Thursday game, session 4

Once again we started with just a few players, and gained more as the session went on.  It wasn’t a problem this time – I’m getting used to it.

The characters arrived in New Orleans and were guided to the house of the Gaston family, a member of which was known to Shara (character name) – she had never been to this house, but her friend Cornelius had described growing up in it.  The tattooed bald man – now named Dagobert – said that he didn’t want to go up to the house because “they will probably kill me for leading you here.”

So the players who were present sent their characters to the door, while Dagobert stayed back with the others.  They knocked with the huge, ornate brass knocker, but no one came to the door.  Shara sent her dragon (just a small one) to the second story to look in some windows to see if there was anyone home, and the dragon reported back that there were dead bodies inside.  Trying the door, they found it unlocked, and they investigated.  Everyone inside was dead – family, servants, etc.

While they were looking around, they found a piece of silk fabric that had gotten ripped off on a rough corner.  Michael Rivencourt (character name) came up with the idea of turning it into “homing fabric” using his knowledge of Alchemy. The fabric resisted, and nearly won the conflict by bursting into flame, but Michael rolled with it and let it burn, but gathered the ashes before they could blow away. Result: he could tell that the owner of the fabric was heading west into Texas.

The characters notified the authorities and told them what had happened from their perspective, including the explanation that they had a lead on who did it and were going to try to find him. The constable looked a bit askance at the mention of magic, but did not interfere. While they were still on the grounds of the mansion, Cornelius Gaston showed up at the front gate.  He was horrified when he found out that his family had been killed, and rushed in to see for himself. He’d collected himself somewhat when he emerged, and when he found out that the characters had an idea of how to find the person that did it, he asked if he could come along to attempt to extract vengeance.  Whisky Wilson wondered what he could do that was useful.

Cornelius: Do you see the sign down the street there for the Fountainbleau Hotel?
Whiskey: … No.
Cornelius: Well, trust me, it’s there. (Takes out his rifle and shoots.) There is now a bullet hole in the vicinity of the F.  Come, we’re headed that direction anyway.

Sure enough, there was a bullet hole in the vicinity of the F. (Of course, he could have known about a pre-existing bullethole, but that would have been risky, since the sign could have been replaced since the last time he’s been in town …)

They followed whoever it was west and then south toward Galveston. When they got to Galveston, the direction that Michael was getting from the fabric started to waver and give a second direction which started slightly off the line of the first direction, but ended up, in a few minutes, pointing directly behind them. The half vampire decided that he would go and investigate.

Strolling back along their route, he saw someone dressed in black that gave him a bad vibe.  He waited until the figure passed him, and then snuck up from behind and dragged him into an alley.  The figure turned the tables, though, and with his dagger to the half-vampire’s throat, demanded to know “why are you following me?”  The half-vampire lost a fairly involved conflict and told him about looking for the person who killed the Gaston family and that they were also looking for the Dead Man’s Hand.  The ninja told him to walk ahead, down the street to a specific hotel. As he approached the hotel, the half-vampire saw Whiskey Wilson standing out front and signed for him to throw a stick of dynamite at him.  Whiskey is always happy to oblige where dynamite is concerned, and he did so – blowing a small crater in the street, but the ninja was nowhere to be found.

For this next part I used a mechanic I modeled on the DitV mechanic for what happens when your fallout total is at least 12 but less than 16 (meaning you’re injured) – you roll your character’s Body stat dice, and if you can match or beat your current fallout total on 3 dice, you recover from your injury without medical attention. What I did was had the characters roll their Acuity stat dice, and if they could match or beat the best two dice on the ninja’s trait dice applying to sneakiness, they would spot him.

Down the street at the hotel, Michael Rivencourt had located the hotel room where the rest of the silk garment was hanging in a closet. He and Theo Beaufort (character name) decided to wait in the room in case the owner returned. As they were waiting, Michael suddenly noticed that the window was open, so he went over to close it. The next thing he knew, he was face down on the floor with a knee on his neck. Theo became aware of the ninja a moment later. There was a conflict in which Theo escalated to sword fighting and instantly regretted it when I pulled out three ten sided dice to add to the ninja’s dice pool and rolled 10, 10, 5. (Two tens is pretty much an unbeatable combination.)

Though Michael tried to help, he was ineffective as well.  They both took fallout, and I think Michael reduced the dice for his trait “I stand by my friends” to d4s. Theo’s fallout would have been a lot worse – like an arm being cut off – if he hadn’t given surrendered) in the conflict. The result was that the ninja instructed them to stop following him, and if they didn’t, he’d kill them next time. Then he left – though he left behind the silk garment.

