OK, I've got a lot to say about this game, and it won't all get said in this post. There's a particular issue I want to get to right away, but I have a couple preliminaries first.


Preliminary 1: Players. I have three. Two are Paul and Danielle, who need no introduction for some of you - the award-winning designer of My Life With Master and numerous free RPGs worth paying for, and his SO, who as others have noted has certain very great strengths as a roleplayer. The third is George, who used to play in Len Lafloka's D&D group, was the star player in a group of mine two summers ago, and who wrote a small part of the recent Tekumel RPG and should have had more of his work included.

I like all three of these people. I have run two very fine sessions and several OK ones for George before with a homebrew system, and ran an abortive Sorcerer game for Paul and Danielle and Tom which had some good moments but which basically didn't work out. This game is my first TT play other than cons and games with old old friends who ouija board the hell out of everything with me since last summer.


Preliminary 2: Why Dogs has the best GM prep sections ever. This is a big deal to me, but to explain why, I need to tell you what game holds second place: Dungeons and Dragons, in particular the 1974 "brown book" and 1977 "Sutherland dragon cover" boxed sets.

Walt Freitag made a point that relates to my reasons in the birthday forum. D&D, admittedly in the EGGman's tortured prose, says: "make a dungeon!" It tells you how to do this, what to stock it with, gives you examples and advice and tables, and so on and so forth. You make the characters, take them into the dungeon, kill orcs, do your thing, and 'roleplay'.

Dungeons have a lot of problems but they give a GM and a group something definite to work with. You roleplay in the dungeon, make your choices in the dungeon, kill monsters in the dungeon, find love in the dungeon, whatever else: it happens down there, and there are maps and fights and random encounter charts and whatever else.

Well, OK, the dungeon isn't the be-all and end-all for me either, since like 25 years ago. So like a lot of other people I played Runequest and TFT and WFRP and Ars Magica and a lot of other non-D&D fantasy games and did 'fantasy adventures', whatever those were - I mean, I knew how to do it from experience, and my groups knew, but how to conceptualize what we were doing, we didn't know (except for my friend Del) and we didn't write down for others (including Del). So we had these amazing experiences, putting aside our characters' personal issues to save the world, choosing between two lovers, between duty and love, between personal history and the categorical imperative, and lots of other stuff. But fuck-all if we could have said what we were doing to anyone else or, and much more importantly, how they could do it for themselves.

Fast forward to 2004-5. Vincent Baker releases Dogs in the Vineyard. I understood the relationship map idea in The Sorcerer's Soul in a general way because my friend Del had been running adventures that way since the mid-eighties, and I was finally able to say "Aha! So this is how Del was able to write all these adventures that played so great even though they didn't tell you what the end was going to be but didn't just provide a setting either! It's the Relationship Map technique!" But it doesn't TELL YOU WHAT TO DO. It says: here's this technique, and if you're slick and at least 1/10 as smart as Ron Edwards you'll know how to fit it into your games.

Dogs TELLS YOU WHAT TO DO, like old D&D did, but it does it in clear and actionable language.

Why don't more games tell you what to do with them? Most games bend over backwards not to do this. Why? Because most game designers are post-D&D-heads, maybe post-Vampire-heads, who struggled with a system for a long time, who played maybe with some different groups, who realized that to get the kind of 'adventure feel' you want you 'have' to house rule the thing anyway. Blah blah blah. The 'golden rule' is a fucking disgrace for our hobby.

Game designers connected with the Forge have by and large gotten over that issue anyway. But most of them are still writing as people with lots of game experience. This shows up in a few places in the DitV text, but overall much less than most other places. And the game TELLS YOU WHAT TO DO WITH IT, which is what I now think really matters.

Tell people what to do with your game. It worked for Gygax and Arneson. I have no idea why D&D is popular now - probably the dead hand of history together with character-fetishism, competent if conservative sales & marketing, and the endless allure of my-guy-beats-your-guy's ass - but why was it popular back then? Sure as hell wasn't the rules. The 'gear factor' that Ron alludes to and that I think is a valid explanation for Vampire's wild sales success is part of it, but I feel like it can't quite be the whole story. D&D told you what to do with it. Mike Mearls' notion of a 'core story' gets close to this but not close enough IMO. The key thing is that someone who reads the game has this idea "oh, what we do is this," and then does it. It didn't matter that the dungeon was so limited and the rules for dealing with it were incomplete so much as that it was a plan, an idea of what you were going to do. The hard thing - and I have evidence for this claim in the form of about 1000 RPGs that try to do it and fail - is to restate the plan when you've changed it in terms that aren't either completely useless or implicitly reliant on what's come before.

