People have lots of fun pondering alternative settings for Dogs in the Vineyard, and given that the Faith in the game-as-written is quite deliberately at odds with modern, Western, liberal values in key ways (e.g. women are subordinate to men, capital punishment without trial is an option), someone occasionally proposes an alternative setting with an outright racist ideology -- most recently, the extremist Black Muslim idea mentioned in this thread. I've been thinking about this for a while, and I don't think Dogs driven by racism will work (Dogs who happen to be racist are fine, you'll be glad to know).

Okay, why?

Talking about the (distinctly unappealing) idea of "SS in the Valley" a while back,

lumpley wrote:
If you set up to play SSitV, you must make town rules where having a Jew in your town means that other townspeople go hungry.

If you set up to play DitV, you can use my town rules, where having two men fall in love in your town, or having a woman act uppity, or having teenagers fool around with each other, means that other townspeople go hungry.

DitV is as offensive as SSitV. No doubt about it.

What you can't do if you set up to play DitV or SSitV is go without town creation rules at all. My impatience with SSitV and all its type is that I'm not seeing any town creation rules. Bring 'em on.

I hate to say it, Sydney, but while I wish you were right, I think you're not.

Jews, homosexuals, and Blacks could be like Demons: after all, according to Umberto Eco's Eternal Fascism, one of the consistent features of ur-Fascism is a doctorine of simultaneous strength and underdogness. So the problem isn't that there's a Jew corrupting Aryan maidens. That's a symptom. The problems are in the corruption itself.

What you have to do is find out who the secret Jew is (you follow the strains of jazz to the underground club with Dada on the walls and a Nigger-Kike Jungle Music band on the stage, presumably). Then you have to deal with those who fell for the corruption. What they're saying, how they're making the town decay.

Oh, it's doable. It's just reprehensible.

Don't forget that Dogs has its own hated people, the Mountain People, whose religion is inherently demonic. And Mormonism has a pretty bad history of racism, too.

Yowza... so SSitV would not be about the SS dragging Jews away in the night (which would be appalling) but about the SS judging the Aryans there for not having done it already (which would be worse).

Do you excuse a grandmother who sees the echoes of her own grand-children in the face of a frightened Jewish boy, and so shows (sinful) mercy and lets him escape?  If that's forgivable (perhaps with appropriate penance), what about somebody who actually goes so far as to harbor members of the mud-races, from the same sense of human mercy?

Good God.  I'm getting uncomfortable shivers even typing this.  That would be appalling because it wouldn't be boring.  I don't know whether such a game could "work," but I'll say for damn sure that I don't personally want to go that far.

Geh.

I'm checking out of this thread.

And as the someone who brought in that Black Muslim thread, I don't see the primary objective of the Black Muslims in that alternate setting being "throw out or kill the white man." I see them working in the inner cities and deep country trying to purge Black culture of the outside elements dragging it down: the drugs, the temptation toward crime, the temptation to go a "color-blind" route and live within a society that does not support you, the temptations of blind retaliation toward or cowardly acceptance of external aggression, etc.

Just like the Mormons of DiTV, they are a willfully separate culture within a broader culture, trying to keep their beliefs and way of life intact without constant assaults from the majority culture. Whereas the SS example is of a culture on the offense, the culture of the Black Muslims is simply trying to hold their ground---and with few exceptions, all their version of the Dogs will be able to do is maintain what is there, not try to expand. Expansion is someone else's job.

And I thought I'd come up with a happy thing. You're right, that's pretty damned awful. (And I do not invoke damnation lightly in this context).

I still think the game breaks, because Nazi ideology has too little moral room for those doing the judging to make judgments, at least interesting ones. The strength of the race is the one thing that matters, the welfare of any individual is meaningless, and while you can make purely tactical judgments (shall we keep these untermenschen alive a little longer to make us more weapons, or just kill them now?), you don't get to balance different moral values. The SS ideal spat on any kind of compassion. Tony's hypothetical grandmother wouldn't fare very well.

