Let loose the Dogs of God!

Last night, our gaming group didn't have our full complement of players at the table so, knowing this, I thought we'd go with a one-shot game of "Dogs In the Vineyard," another game from D. Vincent Baker, creator of "In a Wicked Age."

If you've read the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, then you know the game's essential premise: You are the Dogs; aka, King's Watchdogs or, more formally, the Order Set Apart for the Preservation of (to?) the Faith and the Faithful. You are holy gunslingers, preachers and magistrates who travel from branch to branch (read: town), righting wrongs, judging sin, exorcising demons, laying on hands, anointing with Sacred Earth, etc. So you're gunslingers, but you and your iron are the mouthpieces of God, aka the King of Life. You have not only civil authority but unquestioned moral authority in the eyes of the Faithful.

Steve, Derek and I had a pretty good time. None of us had played it before, and I hadn't even read the entire rule book. However, with enthusiasm, we dug in. Character creation was a breeze, though I wisely read aloud the chapter on Conflict Resolution before they created Dogs. I say "wisely" because it's tough to understand where/why to assign dice pools for Stats, Traits, Relationships and Belongings if you have no idea how they apply in play.

Simply put, we loved the poker-esque style of conflict resolution. It made perfect sense to us. Roll the total of all appropriate dice pools (two Stats + Relationship dice, if appropriate). The two highest dice are added up and that acts more or less as "initiative" if there's no clear instigator. However, that was a point of confusion for us, I'll admit. "Do these two dice factor into an initial See? Can we use those dice again for Raises and Sees?" We quickly realized that it's basically initiative and those dice can, indeed, be used for Raises and Sees. They aren't "put forward."

Raises and Sees, Escalations and adding dice from Traits and Belongings all made sense and were freakin' awesome. Though none of us are poker players (but we know how it works), we loved the feel of it. I've never seen a dice mechanic so perfectly suited to the theme of the game being played. It'd actually be fun to play with custom cards instead of dice, but you'd need a shitload of cards. If you're rolling 6d6 at the start of the conflict, you'd need 36 randomly shuffled cards to deal down 6. It's not utterly impossible or too mind-blowing, but dice work just fine, thank'ya.

We didn't get to play a full game, but we did go through initiation, which was pretty fun. Steve's rather rifle-focused character had "I hope I can solve the problem without using my rifle" (awesome) and so his initiation conflict was finding a Mountain Person (a heathen Native) about to sneak into a farmhouse near Four Bridal Falls, his tomahawk out. Steve found out the family had cleared some of the Mountain People's territorial woods, and ploughed a field over the remains of his ancestors. The Mountain Person wanted to kill the farmer to avenge the desecrated memories of his ancestors. Steve wanted to stop him without resorting to his rifle. They started by talking, but Steve ended up having to escalate to his rifle to win. So he got the trait "Had to pull my rifle 1d6."

Derek's character had the initiation conflict of not losing his temper. He was faced with the execution by hanging of the three leaders of the bandit gang he used to lead, Satan's Posse. (He, himself, was a convert to the Faith.) The senior Watchdog of the Faith tested him by making him responsible for the public execution. His conflict was with the main leader of the gang who cursed him and called him a gutless worm who deserved to hang instead of or alongside them. Derek won the conflict, and so didn't lose his temper and pull the gallows lever in hate or wrath. He did pull the lever (the execution couldn't be forestalled) but he did so speaking scripture, knowing the Word of the King of Life would not be adopted by his former fellows. So he succeeded in his initiation and got the trait "Didn't lose his temper at a critical moment 1d6."

We only had an hour left of time available for play, so we opted not to try to squeeze a town in and come away with a "Well, that was rushed" impression. That's a great sign, I'd say. People had fun and that's what we wanted to remember. Steve even said he'd be buying the game at GenCon. Makes me wish I could go to chat with Vincent.

Ultimately, if you're a fan of Deadwood and/or the Dark Tower series (and love the character interactions and manner of speaking in Firefly), there's no way in Hell you'll not love this game.

The best podcast review for "Dogs In the Vineyard" is Episode 6 of Have Games, Will Travel. That can be found here (direct link to the podcast episode itself). It explains everything concisely, clearly and it's just the right length for a podcast game review.

edit: Looking back on the initiation... I think we (errr... I) screwed up. It wasn't Steve's job to go against his nature, but my job as the GM to beat him at his nature and thus accomplish his hope; viz., "I hope I learn to solve problems without resorting to my rifle." Same with Derek: He ought to have been playing his character as unapologetic about his temper, and I ought to have given him a situation/person that tried to teach him to curb his temper. Wooops... We did it backwards.

In a Wicked Age

Lately, I've been on an "indie" kick, mostly due to being greatly dissatisfied with D&D. While Burning Wheel is my bread-and-butter RPG, so to speak, I've also looked into Savage Worlds and now, most recently, In a Wicked Age.

