I finally brow beat Seth into running some Dogs and we had our character creation session last week.

My question involves the difference between simple achievements where I play what I want and the GM plays my opposition and growth achievements where the GM plays what I want and I play my opposition.

I wanna pick your brain as to the whys and wherefors of that distinction. It threw us for a loop a little bit, but that may be because we didn't grok the intention behind it.

We had a couple of good achievements I think. I was playing the son of a Mountain Man / Fur Trapper who wanted to learn to read (and yes, my Coat is covered with lots of patch work fur and tails and the other Growth Achievement was a prissy snobbish daughter of a Steward who had a fancy schmancy horse...but didn't know how to ride.

It seemed that the players were put in the position (representing the "bad stuff") of trying to intentionally lose the conflict...but since its rather easy to throw a conflict in Dogs that didn't seem like the approach we should have been taking.

Thoughts?

I can give thoughts and an example, but not a reason behind it.

My character's achievement was to learn the middle ground between talking and shooting. The conflict involved some guy calling Dove out about how all of his stories involved his guns. When Dove tried to talk his way out of the growing conflict, the guy took a swing at him. Dove dodged the blow, and out came the pistols and he told the fella all friendly like to back off. The guy shrugged, mentioned that he'd proved his point, and walked off.

I deliberately "threw" the conflict, of sorts, but rather than winning the stakes, I lost them. It popped into my head that that's what he would do, and it would cause a lot of interesting conflict in the future, so I did it. I ended up with the trait "There ain't no middle ground" Which has served Dove in good stead when he's been doing his damnedest not to escalate, and when escalation became inevitable. It also serves to make it more likely that Dove will eventually kill someone accidentally, a scene I'm really looking forward to.

See, the way I see it, with your initiatory conflicts, it doesn't really matter if you win or lose. Either way you get a cool d6 trait. Given that, it mechanically doesn't matter who plays what side of the conflict, and there's a certain thematic sense to having the player play the character as he is, and the GM play toward changing for the better.

The rationale is all about raises.

I'm the GM. If I'm taking the side of you not learning to read, I'm going to be raising things like "you tell the reading teacher to go screw himself" and "you're just so dang stupid" and "you get bored and wander out of the room." If you're taking the side of you learning to read, you're going to be raising things like "the reading teacher is patient and careful, and keeps at it" and "the reading teacher hits me with the ruler when I goof off" and "the reading teacher assigns me ten hours' reading over the weekend and promises to send me home in disgrace if I don't do it."

Too weird. Unnatural. What happens if you try to play it that way is you sit there staring at each other, minds blank, unable to come up with a single thing.

Yeah, you can throw the conflict if you want. It's about the same as all those conflicts where if you escalate you're guaranteed to win. Either way you get an interesting and useful trait.

-Vincent

We recognized right away that win or lose the reward was the same.

Interestingly that paragraph that you think sounds unnatural and wierd...was exactly what I wanted to do...interesting because it doesn't seem at all wierd to me. Its pretty much exactly how it played out only the roles were reversed. I wound up talking about how I went fishing with my friends and such, so it worked...it just seemed backwards. I actually would have enjoyed winning that one because I think "I still can't read" would have been a more interesting trait to play with.

The horse riding one was more problematic because it got all twisted around who was narrating which side even the rest of us kibbitzers had trouble remembering who was representing what. The player really wanted to be narrating how her character was trying to learn to ride and have the GM narrate the obstacles. Instead she wound up taking fall out out on sees that she could have reversed in order to make sure she lost (which did at least illustrate an immediate grasp of how the system works) while struggling to come up with narration taking the side that she wanted to lose.

Perhaps its the difference between a Driven Growth Achievement and a Growth In Spite of Yourself Achievement. The reversed roles would seem more natural in the latter, where I'd have an easier time envisioning the character NOT wanting to grow. But in the horse riding Achievement where the character was actually dedicating herself to learning to ride like a man it might have worked best the other way...

Is that the only point in the game where the roles are reversed like that?


BTW: On the matter of escalating guarenteeing victory, we quickly uncovered the moral of Dogs as embedded in the mechanics as guns were pulled ultimately as part of a "I want to make a friend" achievement...

You know, as I'm thinking about it, I wonder if the "learning to ride" conflict would have been better handled as a standard conflict. I thought that the "I learn to read" conflict of Ralph's character went fairly well. As GM, I didn't feel like I was struggling all that much to come up with good raises. (Well, it was the first Dogs conflict that I had run, but aside from that...)

That being said, while the group was excited that Jebediah (Ralph's character) learned to read, the standard conflicts were more exciting. And yes, Reuben's conflict that escalated to gunfire was very cool.

While I'm here, Vincent, let me note that I think that initiatory conflicts are a brilliant addition to the game. In one fell swoop, you combine a touch of random chargen, character backstory creation and a system tutorial, all at the same time. Very cool. Kudos.

Hey Ralph,

Your last paragraph about the difference between a "you want to grow" and "growth in spite of yourself" is how I ran it with my players.

The question I asked was how resistant did they think the character was to what the player wanted the achievement to be. If the character desperately wanted to learn to read, I would have run it as a simple achievement. If the character didn't really care about learning to read then I would have set it up with the player as resistance.

best

Trevis