What happens when the Demons get their way?  When "What the demons want" is what actually happens?

Do you hold onto that town, on the offchance that the Dogs decide to revisit it, so you can show them that the Demons got their way?

Or do you keep pushing it while the Dogs are still in town, making sure that they're aware that "Something's STILL wrong" before they leave?

How could you do the latter when the players have already decided otherwise? I usually have to explain to everybody why it's OK for the GM to have the NPCs have real opinions about moral issues, but this time we have a pure and clear situation of GM morality. If the GM "pushes it" even after the choice has been made, it's pretty clear that he has an agenda of his own. This exact behavior is warned against in the oft-quoted part of the rules dealing with GM playing God.

The only valid pushing is if there's NPCs in the town write-up who haven't yet got the opportunity to spill their guts. If so, let them. If there's still an ancient, secret and evil temple under the town after that and the players don't know about that (or whatever), then the GM isn't doing it right - this is not a mystery game of trying to figure out what the GM thinks is wrong. It's virtually against the rules to have "something wrong" that is explicitly hidden. My point: if the players DO know about it, but decide it's fine as is, then whatever you'd need GM pushing for? If the players don't know about it, then WHY don't you have a NPC tell them?

Other than that I'd like to quote Vincent here: "When returning to a town once visited, create the town again through the town creation rules." Pretty clear, I'd say. So you don't so much "hold onto that town", but resample it with the new issues attached. If you can't make a rules-legal town out of it (say, the demons killed everybody), then it's not a town anymore and thus not subject to GM preparation. You'll have to "revisit" it in a prologue or epilogue of a session, instead. The same works the other way around, too: if it is fit to be a town, then you have to prepare it through the town creation rules if the players choose it as their next destination.

When resampling a town, I imagine you use the original town and the events of the previous session as creative constraint, but otherwise work normally. Which means, you make the same creative choices you make when normally creating a town. What happened after the Dogs went away? Well, what would be interesting? What would push the PC issues further? Which of the unresolved issues are interesting to keep, which can be discarded? Business as usual.

Crazy talk!

What do you mean 'what happens'?  I mean, by the rules, the story is over when the players of the Dogs say that everything is good & done.  So, that means that either the Demons wanted the same thing that the Dogs wanted or the players are all up & cheering over their Dogs' failures.  In the first instance that means that the Demons were right, because the Dogs are always right, and there's really no issue.  In the second instance, everyone gets to stand up and applaud a really fantastic session.

It really sounds to me like you're talking about the GM trying to overstep his authority in the game.  The GM cannot insist that "Something's STILL wrong".  That would be in violation of the rules, assuming that the players have already declared that the town is fixed and they're riding off.

-Eric

What Euro said. 

(crossposted)

-Eric

What Eero and Eric said.

Best, Ron

I would check my own stuff very quickly to make sure I've done my job, first, and have actively shown off the situation.

Assuming that I have, it's time to carry on; they've made their judgement, and questioning or pushing them on the spot doesn't fit the game to me (though that's just a "ditto", now, with clear reasoning shown).

Finding out what the players think this tells us about their characters, though, that's what I want to know next.

Fred, are you asking about what if, or are you asking about a specific instance of real-live actual play?

-Vincent

I don’t want to hijack this thread, but an actual play of mine comes to mind. I wrote up a town with a little genius girl. Twelve years old and much too bright for her own good. Her parents just couldn’t handle her. That’s what they kept telling the Dogs: “She is too clever for us. We tried to punish her, we beat her, we locked her up, but she still keeps forgetting her place, playing at intrigues and disrespecting her parents and teachers.”

The Dogs decide that the parents are at fault. They tell the parents: “You are not trying hard enough. Now do your job!” And they leave the town.

So what now? Are they automatically right? Will the parents try harder and succeed at showing the girl her place? Am I deprotagonizing if I have something terrible happen, in a while, so the Dogs find the town all screwed up upon their return because they were asking the impossible off the parents?

Is this the sort of thing you are aiming at, Fred?

Okay, so the Dogs say "shape up, you morons," and ride out. Later they come back and they find that everything's all screwed up.

Do the Dogs feel betrayed by the NPCs? Then you're fine.

Do the Dogs' players feel betrayed by you, the GM? Then you've cheated.

Easy.

-Vincent

Frank: Yes, that's the kind of thing I'm getting at.