Dogs does this.


What I wanted to talk about: Like I said, there's a lot of stuff.

So they're in Sulfur Junction, and there's problems, and Brother Sander wants them to go out and lynch a half-dozen Mountain People because there's a murrain that's killed more than half his cattle and they must have caused it, and Brother Cyrus the territorial sheriff says everything's fine, nothing to see here, move along. Meanwhile the richest family, richer than Brother Sander's, the Croziers, are doing great, what with their Dry Goods Emporium and their real estate deals and so forth. Zephaniah Crozier's first wife, Malvina, is Women's Counsellor, because Brother Levi, the Branch Steward, doesn't get on so well with women, and his wife who used to help him out passed away, and the Croziers are so upstanding. Well.

So after Absalom (Paul) and Azariah (George) and Philomena (Danielle) get their feet, they split up. Absalom goes after Levi to shape him up; he's a leading light in the interpretation of scripture and he's appointing women to positions of authority? Philomena goes out to her childhood friend Sarah's farmhouse (this was a Relationship Danielle had put on her sheet) and discovers that her husband's beating her up, she has a black eye, conflict, does she spill, finally Philomena gets her to by pulling out her Big, Excellent Book of Life for 2d8 and reading passages about how a wife is properly treated by her husband. So Sarah spills, her husband doesn't do any work and hasn't lain with her for a year and spends all his time drinking brother Gilead's whiskey.

That'll get dealt with next session.

Azariah got the tough hand. Sister Talitha, Zephaniah Crozier's second wife, has been looking smoky-hot at all three of the Dogs, including Sister Philomena. She's not a virtuous woman. In fact, her dress doesn't even cover her collarbone.

So Azariah wants to get her to acknowledge her sinfulness and maybe find out more about the Croziers. I want Azariah to lose his cherry. So I pick this pNPC with 4/4/4/3 for stats but with this crazy four eights roll for traits, 4x2d10. Well. Azariah tried but he lost. He had three fallout dice.

I scooped them up for the follow-up. I said, "and she wants you to do unlawful things to her body."

The follow-up conflict wasn't pretty either. The best part was probably not the strap off her shoulder, but when she opened Brother Azariah's own Book of Life to the Song of Songs and told him to get busy with pomegranates and all that. She crushed him. (Of course, if he had wanted it bad enough, he could have shot the hell out of her and tied her to his horse and dragged her through town with his rope tricks trait and probably barely muddled through the conflict. I wouldn't have done that either though.)

Now Azariah'll come wandering in after Absalom and Levi have it out and Absalom, who took "I'm not a virgin 2d6" as one of his traits, will probably have some words for Azariah. Where Philomena will be during all this I'm not quite sure. I wish we didn't have to wait two weeks to play - maybe we don't.


OK. So what bugs me about this.


First off, with this player, in this game, it was cool. I even checked back to the Social Contract level and flat out asked George: is it going to fuck with your concept of Brother Azariah if he's not a virgin any more? George said no, it gave him more depth. That's cool.

But. There's this thing that used to happen sometimes in high school. The woman player comes into the game with all men. The men make her character into a sex object, somehow, some way, by imaginary rape or stupid immature flirting or whatever. It's a drag and sometimes more than that.

What if I decided I wanted to do the same thing to Danielle? "Hmm, nice tasty lesbian seduction for you, virgin Dog. Nope, sorry, I rolled it out."

I mean, I would have been cool about it and all. I probably would have had recourse to the social contract level same as I did with George, making sure Danielle was OK with this, and so on. There are devices one can use.

But I felt a little awkward about the whole thing, which may explain why I felt a little relief when the three of them decided to send Azariah after Talitha instead of Philomena. George has already had his character milked for seed by amazons (I was cribbing from Shield Maidens of Sea Rune) in my fantasy game, so I know he can take it.

