Eric, Lisa, Andrew and I played Dogs in the Vineyard yesterday with mixed success.  I ran Paint Creek, a town I wrote up for the occasion.  I won’t go into a blow-by-blow of the whole session, but I thought it would be instructive to highlight some of my observations, and ask the other participants to chip in. 

First of all, I expected 4-5 players and planned accordingly – but planned wrong.  My thinking was “have enough complexity to keep everyone engaged and, if they wish, frying entirely different fish”.  My motivation was the power of a pack of Dogs focusing on a single conflict, which is enormous and potentially unsatisfying.  To this end I created a town with a minor, sort of serious, and super serious problem.  In retrospect, I should have ruthlessly purged all but one and made it very simple.  Even with three players, this town will end up stretching over two sessions and perhaps 8 hours of play, which was not my intention.  I think the town is pretty solid and I had a great time running it, but there is a lot going on.

The players created their own problem entirely outside the ones I had predicted or established.  They also latched onto some things that I had thought peripheral and made them central.  They also made up their minds about guilt and judgment almost instantly.  This, of course, is awesome, and I love the amount of authority players have in the game.  Had I anticipated a bit of this, I could have simplified the town with greater confidence.  I think I was a little nervous and over-planned, not making any decisions about how things would resolve, but providing lots of things for the players to resolve. 

I think I also played the NPCs of the town a little passively as well.  This stemmed from an expectation that each would get their due, a chance to speak to the Dogs before the players started making decisions about who was guilty and who wasn’t.  I had imagined scenes that would be quite illustrative of the problems the town was having, and set them up, but the players sprung into action immediately.  One of them had already been shot in the chest and they had branded a whore (yes, they had branded a whore) before my “pet scene” could take place.  The lesson here is to aggressively frame, and to be creative about including NPCs, and to not fall in love with particular iconic scenes.  All my NPCs were very straightforward with their greivances and troubles, but not all of them got a chance to be heard, and I blame myself for that. 

We had an interesting conflict that all three Dogs were involved in.  Andrew, whose character, Brother Elias (sort of a Eastern-bred backslidin’ coffee-drinkin’ sort of Dog) had just lost a conflict trying to convert an old (male!) flame, stumbled into a follow-on conflict that had ended with Eric’s Brother Hanan (Self-assured, fast-talkin’ Mountain People orphan) getting beaten with axe handles by a gang of local unbeliever yeggs.  Andrew stumbled over to Duncan Hathaway, the gang-leader and a noted gunman, and set the stakes as “Do I give him my pain?”.  It was a fascinating conflict, because each of the Dogs was involved in a general street brawl, but the brutal fighting was all ancillary to, and supportive of, the central conflict.  I played the thugs as hard as I could and it was a very satisfying conflict. 

Unusually in my experience, the Dogs lost two out of three major conflicts. 

Anyway, I’m very interested in hearing from Eric, Lisa, and Andrew, and certainly welcome comments and suggestions more generally!  I’m definitely eager to learn and improve my game.

Thanks,

--Jason

Thanks for posting this, Jason.

We all enjoyed ourselves, and I finally got enough familiarity with the system to feel comfortable running it, so I'd still consider it a success. But I agree that we spent most of our time on peripheral issues, and missed a lot of interesting opportunities in the town.

I said that I felt like Elias' issues were a bit of a derail, but not in the sense that there's a set plot we're supposed to be following -- more that "Hey, I'm starting to think I'm not fit to be a Dog, and I kind of hate myself for surviving when my wife didn't" took him away from addressing issues in town that I had strong feelings about.

Basically, I loved playing Elias, and he certainly took me outside of my usual comfort zone, but I think I bit off more than I could chew in this particular game. (Especially the relationship with the tax assessor, which I'll post about separately.)

I'm really glad we extended the session for an extra hour, because the last scene and conflict was where I "got it" as far as where the true appeal of DitV lies. I think Jason and I were shocked (IC and OOC) by how Eric and Lisa had their characters "fix" the town. I thought their approach was a disturbing band-aid that would do nothing to fix the real problems -- but I don't mean that as an insult. It was awesome. They quoted chapter and verse, and explained how punishing the wayward wives of the Steward would set things right. (Of course it wouldn't, and we all knew it.) Elias, pale as death from a gunshot wound the night before, hobbled out to set things straight ... and failed miserably. He insulted his fellow Dogs, showed dissension in the ranks in front of the public -- hell, he burned the moral high ground. The other PCs smiled, forgave him (he was probably delirious from lack of blood, right folks?), and branded the woman I thought should be sent off to be a Dog. As Fallout, I took "Fears his companions". I loved it.

