Lamentations Of The Dogs In The Vineyard

G+ is on life support, so a few weeks back I trawled through every post I'd made in my 6+ years using it to see if there was anything that I wanted to archive.

I found about a dozen posts that were effectively blog posts I'd misplaced. One was an idea I'd loved but done nothing with. I think over the coming weeks/months/however-long-I-maintain-a-regular-writing-habit I'll expand on this concept and flesh it out as much as I can.

From a November 6th 2014 G+ post:

Prequel to Dogs in the Vineyard; early 1800s sandbox campaign in a largely unsettled counter-Utah; party are not-quite-Dogs; sent off by the church to convert isolated communities, make contact with the Mountain Folk and look into those odd reports of weird caves in the Border Hills.
BUT play with LotFP as base system (plus guns). Clerics are true believers, magic-users are the church's investigators into other stuff who are now a bit tainted, fighters and specialists are the useful novices.
And the weird caves are filled with things out of Lovecraft.

I'm a fan of the setting for Dogs In The Vineyard, and in the G+ circles that I used to read and the blogs I currently read I see barely a mention of it. I LOVE what the game is about, I love the idea of the Watchdogs and I think that Dogs is possibly Vincent Baker's best game - at least out of everything of his I've read. The game-setting-making process he leads the reader/GM through is magical. Going from simple prompts it steers your creativity without being prohibitive.

But while I like the basic stats and skills setup for Dogs, I found it really bothersome to keep on top of the dice pools. The rolls and re-rolls, the escalation. It could be tense sometimes, but at others it was just eight or nine dice on each side clattering and trying to find an exception as no-one backs down.

So why not mix a little Old School goodness in to the blend to simplify some of the mechanics? Why not use D&Dish stats? And since LOTFP has a system that uses equipment and assumptions about a similar background period of history, why not "simply" perform an RPG transplant operation?

Why not write about this in bits and pieces over the coming however-long-I-maintain-this-blog-yadda-yadda-yadda?

Why not.

NPCs

In a G+ post yesterday Zak asked "What do you know about an NPC before they come up in your game?" - a question that I think is really interesting. I think that over the last year, which is as long as I have run games, my approach has changed a little.

The first game that I GMed was In A Wicked Age - by design, I knew nothing about any of the characters before we played. NPCs were revealed as players asked questions, and were sketched from stick figures into something resembling real people over the course of the first scene that they were in.

Dogs in the Vineyard, which I ran as my first short campaign, was more interesting. As NPC stats are descriptive by nature, this plants seeds in my mind about what the people look like. How they walk and talk maybe. For some of the characters they look like people that I know or have seen on the TV. Some - typically the people who are props perhaps - are less fleshed out. As the campaign wore on the potential for some NPCs changed a lot.

The hedge-witch/trader that the Dogs were tailing turned up dead, badly mutilated. Now, originally this was going to be the work of the mad-with-grief Dog-turned-Steward in the town. But... As they investigated this didn't sit right. And so the dabbling-with-demons brother and sister became the "oh King of Life make it stop, they morph into Resident Evil style monsters and they just keep coming" finale bosses. And their grandfather was supposed to be dead, but good things come in threes...

In LotFP/Somewhere North I have used a few generators just to generate details about people. I have stats and nothing else, or a one-liner (a retired hero lives there; a war criminal is in hiding) and this becomes the basis for something else. Names are good. I can't put my finger on what it is about the names that lead to descriptions, but they do something. Randomly rolling Ungrall the Unctuous instantly put the person in my head, with all but one detail missing.

A detail that is always missing for me until the NPC appears on-stage. The voice. I never know what a NPC will sound like until they say something. Never. Zinternik's elves and halflings are all cockney. Ungrall the Unctuous speaks with a pronounced lisp due to tongue boils. Robin, the head guard of Overtornea is incredibly officious and bored. Marco the magic-user is incredibly excited and casts spells like he is throwing Pokeballs.

But until they open their mouth for the first time, even I have no idea what they will sound like.

Dead Dogs: Rumours

More speculative ideas for a zombie game mostly based on Dogs in the Vineyard.

At the start of a campaign, the players have some typical set-up; stats and so on. The GM has had some set-up as well. The basic setting that I am proposing is that the players play characters that exist in the most well-known city to most of them. This is the starting point, somewhere familiar.

Then you take that familiar place and take it to zombie hell.

If the game was to be based on Dogs then it would be good to still include a version of the initiation stage that each character goes through (more on that some other time). I have an idea for a quick card game that could help steer the tone or the setting. The GM will have done some scenario generation just like any sandbox game, and things will change as the players interact with that world and define their own goals. But right as things get going five minutes are spent to see what the characters have heard.

Dead Dogs: 1

For a long time I've been thinking about running a sandbox-y zombies game. And for a long time I've just been making notes in various places, scraps of paper, little journals - even the odd page of a Moleskine.

