Hi, I am new here. Hello to everybody, and thanks to Vincent Baker for his wonderful game. It was a privilege to be able to buy it directly from its author (e.g., rather than giving money to some faceless publishing company).

I've played/Gmed Dogs in the Vineyard 4 or 5 times in the past years, always in one-shot sessions. Now I am about to start GMing what is meant to be a long-lasting campaign. (well, what I hope to be a long-lasting campaign; we start tomorrow).

I know that DitV is best suited for episodic play, but I guess it can handle a long campaign just fine... so what I'd like to ask is:

- Has anybody successfully played a long-lasting DitV campaign?
- Any advice on how to do so? Any rules modifications or "tricks" which should be used to make a long campaign better?
- Do you see any drawbacks/problems in using recurring NPCs, allowing the Dogs to build relationships, allies, enemies, adding some "big picture" elements to the game and so on?
- I've found many ready-to-play Towns online. Does anybody know of any "sequels", that is, of any already Town which has two "adventures" written for it? Say the Dogs come back to a city they already visited, but they find new "Something is Wrong", new Sins and some new NPCs (of course, any such 'sequel' should be heavily adapted to reflect what the players actually did in the previous adventure).
- Somewhere in DitV, Vincent Baker comments that if he were to build a very large town, meant to last more than one session or two, he'd write some different, unrelated sets of "Wrongs" (e.g., three different paths to Pride/Injustice/Sin and so on). Does anybody know of an online Town which has these characteristics?

Thanks in advance for all the answers!

The game won't last past a dozen towns, give or take. That's pretty much as long a campaign as the game can do.

Always make your own towns! Towns online are fine as examples, but you should be the one doing town creation.

Returning again to a town you've already visited is okay, but speculating about it online always goes terribly. I recommend not thinking about it at all until you're sitting down to do it for reals.

Some people like recurring relationships, but I don't. Assigning relationship dice means committing your reserves to this, right now; there's no guarantee that you'll ever get to roll those dice again.

Start with straightforward towns that go all the way to hate and murder, with a sorcerer who's obviously a sorcerer. You can get more complicated later, if you find you still want to. These are Western crime thrillers; you'd be bored stupid if you went to see a Western and there wasn't even a murder in it.

-Vincent

Wow... that was quick :)

lumpley wrote:
The game won't last past a dozen towns, give or take. That's pretty much as long a campaign as the game can do.

Always make your own towns! Towns online are fine as examples, but you should be the one doing town creation.

Returning again to a town you've already visited is okay, but speculating about it online always goes terribly. I recommend not thinking about it at all until you're sitting down to do it for reals.

Some people like recurring relationships, but I don't. Assigning relationship dice means committing your reserves to this, right now; there's no guarantee that you'll ever get to roll those dice again.

Start with straightforward towns that go all the way to hate and murder, with a sorcerer who's obviously a sorcerer. You can get more complicated later, if you find you still want to. These are Western crime thrillers; you'd be bored stupid if you went to see a Western and there wasn't even a murder in it.

.:. wrote:
But I have to say that DitV striked me as a game who would work really well with "published" adventures... due to the specificity of setting and uniformity of characters' role, and due to the fact that most Towns follow the same pattern.
There are so many online Towns that chances

It's probably best to approach a Dogs campaign without too much preplanning. For example, the GM doesn't really need to know how long the campaign is going to last - just start playing, and you'll probably see the game wind down naturally around the dozen session benchmark due to how the game's situation itself resolves. The reason for this is basically that the energy that runs the game comes from the ambivalent positioning of the player characters against the social system of the Faith, and once that position has been nailed down irrevocably by dramatic choices through the course of play, there is no longer anything to play about.

While you can well use a town somebody else has created, especially if you feel that you appreciate the choices made in creating it, it's probably not possible to create a follow-up for the same town in advance. This is because the follow-up should presumably take into account the choices made by the Dogs; if the town is such that the choices made by the Dogs don't really impact anything and thus you can project a second adventure onto the situation even before the first one's been played, then the town isn't very good in the first place.

Tying adventures together by introducing left-over material from prior play to new towns is definitely something to do in campaign play. This comes naturally as long as you don't preplan your campaign, but rather create individual scenarios sequentially: once you've seen how town A played out, it'll be easy to put in interesting references to its situation in town B. Just remember to keep the mix of new elements and old elements balanced.

Lupo,
  Especially for a longish-term campaign, the best way to have persistent NPCs is to have the PCs return to Bridal Falls City.
  This is an area that van have a conflict or e conflict free, pretty easily. It's easy to imagine NPCs that are there that you will see again and it is easy to come up with a reason to go there again.

  anyways, good luck and let us know how ti goes please.