If you're explaining and you say "you know, like in a western," and your (potential) players just keep staring at you blankly? Dogs is going to be a hard sell.

-Vincent

Speaking from personal experience, Vincent?

I think you need a catchy by-line. A concept to pitch.

What about Reservoir Dogs crossed with The Last Temptation of Christ?

Mm. Except you lose that outsider feel that the dogs have. Really, it's High Plains Drifter, the role-playing game.

--Em

Brennan, you know it.

I made characters last night with my friends Tony, Jodi and Bruce. Tony's played before and he's into it but Bruce and Jodi with the blank stares. (Em, you can probably imagine.) I'm gonna try to play a session with them - unless they show any of the scheduling reluctance we geeks use to communicate disinterest to one another - and if it doesn't catch we'll switch to some other game.

I'm all like, "but... but... it's a religious western game about teenage Mormons with guns! How can you not be immediately captivated? What more could you POSSIBLY want?"

-Vincent

Wow. I can imagine this would be rough. Some folks are probably just not going to be interested.

I think my presentation of the game for testing over Christmas was a bit crude and fumbling (see Krista's post for her version). I think the game has so much going on it can be hard to pitch.

lumpley wrote: If you're explaining and you say "you know, like in a western," and your (potential) players just keep staring at you blankly?

Oh my.

Brennan's right. It's complex, and hard to take in all at once. Pick a simple angle that they'll understand and like, then introduce them to the setting via all that amazing color (like the coats, dogs' coats kick a')

What about giving the old supernatural investigator spin? What brings the dogs into town is going to be something affecting the whole community, created by demons. That gives you a magical in that may intrigue them, especially Jodi. I think the mystery aspect of it will be of interest to Bruce.

Presenting it to them that they get to play Mormons will, I'm sure, give you a predictable response. But you're not asking them to play mormons, you're giving the the chance to wrestle with moral quandries in a freakie-deakie social structure based on Mormonism. They'll dig it.

--Em

Yeah, I think Emily's right on. For one thing, you have to settle in your mind whether or not they're Mormons. I think we have to say they're not. Battlestar Galactica wasn't pitched as MORMONS IN SPAAAAACE, I'm sure.

So I think you have to say, "it's like the West in the mid-19th century, and the PCs are roving holy warriors, investigators, and sorcerers in combat with the demons that beseige the towns you visit." I mean, yeah, they'll probably pick up on its Mormonity, but most games are so frickin' Christian already, it won't seem so out of place.

Me, I've been thinking about a game that takes place in the Bronze Age in Mesopotamia, just to get away from all the Christian symbolism. Compared to that, Dogs seems positively docile.

I think the anti-Western thing has to do with a shift in our sensibilities. For one thing, I think we're sort of embarrassed to have this land of freedom built on a hill or corpses. But I also think that the postmodern sentiment that's becoming a real moral stance in our society doesn't view anything as really mythic any more. We have our leftover Enlightenment ideas about Progress, which gives us near-future sci-fi like Transhuman Space, but it's deliberately non-mythic. Or we have space opera, like Star Wars, which really addresses the period in history when Space was a noble frontier, not a series of engineering problems to solve. The Matrix showed a possible new myth, with outlaw hackers changing reality, but they went and fucked up the second and third movies, so we might have seen a case of SMDS (Sudden Mythic Death Syndrome).

I love the mid-19th century for its extraordinary weirdness born of the desperation that many felt about losing control of their lives at the hands of Industry and Science. The Mormons, the Matthians, the Christan Scientists, Spiritualists, and a pile of other groups were all trying to recreate a feeling of wonder, where simultaneously inexplicable events could happen and yet be described in scientistic terms. It's a true period of American myth and magic, and the Lone Ranger doesn't exactly cover it.

nikola wrote:
I love the mid-19th century for its extraordinary weirdness born of the desperation that many felt about losing control of their lives at the hands of Industry and Science. The Mormons, the Matthians, the Christan Scientists, Spiritualists, and a pile of other groups were all trying to recreate a feeling of wonder, where simultaneously inexplicable events could happen and yet be described in scientistic terms. It's a true period of American myth and magic, and the Lone Ranger doesn't exactly cover it.

I know this thread is months old, but I had to respond to it anyway. Vincent just let me know that this forum existed.

nikola wrote: I love the mid-19th century for its extraordinary weirdness born of the desperation that many felt about losing control of their lives at the hands of Industry and Science. The Mormons, the Matthians, the Christan Scientists, Spiritualists, and a pile of other groups were all trying to recreate a feeling of wonder, where simultaneously inexplicable events could happen and yet be described in scientistic terms. It's a true period of American myth and magic, and the Lone Ranger doesn't exactly cover it.