Monday game, session 4

Hammesdorf met the group at the railroad construction site and demanded the real gem, and this time they were all ready to jump him and kill him … not that they had any real motivation to, but thankfully the witch hunter, who was doing the talking (the one Hammesdorf has hired) gave him the gem.  Then he instructed them that he would be giving a party and a demonstration the following evening at his mansion (their first hint that he has all of the gems and is ready to assemble the Occhariad) and that he would be needing them to provide security at the party, partly to make sure no one without an invitation got in, but mostly to make sure no one left before or during the demonstration.

Night of the party: the characters prepared a horse bomb, rigged up with sticks of dynamite purchased at the general store and railroad stakes they found. (Note: no animals were harmed in the creation of this imagined story. At first the player with the idea wanted to use his own horse, but I ruled that out since he has written on his character sheet that he has a strong relationship with his horse.) They have an artist who can draw a picture of a place and briefly make it into a doorway, so he was stationed on the third floor and they brought the horse in there, where he could look over the balcony at the ball room and draw another picture for the horse to go through to the main floor.  Meanwhile, they were all just watching to see what would happen.  Finally Hammesdorf came out and started blathering on about the new era that is at hand, etc. etc.  Also during this speech, he said that the problems with the railroad route have been resolved and they’ll be proceeding as planned (not taking a week to re-plan the route, as the characters expected).  Two of his henchmen then brought out something really heavy looking, which turned out to be a clock (from an idea of one of the players, equating the twelve twelve-sided gems of the Occhariad with a clock – I decided that Hammesdorf was building them into a really fancy clock for channeling the Alchemical energies).

Hammesdorf then announced that he would demonstrate the power of this fully armed and operational battle station – oops, wrong game.  He grabbed a metal rod built into the back of the clock and held his other hand above his head.  His hand began to glow a bit.  At this point, the ninja decided that he should never have let Hammesdorf grab that rod, and he moved in to cut off that hand.  Hammesdorf blocked him with a force field and shoved him backward, and at one point in the conflict shoved him through the plate glass window.  The other characters joined in and started swinging their swords, throwing shuriken, etc., and Hammesdorf and his two henchmen held them at bay until one character took control of one of the henchmen and had him shove Hammesdorf and the clock over onto the floor, underneath the chandelier.

By this time, Hammesdorf and his henchmen were running out of dice, but so were the characters.  They decided to throw everything they could at him and run – so the horse bomb came through at about the same moment the guy with the rifle shot the chandelier so that it fell down onto Hammesdorf, and people were diving out of windows, etc.  And *that’s* where we left it, because time had run out.  It was pretty exciting – and of course, they don’t yet know the fate of Hammesdorf.  And neither do I.

This was the biggest conflict I have run using the Dogs in the Vineyard mechanics. It did *start* to feel a little long, because there was a little bit of waiting for the players between their turn to do stuff, but I have to say again that it was still superior to the D&D experience. We had seven people involved, and it was still much faster than D&D combat with the same number of people. But more importantly …

The culture that this game creates is one where everyone is involved a high percentage of the time. At one point the ninja moved in for the kill with the two 10s he had been holding in reserve (this is the best number you can do an action with in the game unless someone else is helping by adding a die to your raise). He said he was going to cut off Hammesdorf’s hand, but the other players wanted him to go for the head. He changed his mind, but for the rest of the combat he regretted it, and kept saying stuff like “go for the head, you said.  Never mind the hand, you said. Now look where we are! He still has his hand on that thing!” The game mechanics encourage everyone to be focused on what’s going on because it takes the collective brainpower of everyone in the game to create the best game experience, mainly to make sure that characters in conflict are doing or saying something the opponent can’t ignore – but also to refine what the player comes up with, so that the character does or says something *cool* that the opponent can’t ignore.

I should say that the most important criterion I’m using in my ongoing comparison of D&D vs. DitV mechanics is suitability for play with larger groups in libraries.  There are certainly pros and cons to each game. But in this area, D&D suffers, and DitV is particularly well suited.

Monday game, session 3

Some players were out of town or couldn’t make it for other reasons, so we only had 4 or 5 for this session.  I had decided that I wanted to get the characters out of their current situation because I had a whole other plot to get them into, and so I had the Indian leader who had kidnapped Sori’s brother (Sori is one of the characters) explain why they had kidnapped him.  (Also, I named him: Standing Ox.)  It was because he had a knack for finding things that they desperately needed, since the railroad was scheduled to build across their sacred lands, and the rail baron who was overseeing it had promised to reroute the tracks if they could find a certain item.  It was kind of a reset button exercise, but I explained that I had figured out what I wanted to do with the plot, and they weren’t too put off.

