More on Monday’s game

First, a realization: I haven’t explained how the Dogs in the Vineyard mechanics work.  In a nutshell, when you enter into a conflict, you figure out all the stats and traits (think skills and abilities) that apply to the conflict, and you roll all those dice that desribe them.  Then you take turns putting forward two dice, kind of like a bet in poker, and you say or do something the other character can’t ignore.  Depending on how many dice the opponent uses to “call” the “bet”, the result is that he either turns the blow back on the initiator, blocks or dodges it, or takes the blow.  There is always the option to “give”, meaning give up or give in.  Also, you can “escalate” the conflict – if you’re just talking (arguing) about something, but you’re losing and don’t want to give, you might pull out a gun or a knife and get to roll some more dice.

Next, an observation: the Awesome RPG is so context sensitive that there will be very little  in common between the Monday and Thursday sessions.  The characters are all completely unique.  They have almost no abilities in common, unlike, say, D&D, where all characters use templates as starting points.  They have unique motivations.  So what I’m thinking is “how do I make something interesting out of the relationships they’ve chosen, or the motivations they’ve given me?” instead of  ”what’s going to happen next?”  

I’m not saying that I won’t have encounters in mind … but when you run D&D, you plan encounters (or at least you mostly do that with 3rd Edition and later).  With Dogs in the Vineyard, you create a conflict, and the characters come into the situation and get to the bottom of what’s going on and judge and punish the guilty.  But I’m not running either one of those games!  The mechanics are DitV, and that means that I’ll be leaning toward that game’s style of … encounter generation, for lack of a better term.  And while each group might happen on the same situation, their responses will very likely be completely different.  (Part of what I’m doing here is just psyching myself up to be flexible.)

So far, it feels like the players are thinking of their characters as much more real and immediate.  Not sure why – could be that they’ve figured out during character creation that their characters contain exactly what is interesting to them, rather than a template, like D&D (which many of them had played exclusively before yesterday).  There has been a lot of suggestion-making for each other for traits and other ideas, for people in both games, and between games – many of them have started their characters in the last couple of weeks.

On Monday, the players directed a lot of the action, choosing to go after the kid brother who’d been taken by Indians.  (If I’d been really on, I’d have come up with some kind of moral dilemma for them – a reason the Indians needed the boy – but I was unprepared.)  There was some very fluid plan-making once they caught up with the kidnappers.  They were sneaking up on the campfire, when suddenly the ex-miner said “No, wait, let’s talk to them first.”  So they did that, and when that fell apart, they attacked.  

I broke it down into two main conflicts – the ex-miner and a character based on the Native American character from “Brotherhood of the Wolf” (with the added ironic twist of actually being a werewolf) vs. the leader of the Indians, and the ninja and the assassin vs. the medicine man who had charge of the boy.  There were more Indians present, but I ignored them because time was short and I wanted to keep things simple.

The ex-miner didn’t want any actual physical help, and so the werewolf and the other players were trying to figure out a way to help that didn’t involve jumping into the fight.  They had attacked at night, and there was a full moon, so the werewolf decided that he would just change into his wolf form and howl at the top of his lungs.  That brought some superstitious fear into the eyes of the leader, who was distracted enough that the ex-miner got the upper hand and knocked him out.

Meanwhile, the ninja and the assassin were having their every move blocked by the medicine man, who had some magical abilities (see http://iarpg.blogspot.com/2009/06/magic.html for an idea of how magic works).  They wore him down, and just when it looked like they were getting the upper hand, the medicine man escalated the conflict by bringing out a weapon, so he got to add more dice to his dice pool.  Still, with two against one, they managed to take him out (as I argue Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan should have done easily against that horned Sith guy, but never mind that now).

Then two players started to argue over whether the leader of the Indians should be tied up with the rest of them while they went back to town to collect the reward.  I said “This sounds like a conflict!” and off we went.  The player who had knocked the Indian leader out wanted him not to be tied up, and won the conflict when he said “I’ll be responsible for him” and the other player gave in, saying “okay, but if anything happens, it will be on your head.”  I am not sure how to convey what a huge leap this is in terms of quality roleplaying for these two.  The player who won has mostly been an anarchist out for himself in most of the games I’ve seen him in, and the loser would never have backed down in the past – but I think it’s worth saying, as well, that given the right tools – the DitV mechanics – he saw that it made sense.  Both of them are older teens, and so it’s maybe the right time for this kind of improvement, but again, the tools are certainly a key.

Could that kind of interaction have happened in a D&D game?  I guess I have to say yes … but it’s extremely unlikely.  The mechanics of Dogs in the Vineyard make it not only likely, but expected and common.  I had a brief discussion with some of the players afterward about those mechanics, talking about what was obvious about them, but also pointing out that we didn’t really have  a lot of experience with them, and that it would be interesting to see what else they could do.