Dogs in the Vineyard: who do you know in Town?

#21

ok, that took longer than expected.

I said:

  • Treat the other players like ends in themselves, not as mere means.

You said you don’t know what this means. Sorry about that, I was being cheeky. This is a memory of translation of a quote from Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (probably). This is sort of the book for deontological ethics which is to say: Rule following morality.

Kant was essentially saying to treat people as people, rather than objects. That is, to care about their feelings and freedom rather than imposing your will upon them. As the Platinum Rule puts it: Treat others as they wish to be treated. Or, as Wil Wheaton might say: Don’t Be A Dick. These are all related and, for the purposes of this conversation, can be treated as the same.

Since games are mind-control and the game is a conversation, I think we should think about the rules they impose on our behaviors and determine if those rules are good or not.

In the text, Vincent gives the specific rules that he wanted them in order to bring about a specific type of conversation at the table, and to mind-control the players and MC in a specific way. That is: The rules are meant to bring about a conversation with specific guiderails and anything you do within those rules fits your table.

Because it is Vincent and Dogs, I’m willing to grant that there’s some skill involved in player and MC manipulation. I can see it and I have rarely been able to do it myself.

By asking things like “Hey, I’ve read the text. Is the game intended for A or B?”, we are essentially asking “Please add some Authorial-stance rules to the rule text”. Which Vincent says no to and, I think on reasonably grounds: Anything he says will be taken as new rules for how to run the game. You’re asking for him to do just that. I’ve for sure asked that in other places.

So: Vincent has a text that is meant to bring about specific conversations at the table, and (turns out) in the conversation of RPGs. By asking for more than clarification, we ask him to modify those rules. He says no, because he wants us manipulated in specific ways that are in the text.

What’s this got to do with Kant?

The Rules in the text take the place of Kant’s moral rules: We take these as how to have the conversation that is the game. By seeking for Vincent to change the text, we’re seeking for a change to those rules.

And that has a lot to do with treating your friends at the table as means in and of themselves: If some rule change or setting specific detail works better for you, then do it! We don’t need permission from Vincent to treat our friends well.

This got a little long. I have no idea if it is cogent anymore.

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#22

Vincent,

I haven’t had any trouble with the game. In fact, Dogs is probably THE most consistently functional and fun game in my library. It always delivers, and the Town Creation rules work really well. I’ve run Dogs a bunch but not a ton - played in two games, ran 8 Towns or so for a total of 5 different groups.

The last two times I ran it, I even ran your sample Towns from the book (Boxelder Canyon and Tower Creek), with no additional prep, and it was much more fun than I expected. (A Town like Boxelder Canyon can look pretty spare and unexciting on paper, and I had no personal investment in it, but it still generated a very satisfying game, thanks to how well all the bits and pieces of DitV work together to deliver great play. We had a blast!)

The Relationships thing, though, just doesn’t seem to pop the same way as everything else in the rules, unless I do something quite different from the directions in the book.

I never thought too much about this until I saw (recently, upon rereading) that you (as the author of the book) ALSO do something different in those sample Towns. So now I can’t stop thinking about it! I’m guessing that, when you ran the game, you did some things that worked really well but aren’t in the text. I’m guessing that many people might (as I did).

I’m not looking for a ruling from on high or a dogmatic approach; I’d be happy as a pig in mud if a people suggested a few fun things to try in this thread. (“One time we played Dogs and we did X, Y, and Z… but maybe it would be even more fun without the Y part, I’m thinking…”)

That’s my main desire/wish for this thread. Just to talk possibilities and options (and maybe some anecdotes).

I DO also have a Vincent-specific question (one that perhaps no one else could answer), though - that is how common you would expect family ties and blood ties to occur in a game of Dogs. I watched a video of you playing Dogs (it’s on YouTube!) and I was really struck by the depth of the history you brought to the table. It made the game deeper and more interesting, and isn’t something I’ve seen anyone else do when playing the game.

So, my question is: what is the expectation for the “Wild West that never was”, whether in your imagination or in the actual history it’s based on? Where does one find blood relations and family members? I can imagine extremes like, “each Town was settled by a single family striking it out on their own, with no ties to anyone else, and Towns are far apart”, on one end, and “intermarriage was a big deal and families often fostered children of other families, so pretty much anywhere you go, you run into a blood relation, and Towns are close together and tight-knit, never spreading out too far”, at the other.

