Dogs are Paladins. Strictly Lawful Good by the definition of their Faith. that's my D&D comparison.

Of course, nobody plays Paladins like Dogs - but they should.

The debate always baffles me.  D&D is a game about racial genocide that lionizes killing people from different cultures for fun and profit.  Top secret can easily be a game about crimes against humanity committed by the agents of industrial capitalist nations against the innocent law enforcement personal of developing nations.  Traveller is all about the inherent racism and exploitation of the colonial period.  Champions makes gangs of thugs causing massive property damage and civilian casualties out to be a heroic lark.  Boot Hill endorses the genocide of the American Aboriginal Population by romantisizing a brutal chapter in American history.

Honestly all heroic stories carry a heavy burden of assigning right and wrong to extremely questionable actions.  That's one of the lessons rpgs teach pretty well really.

Quote from: alexandroHmm...characters doing stuff, which is always considered "morally right" and in tune with the ethos of the setting...

How is it different, if you do it one time in the name of religion and the other in the name of The Laws of the King or Omertà?
I don't see the difference.

The difference (if there is one) is in the fork-tongued approach to the metaphysics and causality of the setting, i.e., objective relationship between sin & demons, and causal relationship between Dogs' actions and what happens to the town. I may be forgetting, but I don't think I've ever seen a satisfactory response to the criticism that the players can declare the town to be "done" and effectively both in a moral state of grace and "solved" (in terms of no more troubles) whenever they feel like they've done enough. And conversely if they don't declare it, there's nothing to tell the group to stop; the game can just grind on as long as least one participant (including the GM) thinks there's still a worthwhile conflict. Meanwhile the others may just stand around wondering what the point is.

Quote from: WerekoalaDogs are Paladins. Strictly Lawful Good by the definition of their Faith. that's my D&D comparison.

Of course, nobody plays Paladins like Dogs - but they should.

ACtually, lots of people play Paladins like DitV's Dogs.  It's part of why the paladin has such a poor reputation.

Quote from: Elliot WilenI may be forgetting, but I don't think I've ever seen a satisfactory response to the criticism that the players can declare the town to be "done" and effectively both in a moral state of grace and "solved" (in terms of no more troubles) whenever they feel like they've done enough. And conversely if they don't declare it, there's nothing to tell the group to stop; the game can just grind on as long as least one participant (including the GM) thinks there's still a worthwhile conflict. Meanwhile the others may just stand around wondering what the point is.

That is an interesting point, but it's never come up in my games.  I've run Dogs quite a bit, and while there's no mechanic for saying a town is done, it's always a mutual decision to be done.

Somehow I missed your post, Joe.

It did happen in the last game I played, I was simply unengaged by the doctrinal issues of some deviation from The Faith, it simply meant nothing to me without real consequences, which I could not see. That another player thought the vaguely creepy cult was worth fighting also didn't matter. I was certainly not going to initiate an exorcism, having seen how utterly irrelevant that was from the previous town (basically, we had just made trouble for ourselves and solved nothing). So, I suppose, if the other player had begun shooting kids for making freaky dolls out of cornhusks, I might have engaged by fighting him, but it wouldn't have overcome the fact that the "evil" of said behavior was purely a matter of aesthetics--there was no interesting moral choice there. On the other hand, when we turned our attention to the wife-beating farmer, we got the situation I described a few posts ago--and there, for different reasons, the moral "weight" of the action was vitiated by an aesthetic decision to shift the goalposts. (Twice, in fact, because after my character slammed the farmer into a wall, we could have left him paralyzed and at his wife's mercy, but the other players intervened for some reason. In short the whole thing became entirely a "meta" struggle over aesthetics, and thus rather offputting as I could neither "just play my character" nor "tell a satisfying story".)