In this old thread:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10953
Vincent suggests a rule for replenishing Relationship Dice over time.

lumpley wrote: Between towns, choose 3 dice, roll 'em, 1-3 you get it, as above. To be fiddled as actual play results warrant. Running out of Relationship dice means that you're dependent on these for new relationships, which means sometimes you'll have 'em and sometimes you won't. You can also rebuild slowly if for some reason you don't assign relationships in a town.

lumpley wrote: I'm also going to wait on actual play before I do anything to Relationships with sin 'n' stuff.

The available relationship dice options in reflection fallout work perfectly. Read them carefully to see what I did instead of tying it to background.

Making group relationships "cost" double dice is an atrocity I can't possibly support.

-Vincent

lumpley wrote: The available relationship dice options in reflection fallout work perfectly. Read them carefully to see what I did instead of tying it to background.

Making group relationships "cost" double dice is an atrocity I can't possibly support.

There's this thing that happens sometimes when people see Dogs. They go "holy FUCK, the characters are effective! I gotta put a stop to that! How can this possibly go well if the characters run around accomplishing all their goals all the time?"

It's nonsense. The meaning of the game, now look I'm talking about the MEANING of the game, depends on the characters being effective and accomplishing their goals. Your job as a GM isn't to keep them from accomplishing exactly what they want to accomplish, it's to design good towns and then play the townspeople fully and with passion. I promise, the Dogs can win every single conflict easily and the game still works, it's still challenging morally and it'll still engage you and your players. Losing a conflict once in a while is a spice, not a staple.

Minmaxing Dogs is playing Dogs well. Some gamers, some GMs, have a really hard time with that, and it seems that you're one of them.

-Vincent

That's absolutely true in play.

In our recent game one of the initiative achievements was "I want to make a friend at Dog School". This character had little in the way of Social niceities and was going to get buried by the GM dice.

The player found a way to escalate to Gunfighting (which she was good at) at to get enough dice in order to win.

The key thing here wasn't whether or not she COULD make a friend. Dogs have enough dice that the CAN do almost anything right from the start anyway. The key was that she was willing to kill somebodies pet dog in order to make a friend.

The system provides almost no limitation on effectiveness. Because the system isn't concerned with limiting effectiveness. The system is concerned with making the player's choose where their effectiveness comes from. When your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Do your characters have a wide range of tools on their character sheet? Or do they have 1 really big hammer (like a super high gun fighting stat).

As Vincent noted earlier...the character with the super high gun fighting stat is a Dog GM's dream come true. The question isn't "how good is he with a gun". The question is "given that so much of his character's effectiveness is tied up in that gun, how often will he use it" i.e. at what point do all the innocent townfolk start looking like nails to him.

That's why doubling the cost of relationship dice as a way of limiting effectiveness is an abomination in this game. You WANT the players to have that kind of effectivness at their disposal.

lumpley wrote: There's this thing that happens sometimes when people see Dogs. They go "holy FUCK, the characters are effective! I gotta put a stop to that! How can this possibly go well if the characters run around accomplishing all their goals all the time?"

Valamir wrote: That's why doubling the cost of relationship dice as a way of limiting effectiveness is an abomination in this game. You WANT the players to have that kind of effectivness at their disposal.

Perhaps I'm missing something. By "groups" do you mean institutions, like the Faith or the Dogs? p40 in "Conflict & Resolution" points out that you only use relationship dice with an institution if your opponent is a person with authority in the institution or what's at stake is your status with regard to the institution. It's not like a person where you get the dice when they're your opponent, or they're what's at stake, or when they come to your active aid in a conflict.

So if you're planning to lay a lot of smackdown on Stewards, then taking dice in a relationship with the Faith makes a lot of sense (and seems fine to me, because its telling the GM you want a lot of conflict with people in authority in the Faith). But I don't see why that would need to cost more than a relationship with anything else?

cdr wrote: Perhaps I'm missing something. By "groups" do you mean institutions, like the Faith or the Dogs?

p40 in "Conflict & Resolution" points out that you only use relationship dice with an institution if your opponent is a person with authority in the institution or what's at stake is your status with regard to the institution.