Thanks for coming up and engaging in this! I know you might have mixed feelings about the game now, so I really appreciate your input. It’s still one of my favourite RPGs, and I’m thrilled to be coming back to it after not playing it for 9 years!

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#23

That makes sense to me, sure! Thanks for clarifying.

#24

I don’t know how to tell you this! You keep trying different ways to ask me, but I swear this is the answer:

How common would I expect blood ties to be? I’d expect it to depend on how the GM and players play it, each time.

“Where does one find blood relations and family members? I can imagine extremes like, “each Town was settled by a single family striking it out on their own, with no ties to anyone else, and Towns are far apart”, on one end, and “intermarriage was a big deal and families often fostered children of other families, so pretty much anywhere you go, you run into a blood relation, and Towns are close together and tight-knit, never spreading out too far”, at the other.”

Yeah, me too.

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#25

Hmmmm! You’re not willing to say how you did it when you played, or how you might do it if you were to play again now?

There’s a big difference between “Relationship dice are just temporary bonus dice, which mean little” and “we’re going to use these rules to get the most out of this human drama”, and navigating that isn’t obvious. I haven’t seen it done well in a game of Dogs yet.

Well, thanks, in any case.

Perhaps someone else will post their own experiences or thoughts - I hope someone’s got some good ideas out there.

#26

You’re killing me here. Not willing, give me strength.

How I did it when I played was, however I felt like doing it, each time. If I were to play it again now, god forbid, but if, I’d do it however I felt like doing it when that time came. I don’t have any techniques for you that aren’t already in the text. Cross my bitter heart.

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#27

Almost as if each table and each experience is different. But that can’t be right, can it?

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#28

Sorry, Vincent! I’m not trying to put you out. I just love this game and my curiosity is deep and bountiful. Feel free to consider all my questions to be for other readers of the thread, from now on. Your replies so far are appreciated!

Exactly right! I am hoping to draw on that rich variety and asking people to share their varied experiences.

#29

Yep, re-reading the book these days after a long time and this jumped at me. Specially because I left the actual town examples until last. Then my reaction was “woah, the author is furiously entangling these Dogs to NPCs here through blood/family relations. But he didn’t actually said it in the text, right?” then I went back to the part on Relationships and indeed this is not instructed, at least not explicitly.

My 2 cents: the author (Vincent) left it open on purpose, to show the game can acommodate a myriad uses for Relationships according to group preferences. That said, in the actual examples he go ahead and use it in a way he personally prefer, that is, furiously entangling Dogs with NPCs in town (which happen to be our preference too, right?).

Interesting, I never noticed this in the rules. How does it work, this “Reflection replenishing relationship dice” thing?

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#30

@Silva,

Yes, it’s interesting, right? It’s got me thinking about various ways to do this, and I was hoping that this thread would get some people to share their experiences and the way they have used Relationships in Dogs. I think it’s the least obvious or at least the least well explained part of the rules.

As for Reflection, at the end of that process, you get some new unassigned Relationship dice, in preparation for the next Town. The text similarly does not seem to specify or explain what to do with these dice, so I have to assume the intention is that you can assign them to NPCs in the next Town when you encounter them.

#31

Excellent summary and analysis. Very succinct.

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#32

Not exactly but there is this sanctioned setting agnostic version sanctioned by Vincent…

I am not sure why he doesn’t sell the PDF any more.

#33

Hey, that’s pretty interesting. I remember seeing a link to this document, but I didn’t get a sense that it was well done (I believe somewhere in there the author even says that he has never actually played Dogs!).

I could definitely be wrong about that intuition, though. Has anyone read this, or played it, and what can you tell us about it?

Do you know where/how Vincent has given his approval or blessing? I’d be curious to see from what perspective. Thanks for sharing!

#34

The author played this version at several conventions and says it went well. Not sure if he ever played the original version though. It does say Vincent explicitly game his blessing as Vincent was refusing to publish it any more due to the problems he had with some interpretations of the setting.

This generic version does not have that baggage. Not sure though if it carries any of the depth though either that would give you the feel of authority from the original though.

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#35

From what I understand Vincent let him know he had the legal right, and perhaps encouraged him, to write the project. I don’t believe he ever said anything about the final product.

