The Rogue Wolf said:
This article would have been helped immensely if it had given me any clue at all as to what Dogs in the Vineyard actually does differently, to replace those base stats like Strength and Level.
Very true.
I've read it and played it. Let me fill you in a bit.
Dogs in the Vineyard is an independently-published roleplaying game written by Vincent Baker. It came out in 2004. It's part of an "indie" design movement that generally emphasizes focused rules that help the players address the game's subject matter.
So, to understand why it works how it works, you have to understand the overall thematic focus of the game.
Here, take a look at these excerpts [http://www.lumpley.com/dogcerpts.html].
Fundamentally, DitV is a game about community in crisis. The player characters find towns in trouble -- in trouble because pride and sin have disrupted the community and opened the door for calamity to strike. It's the Dog's job to clean things up.
The Wikipedia article summarizes the mechanics and setting a bit [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogs_in_the_Vineyard].
The game mostly relies on player-created traits.
Every character has four main stats: Acuity, Heart, Body, Will. Which ones you use depends on the conflict.
The player-created stuff falls into three categories:
- Traits describe your character. "Good Shot", "Book-Learning", "Short Temper",
- Relationships describe your character's attachments to other people.
- Belongings describes your signature stuff. Every Dog has a coat, for example, created by the people of his or her home town to represent the trust and pride of the community.
These are all rated in dice, like d4 or 2d8. As you play, you'll raise and lower these stats and occasionally add new ones.
Players don't really make "skill checks" or anything. You're either engaged in free narrative or a game-mechanical
conflict.
A conflict is about something. You define what's "at stake" and then take turns narrating stuff, using the dice from your attributes to back them up (see the Wikipedia article for an overview of the back-and-forth).
Essentially, every turn we take is about proposing a consequence. The other player then averts it or "takes the blow" depending on how he uses his dice.
If you run out of dice, you lose. If you're low on resources, you can try to call on additional attributes to shore up your hand. You can also "escalate" the conflict -- for example, if you're losing an argument, you can try to turn the tide by pulling a gun. (But it means you pulled a gun! That's not something people do lightly. Remember that you're not dealing with monsters here -- you're dealing with people you're supposed to help and save, many of them your own kin!)
You can always
choose to lose the conflict. People do this in play
a lot. Why? Usually because they'd rather lose the conflict than suffer the consequences of sticking it out.
"Taking the blow" can be worthwhile, too. That's how you improve your attributes and gain new ones. Unless "taking the blow" means getting, y'know, shot in the face -- that's how you lose attributes or get killed.
To summarize:
- Characters are defined in terms of aspects that their players consider important to the character and the story.
- Players engage in conflicts to achieve a goal. The mechanics are about seeing how far your character will go for that goal.
- Characters grow over time, chiefly by learning from their losses.
Generally, if the Dogs all work in concert and they don't care how much bad stuff they cause, they'll pretty much always win a conflict. In other words, a group of canny and coordinated young people with rifles or big-ass Dragoons can massacre a bunch of town people in the streets to get their way. Usually you don't want to do that.
Now, I'm kinda ignoring some of the bits that make the game awesome here, in favor of keeping the description kinda short and mechanics-focused.
The Rogue Wolf said:
What bounds do the characters have, if any? How does anyone know what they're capable of?
You have the stats described above. Everybody's supposed to point out weak conflicts or poor ideas.
The players define the tone of the game in play. See the excerpt on supernatural stuff, linked above.
The Rogue Wolf said:
Or are the games simply an extension of two children running around in a parking lot, yelling "I shot you!" "No, I shot you first!"?
I think you can see from the conflict rules that it's not just, err, arbitrary.
The whole "I shot you!"/"No you didn't!" thing is kinda a red herring, anyway. While a lot of RPG players and a lot of RPG books mention this as an example of "why we need rules", Baker is quick to point out that many, many people actually play freeform games all without ever running into this problem; as such, he thinks it's trivial.
The Rogue Wolf said:
Not a single word here has told me, and nothing here has given me the slightest impetus to go looking for myself.
When I want to "sell" someone on "indie" games, I usually show them this little story about actual play -- it's not about DitV but it really summarizes what this style of RPG is all about. If you only read one link, this is the one:
[Trollbabe/Conan] AP: The Heart Ripper [http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=250634]
-- Alex