I stumbled upon In a Wicked Age via deadlytoque's comment on the Gnome Stew article, A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming.

I'm quite glad I did! I checked out a few reviews (and an actual play write-up) and hit up the main website. I ordered it.

Quite simply, IaWA is a story- and conflict-driven game powered by a universal conflict resolution mechanism, and is centred around one of four Oracles: Blood & Sex, God-kings of War, the Unquiet Past, and a Nest of Vipers. Each is essentially a subgenre of fantasy-adventure. For instance, Blood & Sex tends to revolve around sword & sorcery style concepts whereas a Nest of Vipers has entries that push intrigue and cloak-and-dagger play. Someone picks one, and that sets the tone, character concepts, conflicts and potential scenes for the chapter, which is the term used to define a particular story arc in which characters have resolved most of their issues of contention. While it may sound like a "soft" mechanic, it actually factors into who proceeds to future chapters, who emerges as the clear protagonist, etc.

Above, I mentioned the resolution system. It reminds me a bit of the Mouse Guard RPG universal conflict actions. Fighting, seducing, fleeing, stealing, negotiating. . . IaWA adjudicates them all using 6 "forms": Directly, Covertly, For myself, For others, With love, and With violence. All rolls undertaken will involve two forms together. Stealing something might use Covertly and For myself. Instigating a deadly riot might be Directly and With violence. Convincing someone to heal your friend might be For others and With love. At character creation, die types (d12, d10, d8, d6, d6, d4) are assigned to each, one die per form, at the player's discretion.

Character generation is brilliant and extremely open. After a player has chosen one of the four Oracles, someone takes a standard deck of cards and deals four. Those four are then referenced with the Oracle type at the back of the book and the entries are written down. From those, you derive the scenes, the hooks for conflicts and the characters.

Let's just check out an example: I picked God-kings of War and dealt myself out four cards, as though I was starting a game. I got the Jack of Spades, the Queen of Clubs, the 2 of Hearts and the Jack of Hearts. Referencing the entries under God-kings of War at the back of the book, the entries for those are:

• A fortress guarding the only pass through treacherous mountains, overseen by a corrupt and voracious war-captain.
• An altar to devils of the waste, stinking with gore.
• A staff of white wood, summoner of lightnings, and the war-magus bearing it.
• The head of a high war-captain, in a carved wooden cask.

Now, with a group of players, characters would be generated from these entries. Perhaps a monk is bearing the head of the high war-captain in a carved wooden cask. Maybe the dead war-captain himself is carrying his own head! (You can be as flexible or open as you choose.) There's obvious a war-magus. Perhaps there are also tormenting lightning spirits, too, or the staff itself contains an imprisoned elemental! The more imaginative and outside-the-box you are, the more interesting the characters will be, and the more numerous there'll be.

Brainstorm all the possibilities, the GM writes them down, and then the players choose one. The rest become NPCs. Then each player assigns the die types to the six forms, picks a particular strength (a specialty mechanic), and a "best interest" (analogous in my mind to a Belief in Burning Wheel); i.e., "It's in my best interest to. . ."

Once you're all done, you can kick off play. Play is focused heavily on being in and engaging in conflicts with other players and the NPCs. The story is derived from those conflicts. As I may (or may not?) have said before, the players really drive things, though the GM provides the set-up and means for the players' character to meet up. Hell, the entries themselves pretty much write the story! (Case in point, see the four randomly-generated entries above.)

Anyway, there are better reviews than this one out there, and this isn't really meant to be a review but more of a gushing "wow, glad I found this RPG!" kind of post. I plan on giving this a whirl in the near future. Once I do, I'll post an actual play write-up and give my impressions of it.

Burning Shepherd

I won't re-write everything here, as I've already done so over on the BW Forums.

Not long ago, I had a cool Burning Wheel character idea I wanted to play: a completely unworldly, start-from-scratch shepherd. Hell, he doesn't even have any social skills (no Persuasion, Oratory, Rhetoric, Falsehood... nodda). The more I thought about the character, the more I wanted to play him. To break it down, he's a Born Peasant --> Farmer --> Shepherd. Starting resource points gave me just enough for basic gear and a flute... and a spiteful, forbidden relationship with a young woman (niece of the farm's head of the household). I had two free trait points. What did I spend 'em on? Unlucky and Lost. Haha! Bring on the complications!

A great GM, Eeyore (aka, DaGreatJL), answered the call. After a few scheduling hiccups, we finally got the game started this past Wednesday. We both had a blast. Despite never having met before, we meshed really well and played well off of each other; lots of fantastic collaboration and, in proper BW fashion, we both had clear understandings of intents (from me) and the consequences of failure (from Eeyore). I had no issues with failure (fear of failure can ruin BW) and he had no problems giving me a tough, but fair, go.