And then I thought, why not share some of that thinking here? See if other people can spot good ideas or spot obvious drawbacks. There are two main game systems that have influenced my thinking so far, Apocalypse World and Dogs in the Vineyard. If you've read this blog before then you'll know that AW is the game that got me into RPGs and Dogs is the first game that I've GMed for a campaign. So maybe it's natural that they're the ones which are leading me in terms of system.

I started making notes earlier this year convinced that AW was the way forward for a zombie game. Archetypes abound in zombie fiction, and so the playbook style characters for a zombie game would work quite well. Couple that with what I still think of as the best dice mechanic in a game, and a system of experience that creates cinematic, larger-than-life characters (without feeling like they are overpowered superheroes), and there starts to feel like the bare bones of a zombie game.

More recently, having GMed Dogs, I'm more inclined to go with that as the basis for a zombie apocalypse game. The main reason being a game mood one: in Dogs it is not the place for the GM to pass judgement on whatever the PCs do, only to respond in-game. The Dogs are the Law, in a world filled with sinners and demons, what they say goes. It struck me that in a post-apocalypse filled with the undead hungry for the living, there are going to be difficult decisions everywhere. And there is going to be no-one to judge those decisions, save for how others respond. So the mood of Dogs might be relevant - in which case the game mechanics might also be relevant... (if mechanics and mood have any connection at all; I don't know if they do, I don't know if they don't)

Anyway. I'll spew out thoughts about this over the next few weeks and see if any of it starts to make sense. I know that there are other people who have hacked AW and Dogs for zombies games, and I'll link to those or interesting bits in future posts too. And I know of All Flesh Must Be Eaten! but haven't been able to find a copy in the past; plus I think I'm more interested in something with a The Walking Dead vibe rather than out-and-out archetypes or cliches, which is what leads me more to Dogs than Apocalypse World I suppose.

Anyway (take two). Thoughts? Suggestions?

Dogs Thoughts

As I mentioned last week, due to work commitments I've had to take a few weeks away from regular games nights and Dogs in the Vineyard. Dogs is the first campaign that I've run, and it's been really enjoyable. It is a system where there are so many different directions that a game can go in. Even with the simplest of backgrounds and a handful of NPCs rolled up you can get an intriguing game going.

I read the final section of the pdf a few days ago, and there were some neat thoughts that have helped steer my thinking a bit more as well. Vincent Baker describe it (paraphrased badly by me) as a noir investigation that happens to be set in an alternate West. And with several factions possibly at play, none of them exactly in the right - but one or more of them probably very much in the wrong, it gives the Dogs something to do.

In the first and second sessions the Dogs set up a town meeting, so that the guilty/sinful could confess in front of the whole town and hopefully get rid of any bad blood that existed. This worked really well, a solution that I didn't see coming at all. Quite a facilitated solution in fact, the Dogs didn't immediately pass judgement, but brought out into the light everything that was going wrong. And they were happy with how things ended up.

And yet in the last town they were deeply unhappy with the situation as they arrived in the town of Jewel: daily sundown services where people confess the wrong they have done so that the demons are kept at bay. Leaving aside the demons (whose existence wasn't proved until the last session), they did not like the Steward leading these public confessions. And then one of them said, "Is that different from what we did?" - which was a great realisation. It was in no way planned by me (the setting detail of the sundown service had been made before the start of the campaign), but was a neat thought. The Dogs do have a final say: I don't judge their choice of actions, and there is no higher authority in the game that says they can or can't do something, other than their own thoughts/beliefs.

If the Dogs start to doubt past actions perhaps that leads to something interesting - as I plan for possible future sessions - can I exploit their doubts somehow...? Present them with situations where they might really disagree? Can I devise a situation that's not "on-rails" but which is a kind of Kobayashi Maru? Not so that I can say "that was a bad decision" but so that THEY can't see a way out, but have to act all the same. And when they do act, how will they respond to the consequences?

(lots of half-formed questions there! Apologies)

Dogs in the Vineyard, Session 5

Last night the Dogs assembled as "Three in Authority" and brought deliverance to the town of Jewel. Brother Paul arrived in town just as Sister Basemuth (Patrick) tried to hold the Steward back from killing a woman who was strongly suspected of being a witch; Brother Caleb (David) meanwhile was in hot pursuit of a man - the witch's brother - who had staggered away despite being tied up and shot in both legs.

After sessions of solving town squabbles and disagreements with local tribes, this was a full tilt into horror, action and exorcism. Brother Caleb tracked down the tongueless brother, Alex, and had to fill him full of lead as he transformed into an unspeakable monster, all triple-jointed fingers, razor teeth and deformed skull. The dice went with Caleb, but it showed up that when it comes to dealing with demons it really pays to have more than player acting against them. Demons/monsters can have a lot of dice in physical conflicts...