I think I have a handle on Elias now. He's really The Worst Dog Ever, and knows it -- he smokes, drinks coffee, started drinking alcohol again, and, Hell, is probably damned as a catamite. He tried to go out in a blaze of glory, and thanks to some great healing from Lisa's character, couldn't even succeed at that. So what now? I think he's going to give up on himself entirely, and just try his damndest to save the flock.

One approach that might work really well as a follow-up would be to come back to this town a little later, when things have gotten worse. I'd love to play Elias in that situation.

Okay, the homosexuality angle. This is the second time I've ever had it come up in a game, and the first (a decade ago) involved an extremely awkward situation where I wasn't completely sure whether the player was (a) taking his character in a new direction, or (b) coming out (OOC) in a really indirect fashion. It was not comfortable or enjoyable gaming. Whew.

So it was pretty cool that I brought it up, sort of out of nowhere, with people I'd met twice and not gamed with before, and it went really well. I was really impressed with you guys for that.

I don't give much credit to Immersion, and the idea of "channeling" a character vaguely bugs me, so I didn't expect Elias to surprise me like that. Jason told us what the NPC was gay, and I just went, "Oh man, Elias had sex with him once." The way I see it, having sex with the tax assessor years back was just one of the self-destructive acts that culminated in Elias and his wife heading out west to start their lives over. (Culminating with her dying in the snow, and him becoming a Dog.) He isn't gay, and in fact he probably used the situation solely to further screw up his life.

Again, let's look at the context. I know Jason pretty much just from a run to Sonic with him, his wife, and my fiancee at MACE, and here I am in a tense scene with him portraying Elias's former "lover", in a situation full of shame and impotent rage. And we played the scene great, without any awkwardness. That's bad-ass. I've got friends I've played with for years that I can't comfortably run scenes with if they've got a hint of sexuality. But we're not just dealing with a sexual situation, but one that brings up the controversial angle of "self-loathing gays" (something I have no personal experience with, but admittedly fits the setting).

I think this was why I kept needlessly apologizing for derailing the game -- not because it was uncomfortable, or uninteresting to the rest of the group, but because man oh man, it was a thirty-minute Initiation challenge ("Am I a Dog, or a damned sinner?") smack dab in the middle of learning about the town.

I knew the followup conflict was going to involve me blundering drunkenly into the conflict with the corrupt sheriff, but I had trouble defining the stakes. "I transfer my pain to him" was someone else's wording, and it was perfect. It transformed the character from "damned sinner" to "Honest-to-God Dog" through, of all things, a drunken melee and shooting. Wow, reclaiming a gender role (man, in authority) through the basest, venal male instincts, while in the process shitting on the moral superiority required to hold that authority. That's some interesting shit.

If anyone's seen Reefer Madness, I pictured Elias as Alan Cummings from that movie, and I think that's where I drew a lot of my ideas. That character's a self-appointed moral watchdog who's clearly sexually repressed, and sublimating it into heavy-handed judgment of others. Now that I think about it, I'm glad I had such bad luck with conflicts; seeing a character like that "win" is almost repulsive to me, but seeing him fail, have to face his hypocrisy, and realize there's people with much worse problems than him, that was satisfying.

Andrew wrote:
So it was pretty cool that I brought it up, sort of out of nowhere, with people I'd met twice and not gamed with before, and it went really well. I was really impressed with you guys for that.

I don't give much credit to Immersion, and the idea of "channeling" a character vaguely bugs me, so I didn't expect Elias to surprise me like that. Jason told us what the NPC was gay, and I just went, "Oh man, Elias had sex with him once."

That game was a blast.

When the big fight between the three of us and the corrupt sheriff was framed out I knew I'd love it.  The conflict really didn't have a damned thing to do with the sheriff or the town.  The stakes were "Does Elias transfer his anger and pain onto the sheriff?"  It was really all about Elias venting.  I can't even describe how much coolness that conflict added to the entire story. 

I'd also like to add that there was something else I found cool about that conflict.  Through a grand majority of the conflict it was Elias vs. the Sheriff personally and my character tussled with the Sheriff's crownies.  By kicking the crap out of the thugs my character was helping Elias by sucking up the Sheriff's power.  (The crownies were Traits in the Sheriff's group.)

I'm sure it'll be at least 8 hours total in that game.  As far as I've concerned, getting rid of the whore-wives that the Steward was keeping was only the very first step in a long process toward fixing that desperately broken town.  My first place was to burn the whole corrupt place to the ground.  Instead, I decided it would probably be more fun to bust my ass looking for whatever small bit of redeeming qualities the town may have.

We haven't found any of those redeeming qualities yet. 

We'll keep looking.