You can take a Relationship with an institution like Faith or Dogs, and probably Territorial Authority.

Could you take a Relationship with, say, "Outlaws"?
What about (different question) "the McMurdough Gang"?

Or would these be taken as Traits instead?

I hate to tell you this, but the answer is to take traits and relationships that make sense to you. Tell your players to take traits and relationships that make sense to them.

Can you? Would you? Do you? Hell I don't know. Write down words that make sense and that everybody knows what you mean.

Screwing around with making some relationships "cost" more than others is a terrible idea. It's a throwback to a really stupid and outmoded - or at least incompatible with Dogs - approach to RPG design.

If your group decides that "obviously" group relationships are better than individual relationships, then I guess that means that everyone in your group should take only group relationships. That doesn't bother me a bit, it shouldn't bother you either.

-Vincent

demiurgeastaroth wrote: You put 1 die in Group relationship, you get 1 die.
You put 1 die in a Single relationship, you get 2 dice (or 2 single relationships at 1 die).
...What I'm trying to do is make each option equally attractive.

There's a couple of questions here that haven't yet been answered.

1. Institution Relationships:
The term 'institution' (and examples in text: Dogs, Faith) suggest to me actual, formalised institutions.
Can this kind of relationship apply to loose groups, such as "Outlaws" or (nikola's example) "Farmers".

2. With a Relationship with the Dogs, you can use it "when what's at stake is your status with regard to the institution". I may be being dense, but I'm not clear what that means. To help me see, can someone suggest three different examples of this?

nikola wrote: A Relationship with Farmers is pretty useful. A relationship with Farmer Ted, taken the moment you draw on him, is really useful - for a minute.

I think perhaps that the point is that it really dosen't matter if the relationship with Farmer Ted is more or less useful than a relationship with Farmers as a whole. What does matter is that your choice of relationships tells us all about who you want your character to get into conflicts with. If you take the broad scope of Farmers, then we know that you don't care which farmer you get into conflict with, you just want to get into conflict with farmers. On the other hand, if you just have Farmer Ted as your relation, then we know that you're specifically interested in conflicting with or about Farmer Ted. It's not the power of your character that's important, it what you're telling us about your character that is.

-Eric

Technocrat13 wrote: I think perhaps that the point is that it really dosen't matter if the relationship with Farmer Ted is more or less useful than a relationship with Farmers as a whole. What does matter is that your choice of relationships tells us all about who you want your character to get into conflicts with. If you take the broad scope of Farmers, then we know that you don't care which farmer you get into conflict with, you just want to get into conflict with farmers. On the other hand, if you just have Farmer Ted as your relation, then we know that you're specifically interested in conflicting with or about Farmer Ted. It's not the power of your character that's important, it what you're telling us about your character that is.

-Eric

3 examples:
What's at stake is, does she talk you into betraying your fellow Dogs?
What's at stake is, does the steward recognize your authority?
What's at stake is, does she acknowledge you to be as good a Dog as she was?

-Vincent

lumpley wrote: 3 examples:
What's at stake is, does she talk you into betraying your fellow Dogs?
What's at stake is, does the steward recognize your authority?
What's at stake is, does she acknowledge you to be as good a Dog as she was?

-Vincent

I think that you're making a poor assumption; That Ted is temporary. If I have Ted on my sheet, that means I'm telling you that I want to get into conflicts with Ted. Not once. Not a couple times. Over and over. Ted is central to my story. That's why I put him there.

Therefore, a Relationship of Ted 1d6 is no more or less powerful than a relationship of Farmers 1d6.

-Eric

... well, the point is that they're not mutually exclusive, that you can take (and lose) relationships at will.