OK, so what's the point. It's a point about GM-Force. I get this list of pNPCs which I have to assign. That's a gamey decision. Some of them can at least force the Dogs to pull guns if they want to win, some can't, that's a gamey decision too. So if I want something as GM I can apply a certain amount of force to get it. That's not necessarily bad. But it does mean that I'm in the game as much as the rest of the players, and in the same way, plus I get to design the setting and the situation. That's not necessarily bad either. I don't know. It's just, all this stuff worries me. I guess it's terror of railroading, really. I mean, it's not really railroading in one sense, and yet in another sense it's sort of railroading with gamey limits imposed. Who's gonna pop a cap in the hot seductive Sister instead of getting his freak on? Maybe some Republican, but probably no-one I play with. Maybe Paul, he sort of gets off on the hard-ass thing, and Absalom has family issues. I don't know. I think this is worth talking about else I wouldn't post it but I'm sort of running out of words here to say more.


It was a good session though. The first time I played with Paul he ran an awesome session of Great Ork Gods. I think I finally caught him with this game - it was pretty darn good.


It's also the first session I ran that I felt like was good because of the game, rather than because I had my game on, since I don't know when. WFRP? That was the modules more than the system. It's been a long time.

So I guess thinking about it a little more my worry isn't a worry about the game exactly, though the issue it brings up is probably important for any designer to think about a little.

It also relates to what I can't help but seeing as the fundamental, basic difference between TTRPGs and single-player CRPGs.

What we're doing in a TT role-playing game, in part, is introducing descriptions of imaginary stuff for group consideration, resolution, adoption. This can be highly constrained, I suppose, but ultimately I think (I think! - feel free to refute) unless there's some freedom to do this it's not really an RPG any more. Although fantasy plays its role in the game, chess isn't an RPG: what you can do is precisely constrained by the board and rules for movement of the pieces.

This ground-level freedom to 'create our shared world' through the descriptions we introduce in play means, always, that social contract is going to be a factor. What you want can be different in different games, the boundaries can be different in different games, and so on - all of that is highly individual.

But because it's not eliminable I think that there will always be the possibility of 'abuse', relative to any given social contract, by bringing in stuff that doesn't seem to fit what others are going for. Games can help with this both positively and negatively but they can't rule it out entirely and remain RPGs.

(Just in case someone who cares about the 'role-playing' part of 'RPG' with a particular emphasis is reading this, I'm actually talking about a broader family of games when I use the term here. Let's not use that to derail the thread if possible.)

But it is worth noting that Dogs both constrains the GM and gives him or her a tool to do more than bass playing by way of the really interesting pNPC rules. I had sort of had it in mind to use the 4x2d10 traits pNPC as this bad-ass gunfighter dude, and now I can't - I'm constrained. But because I thought things would be better in the story if George's character succumbed to temptation, I used it there instead, to try to get the outcome I wanted out of the scene. That's GM Force, the bass taking the lead. I checked it with George because sex stuff can be awkward so I wanted to back up to social contract there but with his consent I went ahead with it.

Except that those three fallout dice weren't yours for the taking. Players can take an NPC's fallout dice (if no one cares about that NPC receiving fallout traits) and roll them into the follow up, but not vice-versa. This is salient to your post because it would have likely challenged the "force-ness" of the outcome: three fewer dice for you, and, likely, an extra trait for Azariah.

More important, though, is to note that paralleling a GM choosing the assignment of proto-NPCs, players have their own disposable resources at hand -- relationships -- with which to alter conflicts on the fly. (Of course, in the same way you are, as you put it, "constrained" by having used up those pNPC traits so too are players who spend their relationships constrained.)

As an aside, and on a personal note, all the Dogs who've graced our tabletop play thus far would've effected a bullet aeration of Talitha without hesitation, and outside of Dogs none of us play "hard-asses" on a regular basis. It's something in the air, I think.

- Kit

So the GM can't do the same thing? That makes sense, actually. I only took them as d4's, though. I still think the GM can generate a hell of a lot of force where he wants to with those rules: not so much that the Dogs can't probably often overcome it, but enough so that if you drive stakes hard you can force them to give on some tough stuff. Again, I'm not sure that should be regarded as a problem.