Vincent: You seem to be saying that the measure of what the GM ought to do, is how the players feel if and when they find what the GM has decided the consequences are.  Have I got that right?

Well, not really.

Whether the GM betrayed them, as a co-player of the game and a co-collaborator of the fiction. Very specifically "betrayed," not just "how they feel."

-Vincent

Along the same lines, Frank, what did you do?

-Vincent

It was a one shot. I didn't get to revisit the town.

- Frank

Actually, one of my favorite towns from our long-running Dogs campaign was a town where our GM created a town where the Dogs had "failed". Instead of adressing the situation that was causing demonic attacks, they basically made things worse. So at the point where *our* Dogs came in, most of the town had died of plague and those that hadn't had gone criminally insane. The steward was killed brutally by his own sherriff, who admitted to killing the deed while he was in the act of assembling a posse against the dogs. And we had a fantastic gun battle with a sorceress and her evil cult. (Oh, and we also got tricked into eating soylent stew...) And all of it was fantastic. At no point did I find myself thinking 'hey! The GM cheated!'.

Granted, this was not a town that we had been too before. But Vincent's point stands: all that needs to be done is to run through town creation, then assume that everything happens the way the demons want it to and run through it all again.

It definitely isn't the sort of town that I'd want more than once or twice in a campaign, but overall it was fantastically gritty and that town wound up evoking some of our best roleplaying of the campaign. And it also made our Dogs more cautious in their decisions, because we all kept in mind what *could* happen if we didn't deal with situations properly.

So just because the rest of the Faith doesn't have the right to judge a Dog's actions/judgements doesn't neccessarily mean that the Dogs can't still be wrong in some instances. Or at least that's my two cents.

~ Anna

(This is Solamasa's wife. I've been hijacking his account for a while, but finally got my own...)

Oh, yes, definitely. NPC Dogs, no holds are barred. The GM can have NPC Dogs be heretics, sinners, sorcerers - no problem.

NPC Dogs aren't protected from the GM's judgement by anything.

-Vincent

What's right and wrong and the Truth is for the players to decide, not characters. "Dog" is just a Trait if you're not playing a protagonist.

So Fred, how are you doing with this? Did I answer your question?

-Vincent

lumpley wrote:
Well, not really.

Whether the GM betrayed them, as a co-player of the game and a co-collaborator of the fiction. Very specifically "betrayed," not just "how they feel."

-Vincent

The straight answer:

Yes.

The nit-picky answer:

Of course the GM hasn't done anything until the players find out about it. The GM can harbor secret fantasy consequences all he likes, same as everybody else; it's not until the GM makes them real in the game (via town creation and/or conflict resolution) that they are real in the game.

Here are the two different interactions I'm imagining.

Interaction 1: proper GMing

GM: When you arrive in town you learn that sister Marybette had the child after all.
Players: Oh crap oh crap oh crap, I can't believe she did that, this is the worst thing we've ever had to deal with, crap, what are we going to do about that, she totally sucks, maybe we should just kill her to death right now.

Interaction 2: improper GMing

GM: When you arrive in town you learn that sister Marybette had the child after all.
Players: No she didn't, that's not okay, you totally suck, take that back or I'm going to quit this stupid game.

-Vincent

It probably should be noted here that the distinction Vincent draws is, again, exactly the same whether you're making a new town or revisiting an old one. It makes no difference whether players withdraw credibility due to the GM abusing a previous town or due to him abusing, say, reappearing characters from another town, or player sensibilities concerning the Faith, or whatever else. The GM is always in a position to abuse authority when he sets up situation in town creation, so if there's a difference between an old town or a new one, it's only in the degree of expectations players have concerning the material. I imagine it's pretty rare for a GM to manage to betray expectations in the first session, but a crass enough misreading of the setting could manage even that.

Furthermore, you could say that Vincent isn't discussing rules here at all, but rather base social contract issues. The rule seems to be that the GM does whatever he pleases concerning the town. Vincent' criteria of betrayal concerns a more fundamental requirement of roleplaying happening at all - players have to give credibility to what others claim about the SIS - Lumpley principle, in other words. So as I understand it, Vincent isn't so much saying that the DiV rules require the GM to not make players feel betrayed, but rather that it's a requirement of play happening at all.

