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

[igorhorst]

In session 2, the politicans cut off the water supply to London (while claiming that it was being damaged in a terrorist attack). They then provided water to loyal aspects of the city to gain popularity, while covering all the looting and rioting the protesters did (while neglecting the fact that the journalists themselves were also looting and rioting). They then managed to get an interview with the Combined Peace Movement’s leader and the interviewer managed to get the leader to call the protests off, and in return the government provided self-governance to each Region of the United Kingdom. Water supply to London quickly got restored soon afterwards.

A crackdown on the KGB agents helping the protesters went wrong though, and a Region was soon subverted by the KGB and declared independence (though the KGB agents started shooting at each other, so not a huge loss).

WW3 itself was inconclusive - though the Soviets won the land battle and conquered Germany, the politicians managed to destablizie the USSR enough to get pro-peace generals to launch a coup, thereby averting a nuclear war between the West and the East. The game ended with the Soviet Union and NATO agreeing to form a CoDominium, and Germany itself being demilitarized and “neutral” territory. We still have some loose ends though to cover in a possible session 3, like how the politicians will demobilize the UK and if they will give up their wartime power and all the resources they stockpiled.

As for the escalation of violence, it did become an issue of sorts, but we treated “death” as a political death (scandals, unpopularity, retirement to radio talk show host, etc.) which renders your character incapable of playing any role moving forward. It may sometimes lead to actual death (like assassination), but if it doesn’t make sense in the fluff, we just stick to a nonviolent decline into obscurity.

During the second session, we also changed how “healing” worked. Instead of rolling to heal after you’re seriously injured (as in the original rules), I give you a demand. If you let the demand get fulfilled, you live and are fully healed. Otherwise, you die and prevent the demand. For example, a politican who was seriously injured was given a chance to heal up if he let the KGB agents shooting at each other to “set aside their differences” and establish a working puppet government. He didn’t, and so he sacrificed his political life to let the KGB Agents in the UK keep attacking each other.

[igorhorst]

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?

These are the different levels of escalation in my DitV game:

• Talking with intent to persuade (e.g: debate), Acuity+Heart, d4 fallout
• Implementing nonviolent government programs (e.g.: rationing), Body + Heart, d6 fallout
• Fighting in close-combat situations (e.g.: pitched battles and skirmishes between two sides), Body + Will, d8 fallout
• Fighting in ranged-combat situations (e.g: bombing raids and missile strikes), Acuity + Will|, d10 fallout
• Fighting in propaganda-combat situations (e.g: terrorism, ‘heart and minds’ COIN), Heart + Will, d10 fallout

If you start engaging in combat situations against protesters (for example, sending police officers), uh, then protesters may very well die (though their deaths really serve to hurt the leader of the protesters, as that leader take Fallout damage).

Which may be why the politicians didn’t resort to violence, trying more subtle ways to persuade them to drop their cause - and the protesters also didn’t really want to resort to violence either, knowing it may hurt their cause.

Violence did get used later on during the war between the Politicians and the KGB agents, though the Politicians were conducting “propaganda-combat situations”, such as using the police to try to locate and arrest the KGB agents (and wasn’t attacking protesters directly).

[Paul_T]

Absolutely fascinating, @igorhorst. That’s a far deeper hack than I expected. Would you consider starting a new thread about your game? I have lots of questions, but they no longer have anything to do with the original topic.

[igorhorst]

Here’s the new thread:

Demagogues in the Vincity (Igor Horst's houserules for "Dogs in the Vineyard")

After some discussion in a previous DitV thread, Paul_T suggest that I start a new thread about my ‘Cold War’ game. So here is that new thread. Here’s my house rules for “Demagogues in the Vicinity”, my houserules for DitV that I used for the ‘Cold War’ game. Note that I included only a brief summation of the sample scenario ‘1986 Coup’ - the full scenario is currently kept under wraps because I plan on running it again in my local group again soon. After I finish running it, I’ll post my fu…

[Paul_T]

Wonderful, thanks!

In the meantime, I hope others will come comment on how they handled Relationships in this thread. Perhaps the newer PbtA-focused crowd has missed out on this game, though? It is hard to say.

[Paul_T]

I read a nice review of Dogs earlier today, and this quote jumped out at me:

Relationship dice. You get dice for significant relationships – and the thing here is that what matters isn’t how much you like the person, or how strong your bond is. It’s how much you want that relationship to be a factor in the story. So you say ‘I’m interested in this relationship’, and then you get rewarded for getting that relationship mixed up in things.

It’s clear how the Relationship dice reward the player when they come into play (with increased effectiveness), but it’s much less clear how the Relationship rules help us, as a group, to “factor them into the story”. Unless the GM is instructed to include them in the Town writeups and to somehow get them to recur, it’s really not obvious how this is supposed to work.

A minor flaw in one of the finest RPGs of all time.

Hence this thread!

That quote seemed rather a propos, so I’ll leave it here.

