After playing one session of DitV, and seeing each player get Experience at least three times, plus Reflection, plus all the actual Fallout, I was a little shocked. They say D&D advancement is too fast! (Well, I do anyway.)

My players immediately worried about people putting lots of advancement into, say, their gun skill. One of the players started out with 3d8, and could easily see after 3-4 sessions having 6d10. If other players scattered their advances around a bit more, this is a massive advantage.
There is, of course, the argument that this advantage only applies if it escalates to gunplay, and someone who does that same with a social trait has just as big an advantage in situations where the dogs don't actually want to use guns.

But I had a different concern (two actually):
First, the NPC creation system is nifty. But the balance between NPCs and PCs will be completely different after just a few sessions. Games I like I inevitably end up running for campaigns which last 12+ sessions, and more often 50+ sessions. I dread to think what Dogs will look like after 50 sessions.

Second, imagine how tedious a conflict would become if on each of their first half-dozen raised and sees, each player and their opponents were throwing an extra 4-8 dice into their pool...

I don't mind the fallout 'experience' - since that naturally gives flavourful ratings around the d4 or d6 level. It's the ability of experience to give mega-d10 ratings, and to turn a d4 trait into a 3d10 trait in just a few sessions.

Does anyone else share this concern? Does everyone else play long-term games of DitV - and if so, could you post a couple of sample PCs from your game?

The short answers continue:

Embrace those big gunfighting dice. Every die in gunfighting is a die you love. That's a character who winds up making life or death decisions every single time, and that's what the game's for.

Learn and love the group NPC, sorcerer and possession rules.

You'll make it to 12+ sessions easy. 50? Probably.

-Vincent

Oh hey, do you see that your concern about experience and your concern about lethality are the same concern? The game balances risk and gain against one another. It's your job as GM to make sure your conflicts' stakes aren't out of scale with risk and gain. In practical terms, that means: you want small conflicts with lots of follow-up potential, not one big conflict to resolve the whole mess.

-Vincent

lumpley wrote: Oh hey, do you see that your concern about experience and your concern about lethality are the same concern?

In practical terms, that means: you want small conflicts with lots of follow-up potential, not one big conflict to resolve the whole mess.

The game balances risk and gain against one another. It's your job as GM to make sure your conflicts' stakes aren't out of scale with risk and gain.

I could see the problem becoming quite serious after a lot of sessions. That's probably the place where the characters are starting to get worn too, so if I ever get through that many sessions (wishful thinking), I'd probably start to think about a new set of characters.

If you have 6d10 in guns, as someone once said (I believe on this forum) that's six ten sided dice that are sitting around, whispering in your ear, begging you to roll them. That character will leave footprints in blood wherever he walks.

I really don't think that providing risk is difficult in DitV. Consider this:

A woman doesn't like what the Dogs are doing to her son. She pulls out a rifle and shoots. She has a 3d10 relationship with her son, and she gets a really good roll, and raises with 18.

Even with +10d10 dice, the Dog isn't insured that he's going to be able to get good enough dice to Dodge or Block. Meaning if he's going to continue this, he's going to have to Take the Blow. Taking a blow from a gun puts you at risk of losing their character insntantly after the fight, no take-backs.

Worse yet, what about if the Dog doesn't want to escalate to gun-fighting where all his precious traits are? What if he wants the woman to live? That's loking at a really mean deal.

I see Darren's worry. The thing is, the experience system is relentlessly linear - you get that one die allways, with no diminishing returns. It's also non-retractable - you can't lose experience, ever. The end result is rather like D&D, actually. The game progresses steadily towards... something.

Now, the key question here is if the system can handle it. There'd be two ways a system could do it:
1) the progress is illusionary, numbers are just growing (Sorcerer comes close, Hero System too, HeroQuest is the perfect example)
2) the progress has some end-point, substantially changing the game (WW games spring to mind, to a degree, but MLwM is a better example)
Then there's the dysfunctional way, the one in D&D: the system continues qualitatively the same, packing more and more stuff in the execution without finding any kind of ending or lesson out of it all. Soon you're all at level 20 with Epic levels to look towards, and fights, when they're played, take the whole evening with literally hundreds of rolls...

