Well, the Thursday session was not quite as good as the Monday session. There were more players without any start on their characters (5), and one of them had no experience with roleplaying at all. Even though some of them showed up early to make their characters, the rate of progress was pretty different, so that made it a little harder to keep track of who needed what.
Once we got to the characters’ initial accomplishment, things went smoothly enough with the accomplishments, but there wasn’t the same interest level on the part of all the players as there was on Monday. Part of that was due to the presence of three laptop computers … which will be allowed next week only on a provisional basis. My thought after the session was to ban them from the game, but they all have their characters on their computers. If it doesn’t work out next week, they’ll have to print them out like everyone else.
The initial accomplishment in Dogs of the Vineyard is something that happens at each character’s initiation, which is kind of a rite of passage into being one of God’s Watchdogs, responsible for keeping members of the Faith from straying too far from the path. In my game, we’re not using that setting, but I decided to keep the initial accomplishment as something that was an important formative event for each character. Many of the events have taken on a fairly dramatic and bloody feel (“I hope I was able to get revenge on the person/people who killed my parents/wife/brother”), which is not exactly what it’s supposed to be if you’re playing DitV, but I decided that if that’s what they wanted, that’s what I’d give them.
But it also gave me a chance to introduce the idea (again from DitV) that conflicts have stakes, and figuring out what they are is part of the process of the game. In a few cases, talking over the player’s idea led us to a better way to state the conflict, and in a couple of cases, led us to a different – and better – conflict to play. For example, one guy wanted to “get revenge on the pirates who killed his parents” – but after talking it over and setting the scene, it really became more interesting to him to be able to save his parents from the pirates.
Another guy wanted revenge on the bandit who robbed him and injured him to the point of leaving scars and brain damage (remember, they’re making this stuff up – not me!), but he couldn’t state it clearly enough to satisfy himself. We talked it over, and he decided that what his character really wanted was “payback”, not revenge – and he decided what he really meant was the money, not the injury. It turned out that he rolled very poorly, and I rolled very well, so he played up the “brain damage” and it went something like this:
Kory: I go up to the guy in the saloon, and I say “I want the money you stole from me back!”
Bandit: That wasn’t me … that was Joe Morgan. He died a while back.
Kory (confused): Oh … well, maybe I got the wrong guy. No, wait! I’m pretty sure I recognize that knife you’re carrying! That’s the knife that I got stabbed with!
Bandit: Oh, this? Yeah, I got it off of Joe Morgan before he died.
At that point, Kory, not having any dice left, shrugged and exited the saloon (having lost the conflict). (What happens then – when running the initial accomplishment – with the DitV mechanics, is that you gain a new 1d6 trait that states what happened or failed to happen in your initial accomplishment – so it might be “I saved my parents from the pirate attack 1d6″ or “I failed to save my parents from the pirate attack 1d6″ – and I think it’s fairly clear that whichever of those things happens, you have something interesting added to your character.)
Because of the extra time spent on characters, we didn’t get to the point of getting the characters together. That will come next week …