After journeying to Standing Ox’s tribe’s sacred lands, the group split up – some going with Lance (Sori’s brother) and Standing Ox to find the item they were looking for: a piece of the Occhariad Dodecagon, a group of twelve gems all cut to have twelve sides, that when assembled in a certain pattern is said to open a pathway of the mind to the fonts of eternal knowlege.  Others have said that the Occhariad is a locked door, and madness lies on the other side. (Characters who are practitioners of the Alchemical arena of magic have all heard of the Occhariad; more educated ones also know that the Golden Path of John Dee dismantled the Occhariad in 1605 to safeguard the world, distributing the gems to Britain, Spain, Russia, India, China, and other places.)

The other group of characters went to meet with the railroad baron Hammesdorf, to try to talk him into giving Standing Ox’s tribe more time to try to come up with the item.  One player – the Romanian witch hunter – has given his character a lot of good talking traits, but he’s playing against type – he’s not an exceptional talker himself.  So in his conflict with Hammesdorf to try to get more time, he was struggling, but the rest of the group was able to keep him on track and suggest ideas for what to say that Hammesdorf couldn’t ignore.  He got the time extension, but at the expense agreeing to enter into the employ of the railroad baron so that Hammesdorf would be able to discuss the business of the Occariad with him.  Then he headed off to catch up with the rest of the group.

Meanwhile, Lance was using his knack to find the gem from the Occhariad. He led the others to a place where a dry streambed formed a small waterfall, and there was a cave behind the waterfall.  They went in and down a narrow passage and found that it opened into a fairly large cave.  In the center of the cave was a wooden staff with a metal headpiece on it (but no, the gem was not in the center, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark).  They found alchemical symbols on the headpiece, but once Lance got close to it, he became nervous, and said some things that led his companions to think he’d forgotten why he was there. He then left the cave and kept walking for about a quarter mile.

At that point he explained that he thought that there was some kind of mesmerizing compulsion put on the staff or the headpiece, because it made him think of just about anything besides what he was trying to find.  The rest of the characters thought maybe they could have a conflict with the staff to see if they could disable the compulsion, and that’s what they did.  They did get rid of it, and Lance went back into the cave and found the gem in a hidden part of the cave.

By this time the witch hunter had caught up with them, and they thought about whether they should actually give this artifact to the railroad baron, since they were mostly thinking that the Occhariad is not something they want to be reassembled.  Someone had the idea of trying to create a copy of the gem using Alchemy, and use Phantasmagoria to make it seem like the real thing, and possibly use Mesmerism to make Hammesdorf believe it was the real thing.  Because we are using the Dogs in the Vineyard mechanics, there was no check to see if they were successful in crafting the duplicate – they could only be successful in the context of whether Hammesdorf was taken in by it, so we moved quickly to that confrontation.

In fact, DitV mechanics can be thought of in relation to Dungeons & Dragons mechanics in this way: the part of a roleplaying game that is the most interesting – and, really, the only part for which it’s necessary to have mechanics  - is an elaborate, roleplayed opposed check.  That’s what we’re doing when we do these conflicts.  It’s abstract in the sense that it’s not important *during the conflict* who is healthy, injured, dying, or dead.  It’s only important who has resources left to remain in the conflict.  And the mechanics reflect this: it never happens that a character dies during a conflict.  Dogs in the Vineyard deals with fallout *after* the conflict.  Of course it’s possible for a character to die from wounds taken during the conflict. The rules say that if your fallout total (determined with dice related to ‘Taking the Blow’) gets to 20, you have two choices: 1. Die now, or 2. Set up your death scene, during which you’ll die.  This is partly giving recognition to a player whose  character’s principles are so important that he or she just won’t give in during the conflict – and “giving” is always an option during a conflict.

In the conflict in which they tried to pass off their fake as the real piece of the Occhariad, the players were in over their heads.  Hammesdorf is a powerful practitioner of magic, and saw through the fake pretty much right away. However, he decided to see where it would lead if he pretended to be taken in.  He told them to meet him later at the railroad camp so that he could give them (as his agents, by extension of their association with the one member of the group who he had employed) their next instructions.  And that’s where we left it.  Next time I expect we’ll have a serious conflict on our hands as Hammesdorf reveals that he knows about the fake.