Could use Dogs you play a game about "Ordinary Germans" (to use the title of a famous book on the subject) who, unlike the hardcore SS, had ordinary human moral values we'd recognize plus a sincere belief that Jews should be exterminated? Quite possibly. I might even be able to steel myself to play such a thing, some day. But I can't think of any outcome for me as a player beside (in the end) rejecting the value of "kill all the Jews" as incompatible with all the other values, which means the decision is made before play even starts, which means, in turn, that whatever else such a game is, it isn't Narrativism aka "thematic play."

(It also isn't fun, but I think we all knew that).

So instead of "Nothing in the rules breaks. The players' (not PCs') relationships with the NPCs break," it's that "the players' relationship with their own PC breaks," and the character is no longer a vehicle for interesting moral choices.

I agree with Sydney's original post.  I even said as much way back in the Forums, I think, but I'm way too lazy to find the reference.

The problem is that race is not something that you can atone for.  If we're going to say that Jews or Blacks or Whites are the core of problem, they need to be like Demons -- mysterious and strange and possibly just bad luck.

If you look at the referents of racist ideologies, the hated races don't act like Dog's Demons, and they do it in such a dramatically different way that it really would break the game.

Now, Nazis hunting Communists, spies, and homosexuals: That's fine.  Throw in Jews as color only.

yrs--
--Ben

Sydney wrote: The SS ideal spat on any kind of compassion. Tony's hypothetical grandmother wouldn't fare very well.

TonyLB wrote: In SSitV, whatever the SS decide (even compassion) that's what the Fuerher wants.

Thanks, Sydney.

Everybody help me remember this, okay? Now when someone new comes saying "what about ... NAZIS?" we can point them here.

I don't want to make it a sticky, just help me remember.

-Vincent

I had trouble sleeping for nervousness after posting this... thing. Thanks to Tobias and Vincent for understanding, and to everyone else for not stomping.

The whole Dogs vs. Stewards vs. Territorial Authority thing maps too, albeit weirdly. Dogs become roving SS troubleshooters in their black uniforms, Stewards become the plainclothes SD (Sicherheitsdienst) or Gestapo secret police chiefs -- both groups reporting to Heinrich Himmler, but through different channels -- and then TA is everyone else in the fucked-up bureaucratic Reichmare of occupied Europe: local German civil government in places like Bavaria that can't figure out what happened to federalism and local self-rule; rival security organizations like the regular Army (Wehrmacht) and its military intelligence service (Abwehr) that just want to win the war, goddamit, would you please stop taking over all the trains; the construction company on steroids called the Todt Organization (Albert Speer's people); puppet regimes in occupied France or Belgium; uneasy allies like the Hungarians ("you want us to send our Jews where?") or the Italians ("but the Fascist Party is more Jewish than Italy as a whole because small business owners are anti-Communist!"); and on and on and on. The General Gouvernement in occupied Poland -- those parts that weren't simply annexed to Germany -- would be the perfect horror of corruption, incompetence, guerrilla warfare, and death camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau's near Krakow, not in Germany at all), with Stalin's Red Army coming closer by the day.

And you know, the one thing I sort of hope for, about this despair-inducing thing? That some wannabe Stormtrooper or "monster I am let monster I wankey wank wank" type Googles up these rules, gets his buddies all psyched about "we're gonna be Knights of the Reich! We're gonna kick some untermensch ass! We're gonna be baaad"; and then halfway through the actual session, the "protagonists" are all stomping on Tony's hypothetical grandmother, and she still won't Give, so they Escalate to bureaucracy and say "Don't want to talk? Fine! See how you like it when we tear up your ration card, bitch! How you gonna eat without your fuckin' ration card?" And the d10 fallout kills her -- not right there, of course, but as sure as a bullet. And all players look at each other and go, "Wait a sec, when did this stop being evilsexycool and just become vile?"

It was always vile, you know. It was just harder to see it.

Essential reading:
Robert Harris, Fatherland -- a German detective, drafted into the SS, dodges his superiors to investigate a murder in a world where Hitler won.

