![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I've finished reading the second edition of Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard. It's one of the five games I hope to be able to demo at the drop of a hat by next summer.
As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
agrumer has pointed out, Vincent writes well. He writes simply. He makes it look so easy that I needed agrumer to point out how well Vincent writes. Oh, sure, there are nits we can pick. He introduces the term "GM" without defining it, and that's an issue because he introduces it in the section explaining roleplaying games to people who've never played them before. He refers to blank character sheets that aren't actually in the book. Stuff like that.
He does some brilliant things, too. The players are playing Dogs, troubleshooters for a Mormon-like religion who go from town to town, uncovering and dealing with injustice and sin. Vincent emphasizes that the GM's job is to set up the situation in each town, not to mandate a solution. This seems incredibly obvious, but it isn't.
He also refers to the highest authority figures in the religion of the game, saying that there's a whole hierarchy and such that these figures have, but that, for the purposes of the game, that's totally unimportant. Most authors of rpgs would hint at Dire Goings On in this hierarchy, and would create supplement after supplement delving into the politics of this upper level.
There are at least two good reasons for not doing this. First, a game should be complete in itself. Most games that have layers and layers of hierarchy and secret politics wind up messing up campaigns where the GMs buy all the products, and discover that their game world differs significantly from the Official Setting. Part of the Forge / Indy Game philosophy deliberately bucks the trend to create more and more supplements. Dogs is complete in itself.
Second, the wheels-within-wheels structure tends to devalue the PCs. The real power is somewhere else, and the PCs are supposed to chase after it. This is an oversimplification, but there tends to be a lot of truth to it.
Dogs, by contrast, is designed, in every sentence and every paragraph, to keep the players and their PCs at the center of events. The ultimate authorities are not really important. The decisions that the PCs make and the actions that they take are what is important. Forget the hidden conspiracies of the elite. What are you going to do about Brother Jeremiah's affair with the the Stewart's wife?
In case it isn't obvious, hidden conspiracies of the elite are fine for some games. Dogs just isn't one of them. It's setting out to do something fairly specific. At the same time, its scope is broad enough to satisfy me.
Does the game work? I think so. I can't be more definite here. I have played it once, and had a blast, but Vincent was running it. The question is how well it runs when the designer is not there. I tried a ten minute demo withebartley, and that did not go as well. It wasn't that the rules weren't clear. They were. But, the system did not click for her. I do not yet have enough data to know how much this is her tastes, how much it is how I ran it, and how much it is the system.
Personal tastes are an important factor. I have come to the conclusion that, while I enjoyed playing My Life With Master with Michael Miller running it, it is not a game I would enjoy running. Breaking the Ice delighted many people, and I just Don't Get It. I played in a demo, run by the author, where my fellow player was someone I really enjoy playing with, and my brain kept saying, "Why on earth would I ever want to play this?" That's not a flaw in the game; that's personal tastes. And I just Don't Get the resource management system for Marvel Diceless Superheroes. ebartley gets it fine.mnemex gets it, and is sure that I could pick it up with a bit of practice. He's probably correct, but I have not the slightest desire to pick it up. I have much the same problems with it that ebartley had with Dogs, and I've seen Marvel run surprisingly smoothly with 9 players.
As
agrumer has pointed out, Vincent writes well. He writes simply. He makes it look so easy that I needed agrumer to point out how well Vincent writes. Oh, sure, there are nits we can pick. He introduces the term "GM" without defining it, and that's an issue because he introduces it in the section explaining roleplaying games to people who've never played them before. He refers to blank character sheets that aren't actually in the book. Stuff like that.He does some brilliant things, too. The players are playing Dogs, troubleshooters for a Mormon-like religion who go from town to town, uncovering and dealing with injustice and sin. Vincent emphasizes that the GM's job is to set up the situation in each town, not to mandate a solution. This seems incredibly obvious, but it isn't.
He also refers to the highest authority figures in the religion of the game, saying that there's a whole hierarchy and such that these figures have, but that, for the purposes of the game, that's totally unimportant. Most authors of rpgs would hint at Dire Goings On in this hierarchy, and would create supplement after supplement delving into the politics of this upper level.
There are at least two good reasons for not doing this. First, a game should be complete in itself. Most games that have layers and layers of hierarchy and secret politics wind up messing up campaigns where the GMs buy all the products, and discover that their game world differs significantly from the Official Setting. Part of the Forge / Indy Game philosophy deliberately bucks the trend to create more and more supplements. Dogs is complete in itself.
Second, the wheels-within-wheels structure tends to devalue the PCs. The real power is somewhere else, and the PCs are supposed to chase after it. This is an oversimplification, but there tends to be a lot of truth to it.
Dogs, by contrast, is designed, in every sentence and every paragraph, to keep the players and their PCs at the center of events. The ultimate authorities are not really important. The decisions that the PCs make and the actions that they take are what is important. Forget the hidden conspiracies of the elite. What are you going to do about Brother Jeremiah's affair with the the Stewart's wife?
In case it isn't obvious, hidden conspiracies of the elite are fine for some games. Dogs just isn't one of them. It's setting out to do something fairly specific. At the same time, its scope is broad enough to satisfy me.
Does the game work? I think so. I can't be more definite here. I have played it once, and had a blast, but Vincent was running it. The question is how well it runs when the designer is not there. I tried a ten minute demo with
ebartley, and that did not go as well. It wasn't that the rules weren't clear. They were. But, the system did not click for her. I do not yet have enough data to know how much this is her tastes, how much it is how I ran it, and how much it is the system.Personal tastes are an important factor. I have come to the conclusion that, while I enjoyed playing My Life With Master with Michael Miller running it, it is not a game I would enjoy running. Breaking the Ice delighted many people, and I just Don't Get It. I played in a demo, run by the author, where my fellow player was someone I really enjoy playing with, and my brain kept saying, "Why on earth would I ever want to play this?" That's not a flaw in the game; that's personal tastes. And I just Don't Get the resource management system for Marvel Diceless Superheroes. ebartley gets it fine.
mnemex gets it, and is sure that I could pick it up with a bit of practice. He's probably correct, but I have not the slightest desire to pick it up. I have much the same problems with it that ebartley had with Dogs, and I've seen Marvel run surprisingly smoothly with 9 players.