Being on the other side of the "screen" was an eye-opening experience for me. Up until then, I'd only GM'd Burning Wheel -- I'd never played. Playing it feels so damn organic, especially in a solo campaign. With the freedom to focus in on one player, a GM can really nail that player's character's Beliefs and Instincts and get things shaken up in a major way.

Like I said, it was an awesome time and I can't wait for session 2 on Sunday!

Survival of the Scrawniest

In my last post, I talked about how much I was looking forward to getting into Burning Wheel. Well, on Saturday, we got burnin'!

While I'm looking forward to a full-group campaign with four players, one of the players and I are currently in a position to play. The others have school work and other commitments that keep them from being able to regularly set aside a Saturday to play. Given this, John and I both wanted to give it a shot, test the rules and run a specific kind of game we likely wouldn't be able to do once all five of us were playing: Orcs!

Before we got together, John and I had spoken via email all week, hammering out the minor details. He was to play a magic-using, goblin-type Orc and I'd have a NPC for him to do some heavy lifting. We decided that, since it would be a relatively short game (maybe 5 or 6 sessions) and he was wanting to be relatively powerful, 6 lifepaths was a good number. (Five is the recommended for Orcs if four is what you'd have used had you been playing anything else. So six is the new five!)

So was born the mini-campaign: Survival of the Scrawniest (John's character, Jharka the Whisperer of the Dark, has a Power of 3 and the Diminutive Stature trait)

I had a blast with it. I think John did, too, given that we started with world burning at 11am, took a break for lunch, did character burning from 1-3 and then played for four or five hours.

One of the things I really enjoyed was the proactive nature of the game itself. Burning Wheel uses the BITs system (Beliefs, Instincts and Traits) to focus and reward the player for performing character actions and gives the GM lots of options for creating obstacles and story. Beliefs usually contain goals or hint at goals, so John was driving toward them (which rewarded him in the process). I did very little steering, though provided lots of options since I'd read the books and John hadn't.

I recorded the game, but we had the digital recorder just above the table so the sounds of paper and dice rolling are pretty loud and at times it's tough to hear our voices. Also, I haven't edited it. When I have and if I'm able to enhance our voices but not the clatter of dice and the shhh'ing of paper, I'll post 'em.

In the meantime, check out my write-up of our session and let me know what you think!

Next up: the Mouse Guard game I'll be running this Saturday for my friends and their two kids!

When a New Game Comes A-Callin'

There's a specific kind of excitement that accompanies a new gaming system.  You've heard about it, checked out reviews, maybe read forums where people have discussed it.  With luck, the publisher put out a 20-page PDF that made you greedy for the real thing.  All that is great but it doesn't compare to the day you speed-walk to your friendly, local gaming store or hear the knock on your door that heralds the arrival of that long-awaited package.

Nothing's better than laying hands on that rules book.  The euphoria is almost overwhelming.  (Okay, maybe not but damn it feels great.)

I've recently gotten a double-dose of giddy in the form of mail deliveries:  Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard RPG.  *SQUEEE!*

Mouse Guard arrived about a week before Burning Wheel, which is good because I'd have had to hire someone to read and dictate to me to absorb both.  As it was, I had a chance to read all the way through MG, and even run a game.  It was an awesome experience, for myself and my two utterly new players which were my girlfriend and a friend of hers.  Surprisingly, both said they'd play again and wanted to know when.

Then came Burning Wheel, the true prize I'd coveted.  It's a double-whammy, which I knew but still rocks.  BW consists of two books:  The main RPG rules book and the Character Burner (think DMG and PHB).  Good bang for my buck and only took 3 weeks.  The books are smaller than typical RPG books -- only 5.5" x 8", a great size for portability and easy reading.

The content... O, the content.  I got giddy just leafing through the first dozen pages.  I dove right in, something I hadn't done for a while.  Even D&D 4th Edition didn't get make me all that giddy and feeling ready to roll.  I was happy to read through those books but I was ravenous to read through BW.  I finished Mouse Guard in about 6 hours of reading.  I'm still working on BW; reading, re-reading, digesting.

Every time I pick those books up, I learn something new and that initial sense of excitement is rekindled.  I'll be playing a game via Skype with some folks from the Burning Wheel forums.  There will be 3 players and on Monday we're getting the skinny on the world and campaign feel and then doing character burning.  I'm quite looking forward to it.  In addition to that, I'll be running Mouse Guard for friends of mine and their two kids, and starting up a Burning Wheel campaign with a group of good friends (and fellow gamers).

Now my excitement has transitioned from receiving and reading the books to putting them to work for me and the others.  Nothing can beat that "let's do it!" enthusiasm and excitement, especially when shared with friends.