It's a good point you make about the relationship trick.

I think Talitha would have taken him anyway, but it would have been closer, and maybe he would have escalated to physical and slapped her around, and then maybe he would have been willing to go to the gun.

I think it's going to be a better story because he gave in though. That was why I invested the high trait proto-NPC into her, because I thought that. I wasn't expecting to get that kind of decision as GM is all.

Your players would gun a woman down in her own home rather than sleep with her? Very interesting. Actually, my original wording on that part was too strong, I think in certain circumstances any of these players and others might do the same, but what can I do? I get bored when I don't write forcefully. The way the situation led into things it would have been pretty odd to do this, but on the other hand they are DOGS, so not out of the question in the game at all.

If I may ask, what was your reasoning for the second conflict where the seduction took place? I think that would shed a lot of light on the entire situation.

Just to say: Dogs respects the player's vision of the character just about exactly as much as I intended: not entirely. It's appropriate sometimes for really hard stakes to be on the table, appropriate sometimes for the player to lose them. I'm comfortable with the safeguards that are in place and comfortable that sometimes they won't be enough.

Great thread, Sean, I'm following it close.

(Also you're very kind.)

-Vincent

Good question, Uzzah.

Part of it is the old saw about how if you catch a tiger by the tail you'd better be prepared to get bit. This woman was there throughout the previous scenes, making eyes at the Dogs, inviting glances: they knew what she was. So they decide to send one male dog to interview her alone?He goes willingly? They warn him against succumbing to temptation, but well. After he lost his stakes to get her to tone it down, see her sinful ways, I felt like, surely, his getting seduced was a follow-up issue. And now she has a relationship to him and may ask him to do other stuff for her. We'll see.

Part of it is that I'm utterly fascinated with behavior-constraining social interaction mechanics that are more structured than 'roll your seduction skill' and which help play out the situation.

Part of it was that I liked making the story go that way. Why? Some of it was aesthetics - it ties the character into the R-map more deeply. Some of it I have to talk to my shrink to answer. I mean I have some ideas. I like sexual transgression and often go that way in RPGs if it's available. Also, something in me gets off on trying to 'wound' Brother Azariah this way. Have to think about that more.


Lumpley/Vincent - glad you're enjoying it! In re kindness: I do think that giving people - including the GM - something concrete to do when they're playing is incredibly important and that most games have a toxic aversion to this. There's tons of GREAT GMing advice in all kinds of games out there, but it's all advanced stuff, and it's not given a foundation.

People really like to be told what to do in concrete terms. It's really important. The ones who want to abstract will figure out how fast. People can figure out how to role-play - they'll just start doing it in a lot of circumstances, including the traditional "you have a character, here's this situation, what do you do?". Yet we endlessly describe and redescribe and instruct them in this, secret advanced techniques and all - something they all did playing house or doctor or cowboys and indians anyway - while not telling them "this is the setup for roleplaying in this game."

So anyway, am I kind? It's possible. I strive to be accurate, however. My friend Alicia, who has not read any RP materials before and has only played three or four games in her life is thrilled by the MS and wants to run a game. This is key: not play, but run. I wanted to run old D&D out of the box as a newbie too, because I could get out my graph paper and make a map and a dungeon. Most games, you can't do this with unless you get initiated into the practice by someone else, or you're damned determined. So that's one data point in support of my view that Dogs is something special among RPGs and that the town creation rules are a big part of why.

Sean wrote: Good question, Uzzah.

Part of it is the old saw about how if you catch a tiger by the tail you'd better be prepared to get bit. This woman was there throughout the previous scenes, making eyes at the Dogs, inviting glances: they knew what she was. So they decide to send one male dog to interview her alone?He goes willingly? They warn him against succumbing to temptation, but well. After he lost his stakes to get her to tone it down, see her sinful ways, I felt like, surely, his getting seduced was a follow-up issue. And now she has a relationship to him and may ask him to do other stuff for her. We'll see.

Part of it is that I'm utterly fascinated with behavior-constraining social interaction mechanics that are more structured than 'roll your seduction skill' and which help play out the situation.

