What's So Cool About Dogs in the Vineyard?

[Erik Mona]

Until 1978, the Mormon Church refused to ordain blacks as ministers, claiming that they were descended from Caine, the Bible's "first murderer." There's apparently some evidence that Joseph Smith meant the ban to apply only to slaves, but Brigham Young made it clear that the doctrine referred to all blacks.

I don't want to go too far into it, because doing so might violate EN World's standards on religious discussion, but suffice it to say the history of the Mormon church is absolutely fascinating. It is a distinctly American religion, and its early days probably would make a riveting backdrop for an RPG campaign.

My question was whether or not the game addressed the issue of race relations within this historical context. At one time the United States government was VERY anti-Mormon, and the conflict even resulted in bloodshed and massacres a few times. I'm interested to know how (or if) the game addresses this aspect of the church at all. My assumption is that the game is pro-LDS, but since I've never seen a copy I'm merely trying to sate my curiosity.

You can read more about this issue on the following website, which was put together by an African-American Mormon: http://www.angelfire.com/mo2/blackmormon/homepage.html

--Erik

 

[Hairfoot]

So the game has a strongly Christian theme?

 

[afreed]

It should be emphasized here that DitV isn't actually about Mormons in the American West, any more than, say, D&D is actually about medieval Europe. (Okay, that's overstating the case, but you get my meaning.) The setting is fairly loosely defined, so you can make it as ahistorical or realistic as you like, but it's not a real-world setting.

In other words, it doesn't address issues like racism in Mormon history. It doesn't even examine the fantasy version of the faith very closely...interpretation is up to the GM and players.

(I can't recall--does the book explicitly suggest trying the mechanics / adventure style with other religions? Or did I read that on rpg.net somewhere?)

 

[LostSoul]

My question was whether or not the game addressed the issue of race relations within this historical context. At one time the United States government was VERY anti-Mormon, and the conflict even resulted in bloodshed and massacres a few times. I'm interested to know how (or if) the game addresses this aspect of the church at all. My assumption is that the game is pro-LDS, but since I've never seen a copy I'm merely trying to sate my curiosity.

Ah. No, there's no mention of that in the book. Although you could put that in if you wanted to.

It seems like that would open up a whole other area of play... a lot of interesting questions for the players to face. I think it would depend on your group and the issues you wanted to deal with. What does it mean to be a Dog if the Faith is wrong? What does it mean to be a Dog if the Faith is right, but morally abhorrent? Interesting stuff.

 

[LostSoul]

(I can't recall--does the book explicitly suggest trying the mechanics / adventure style with other religions? Or did I read that on rpg.net somewhere?)

There's a thread on the lumply games forum that has a number of different settings. There's quite a range there, including playing as Delta Green agents fighting against the mythos, and Jedi Knights. (Some are quite distasteful, but could make for powerful, f'ed-up games.)

Here's what the book has to say:

If you want to play Dogs with some other religious flavor, simply rewrite the Problems in the Faith section in the town creation rules to suit your religion of choice, and change the Elements of Ceremony to match.

Consider:
— Seventeenth-century Massachusetts, with the PCs as witch finders.
— Thirteenth century Europe with the PCs as Dominican inquisitors, the black and white Hounds of God.
— A modern-day mob game, replacing the Faith with the Mafia’s codes of silence and loyalty, with the PCs as enforcers.
— Or a game about the Untouchables, with the Law instead of the Faith, and the PCs as Eliot Ness and his people!

Any of those sounds interesting and fun to me.

 

[WayneLigon]

I'll probably order the print version next week or so; sounds interesting.

 

[Nomad4life]

Mormon Cowboy Occult Troubleshooting Gunslingers in the Old West.

OK. Now this I gotta see.

 

[devilbat]

I'll be picking the print version of this up in the next two weeks. If my wife finds out, I'm blaming you guys.

 

[Paka]

When I first read Dogs in the Vineyard and got excited to play it I started the following thread at RPG.net.

If you have any further questions, please let me know:

Dogs in the Vineyard: Quasi-Mormon Gunslinger Paladins in a west that never was.

P.S. The thread's title was pseudo-Mormoms but I was corrected that it should have been quasi...such is life.

 

[fusangite]

I've run two campaigns based on Mormonism and am in the process of running a third (but it's been on hiatus for the past three months). I'm currently doing my PhD; and my dissertation will be about Mormonism. I have played in an episode of a friend's game of Dogs and I hate to say this but... I'm not a huge fan of the game.

Mainly, my lack of interest in the game stems from a few things:
(a) the fact that in order to avoid offending the LDS church, it is theoretically set in some other theocracy in some other desert territory at the margins of the 19th century US means that a lot of the specific theological and setting peculiarity is lost, depriving the game of a lot of great flavour. My GM in the game in which I briefly played didn't really know much about Mormonism so I found that the cool interesting stuff about the setting I wanted to deal with just wasn't there.
(b) the game system is just not my cup of tea. I've designed and run games with rules-light, make-up your own skills structures myself and I guess I'm kind of bored with those games. I don't really like the fact that the rules are silent on whether the faith's belief system is real. For me much of the fun of a Mormon game is about exploring the logical consequences of the theology being real or not.
(c) the game system is also not my cup of tea in that it is a Forge-type game that forces the players to do way more NPC and story generation than I enjoy. If I want to generate that stuff, I'll GM, thanks very much. Now I'm not saying that the rules are bad or insufficient for the kind of game Dogs wants to be -- I'm sure they're very good by those standards; they're just not the kind of games I like to play.

I think I may just make a Mormon Sidewinder game for GenCon next year as Teflon Billy suggests.