned from it.

If you grew up in a complicated family, you're going to know how to create complicated new relationships. If you grew up in a strong family, you're going to know how to create strong new relationships.

You really aren't meant to spend your relationship dice on people you used to know.

Lance: real-world LDS doctrine has it that the dead have work to do, including looking out for their living families. So that's totally viable.

-Vincent

Simon Kamber wrote: How is that a relationship?

I can't quite see how you'd define stakes out of this for so many conflicts. Then I again, I didn't see it.

Could you give me some examples of stakes involving the dead mother?

lumpley wrote: Maybe this will help, Mike: your starting relationship dice aren't there to describe your character's pre-initiation community. They're there to reflect what your character learned from it.

If you grew up in a complicated family, you're going to know how to create complicated new relationships. If you grew up in a strong family, you're going to know how to create strong new relationships.

Brand_Robins wrote: Are you familiar with SVU? It's a show that deals heavily with rape and abuse cases, so having a relationship with a family member that is based around the trauma of rape is going to be something that's relevant more than it would be in a show about, say, emergency room doctors.

lumpley wrote: You really aren't meant to spend your relationship dice on people you used to know.

Mike Holmes wrote: Also, let's say that I do take a character like a preacher in a town I come to. I still maintain that its fun to be able to bring that relationship in without direct stakes, even if it would be easy to do it. That is, I could say, "I want to do this because if I don't the preacher will think I'm a dork" or I could say, "I want to do this because if I don't the preacher would think I'm a dork."

I'm not talking at all about who you take or when. I'm talking about when relationships already taken can be brought into play. Heck, I would like it if you could say, "Hey, I'll take a relationship to that preacher I met ten minutes ago, and say that I'm going to try harder because I like him."

Hey Mike.

Are you asking me why the rule is the way it is?

The reason is: if you bring relationship dice into play at the moment-to-moment of conflicts, as well as at stakes and opposition, you deflate the tension in the system.

Here's why: your traits are going to be a good mix of emotional, ideological, physical and violent, right? In the existing rules, if a "just talking" conflict is turning against you, you have two choices: bring in an emotional or ideological trait, or escalate. Notice that escalating gets you two things: new stat dice, plus access to your physical or violent traits.

Your relationships on the other hand, applied to sees and raises, are going to be practically all emotional and ideological. Even if the relationship's been established to be physical or violent, like "my dad (who used to kick shit out of me)," you'll be able to easily interpret it into a "just talking" see or raise. So when a "just talking" conflict turns against you, that'd be a whole new body of dice available to you before you have to consider escalating.

The pressure the rules put on you to escalate is what drives the game. Allowing relationship dice to be brought into conflicts on the fly would be taking your foot off the gas.

-Vincent

Perhaps it would be useful to illustrate what happened with relationships the one time I got to play this game.

My character, Matthew, had an issue with his father being murdered. He had Relationship: My dead father 1d8, and Relationship: The Sin of Murder 2d6, because he had spent a lot of time thinking about killing and what would make someone do it, trying to come to grips with what happened to his dad.

Now, that Sin of Murder thing came up all the time, because Matthew was not exactly the forgiving kind. A man tried to kill him and failed, but Matthew executed him afterwards for various and sundry sins - among them attempted murder. Was that execution a justifiable killing, or was it murder? Actually, Matthew wasn't sure, but he did it anyway. Not only did his relationship with Murder come into play, but the fallout he took from those two conflicts significantly changed his relationship with Murder. Where he used to understand murder and how bad it was (2d6), having both killed a man in cold blood and having had a man try to kill him, now he's unsure and the whole idea of murder just complicates his thinking and his actions (3d4).

My friend's character was all about the unspent relationship dice. A good but not particularly righteous man was involved with the new second wife of the (very bad and about to be exiled-by-the-Dogs) Steward. He had some powerful justifications for what he and his lover had done, and was trying, in the ultimate confrontation of the session, to convince us Dogs that he was right. We were getting down to bare-bones dice, and my friend said, "You know what? I'm dropping 2d8 into a relationship with this guy. I really like him, I sympathize with his struggle, and I want him to come out of this without us having to do something more than just talk him back into the fold." Another of us said, "Yeah, and I really feel for his lover; she's a girl like me who had a hard time getting out from under everyone's thumb. I'll take my last 1d10 relationship die with her."