Part of it was that I liked making the story go that way. Why? Some of it was aesthetics - it ties the character into the R-map more deeply. Some of it I have to talk to my shrink to answer. I mean I have some ideas. I like sexual transgression and often go that way in RPGs if it's available. Also, something in me gets off on trying to 'wound' Brother Azariah this way. Have to think about that more.

Hi Folks,

I'm playing the hapless Brother Azariah, who walked blithely into peril. I'm entirely new to Dogs (and the forge). As Sean says, I was cool with the situation, though I confess part of it was naiveté. I hadn't really grasped that a young Dog could face "Sloe-Eyed 2d10" and several other d10 seduction traits all in one over-whelming but mere mortal npc, so going in I figured my odds of success were not horrible. It did occur to me that Talitha might be possessed (I think another player, Paul, suspected that too -- there was something about the way Sean described her gaze...). I thought if she was possessed, I could use a lot more physical means, and perhaps invoke a ceremony (I didn't really understand the ceremony rules at the time).

Azariah was instantly in over his head. Between her massive traits and my bad dice luck, I'm not sure I could have won the contest even if I had pulled a pistol. I did consider gunplay, but that just didn't fit the character. Azariah is a little soft-hearted (one of his relationships is "Still Misses his (deceased) Mom") and naive. He was raised in the Faith, on a ranch, his father a zealous convert from Back East, his mother from a family long in the Faith. Most of his traits are physical (Steady in the Saddle, Good Shot When He Aims, Deft With a Rope). So I just couldn't see him coldly drawing a weapon on a woman in her own home, sinful lust notwithstanding. He's plenty distraught about the whole business now though; I'm still thinking about how to play it. Our group will need to discuss what rules the Dogs have about celibacy and maintaining personal purity. It will be interesting to see how Azariah changes as he serves as a Dog: whether he gets tough and flexible, or tough and rigid, or broken...

Sean, as to your qualms about "GM-Force," I don't think I understand the problem. How is the gm's situation in Dogs any different from other games? The pNPC rules for Dogs don't say "you have to use up the first six stats before you make more." So you are no more constrained than in any other game. It seems to me that the point of not hooking stats to particular npc's in advance is mainly to save preparation effort. It encourages the GM to populate the town fully, but since it's a safe bet that the Dogs won't have conflicts with everyone and you can't always predict which ones they *will* conflict with, there's no need to stat them all out in advance (Vincent, feel free to correct me if I'm missing something here:)).

Heh. Miriam just deleted my post. I've got to get to work, but I'll try to reconstruct it quickly.

You ask:

"How is the gm's situation in Dogs any different from other games?"

It's very different. Here's two ways that are extremely important.

1) Players can set stakes. If you say "I'm taking over this town. I go to the mayor's office, throw him out on his ear, and start ordering his secretaries and the sheriff around", you've set stakes for the conflict. If you win the dice roll follow-ups, you're da Mayor.

In a lot of games when you get into conflicts you can only do things, and it's often up to the GM (effectively) what the meaning of the things you do is. When the conflict is "I want to kill this guy" they often come down to more or less the same thing. But when the conflict is "I want to find out what's going on with the Croziers", it's not like I as GM can have the NPC lie or not know if you win. I mean, I can as part of the conflict, but you'll figure out the lie or talk to a different NPC who does know by the end of it, since what's at stake is not "does this person do or not do x" but "do I find out what I want to know"?

Further, the players as well as the GM, set these stakes. So you can say to me: you're going to tell me this if I win this dice roll sequence. You're going to change your town/NPC/situation whatever if I win here. And I have to adapt when you win. Combined with #2, this is a very big deal, because together they mean the GM is not 'God', but just another player, though one with a different role than the other three.

2) You continue:

"The pNPC rules for Dogs don't say "you have to use up the first six stats before you make more.""

Mine actually do say this, at least by omitting not saying the contrary. The process on pp. 81-84 says: roll up six pNPCs, assign them to named NPCs during play one at a time as you wish, and when you use up all six, call a break in play to make more. Nothing there about just rolling up a new one when I need it.

