Experiences with Dogs in the Vineyard
- Thread starter Momeeche
- Start date
I've played Dogs for years and really enjoy it. The game is designed to present the players with difficult and sometimes impossible choices, so it is always fun to see how people approach their character's dilemmas. The juxtaposition of what are usually teenagers away from home for the first time in their lives and the chosen representatives of God with absolute theological authority (wrapped up in the same people, of course) is invariably dramatic. As a GM you don't have to push very hard before the players are disagreeing on the right course of action, how to balance justice, mercy, and righteousness, and it just gets awesome fast. It's a great game.
I keep hearing that but I've never seen it played at a convention, at a store or seen it for sale anywhere. How adaptable is the mechanical system?
We found it's a very good game, provided you can get everyone into the setting. As jmstar said, you've got players with absolute authority but it's really then down to them to create their own internal moral dilemmas.
What I found is that sometimes they won't and it becomes more like Judge Dredd, who doesn't mess with feelings of uncertainty or guilt. I found it quite a hard pitch as a GM giving the players (a totally non-religious bunch) the combination of total moral authority and at the same time moral doubt.
The mechanics are clever, in that they allow seamless escalation from talking to fists to guns. Each side rolls some dice and then you start playing your dice - in ones and twos - and narrate your action. When one character can't beat the other's dice they lose, or they escalate the conflict and get to roll more to add into the conflict. It works really well.
As I said above, the challenge I found was getting totally non-religious players into a game about the limits of religious authority. We found it sometimes veered into satire, with the occasional shout of 'nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!'
What I found is that sometimes they won't and it becomes more like Judge Dredd, who doesn't mess with feelings of uncertainty or guilt. I found it quite a hard pitch as a GM giving the players (a totally non-religious bunch) the combination of total moral authority and at the same time moral doubt.
The mechanics are clever, in that they allow seamless escalation from talking to fists to guns. Each side rolls some dice and then you start playing your dice - in ones and twos - and narrate your action. When one character can't beat the other's dice they lose, or they escalate the conflict and get to roll more to add into the conflict. It works really well.
As I said above, the challenge I found was getting totally non-religious players into a game about the limits of religious authority. We found it sometimes veered into satire, with the occasional shout of 'nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!'
You can buy it here if you want.
People hack Dogs all the time into other settings - it works for any setting in which the PCs have unquestioned moral authority (Jedi are popular). I think it suffers a little when you do this, since the game's hierarchy of sin is very elegant and it needs to be changed to match the new morality when you hack it.
People do need to buy in. I find the key is to make your towns have problems that are meaningful and relevant to your players. Make the situations about stuff your friends are interested in and care about, and populate them with sympathetic people with reasonable desires that are wildly at odds with each other and the Faith. That's a recipe for awesome.
People hack Dogs all the time into other settings - it works for any setting in which the PCs have unquestioned moral authority (Jedi are popular). I think it suffers a little when you do this, since the game's hierarchy of sin is very elegant and it needs to be changed to match the new morality when you hack it.
People do need to buy in. I find the key is to make your towns have problems that are meaningful and relevant to your players. Make the situations about stuff your friends are interested in and care about, and populate them with sympathetic people with reasonable desires that are wildly at odds with each other and the Faith. That's a recipe for awesome.
Yes, when it's working and the players get grabbed by a dilemma, it's awesome. I really admire the mechanics, and it's also a beautifully written game.
I can only speak from personal experience though and say we found the 'buy-in' moments a little hit and miss, in a way I haven't found with, say, Apocalypse World or Mouse Guard. It's a group thing, I guess.
Cerebral Paladin
First Post
I've run Dogs a bunch of times, and it can be great fun. A couple of comments:
(1) Dogs is a game about judgment. It works best when you play to its strengths, trying to set up hard moral choices. A young woman was semi-coerced into a marriage with a much older man who has great authority and standing in the community; she's having an affair with a likeable young man about her age. The woman and her lover are both willing to go to great lengths to continue their affair--the older man feels the need to preserve his social position and the sanctity of marriage. How do the PCs resolve the conflict? Are they willing to beat people up to force their resolution? Kill them? That's the essence of Dogs as it's written, and in my experience that's how it plays best. You can run a more traditional style of game using Dogs, where it's more about figuring out the situation or going on an adventure and fighting clear bad guys. But it's not particularly well suited to that, and it plays lots better when you stick to the hard moral choices.