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#36

That sounds about right.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to start a new thread about “DOGS”, in case anyone is actually familiar with the product, while I still hope to solicit some advice or ideas about how to functionally handle Relationships in DitV in this thread. Surely a better way is possible.

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#37

Here’s how I’m handling relationships in my current DitV campaign - though it is a kinda odd campaign, the players are British policymakers dealing with the Cold War crisis. …

The players are stuck governing the same Town (London) for all three sessions of the campaign.

This makes relationships more meaningful, as players must deal with their friends/family/whatever for three sessions…even if they successfully solve one problem, they still have to stay in the same Town to solve all the other problems (you can always make a Town more complex simply by running through the Town Creation process multiple times - or even just combine multiple Towns together to create a Mega-Town), and deal with the aftermath (especially if they happened to offend or hurt some of their Relationships in the process).

#38

That’s a very interesting setup! It reminds me a bit of the short campaign I ran, and probably had many of the same positive features.

I have a few questions for you:

  1. How did the Relationships come into existence, and who had a say in it? Were they established before play, or during?

  2. How did the Relationships interface with Town Creation? Did you intentionally include “friends/family/whatever” in the Town writeup, or did it work in some other way? Could you give an example?

  3. When you talk about going through the Town Creation process multiple times, do you mean that you did it all “up front”, or that you would create new Pride-Injustice-Sin-etc chains in-between sessions? How many “Towns” in terms of problems did you end up with for a three session campaign? Did they all get resolved?

I’ve made some “double” Towns before, but never anything with more layers than that. (And in my case the two “chains” were always overlapping, not completely separate situations.)

#39

  1. Players have a say in Relationship creation. I originally intended for Relationships to be created during the initiation conflicts, when players introduce characters and quickly establish relationships with them. But due to a snafu in explaining the rules, relationships were accidentally established at character creation (two players went ahead and defined relationships).

  2. Generally, I developed factions and then intentionally slotted in the Relationships as leaders of the factions whenever appropriate. Consider this the Reverse-Jenskot - the players create the characters and I choose where they go. (The only exceptions was the Soviet Union, where I prepped up a dictator for the players to deal with, and NATO, where I just improv-ed an American representative since I couldn’t see any good Relationship to slot in there.)

I’ll give an example from my current campaign: one faction I have is the Combined Peace Movement. I have prepped their history, their ideology, their plans…the only thing that I didn’t prep is the actual leader of the CPM. When Player A established a relationship with his estranged wife, I slotted her in as the leader of the CPM.

Another thing that I have done is introduce factions through the initiation conflicts as well, so players already get a good idea of the political situation before the game “starts”. During initiation, Player B started a propaganda campaign to get people to migrate away from London into the suburbs, thereby making it more likely for British civilians to survive a nuclear attack. So I had Player A’s estranged wife (and the rest of the CPM) launch a protest movement to oppose the propaganda (claiming that moving away from the cities to the countryside would be bad for the environment).

A second example would be the UK Nationalists, who during the course of play, winds up being led by Player C’s jealous cousin and supported by Player A’s fellow war veterans. During initiation, they opposed Player C’s plan to covertly seize the United Kingdom’s economic wealth.

  1. I did it all “up-front”. I created three “Towns”, and all those problems are overlapping, in a sense (which is a good thing - makes the resulting moral dilemma more complex). The campaign is still ongoing (we finished the first session) - and no, those problems haven’t been resolved yet (probably made more worse than I expected). I’ll keep you posted if our fearless leaders have actually succeeded in anything (though, they did lose control over London to the CPM).
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#40

@igorhorst, what a great summary!

That sounds like an incredibly interesting game, and I hope you will come back to report on how it went (send me a link, if you do so elsewhere!).

I didn’t go into in great deal in my opening post, but my own approach for the one Dogs campaign I ran was very similar. I did stick to the basic Dogs conceit of visiting multiple Towns, so not all the problems were “overlapping”, but I had the players create Relationships and then slotted them into existing Town writeups, just as you have done. It was tremendously effective, and made for a very memorable and exciting campaign. (I also assigned them semi-randomly, which kept the process exciting and full of surprises for me, as well.)

How has the game proceeded so far?

Do you find any difficulty with the escalation of violence in a more modern, lawful setting? I don’t know who your characters are, but it’s hard to imagine them at liberty to draw and fire on British civilians and envinronmental activists… how does the question of violence built into the system factor into your London setting?