Take the relationships you want. That way, what you fight over and with is mechanically supported. If relationships with groups are penalized, it means the players can't direct the conflicts with groups as well as they can with individuals. Why do that?

(Edit: this was in response to something hours ago. I went to see Hitchhiker's Guide and then submitted. Now there's more posts!)

Why don't you just let your players choose what they want?

Darren, did you read what I wrote above?

If you can't figure it out, it's easy, just don't write it on your character sheet.

All these questions you're asking us, they're questions for your group. They aren't even questions to ask out loud, they're questions to have in mind and observe how your group instinctively answers them. This is in the rules! Start play with an open mind and an open heart, and follow your group's lead.

Introduce the rules, clearly, fully, but neutrally, and whatever relationships they choose, those are the relationships they want. Badgering us for what we think and how we justify things gives you absolutely zero useful information.

We can't help you. You're asking us to do your group's work.

-Vincent

lumpley wrote:
All these questions you're asking us, they're questions for your group.

demiurgeastaroth wrote: With institutions, are they meant to be formal institutions (like governments, religions, military forces, police forces) or can Institution Relationships also be used for more general types of characters (outlaws, farmers, traders, etc.)?

nikola wrote: Why would it be that? Formal institutions are exactly the same as any other group except that lots of people think they all think the same thing about them (they're probably wrong).

Oh. Yeah, an institution explicitly has some kind of authority structure to it. You can't take a relationship to "farmers" or "outlaws," although you certainly can to a particular outlaw gang or, I dunno, farmers' collective or something. You get the dice when you're in conflict with an authority in the institution, not just any ol' anybody in it.

That's page ... 40 of the GenCon edition, must be 42 or 43 of the first edition.

-Vincent

lumpley wrote: Oh. Yeah, an institution explicitly has some kind of authority structure to it. You can't take a relationship to "farmers" or "outlaws," although you certainly can to a particular outlaw gang or, I dunno, farmers' collective or something. You get the dice when you're in conflict with an authority in the institution, not just any ol' anybody in it.

lumpley wrote: Oh. Yeah, an institution explicitly has some kind of authority structure to it. You can't take a relationship to "farmers" or "outlaws," although you certainly can to a particular outlaw gang or, I dunno, farmers' collective or something. You get the dice when you're in conflict with an authority in the institution, not just any ol' anybody in it.

Josh, I actually think I get the distinction there. Kikuchiyo has opinions about farmers, but stakes about Kambei.

Stakes of "Do I win a duel in front of these farmers" are not more charged for him. Stakes of "Do I win a duel in front of Kambei" would be. Relationships are not the same as Traits... they're not the opinions and abilities you bring to the conflict, they are your personal reason for being in the conflict. They're the people who are going to judge you, based on what you do.

That having been said... I could see "farmers" as a relationship. But taking it as a relationship implies that farmers respond to your character as a whole. If you pissed off the farmers in the last town, the farmers in the next town are pissed off at you. The judgment they levelled last town has to be permanent... it's part of the ongoing relationship.

Vincent: Is that the same distinction as institutions? Or something else? Or have I got it completely turned 'round?

If a player wants to take a relationship with a group rather than an individual, that's fine with me. If it's a positive relationship, he's going to be getting dragged into that group's struggles more often. That could be bad for him, or could lead to some good drama. If it's negative, he's going to be up against the whole damn group. Good for him!

On the other hand, taking a relationship with an individual might seem more narrow, but it makes things more personal. You're not just an enemy of the nasty Rail Company, you've got a personal vendetta against Lionel Armstrong, the corrupt and brutal strongman who enforces the will of his employers Back East. Or you're not just friends with the Great Elk tribe of Mountain People, but a personal friend of Chief Ma-Tai-Ha, who considers you to be the one Faithful he can trust. Which relationship would you prefer?

That's why I'm okay with Relationship dice having the same value for Groups as well as Individuals.

We've wandered into something really interesting here. Mostly because I love Seven Samurai so much.