As I see it, DiV might well have the D&D problem. Progress isn't ending anywhere, as the game in it's current state includes not an ending condition or any hint at when a dog should retire numbers-wise. Likewise, the progress is not certainly illusionary - it's much more tiring and slow to roll twenty dice per conflict than it is to roll half a dozen (not to speak of rises and dodges). It's a logistical nightmare.

This is certainly a minor problem, I wouldn't worry about it too much. If it came to that, I imagine that players would recognize the problem and just strip their characters down to size, or start new ones. Trivial to execute. Still, it is an aesthetic flaw... I guess that I'd put in some kind of automatical ending condition, I like those. Like ascension from SoY...

Chris Goodwin wrote: If you have 6d10 in guns, as someone once said (I believe on this forum) that's six ten sided dice that are sitting around, whispering in your ear, begging you to roll them. That character will leave footprints in blood wherever he walks.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Then there's the dysfunctional way, the one in D&D: the system continues qualitatively the same, packing more and more stuff in the execution without finding any kind of ending or lesson out of it all. Soon you're all at level 20 with Epic levels to look towards, and fights, when they're played, take the whole evening with literally hundreds of rolls...

As I see it, DiV might well have the D&D problem.

Likewise, the progress is not certainly illusionary - it's much more tiring and slow to roll twenty dice per conflict than it is to roll half a dozen (not to speak of rises and dodges).

This is certainly a minor problem, I wouldn't worry about it too much. If it came to that, I imagine that players would recognize the problem and just strip their characters down to size, or start new ones.

Trivial to execute. Still, it is an aesthetic flaw... I guess that I'd put in some kind of automatical ending condition, I like those. Like ascension from SoY...

sirogit wrote: I really don't think that providing risk is difficult in DitV. Consider this:

A woman doesn't like what the Dogs are doing to her son. She pulls out a rifle and shoots. She has a 3d10 relationship with her son, and she gets a really good roll, and raises with 18.

Worse yet, what about if the Dog doesn't want to escalate to gun-fighting where all his precious traits are? What if he wants the woman to live? That's loking at a really mean deal.

There's a self-limiter in there you haven't noticed, which is that as your high dice increase you take less fallout. High dice don't snowball. The character you oughta be worrying about is the one with a hundred d4s.

There are other limiters, even subtler, based on the players' emotional engagement with the people and situations in the towns, the draw of relationships, the logic in the conflicts, and the real meaning of the game. There are good reasons both why lots of high dice - or a hundred d4s - don't happen all that much, and aren't a problem when they do.

I'm not saying that my game is all games. If it's not a game your group wants to play, I can live with that. But I am saying that your concerns are pretty speculative and the game's dynamic may be more subtle than you see.

I haven't played a game out to 12 sessions; I don't hold the long-term campaign as an ideal for the game. Maybe I'm wrong.

-Vincent

lumpley wrote: There's a self-limiter in there you haven't noticed, which is that as your high dice increase you take less fallout. High dice don't snowball. The character you oughta be worrying about is the one with a hundred d4s.

There are other limiters, even subtler, based on the players' emotional engagement with the people and situations in the towns, the draw of relationships, the logic in the conflicts, and the real meaning of the game.

<snip>I haven't played a game out to 12 sessions; I don't hold the long-term campaign as an ideal for the game. Maybe I'm wrong.

Well I mean come on. You're arguing with the designer that the design's broken. Of course it's going to get irritating. And of course my answer is going to be "I'll believe it when I see it, play the game straight before you screw around with it."

-Vincent

lumpley wrote: Well I mean come on. You're arguing with the designer that the design's broken. Of course it's going to get irritating. And of course my answer is going to be "I'll believe it when I see it, play the game straight before you screw around with it."

demiurgeastaroth wrote: But you've admitted that you don't play it for long games, which is precisely the situation I'm wondering about.

I'm sorry.
It wasn't my intention with raising all these questions, particularly the Long-term XP one, to appear to be casting aspersions of the game (or, in fact, to actually cast aspersions on the game).
I realise (after the fact, sadly), that my unrelenting pursuit of my theory might have been argumentative or unduly critical. I'm sorry if that's the case - I'm sorry anyway!.