Dogs in the Vineyard, Session 4

Tonight was a great session. After a week's absence the Dogs (two out of three of them) returned to their duties and straightened things out in the Hope Mission. That didn't take all that long, and they set out for the town of Jewel, hot on the heels of a woman that they suspected of being a witch.

They quickly started making other plans when they found her dead body, strung up in a tree and with the symbol of their faith carved into her flesh...

Dogs in the Vineyard, Session 3

After a week's absence we return to the small, isolated Hope Mission. The Dogs had arrived at the end of a day's riding to find that people were scared: the Steward was holding some of the Mountain People in the basement of the Meeting Hall; one of the hunters was claiming he had been stabbed by a Mountain Person days earlier; events had snowballed before they even arrived, and now it seemed like they had only hours before a war party would descend on the town and take back their people by force. What could the Dogs do???

Quite a lot actually...

Dogs in the Vineyard, Session 2

Last week we left things with Sister Basemuth (Patrick), Brother Caleb (David) and Brother Paul (Steve) at the farm; they've tracked down Newton's kidnappers, Cornelius and Nate, but they're too late - Newton has been strangled to death...

...or has he?! The slight trace of breath is in him, and so they perform ceremonies to call him back, to tell him that his time has not come - and it works. They save the boy.

Thinking Ahead

It dawns on me this afternoon that I am halfway through the week to the next games night. Which means that I need to think about expanding my setting notes for Dogs in the Vineyard. Without giving too much away to some of the players (who might read this) it's fair for me to say that while I had the starting conditions for the first few towns in place, I have only the briefest of sketches for others.

I know of connections between some of the towns, and I know of the sins but not the sinners for some more. The only really time intensive thing in terms of prep is the names of everyone, and their stats. I spent an evening earlier this week rolling dice against NPC stat tables again and again to build up a buffer of numbers for play.

(thought: there must be a simple way to mechanise that, an app that just generates a list of disposable NPCs... Select the number of people that you want, click Go and it creates a pdf list of stats)

So maybe that's what I need to do this evening: the valley has seven towns (or does it...???) and I have prep for three. So best be getting on with the other four - not that the players will ever visit them all - and think about the connections and webs of wants and needs. Again, that's a key insight that makes Dogs in the Vineyard work I think: the town creation drives you towards thinking about human relationships. It directs you to think about what people want - crucially, what they want from the Dogs. You're not just building a shooting gallery.

Dogs in the Vineyard, Session 1

Last night was the first outing for Dogs in the Vineyard in our group, and I was GMing. It was the first time any of us had played it, but I think that despite a couple of head-scratching moments with the mechanics (more on those later) it was a good evening.

We started out with character gen; it took a little while because of thinking about potential with relation to the setting (it's late August, 1851), but after a bit of thinking we arrived at:

• Patrick, playing Sister Basemath Armstrong, a fearless and funny Dog with a Strong Community background. During her initiation she corresponded with a geologist and was able to satisfy both him and the public that dinosaur bones had been left behind in Noah's Flood.
• David, playing Brother Caleb Romney (a distant relation perhaps), a Well-Rounded Dog who is able to employ a coldly logical perspective, track people and he's also pretty handy with a gun. During his initiation time he unfortunately failed to capture a criminal, but this has now spurred him on.
• Steve, playing Brother Paul Usher, a Dog with a Complicated History - not raised in the Faith, but a part of it now. He's rugged, stubborn and has all the traits that you might expect from a western gunslinger. During his initiation he saved a child from a burning building.

After initiations and descriptions of their coats they were given their commission by Brother Emmanuel from the Dog's Temple: go out on a long journey to the southern-most valley where the Faithful live. It's a long time since Dogs have been through that part of the world; give the Stewards letters, help the communities as you see fit and do whatever you have to do to keep the Faith strong in the towns.

We join the Dogs as they come up to a farm outside of the town of King's Bridge.

Dogs and Dice and Decisions

It's Games Night! And tonight I start GMing a game of Dogs In The Vineyard, something which I'm really excited about. It's the first time I've played DitV and also the first time (assuming all goes well) that I'll be GMing something which isn't a oneshot. And we have at least one new player joining our merry band.

I think I have my head wrapped around the dice mechanics and the general principles of "Say yes or roll dice" and "Escalate, escalate, escalate!" Other than that, I'm just interested in playing something a bit different. DitV feels like a breath of fresh air. I thought that setting prep would be difficult, but so far it has been really straightforward. Why? Because they focus on people, what they need, what they want and how far they might go if others (or demons!) push them. And it is so much easier to focus on those fundamentals, the inclinations and breaking points. I have a little map (which I have to redraw to get rid of my notes) and I have notes of circumstances for a few towns and their inhabitants, as well as a paragraph each for those I've not fleshed out yet - I want to see what direction my players take things...

I'll be writing a lot about this over the next few weeks. If I ever finish writing about other dice mechanics I've been interested by I might even get around to thinking about the simple but complex dice of DitV. I can't wait to see it in play.