Only three players showed up for the beginning of the session, though I knew more would be coming later. This threw me into disarray, since I had planned to plunge ahead with the attempt to find the tattooed bald man. I was also pretty tired that day, so it took me a little while to recover and figure out what to do. I decided that the group was planning to wait until the next morning to make that attempt, and while we just had three players, we’d go on with more action the evening before.
(One of the main reasons this worked is something I’m finding more and more this summer: the Dogs in the Vineyard mechanics are much, MUCH more scalable than D&D. Three characters in the beginning of the session, four more arrive in the middle? No problem. There’s no adjusting numbers of monsters to throw at them. There’s just trying to present conflicts that are interesting to the majority, and making sure that they all have conflicts they’re vested in. How to do that might be a topic for another post …)
Whiskey Wilson (the dynamite chuckin’ character mentioned from the last post for this game) decided he was going to tell a story. He has Storytellin’ as one of his traits, and he’s connected to the Phantasmagoria arena of magic, so he can entrance people with his stories. While he was telling the story, he walked around and looked at other characters’ belongings. When he got to Michael Rivencourt (character name), Michael was cleaning one of his guns. Whiskey said he was going to try to get Michael good and enthralled so he could take the other gun without Michael noticing it. Conflict!
First, it should be said, Whiskey came up with a story about a miner who towered above other miners, who could dig farther faster than anyone. But one day, a man came with a new piece of technology – a steam-powered digging machine – and he challenged anyone to try to dig faster than it could, and backed it up with a 10 to 1 bet of any money anyone wanted to put up. Whiskey said that this miner took the challenge and they went at it, digging through a canyon wall to see who would be first to the other side. The miner – “who happened to be me,” he said – won, and the men running the machine never made it out.
This player was obviously making this up on the spot. It wasn’t practiced or polished. But I was enthralled anyway, at the way he was weaving elements of the story of John Henry into the narrative, but changing it and making it his own. It was really fascinating.
Here’s a vague idea of how the conflict went:
Whiskey: I’m lookin’ right in his eyes, tellin’ the story especially to him.
Michael (dodges): I’m not really giving him my whole attention, because I’m cleaning my gun.
Whiskey: I use my voice to make it really interesting.
Michael (takes the blow): Well, now, it is getting mighty interesting at this point. I start listening harder.
Whiskey won the conflict, and picked up Michael’s other gun and started cleaning it. As the story ended, Michael snapped out of it, and Whiskey handed him back the other gun, and Michael did a sort of double take. The fallout led to Michael getting experience, which he decided to take as a new trait: My guns are clean 1d6. It should also be said that the player playing Whiskey has a tendency toward anarchy sometimes, and the origin of this conflict was, I think, him letting that tendency into his play a bit. But by the end of the conflict, the DitV mechanics had taken him somewhere else entirely, and that was very interesting to watch.
Later, the three characters saw a flickering light over the ridge, near the tattooed man’s house. One of them went to investigate, but did not see anything. They figured out that the tattooed man was trying to lure them away, and there was an involved conflict in which Whiskey Wilson started lighting sticks of dynamite and throwing them over the ridge to see if he could hit the guy by luck; at one point, the tattooed man’s voice started talking to him softly right next to his ear, and suggested he throw that last stick of dynamite into the fire – which he immediately did. Michael saved the day by putting out the fire with his Alchemical abilities.
The bald tattooed man fled again after he was spotted in a tree near the camp, and then the rest of the players showed up, so everyone decided that waiting until morning was a bad idea and that they should try to track him right then. There was a conflict dealing with that, and they were successful. On capturing him, they had another conflict, the stakes of which were “will he tell us anything about what he knows about the wooden hand?” The characters won again, and found out that their captive did not have it in his possession, but that he knew where it was. During the conflict, one character said that they would help him visit his home as an enticement to help them (he’d been away from Louisiana for a long time) and he accepted, saying that that would indeed be necessary, because that’s where the hand currently was.
We wrapped up the session with a little bookkeeping regarding fallout and experience.