Essential viewing:
HBO Films, Conspiracy (Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci) -- reenactment, from Adolf Eichmann's notes, of the 1942 Wannsee Conference where all the bureaucracies got together to organize the Final Solution, over a very nice lunch.
Steven Spielberg, Schindler's List (Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley) -- but in the SS worldview, Schindler becomes the villain, bribing officials and undermining the system to preserve his Jewish workforce and his profits.

The measuring-the-body bit is from a scene in a Polish film called Europa, Europa, but I've never seen the whole thing.

I can't imagine how I could ever manage to play this.

However, I wanted to say:
"Bureaucracy: d10s" is the coolest thing I've seen in a while. That's just fucking brilliant. The same thing should apply for any Cold War "behind the iron curtain" adaptation of Dogs as well.

Adapting the Dogs system to the Lenin-era or Stalin-era Soviet Union is straightforward: The Dogs become Chekists, i.e. members of the secret police organization known variously throughout its history as the Cheka, OPGU, NKVD, and finally KGB. (The initials are even the same: KGB is Russian for "Committee on State Security," and at least some uniform insignia dropped the "K," leaving "GB" = "State Security" = "SS"). The Steward is the local Party chief; the Territorial Authority doesn't have a clear equivalent. Demonic influence is capitalist influence, although there's a possibility of a capitalist seeing the light and become a communist in a way that didn't exist in Nazi racial ideology.

After Stalin dies, the system congeals in such a way that it's harder to imagine equivalents to the Dogs. Without Stalin smashing things apart in purges, the KGB, the Red Army, and the civilian core of the Communist Party (as in the professional civilian administrators and ideologists) settle into a rough equilibrium, with a self-correcting balance of power and a pretty clear understanding of how things work. It's still a nightmare of totalitarianism, but it's stable, in an eerie mirror-image of the checks-and-balances of the US system (which is also threefold: executive, legislative, judiciary). There's less room for individuals to take initiative of any kind, which means Dogs doesn't work as well, and which of course is also the reason the Soviet Union collapsed.

Ben wrote:
The problem is that race is not something that you can atone for.  If we're going to say that Jews or Blacks or Whites are the core of problem, they need to be like Demons -- mysterious and strange and possibly just bad luck.

If you look at the referents of racist ideologies, the hated races don't act like Dog's Demons, and they do it in such a dramatically different way that it really would break the game.

Thank you.

I'd say the game-break isn't really the in-game plausibility of how such a society could hold together, though (as much as I'm fascinated by the history/worldbuilding aspect); people play games and read books and watch movies about implausible societies all the time. What breaks is the ability of the real-life players to empathize with their in-game characters.

Sydney wrote:
Thank you.

I'd say the game-break isn't really the in-game plausibility of how such a society could hold together, though (as much as I'm fascinated by the history/worldbuilding aspect); people play games and read books and watch movies about implausible societies all the time. What breaks is the ability of the real-life players to empathize with their in-game characters.

I made believe I wasn't reading this thread for a while. Secretly, I was. I wasn't keeping it secret from you folks, I was keeping it secret from myself.

I'm stickin' with "technically playable" with the "I don't have the stomach to do this ... and why would I want to?"

So, yeah, this is an excellent example of the applicability of the Dogs rules. It even say something about human nature.

What surprises me with this thread isn't the level of repugnance, or that someone actually went through with creating the groundwork for SSitV.

What surprises me is that people seem surprised in any way that DitV could handle this. I mean.. Come ON. Vincent is the same guy who created Kill Puppies for Satan. If KPfS is playable long-term, which at least Ron Edwards seems to believe it is, then I could see a serious group playing SSitV long enough to make it viable.

The only real difference between the themes in KPfS and SSitV that I see is that the SS were real; These punk satanists pulling wings off flies and popping puppies in the blender aren't. At least, they aren't real in the same way, at any rate. The SS and Hilter and the Reich have left an indelible mark on the collective memory of the world, and we shudder at the idea of making them the heroes in any sense.