Again, my friend Conrad suggested part of this plot line, though I’ve changed the direction of his original suggestion.  Still, thanks are due – plot is perhaps not my strong point, and so I’ll take all the help I can get!

Thursday game, session 3

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.

Thursday game, session 2

We had to make one character in the beginning, and one character in the middle, and several players were late, and so it was a bit chaotic, but things went pretty well despite that.

The characters overheard George Smith in a saloon telling the story of a French Foreign Legion unit defending almost to the last man in a battle in Mexico.  George (not a Foreign Legion member) was knocked out but regained consciousness in time to see the climax and aftermath of the battle.  Six soldiers remained at the end, out of ammunition but refusing to surrender.  A bayonet charge killed three, including the last surviving officer, Capitaine Danjou.  Billy noticed that as the officer’s body was taken from the field with the honor guard assigned by the Mexican general, Danjou’s wooden left hand was already missing.

Armand Fontaine, one of the three FFL survivors, has contacted George, after searching for the missing hand for many years.  Now, hearing that the hand may still be in Mexico, he has decided to come back to find it, and George needs volunteers to guide and protect the mission into Mexico.  The characters jumped at the chance for a job.

They set out south and reached the battlefield. I realized along the way that I’ve got NPCs in charge of the group, which makes the players look to them for instruction; I needed to change that.  Armand and George started looking around the battlefield together, and the characters smelled a strange scent and went to investigate.  Over a ridge they saw a small house with smoke coming out of the chimney.  They approached, knocked, and were greeted by a small, tattooed bald man speaking French.  He answered a couple of questions and slammed the door again.  After spending a couple of minutes trying to get him to come to the door again, 10 corpses rose out of the earth behind the group and moved to attack.

The half vampire and the dynamite chuckin’ character took care of the revenants.  At this point the late characters rode up with a delivery for the small house, and were filled in on what’s going on (gunfire and dynamite explosions).  Armand and George came over as well, and filled in the newcomers on their current mission.

On trying to find the tattooed guy again, the group only found an empty house.  Armand Fontaine looked at the contents of what the tattooed man was cooking over his fire and looked very solemn as he informs the characters that this person must be a practitioner of voudoun.  (Which manifests itself in game terms as Mesmerism; no, that religion is not about mind control – or no more so than other religions – I’m just trying to put things into a context; any of the arenas of magic in my game can be used for good or evil, and this is just a story.)

The characters talked the dynamite chuckin’ guy out of blowing up the house, as there might be a clue to his whereabouts inside.

Fontaine wondered whether there is any way to track the voudoun priest, and they started trying to figure it out.  I decided that everyone would be able to contribute one trait’s dice to the conflict of searching for the bald tattooed guy.  On reflection, I should have allowed them to choose a stat instead, if they thought that would be a better help, since some of the traits they were contributing were kind of sketchy.  Still, it worked well for determining a baseline strength for the conflict.  But that’s where we ended the session, except for doing fallout and experience.

Thanks and recognition go to my friend Conrad, who suggested this plot line (which I’m calling “The Dead Man’s Hand”) after reading about the story of the Battle of Camaron and Capitaine Danjou’s wooden hand.

Monday game, 2nd meeting

One more character to make and one more to finish up gave us a slightly slow start, and then a bit of anarchy once one of the new characters came into the game (from an already established character) gave us a bit of a hiccup, but we got past it.

The party came across a farm house where a lack of activity and slightly shifting curtains in an upstairs window made the characters suspicious.  They figured out that there were Indians in the house up to no good.  Several of them moved in to see if they could help.  The ninja had a great plan to sneak in and cut all their bowstrings, but the first warrior he tried it on saw him and raised the alarm … and then was quickly dispatched.  Two more came running, but the ninja hid behind the couch until one left.

On getting a look at them, the Indian leader who had been captured last session told the ex-miner that these warriors were not of his tribe, but another tribe who did not typically conduct this kind of raid.  Despite this, no one attempted to take one alive.  The assassin took one out right next to the house, and then threw a shuriken in a perfect shot to take out the arrow shot from a second story window at one of his comrades.  The price of saving his comrade was that he took an arrow to the chest, but it was not a serious wound.  He then drove the archer back with more shuriken, climbed to the second story window and killed a warrior in that room.  The one he injured ran, but was sandwiched between the assassin and the Romanian witch hunter who was coming up the stairs.

Meanwhile, the ninja snuck into the kitchen where another Indian had his hand over the mouth of a teenaged girl.  The ninja took out that target, while one of the Alchemists came through the front door and burned the weapon and face of the remaining warrior in the living room.