-Eric

Oh yeah guys, great game.  Now I've played a few Dogs already and all of them female but never one this... rabidly devout.  When faced with the fact that a young, newly married couple, with no children had two, count 'em two, houses... I played that Sister Theodosia latched onto this.  This was an easy problem to solve.  Fill those houses with children and then promise that they would give one of those houses to their first born when they married.  Done.  I saw this as rather cut and dry for her. 

I think my favorite parlay was with Brother Elias and with him not being nearly as devout as Theodosia.  I played it like this just winds her up and she is bound to save this town and this Dog and there was no way she was going to let him die. 

Now one thing that I know Andrew was worried about was that he felt he was taking up 'a lot' of time with the scene between his Dog and the Tax Assessor but really Andrew, you weren't at all.  I didn't even notice the time, nor did I even look at my watch once during the whole exchange.  I was perfectly happy and satisfied to sit back and watch it unfold.  If anything, at one point I was almost sitting forward waiting for Jason's reply. 

Jason wrote:
I think I also played the NPCs of the town a little passively as well. This stemmed from an expectation that each would get their due, a chance to speak to the Dogs before the players started making decisions about who was guilty and who wasn’t. I had imagined scenes that would be quite illustrative of the problems the town was having, and set them up, but the players sprung into action immediately. One of them had already been shot in the chest and they had branded a whore (yes, they had branded a whore) before my “pet scene” could take place. The lesson here is to aggressively frame, and to be creative about including NPCs, and to not fall in love with particular iconic scenes. All my NPCs were very straightforward with their greivances and troubles, but not all of them got a chance to be heard, and I blame myself for that.

Lisa wrote:
I'm going to have to agree with you here Jason.  I'll be honest, it seemed to me at times that you wanted to say more but you wouldn't.  Honestly I'm not sure why.  I hope it wasn't that I was scaring you with my zealot-like portrayal of my Dog.  I just felt she should be so very forceful so I was very forceful.  Personally, I think you should just 'balls to the wall it' and let the Dogs respond.  I think one of the reasons that we did jump so quickly into the other scenes and ran with it is because those were the scenes that you did frame aggressively.  Well aggressively compared to the other scenes anyway.

Andrew wrote:
I felt like (not to try to read Jason's mind) it was a simple matter of "I prepped assuming the Dogs would find out more about the situation, but they didn't, so I'm trying to change gears."

I'm kind of surprised that you think we're just done talking to people.  I assumed that there was lots of talking and discoverly left to do.  But that didn't mean that there weren't things that needed fixing right there in front of Brother Hanan's eyes.  So we set about fixing what was broken in front of us.

Once you gave us the big reveal on the whores, I was excited.  I knew there was something desperately wrong with those wives and I was delighted at just how wrong it was.  Lisa and I may have jumped on the punishments for the wives at the same time, but I can tell ya' that our desires for their final outcomes was really different at first.  Lisa wanted them to learn how humble and subserviant they should be.  I (and Hanan) wanted them to become strong pillars of the community, the women that the rest of the town's women could go to with their troubles, just like the wives of a Steward should be. 

That's also why, when the wives came out and said "Fuck this, we'd rather be whores again." I got so drastic on them.  I was pissed.  Brother Hanan was therefore pissed.  How dare they choose to put down the responsibilites that the King of Life had provided for them?  And, as I remember it, the whore that was sent away?  Yeah, I recall that we made her strip down bare and walk out of the town displaying her shame to the world.  The branding of the second whore was only my consolation second-choice.  She'd turned to the faith.  She just didn't want the responsibility.  I was really hoping to convert her to a strong wife.  But then Brother Elias got there and poisoned her mind to think that there was a way out.  And become a Dog?  Elias must have been out of his mind with pain.  How could a woman who can't handle her own responsibilites handle the responsibilities of others?  She's not going to be a wife?  Fine.  She'll never be a wife again.  Brand her and send her to a nunnery.

Yeah.

But there's so much left to do.

Like dealing with Councellor Paul and his Tree 'o Life Bling.  He's gonna suffer.  I'm sure of it.

-Eric

Eric wrote:
But there's so much left to do.

Like dealing with Councellor Paul and his Tree 'o Life Bling.  He's gonna suffer.  I'm sure of it.

If an outsider can chime in...

First of all, this sounds like an awesome town, Jason, and if you've posted it, I'm going to yoink it; if not, would you please post it?

To the players, thanks for giving me a glimpse of how you envision your Dogs.  I'm going to share these postings with my own players for purposes of comparison and encouragement.

Concerning the passively played NPCs, that's a problem I had in my first session.  I'd read the rulebook and somehow gotten it into my head that, just because the Dogs were authority figures, the townsfolk had to accept them as such.  That was just boring, though.  It wasn't until my second session (after a few rather soggy showings in the first) that I decided "Damn it all, they've got Traits and Relationships that grant them a Dog's authority; if they really want that authority, they can bloody well roll for it in conflict!" 