I won't play this game, but I wouldn't play KPfS, either. I'm good not exploring those particular themes.

Sydney wrote:
And you know, the one thing I sort of hope for, about this despair-inducing thing? That some wannabe Stormtrooper or "monster I am let monster I wankey wank wank" type Googles up these rules, gets his buddies all psyched about "we're gonna be Knights of the Reich! We're gonna kick some untermensch ass! We're gonna be baaad"; and then halfway through the actual session ... all players look at each other and go, "Wait a sec, when did this stop being evilsexycool and just become vile?"

I’ve been wondering how to comment on this. Obviously, as a German, I am more sensitive regarding this topic than you are. The task of “fixing” a given town becomes so horribly twisted by this indeed very well thought-through variation that it gives me chills. I’ve always argued that you have to make people think about the Nazis, consider Hitler’s ideas, in order to make them understand why it was so horrible, rather than tell people the “right” judgement straight away (what German teachers and politicians are doing constantly). But SSitV is… tough. I don’t think I could stand it.

- Frank

Frank wrote: I’ve been wondering how to comment on this. Obviously, as a German, I am more sensitive regarding this topic than you are.

I’ve always argued that you have to make people think about the Nazis, consider Hitler’s ideas, in order to make them understand why it was so horrible, rather than tell people the “right” judgement straight away (what German teachers and politicians are doing constantly). But SSitV is… tough. I don’t think I could stand it.

Hey Joshua, no offense meant. What I was trying to say is as a German, I have more reason to be careful about thought experiments such as this. If a Jew sais "hey, what about playing SS", it's sure sensitive, but if a German sais it... well, it was us after all.

- Frank

Frank wrote: Hey Joshua, no offense meant.

What I was trying to say is as a German, I have more reason to be careful about thought experiments such as this. If a Jew sais "hey, what about playing SS", it's sure sensitive, but if a German sais it... well, it was us after all.

In science, there is a thing called a "thought experiment"... though originally named in German.

A thought experiment is an experiment one imagines engaging, because you are either unable or unwilling to actually enact it.

"Imagine you're on a spaceship travelling near the speed of light, with a stopwatch whose ticks are measured by a photon bouncing back and forth between two mirrors."

"Imagine you're on the edge of a black hole's event horizon."

"Imagine you are at the kappa delta phi sorority house and... " no wait, never mind, that last one's not a thought experiment.  Ahem.

Anyways, SSitV could be termed a "thought RPG"... a game one can imagine playing, and can learn from, merely existing in the theoretical, but would be either too expensive (in whatever resource)  to play in real life.

Vaxalon wrote:
In science, there is a thing called a "thought experiment"... though originally named in German.

This is creepy, indeed. I wouldn't want to play it. But it does one thing for me, and I'm grateful for that: I see a lot better now why Dogs is a tough, creepy game anyway. Religious fanaticism is pretty far removed from me. I'm getting a MA in U.S. Studies, so when I read "Mormons", I tend to think something like "Aw, remarkable example of protestant sect in the U.S.", and when I read about the fictional brotherhood in DitV, my thoughts go similar ways. Compaing it to political fanaticism and terror makes it easier to grapple with for me: These guys are scary. Playing DitV should involve uneasy choices. I'm not ever going to play either the SS or the Black Muslim variant, that's for sure, but having read this provides me with a not-so-nice reminder of  not to think of religious fanatics as "quaint, but ultimately harmless". 

These punk satanists pulling wings off flies and popping puppies in the blender aren't.

For the record, I'm pretty sure this thread is responsible for the nightmare from which I just woke, shaking.

It's still remarkable work, and the d10 Bureaucracy is horribly inspired. I wonder if it would be more palatable set in modern American megachurch fascism, or Orwell's 1984 world where the violent reality is unrealised. Would it be just as revolting set in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq right now?

American megachurch fascism?  Yes, just as revolting.
1984?  A bit of desensitization due to distance, there, not as revolting.
82nd Airborne in Iraq?  Far more revolting... but may need doing anyways.