This is very important because it establishes a resource for GM force. It's not like bringing in someone with the Grey Hand or Doomkill in Tekumel or an Ancient Red Dragon for 3rd level characters in D&D, which might be situationally inappropriate but are totally within most rulesets. When I want a conflict, I have to pick one of these six (5, 4, 3...) sets of stats to be what you're conflicting against. Other sources of dice in Dogs, like Demonic Influence, are set by what the PCs have seen in play. There's no way for a Dogs GM to just say "hmmm, I really want to win this conflict, I think I'll pull another 10d8 out of my butt". Isn't going to happen. I'm constrained by a different set of resources, but I can't just do anything. I have to decide: how important is my vision of this conflict, as opposed to the players', to the story we're telling here?" And even if I decide it's really important, we have to roll it out.

D&D had guidelines for setting encounter strength, and a few other games, like Rune, actually have rules for it. I think rules like this are great, wonderful, totally liberating, as well as helpful on the 'tell the GM what to do' horse I was riding in the above posts. Because with rules like this I can bring in whatever seems right for the story and for what our group is comfortable with (that was the social contract stuff I was talking about above); I don't have to pull my punches except on the human level, where I should be paying attention to treating other people decently anyway. If Brother Azariah gets too close to something and someone decides to sneak into his room and gun him down in cold blood, I can just declare that as a conflict, and we'll roll it out - not as "OK, coup de grace time, you take 77 hit points of damage" - but like any other conflict, where I'm confined by my pNPC resources and you have your character sheet to work with.

In that case I'm setting the stakes and they're tough (does Az. get filled full of lead?). But the point is you can set the stakes too.

Your being able to set the stakes combined with the GM having a limited resource for Force means you, as a single player, can effectively tell the rest of us how the game, story, and world are going to be at a certain point, and if you win the dice rolls - where this is a process that's often within your power, because there's no ancient red dragons hiding behind the screen to throw in for me if I really don't want you to win it, just the best pNPC I have left at that point out of six - you get to tell all the rest of us how things are going to be.

There are games like The Pool and Donjon and Wushu where players just get to narrate certain things the way they want them and it stands. That's a simpler way of including this same feature, just let the player 'narrate' or 'be GM' for a space when they win a conflict (The Pool) or automatically at certain points in the game (Wushu). What Dogs does instead is insert the players who disagree about how things ought to go (you and me in this case, but it could be you and Paul next time we play, depending on how Absalom reacts to Az getting home late) into a textured dialogue, aided and abetted by dice, over who's going to get the stakes they want at the end. And the player who wins the conflict gets the vision he or she wanted.


So anyway. What surprised me relative to the designs I mention above and several others was how much agency Dogs gave me as GM to intervene in what the players were doing. Some Narrativist-facilitating games have more the texture: player gets to say this, GM gets to say this, and you collaborate to riff off each other's stuff. That's a good way to play too. But Dogs turns all of that not into taking turns or winning narration rights, but lets both parties narrate the pieces of the conflict using dice rolls until one wins, whereupon the stakes (which could have been set by player or GM) are decided, and the winner (winning player) gets what they want.

Sean wrote:
1) Players can set stakes. If you say "I'm taking over this town. I go to the mayor's office, throw him out on his ear, and start ordering his secretaries and the sheriff around", you've set stakes for the conflict. If you win the dice roll follow-ups, you're da Mayor.

In a lot of games when you get into conflicts you can only do things, and it's often up to the GM (effectively) what the meaning of the things you do is. When the conflict is "I want to kill this guy" they often come down to more or less the same thing. But when the conflict is "I want to find out what's going on with the Croziers", it's not like I as GM can have the NPC lie or not know if you win. I mean, I can as part of the conflict, but you'll figure out the lie or talk to a different NPC who does know by the end of it, since what's at stake is not "does this person do or not do x" but "do I find out what I want to know"?

Sean wrote: 2) You continue:

"The pNPC rules for Dogs don't say "you have to use up the first six stats before you make more.""

Mine actually do say this, at least by omitting not saying the contrary. The process on pp. 81-84 says: roll up six pNPCs, assign them to named NPCs during play one at a time as you wish, and when you use up all six, call a break in play to make more. Nothing there about just rolling up a new one when I need it.

Not exactly a strong statement. You as GM may choose to abide by it, but it doesn't seem to be very well-asserted.