I said, "I'm a gamer and thus not very socially adept," thus proving the second part in spectacular fashion as that could be read to be an insult to everyone who is likely to read this thread.
I wasn't kidding about being not very socially adept! Apologies to everyone!

nikola wrote: As it happens, if it happens, make sure to write it up in Actual Play so we can all see how it plays out. I'm really curious. I've only played three sessions with my group (plus a couple with Vincent like a year ago during playtesting), so they're just getting the gist of "use every trait you can! Take social fallout! Make up reasons the regalia does stuff!"

It's true that dice inflation will be a problem in the long run. I forsee running Dogs for 5 sessions at a time, in the fashion of single "season" like in Primetime Adventures.

You could do what I did by accident during my last game, and only give one experience gain per session (plus reflection).

Kai

ptikachu wrote: You could do what I did by accident during my last game, and only give one experience gain per session (plus reflection).

house rule heresy wrote: Some ratings need two instances of XP to increase. If you gain experience in fallout, and choose such a trait, put a check mark next to the trait. The next time you gain experience on that trait, it actually increases.
These situations are:
- increase a die type from d6 to d8, or d8 to d10.
- increase a d8 trait from an even number of dice
- increase a d10 trait

I think it would be really useful to take a snapshot of the starting characters, run the Dogs through 12 towns with the rules as written, then show another snapshot. I'd love to see that!

And so what if the Monster Dogs can run roughshod over the townsfolk? They still have to decide who gets their wish granted and who gets crushed underfoot, and if the Dogs have different opinions on the matter, then its Monster vs. Monster! Are you willing to use your Dog's "Talk the wings off an Angel 6d10" to force your brother Dog to decide whether it's worth escalating to get his "Shoot the pecker off a gnat 6d10" dice to use against you or to give in YET again?

And that's not even getting into the 10d4 relationship built up over many, many conflicts and building towards the final confrontation using experience to bump it to 10d6, 10d8, ... and maybe he wants to do something about it before you bump it up. The best allies make the worst enemies.

Less apocalyptically, long term fallout can also reduce stats and traits, so it's not a one-way march upward, necessarily. Dropping a die of Heart or Will seems as plausible a choice as taking the trait "I shot my brother dead in front of his kid 1d4" or a relationship "Dead brother I shot 1d4". (Or come to think of it, "Nephew whose Pa I killed 1d4" which might be handy for the followup conflict.) I find how a player chooses to take fallout is mighty interesting, and I've only run Dogs twice so far.

cdr wrote: I think it would be really useful to take a snapshot of the starting characters, run the Dogs through 12 towns with the rules as written, then show another snapshot. I'd love to see that!

And so what if the Monster Dogs can run roughshod over the townsfolk?

Less apocalyptically, long term fallout can also reduce stats and traits, so it's not a one-way march upward, necessarily. Dropping a die of Heart or Will seems as plausible a choice...

So Vincent doesn't pop a vein, I'll say this here and now:

Play through. See what happens in several months when what you fear has been set up. Then see if it happens.

My guess is, this is irrelevant. Folks will stop taking dice in Traits and Stats and start taking dice in Relationships. The players will disagree about what's worth fighting for and things will get reallly interesting.

What do you hope to accomplish with these rules? It doesn't change anything about the core of the game: making decisions about what to do. All it will do is make it more likely that they will have to pay a higher price when they make that decision.

My problem with D&D advancement is not that it's too fast. My problem is that the choices you can make suck. A new spell from the list? Another hit point? Shit, I want to show that my fear of my enemies is consuming me! How do I represent that without it straight out killing my character as soon as it comes up?

You're right: beefing up the opposition just puts you on a treadmill, but more importantly, it's a treadmill that's orthogonal to what's actually going on in the game. You've got everyone running sideways because "getting more powerful" isn't the issue: choosing a direction in which to focus that power is meaningful and relevant.

See Yojimbo. Notice the concentration of opposition it takes to rough up Sanjuro. If it took less, he'd have been incompetent to take a moral stand on the situation in the town.

The game's about the protagonists, not their opposition. When they've all chosen what's important to them, it won't match with the other Dogs and the protagonists will have meaningful, competent, and rich conflicts about it.