In our recently started game of Dogs (two sessions so far, and I've got AP posts on the way) an interesting question came up: can a trait ever change?  Not in number of dice or the size, but in the actual text.

We mused about it a little, and it seems to make sense as an option for reflection fallout - "change the text of one trait."  So you could go from "I've never seen the King of Life" to "I saw the King of Life" or even "I won't ever see the King of Life".  I know that the change isn't needed for mechanical reasons - I can pull in contradictory traits by saying "I used to say I'd never seen the King of Life, but now I have."  But changing the text on the page seems cooler somehow.

I'm tempted to just allow this as a house rule, but I was curious if folks had any insight into why it wouldn't be a good thing - what hidden pitfalls am I missing?  Is there a brilliant design decision that I'm going to stomp all over with my foolish "house rules"?  Will the secret cabal of Game Rules Dogs come to my session and render judgement upon my pride?

-Shawn

Changing the text of a trait as fallout was in one of the drafts. I don't remember why I dropped it. Probably something like, it didn't seem right in normal fallout, but it was outclassed in reflection fallout, I just couldn't figure out how to make it fit.

So, house rule away. I'm for it.

You could also try a house rule whereby players can make slight changes to the texts of their traits more or less as they feel moved to do so, no fallout required.

-Vincent

One possible solution that comes to my mind is to include changing the trait's text in the stakes of the conflict.

Now, I wonder would it have sense to allow making stats, traits and relationships part of the stakes, so that whoever won the conflict could redistribute the dice around the sheet as appropriate to the outcome?

If so, what about using such dice to create new traits or relationships? This could be an option for including "training montage" conflicts or the like. I remember that there was a thread about this some months ago, but I no longer recall the specifics - and I think I could use something like this in my Exalted mod.