So they used these unspent dice to systematically represent their understanding of these people whom they had heard so much about and from, and in part because of that, we didn't have to do anything more drastic than wave guns around without shooting and shout a lot at them. It could've been a lot worse. And if a similar situation ever comes up - or if we ever run into these fine folks' relatives - we can bring those relationships back into play.

That's what Relationship dice are for, in both ways. They're for when something or someone is so important to your character that you can't bear not to have it already systematically described, and they're for when you want to show that your character has really been 'gotten' by one of the NPCs. Both are useful - but if you throw all your dice into previous relationships, you're going to have to accept the fact that they're not always going to come up.

(In fact, I'd say that the big idea of, say, 'Strong Community' isn't that you have lots of relationship dice in your community members, but that you grew up in a place where you learned that your bonds with other people gave you strength, so you form lots of those bonds very fast, as represented by a big pool of availiable dice.)

I think another thing to think about is that Pre-spent relationship dice is in some ways like TRoS' Spiritual Attributes, and certain similar mechanics in other games; They're a heads up to the GM that you want to see this person at least once during the course of the campaign, or that you'd like to see them again.

My two predefined relationships are with Dove's mother, and the Marshall who replaced his pa, kind of a father figure. It's a not-so-subtle hint to Lx that I'd like to see the game veer over to the non-Faithful community where his mother lives (A blooming rose in a bed of sand..). Failing that, I'd like to have them show up somewhere within a Faithful community.. Imagine if that non-Faithful TA Marshall who complicates things in some town or other just happens to be your old mentor?

Anyhow, that's my take on relationships. I'm personally missing out on the power of assigning dice during play, but I'm plenty aware of the potential of pre-assigning them.

Vincent wrote: Allowing relationship dice to be brought into conflicts on the fly would be taking your foot off the gas.

Vincent wrote: Your relationships on the other hand, applied to sees and raises, are going to be practically all emotional and ideological. Even if the relationship's been established to be physical or violent, like "my dad (who used to kick shit out of me)," you'll be able to easily interpret it into a "just talking" see or raise.

Technocrat13 wrote: So, when you define your character's Traits, you define what you want them to do. But when you define your character's Relationships, you define who you want them to meet.

DitV bottom p. 97 wrote: Your Traits contribute to how conflicts go, but your Relationships contribute to what conflicts are about. When you take “I’m a good shot” as a Trait, you’re saying that you want to resolve conflicts by shooting. When you take a Relationship with a person, you’re saying that you want to be in conflict with him or her.

Heh. Right on. And I'm 1000 miles away from my copy. :)

-Eric

We all carry The Book in our hearts... the Godly learn to hear the voice of the scriptures within them.

TonyLB wrote: We all carry The Book in our hearts... the Godly learn to hear the voice of the scriptures within them.

TonyLB wrote: We all carry The Book in our hearts... the Godly learn to hear the voice of the scriptures within them.

When you take a Relationship with a person, you’re saying that you want to be in conflict with him or her.

When you take a Relationship with a person, you’re saying that you want to be in conflict with him or her.

Bringing one relationship into a conflict isn't going to de-accelerate it any more than a trait will, no. Is that your proposed rule, that you're allowed to bring one and only one relationship into a conflict?

I understood your proposed rule to be that you're allowed to bring in every relationship that you can justify. Now do you see how that screws the tension?

And think about what it'd do in combination with "you get a free d6 relationship with your blood." Running out of dice, but don't want to punch your opponent? Think up a new cousin!

I can get a character into a fight just as easily over a dog thinking "I have to protect that dog because my dad taught me to protect animals," as I can over my dad thinking "I have to protect my dad."

lumpley wrote: And think about what it'd do in combination with "you get a free d6 relationship with your blood." Running out of dice, but don't want to punch your opponent? Think up a new cousin!

In game mechanical terms, what you're saying is that in your experience the game works if you double the number of dice you get for traits and do away with relationships altogether.