2. Because it's about making hard moral choices, the best conflicts in Dogs split the PCs. Really, if I'm running a Dogs game, and the big drag out climactic conflict of the session doesn't have at least one PC on each side, I feel like I've done something wrong. (I exaggerate, in part because you really have to let the players make the calls for the PCs, but all the best conflicts I've seen have had PCs on both sides.) That makes it both a moral struggle about what the best solution is--one PC wants to break up the marriage to rearrange things so that both the young lovers are happy, another wants to drive away the male lover so that the marriage is stable and social norms are preserved--but also a struggle about how far you're willing to go. Will you throw a punch at your friend and bosom buddy to get your side of the dispute to win? Will you pull a gun? Will you take a bullet rather than back down?
3. The out-of-the-box setting is fun, interesting, and fraught with moral tensions that bite at both the characters and the players. (For people who don't know, it's a lightly fictionalized version of the early Mormon settlements in what's now Utah--so it's kinda the Wild West, but with polygamy and strong religious values.) But at the same time, it's really offputting to many players. There's a lot of institutionalized sexism in the setting, and there's an overt hostility in the setting (but not necessarily in either the author or the expected players) to homosexuality. A lot of players don't want to deal with that, especially in a serious game which orbits around morality. Being told, "hey, the socially expected thing for you to do might be to tell that uppity young woman to stick to her social role, and then to break up or punish that gay couple" can really turn many players off to the game--even when the key is "but whether you do what's socially expected or what you think is right is up to you." It does work very well in other settings, but the key is that sense of moral authority and judgment. I played in a great Star Trek: TNG Dogs game--the crew of the Enterprise was struggling over how to resolve the moral question of the week, and it ended with a great conflict with two of the PCs on one side and three on the other. It's also best if it's at least imaginable that the PCs will fight each other (hence part of the appeal of using a Jedi background story--they both have moral authority and could reasonably conclude that another Jedi who refuses to agree with them on a really major issue is turning to the Dark Side and should be fought if necessary, with the concomitant issue that a Jedi who pulls a lightsabre to enforce his or her will too readily might actually be the one on the path of the Dark Side).
4. Group composition matters a lot. I don't recommend Dogs for a group where some people just want to hack some stuff up, or go on grand adventures. And the best Dogs games raise moral issues that are unsettling and contentious for the players, not just the characters, so there's a sense that the conflicts have really grabbed everyone. That can be very hard and very rough with casual acquaintances, especially if the players have deep moral and political disagreements. You need to have buy-in, you need to have trust, and you need to have a willingness to engage. I've run Dogs at cons a couple of times, but I've mostly stopped doing that because it's not a game that I really want to play with strangers.
(Incidentally, there are some quirks in the mechanics of the system. I don't really like how d4s work (which can often represent weaknesses), and there are ways to really readily abuse the advancement system if you want to. But as long as you're playing it the way it's intended, those quirks aren't a big deal. If I were running a campaign, I'd probably talk with my players about implementing some houserules. But overall the system does what it's intended to do, produces fun and interesting gameplay, and works when used as intended. Any minor quibbles I have with it are just that: quibbles.)
(1) Dogs is a game about judgment. It works best when you play to its strengths, trying to set up hard moral choices. A young woman was semi-coerced into a marriage with a much older man who has great authority and standing in the community; she's having an affair with a likeable young man about her age. The woman and her lover are both willing to go to great lengths to continue their affair--the older man feels the need to preserve his social position and the sanctity of marriage. How do the PCs resolve the conflict? Are they willing to beat people up to force their resolution? Kill them? That's the essence of Dogs as it's written, and in my experience that's how it plays best. You can run a more traditional style of game using Dogs, where it's more about figuring out the situation or going on an adventure and fighting clear bad guys. But it's not particularly well suited to that, and it plays lots better when you stick to the hard moral choices.