After that, I felt free to challenge the Dogs with my NPCs at just about every turn; there was a lot less of me "saying yes" and a lot more townsfolk getting pissed off and violent.  One of my PCs had some teeth knocked loose by a Steward who didn't feel like being second-guessed.  I even had a housewife lecture them angrily on the meaning of Duty.  Reminding myself that the Dogs don't automatically cow everyone in town was the most liberating lesson of my first session.  (Now if I could only learn to spot incurably limp NPCs before I run them, I'll be in good shape.)

As for "pet" NPCs, yeah, I sympathize with that as well.  As in any game when I've invested in a particular NPC, it's tough to recall that NPCs are born to die.  But in DitV, it's doubly important to let go because the temptation to railroad PCs toward a fixed judgment ("Love my NPC!") is inimical to this game. 

Of course, that doesn't mean you can't have a relative of that NPC (or even the NPC herself) come back later.  Sounds to me like an NPC who could have been a Dog, but was branded a whore and exiled, is a character who is just begging for a rematch in some future town, perhaps as the head of an anti-Dogs cult somewhere.  Could your players have done a better job of creating their own nemesis?

Neal wrote:
First of all, this sounds like an awesome town, Jason, and if you've posted it, I'm going to yoink it; if not, would you please post it?

Sounds to me like an NPC who could have been a Dog, but was branded a whore and exiled, is a character who is just begging for a rematch in some future town, perhaps as the head of an anti-Dogs cult somewhere.  Could your players have done a better job of creating their own nemesis?

Jason wrote:
I, Jason, like Sister Dee, who you guys branded and sent off to a nunnery.  I didn't oppose your choices more than the game allows, but I, as a fellow player if you will, really felt like I had something invested in her and was sad to see her go.  In my mind she had an interesting problem that you 100% avoided solving.  I'm thinking this level of involvement by Jason-as-participant can only be a good thing, but where, as a GM, do you let these feelings color the events in play? 

This is pertinent in dirty hippie games where GM power is expressly limited. 

What happens when I, Jason, say, "Guys, Eric, Lisa, don't do this thing.  She's awesome!  I'm begging you!"  ?

Lisa wrote:
Well I guess it would be like any other thing.  Even the GM is allowed to speak up and say "Oh no way!  Bullshit!"  And give us a reason why you think what we are doing is bullshit.  Just like we players do to you and to the other players.

Um... yeah.  Communication, dude.  You're totally allowed to express your opinion.  You're just not given that ol' GM fiat authority.  If you think we suck and we're fucking up the game then you should really say so.

And, to resolve it another way, just cause we made a decision doesn't mean that Dee's story is over.

-Eric

edit:  Cross-post with Jason

Jason, I understand you. I'm by far the least significant participant in the conversation, though, and I don't have anything to tell you but: yep. You have to be willing to give your heart to your NPCs without any strings attached.

Being the GM means giving up rights that all the other players have - it means giving up rights so that the other players can exercise them.

You don't get to both pose the problem and participate in solving it.

-Vincent

Thanks, everybody.  It's an interesting juxtaposition that I'm only now starting to really appreciate.  I think this was the first time in a game that limited my power as a GM that I really felt that limitation keenly. 

Eric, I didn't feel you were fucking up the game at all - I just felt sad for Dee and wished I could express that without tainting the scene.  I think not communicating was the only thing I could do, really, and that felt awkward, too.  It's sorta subtle, I guess.  I'm looking forward to finishing the town, which will not be at all subtle. 

Jason wrote:
Ok, I'm not getting through.  I couldn't call bullshit as a GM because what you were doing was perfectly acceptable.  Andrew quite capably voiced the opposition.  As GM I had no hound in that fight, at all.  That's all cool, no problems, what I'm trying to communicate is that I had strong feelings as a participant (not a GM)  that I suppressed, and I think that's interesting and worth thinking about. 

Andrew wrote:
Okay, the homosexuality angle.

Hmm. Interesting points.

None of the "fit to be a Dog or no" issues with Elias came up during character creation, apart from him being married. (I suppose since none of us thought anything of it, that's a disqualifier that simply didn't make it into our version of the setting.)

I do know that I wasn't trying to make a prestatement of the truth of the setting. (I'm not sure how I could do that, and I hate when people "beg the question" of a game's Premise, so I don't think that's what I was aiming for.) But while I don't directly agree with you, I do think there's something to your point -- Elias does think he knows the Truth, although I don't think any of us think that correlates with the "Truth" of the setting, which does have to come out during play.