TonyLB wrote: Josh, I actually think I get the distinction there. Kikuchiyo has opinions about farmers, but stakes about Kambei.

Stakes of "Do I win a duel in front of these farmers" are not more charged for him. Stakes of "Do I win a duel in front of Kambei" would be.

Relationships are not the same as Traits... they're not the opinions and abilities you bring to the conflict, they are your personal reason for being in the conflict. They're the people who are going to judge you, based on what you do.

That having been said... I could see "farmers" as a relationship. But taking it as a relationship implies that farmers respond to your character as a whole. If you pissed off the farmers in the last town, the farmers in the next town are pissed off at you. The judgment they levelled last town has to be permanent... it's part of the ongoing relationship.

Vincent: Is that the same distinction as institutions? Or something else? Or have I got it completely turned 'round?

I totally agree that you're going to act like the farmers are someone you know. But you're going to be very surprised if they act like you're someone they know. Right?

I totally get that the relationship with farmers changes the way Kikuchiyo views farmers. But I don't see that it changes the way farmers view Kikuchiyo. The farmers don't think that he has anything special to prove to them, so they don't have a good context to put him under social pressure. They're not judging him more intensely than other samurai.

I've played it exactly the way you're talking about. In fact, I assumed (prior to Vincent's clarification) that that's how it was meant to be played. But I think I see the attraction of personalizing it to either a person or institution.

If you have "Mountain Folk 2d8" and you go to a new village, you can make the Stakes "Do the Mountain Folk accept me." Which is fine.

If you have "Chief Ma-ha-tai 2d8" and you go to a new village you make the Stakes "Do the Mountain Folk accept me as a friend of Ma-ha-tai, whom they know." I think that's better.

What you've done, right in that rewording, is to set the basis for how these people judge you and relate to you. It's not for your benefit... it's for theirs. It helps (in this case) the GM to know how you want these people to think about you.

TonyLB wrote: I totally agree that you're going to act like the farmers are someone you know. But you're going to be very surprised if they act like you're someone they know. Right?...I've played it exactly the way you're talking about. In fact, I assumed (prior to Vincent's clarification) that that's how it was meant to be played. But I think I see the attraction of personalizing it to either a person or institution....What you've done, right in that rewording, is to set the basis for how these people judge you and relate to you. It's not for your benefit... it's for theirs. It helps (in this case) the GM to know how you want these people to think about you.

nikola wrote: Yeah, and Vincent, it was you who suggested Relationship: Women as fallout for Frank Redboots.

The ultimate answer to this entire thread...and indeed many of the recent threads is simply this...

...ask yourself "why does it matter?"

If the answer is any of the following (or similiar):
"I want to know what the 'right' way of doing it is"
"I want to make sure the dice are fair"
"I'm worried the character's may be too effective"
"I'm concerned about balance among the characters"
"I'm concerned about balance with the NPCs"
"I'm concerned the Dogs may have too easy a time"
"I'm concerned the Dogs may have too hard a time"
"My players are going to try to min max"

Then the answer to the question is "it doesn't matter, because none of those questions are relevant...certainly not to Dogs, and also not to most other RPGs (even though we often think otherwise)".

The solution when an issue like this comes up is always "Choose the option that makes the most sense to you and your group at that point in time in that set of circumstances."


Now if you can answer the "why does it matter?" question with something more meaningful than any of the above...then it is something worth thinking about. The solution to it will almost always be...you guessed it..."Choose the option that makes the most sense to you and your group at that point in time in that set of circumstances."


In other words...just play...respect each other...make judgements when necessary. Good sound advice for any game session me thinks, no?

I think that something about long-term play is being missed here.

The answer to all of your questions is: Take enough Fallout, and you can have any relationship or trait you want at any value you want.

Play one or two towns, and you will understand this at a deep, intuitive level. All of your "farmer ted versus family of farmer ted" questions will vanish like dew under dawnlight.

yrs--
--Ben