It seems to me the issue on how the Dogs' efforts are treated.

The good GM doesn't disagree with the decision and then go about twisting it around.  This will end up with a result the shows where it comes from.  The GM wanted something, didn't care about the choices the players made and decided an outcome.
Example: The Dogs set things right in a town by gunning down bad folks.  The good faithful folk receive a talking to and the Dogs head out.  The GM wanted more out of the town, and is particularly annoyed that the players ignored a feuding set of brothers, just shooting one in the process of cleaning up.  When the Dogs revisit the town the GM decides that the town is pissed that so many of the people died and have abandoned the Faith.  The demons won, even though the players and the dice indicated that the Dogs had passed judgement and cleaned up the town.

Now if you think instead about what might happen on revisiting a town you can make very similar situations that don't come from a place of "Screw you and your story direction", and thus don't look like it.
Example: The Dogs set things right in a town by gunning down bad folks.  The good faithful folk receive a talking to and the Dogs head out.  The GM has more notes on the town, and keeps them in case of a revisit or to recycle unused material.  When the Dogs revisit the town the GM decides that the surviving brother in a feud "settled" by the Dogs is angry that he didn't get to set things right with his brother.  With demon help he brings his brother back from the dead and starts leading the town into damnation.  The demons have major ground because of an NPC who has betrayed the Dogs.  The players and the dice did not cut off this option from the NPC, and presumably won't mind that something else has happened and that it relates to what they did.

Basically if in describing the town after the Dogs you could reasonably slip in "And your efforts amounted to nothing!" it isn't right.

Okay, let's take a specific instance of play, and draw a hypothetical out of it.

The players in my FTF game, last session, finished playing through a town.  There were two blood-brothers, one of whom was the Steward.  The Steward leaned a bit too hard on the justice side of the justice/mercy dichotomy, and his brother decided he'd be a better Steward than the first, and founded a schismatic temple.  The whole thing devolved into sorcery, and in a big gun battle, only one Dog was left standing - the rest were in bad shape.  The last one standing (not the most decisive member of the group by any measure) decided to lock the steward up until his fellow Dogs were well enough to decide, collectively, what to do with him.  He didn't feel that he had enough authority, alone, to kill the sorceror (though he personally felt it was the right thing to do).

I presented the players with the possibility that the Sorcerous ex-steward would escape from jail while the dogs recovered.  They thought that would make a nifty piece of story, so they adopted it, and that's what happened.  They fully expect that at some point in the future, that Sorceror is going to show up again, in another town.

The Dogs had also chosen a new steward, and left the schismatic brother mostly intact; he had to pay for the damage that had been done to the town while it was in turmoil, but otherwise went unpunished.

One of the things that I listed as things the Demons wanted, in this town, was for the Brothers to be maintained in their positions.  In the case of the schismatic brother, they have done this.

Would it be amiss for me to start a revisit of this town with the following?

"PRIDE: Brother Hatham feels that since the Dogs did not strip him of his wealth, that he deserves it, and that what he does in furtherance of it is the Will of the King of Life."

Would your fellow players feel that you'd betrayed them by that?

-Vincent

Would it be amiss for me to start a revisit of this town with the following?

"PRIDE: Brother Hatham feels that since the Dogs did not strip him of his wealth, that he deserves it, and that what he does in furtherance of it is the Will of the King of Life."

14thWarrior wrote: The demons, having gotten something of what they wanted, would still present in the town even after the Dogs cleaned things up;

When there's a conflict, the GM is to say yes or roll dice.

If the players say "we banish the demons!" the GM is to say "yes, you do!" or else "oh yeah? Roll for it!" and if the players win, then indeed their characters have banished the demons.

In no other circumstances may the players assume that the demons are or remain banished.

That's all the rules there are about that.

-Vincent

Basically, if the Dogs' players think they've thwarted the demons, then they've thwarted the demons.

Am I wrong about this?

lumpley wrote:
In no other circumstances may the players assume that the demons are or remain banished.

lumpley wrote:
Would your fellow players feel that you'd betrayed them by that?

-Vincent

Vaxalon wrote:

lumpley wrote:
Would your fellow players feel that you'd betrayed them by that?

-Vincent

I honestly can't say. 

I'd have to ask them.  In the process of asking them, I think that at least some of them would feel deprived of the fun of figuring out What's Wrong for themselves.