That took care of the immediate threats.  The rest of the family came out of the basement and thanked their rescuers, and invited them to eat supper and stay the night – also, this is where the Romanian witch hunter came into the game, because he was visiting his cousin, the owner of the house.

Sleeping arrangements were made with the captured Indians (from last week’s encounter) bedding down in the barn, still tied up.  Several characters set up outside to guard the barn, and the rest stayed in the house.  The ninja decided he would guard the bedroom door of the teenaged daughter.

In the middle of the night, the ninja was set upon by a shadowy figure over eight feet tall.  He fought it off, but just barely.  The noise woke the house, and there was a bit of an uproar trying to figure out what was going on.  Returning to the comments of the Indian leader (from a previous encounter, not this one), the group quizzed him on what he thought was happening.  His opinion was that some kind of evil spirit had possessed the band of warriors who had attacked during the day, since that tribe normally stayed far out of the way of white settlements … but that meant that someone in the house was the source of the possession.  When pressed for more information, he said the spirit might be the one they know as “Koyaanisqatsi”.

You might be familiar with the movie of the same name.  I’m not sure how that came to me in that moment.  Part of what I was setting up was the teenage-offspring-has-serious-issues-aka-poltergeist kind of idea, but then, not even remembering exactly what it meant, “Koyaanisqatsi” popped out of my mouth.  One player said “Is that really an Indian word?” and I answered “Yep.”  ”What’s it mean?” he said, seeming like he was not completely sure he believed me.  And again, it just came out, and without missing a beat I said “Life out of balance.”  To which the player replied “… whoa.”  It was kind of a serendipitous age-and-experience-impressing-the-young moment.  (It should be stated that the Hopi word “Koyaanisqatsi” is a description of a state of being, not an evil spirit.  I’m just borrowing the word to fit into something in the game.)

At this point the cousin of the witch hunter took exception to what was being said.  He vehemently denied that it could be any of his household causing the problem, and he told the characters they would have to leave immediately.  The ex-miner took out a stick of dynamite and said “I don’t think so.  I think we’ll stay until morning.”  The head of the house backed down, saying “Fine.  But first thing in the morning!”  The ex-miner pushed his advantage, saying “And I’m cooking you breakfast.”

However, a couple of characters noticed a haunting, hunted look pass briefly across the face of the teenage daughter, and the Indian leader said that it could be very dangerous to leave the situation as it was, since the evil spirit could be sent into anyone (foreshadowing, anyone?).

That’s where we left it, except to figure out the fallout taken by three characters.  Fallout, in Dogs in the Vineyard, is essentially “consequences”.  Anyone who has to “take the blow” – i.e. match what’s put forward on his/her opponent’s two dice with three or more dice – takes fallout.  The assassin took an arrow in the chest; two other characters had to take a blow as well.  The more serious the fight, the more dangerous the fallout – so if you take the blow when you’re just talking, it’s not really possible to die from it; but if you take the blow when someone is shooting at you, it’s a lot more serious.  When you take fallout, there are various options to choose from, but I’m not going to list them all here.  Check what they got, below, to get an idea.

The Romanian witch hunter took a blow while everyone was arguing hotly about the evil spirit and whether it was being channeled by someone in the house; so he decided to reduce the die size for his relationship with his cousing to d4, meaning that it had gotten more complicated.  The assassin took the arrow to the chest, but I don’t recall what his fallout was … I’ll post it when I check with him.  And the ninja also took a blow during the fight with the 8-foot-tall monster, and he decided to take a new 1d4 trait “Shadowy figures scare me.”  Two of the three rolled 1s as part of their fallout roll, which means they will gain something good out of their encounters as well; this slipped past us as we were doing this stuff at the very end – so we’ll have to take care of it first thing next session.

A quick read at IARPG

While writing up the Thursday session, I realized something important.  It’s a difference between D&D and Dogs in the Vineyard that somehow, the Monday group got immediately, but that the Thursday group hasn’t gotten yet – so I’ve explained it to them in an IARPG blog post.  It’s going to be a critical piece of knowledge for anyone playing a DitV-mechanics-based game.

Thursday game, first session

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 …

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.

D&D MMO development

http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2009/06/08/daily25-Turbine-makes-Dungeons–Dragons-Online-game-free-to-play.html

I don’t know if this is signalling a shift in how MMOs in general are going to think about their pricing schemes, or if it’s just Turbine, or if it’s just this game, but it’s an interesting development.

Edit: more on free-to-play MMOs at Gamasutra: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4046/what_are_the_rewards_of_.php