(The whole blog entry/review is quite nice, for anyone curious: https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2016/11/11/assorted-cool-things-about-dogs-in-the-vineyard/)

[Joe_Kenobi]

Paul, I don’t have your experience running DitV (just once that I remember), but I’ve played in several games GMed by DitV veterans, so I’ll offer a few thoughts.

First, I think it’s important to differentiate between relationships and Relationships. While the player gets to choose their Relationships, one of the GMs I’ve played under loves peppering towns with people with whom your character has relationships. Your sister who you haven’t seen since she married and moved away, your uncle the millworker, someone you had a crush on when younger and haven’t seen in years–these sorts of things. When they’re a blood relative, per the rules, you automatically get a 1d6 Relationship with them. But more importantly, these relationships serve as invitations to assign Relationship dice and make them a bigger part of the game.

As discussed previously in this thread, there’s certainly the option for the player to see a character and declare, “Oh, that’s my cousin!” to bring in a Relationship. But the GM can also build a town and plan on some of these types of relationships, leaving it in players’ hands whether to pursue them as Relationships.

Second, when I played a Dogs campaign, that GM saw Relationships as a way for players to indicate who they’d like to serve as recurring characters. Obviously, with the way the game is driven by Towns, its episodic structure changes what this means versus more serialized campaigns. But there are plenty of episodic TV shows that nonetheless have secondary characters who appear every now and then.

Ways to handle this in DitV: A Relationship character can get married and move to another Town; their profession can be desperately needed elsewhere and so the King of Life has called them to another Town; a family member passed away, causing a temporary or permanent move to that member’s Town to help look after other family of the loved one; the Dogs can revisit a prior Town. Generally for us, the Dogs get into Town and are surprised to see a familiar face, and then learn why that person is present.

None of this works well if it’s overused, but these sorts of callbacks can feel more natural when used sparingly.

Two other thoughts: I agree that overall, Relationships don’t sing in quite the same way so many other aspects of DitV do. The dice take longer to be assigned (or go unassigned) and are rolled less often than other categories. I don’t know a way to make them feel as essential and intuitive as so many of the other great parts of this game. And second, sometimes Relationships are less useful as dice and more useful as an aspect of character creation. They can be helpful in developing your concept for your character, even if you never end up rolling them or encountering the Relationship character at all. That’s still a useful feature to have in a game.

[Paul_T]

Good stuff, Joe.

I think a lot of what you’re describing is implied by the rules and by the text, but rarely addressed explicitly.

The GM tying relationships into the Town write ups and then letting the players decide which are Relationships can be one way to do this, and might be what’s happening in the examples in the book. However, I haven’t heard anyone explicitly say “don’t assign the Relationship dice at character creation; the GM will put relatives of yours into Towns and you’ll decide whether to assign dice to them when you meet them.”

Unlike Traits and Belongings, Relationships aren’t something that you can take with you (at least, not usually!), and so it falls on the GM and Town Creation to determine whether and how much they will figure in the game. That goes equally for the fictional content and the mechanical impact (does someone’s Strong Community background mean anything after the first Town has been visited and those dice have been assigned?).

I think that’s why it’s really key to have a principled approach to this. Thanks for the thoughts and observations!

[Paul_T]

It’s been a lot of fun to revisit this game, and I’ve almost never had a bad session of it.

Further thought and review brings up another interesting wrinkle, which some people discovered and enjoyed back during the days of the Forge:

You get those Relationship dice when the Relationship is somehow at stake in the conflict. Some people decide to take that to have deeper meaning about communities in the Wild West that Never Was:

The thing to remember is that the world of the Dogs is not a faceless, mobile, modern society where things happen and it concerns nobody but the people who are there on the spot (and sometimes not even them). Harriet is going to hear about what you do. Harriet is going to have opinions about what you do. Harriet is, in short, going to judge you in the same way that you judge others.

That is the power of a relationship. You have the strength to do something because your failure would reflect poorly on others. They are counting on you. Or maybe they expect failure for you, and are just waiting to hear how you blew it this time. Whatever. Your actions matter to them, and their opinions matter to you.

And that’s why the Relationships have to be part of the Stakes. You, the player, want to up the Stakes from the measly “Will I fall off this horse?” to “Will my papa (God rest his soul) watchin’ from heaven see me fall off’n a horse, after all the hours he spent teachin’ me to ride?” You get dice for making it more important to you. But that’s meant to be a gamble, a big gamble. If you lose those Stakes, you’ve got to know, with the utter certainty that you would for any other Stakes, that your father does see you, and that he is disappointed in you.

A pretty interesting narrative and mechanical technique here. I’ve never used it in play, myself, but now I’d like to try.

This is more of a player-side technique, but perhaps it can be used to inspire the GM in some indirect way, as well. For example, secondary relationships:

• When preparing a Town, consider the PCs’ Relationships. If you can’t include one or two, try, instead, to include someone who has a strong relationship of some sort to them. Is the Steward here your father’s brother-in-law? Do they write to each other often? Suddenly it matters what you say and do just a little more.