2. Because it's about making hard moral choices, the best conflicts in Dogs split the PCs. Really, if I'm running a Dogs game, and the big drag out climactic conflict of the session doesn't have at least one PC on each side, I feel like I've done something wrong. (I exaggerate, in part because you really have to let the players make the calls for the PCs, but all the best conflicts I've seen have had PCs on both sides.) That makes it both a moral struggle about what the best solution is--one PC wants to break up the marriage to rearrange things so that both the young lovers are happy, another wants to drive away the male lover so that the marriage is stable and social norms are preserved--but also a struggle about how far you're willing to go. Will you throw a punch at your friend and bosom buddy to get your side of the dispute to win? Will you pull a gun? Will you take a bullet rather than back down?
3. The out-of-the-box setting is fun, interesting, and fraught with moral tensions that bite at both the characters and the players. (For people who don't know, it's a lightly fictionalized version of the early Mormon settlements in what's now Utah--so it's kinda the Wild West, but with polygamy and strong religious values.) But at the same time, it's really offputting to many players. There's a lot of institutionalized sexism in the setting, and there's an overt hostility in the setting (but not necessarily in either the author or the expected players) to homosexuality. A lot of players don't want to deal with that, especially in a serious game which orbits around morality. Being told, "hey, the socially expected thing for you to do might be to tell that uppity young woman to stick to her social role, and then to break up or punish that gay couple" can really turn many players off to the game--even when the key is "but whether you do what's socially expected or what you think is right is up to you." It does work very well in other settings, but the key is that sense of moral authority and judgment. I played in a great Star Trek: TNG Dogs game--the crew of the Enterprise was struggling over how to resolve the moral question of the week, and it ended with a great conflict with two of the PCs on one side and three on the other. It's also best if it's at least imaginable that the PCs will fight each other (hence part of the appeal of using a Jedi background story--they both have moral authority and could reasonably conclude that another Jedi who refuses to agree with them on a really major issue is turning to the Dark Side and should be fought if necessary, with the concomitant issue that a Jedi who pulls a lightsabre to enforce his or her will too readily might actually be the one on the path of the Dark Side).
4. Group composition matters a lot. I don't recommend Dogs for a group where some people just want to hack some stuff up, or go on grand adventures. And the best Dogs games raise moral issues that are unsettling and contentious for the players, not just the characters, so there's a sense that the conflicts have really grabbed everyone. That can be very hard and very rough with casual acquaintances, especially if the players have deep moral and political disagreements. You need to have buy-in, you need to have trust, and you need to have a willingness to engage. I've run Dogs at cons a couple of times, but I've mostly stopped doing that because it's not a game that I really want to play with strangers.
(Incidentally, there are some quirks in the mechanics of the system. I don't really like how d4s work (which can often represent weaknesses), and there are ways to really readily abuse the advancement system if you want to. But as long as you're playing it the way it's intended, those quirks aren't a big deal. If I were running a campaign, I'd probably talk with my players about implementing some houserules. But overall the system does what it's intended to do, produces fun and interesting gameplay, and works when used as intended. Any minor quibbles I have with it are just that: quibbles.)
lin_fusan
First Post
I would also like to chime in support about Dogs In the Vineyard. I think it is mechanically interesting, has a very compelling setting, and possesses an interesting take on the role of the Gamemaster. I would heartily suggest the game for players who are interested in moral choice and conflict, regardless of religious affiliation or non-affiliation.
It is hackable, but I'd assert that the game works best with the pseudo-Mormon Wild West background.
It is hackable, but I'd assert that the game works best with the pseudo-Mormon Wild West background.
Jan van Leyden
Adventurer
Lots of thanks for your comprehensive post. That I can't give you XP right now seems to be right in the spirit of Dogs: how do I try to coerce other board members to spend points in my stead and how will the community react to this.
I've played it a few times with friends, and we've always enjoyed it. We've used the system for both the standard setting and others. I don't agree that it is only useful in a game where the players have 'moral authority' however. We've used it for a detective noir game and for a doctor who game. I do think you need a setting where social interaction is as important as combat.
It is reasonably priced and worth trying out.
It is reasonably priced and worth trying out.
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