I read it...thought it was okay. Had ZERO interest from my players.

I've read it and played it. It's a great game, and extremely well-written. I found the advice on how to run the game is applicable to just about every other RPG I've run since. For the record, it's an RPG, pure and simple. It reminded me of OD&D more than anything else.

Quote from: Spinachcat;425025Mormons creep me out

My wife was a Mormon. She's got over it.

I read DiTV. I actually thought the setting was ok but the rules do nothing for me.

Quote from: Simon W;427065

Quote from: Spinachcat;425025Mormons creep me out

My wife was a Mormon. She's got over it.

Sandy Peterson, creator of Call of Cthulhu, apparently also is Mormon. Seems like a nice enough guy. What's with the Mormon-o-phobia?

Quote from: Simon W;427065I read DiTV. I actually thought the setting was ok but the rules do nothing for me.

I read about DiTV and decided it was not for me, let alone my players. Both subject matter and system hold no appeal for me.

Quote from: DKChannelBoredom;425144The "DiTV is not a roleplaying game" is getting old and lame. In the spirit of Christmas, put it back in the rpg forum, please.

Agree.

I have no opinion on the game, but this is just baby-spits-dummy petulance. Of course it's an rpg and as such should be discussed in the rpg forum.

I'd never even heard of it until I came here but going on the fact so many people hate it it must be great

Having read a couple of reviews, it does seem like a dice mechanic perhaps more than anythign else. How does combat work given that engaging parties can take narrative control? How are non-opposed actions resolved?

Hey Ghost Whistler,

There are no unopposed actions in Dogs in the Vineyard. A character's action is either interesting enough to make into a conflict or it simply succeeds, at the discretion of the GM. If the GM initiates an action, which is fairly rare, it's always a conflict. In a conflict the GM opposes the player, and others can join in on either side if that makes sense.

Regarding narrative control, you can definitely make the stakes in a conflict something bigger than your dude. "The stakes are, does he change your mind", for example. How far this goes, and how far you stray from character monogamy, is largely a matter of an individual group's preference. Setting good stakes is really key, by whatever "good" means to you and your friends.

I just learned a new acronym: STFI. It means "search the f*ing Internet".

Okay, I've got a few minutes. Everything is resolved the same way. To begin with, there's no such thing as a non-opposed action. Even if there are rules for "personalizing" inanimate objects (like a mountain you want to climb), then in play, they never come up. Basically, it's all interpersonal conflict.

Without going into detail that's irrelevant to your question, the way it works is, first you have a conflict. Like "Joe Bob wants to burn down the mayor's house, and Steve wants to stop him." Then on your "turn", you roll a bunch of dice for your relevant abilities (based on the type of action you're taking, classified into "just talking", physical but not fighting, fighting hand-hand, and gunfighting) and descriptive traits (whatever's immediately relevant to what you're doing). Then you take two of them out of your pool (called a "raise") and describe what you're doing. Really, it's what you're threatening to do, or if you're "just talking", it's what you're claiming to be true, "or else".

Everyone who's directly affected then has to take 1-3 dice out of their pool whose value is >= what you pushed. If they can't or won't do this, then "or else" happens--meaning, you achieve your overall goal in the conflict. If you're Joe Bob, then the mayor's house goes up in flames.

In order to match a raise without suffering any consequences, you need do it with just two dice. (This is called a "block".) If you do it with three dice, you "take the blow", meaning that the action affects you. Steve calls you the son of a whore, you "take the blow", then you are the son of a whore. (Or at least, you're deeply affected instead of you just shrugging off the insult.) He shoots you, you're hit. If you don't match a raise, then you don't take the consequences, but as just noted, the "or else" happens unless someone on the other side of the conflict stops the raise. [EDIT: this isn't quite right. If you don't match the raise, you're out of the conflict, and when everyone on one side drops out, the other side wins.] More about "taking the blow" in a second.

(Matching a raise with just 1 die gives you a little tactical benefit but aside from not remembering it, I don't think it's really relevant to your question.)

Any time you're making a raise or responding to one, you can add more dice to your pool by including new traits that are relevant to your described action. Like if you start by talking and then decide to hit Steve with your heavy walking stick, you throw in the dice for the walking stick. You'll also be throwing in extra dice because fighting, in and of itself, adds some dice that you don't get by just talking. But basically all the dice you get, you get just once. If you keep walloping Steve with the stick, you're not going to get any more dice, because you've already gotten them for the stick and for fighting.

So: you keep doing this until everybody on one side "gives", that is, fails to match a "raise". They lose the conflict, so the other side gets to have whatever was their goal going into the conflict.

Note that getting hit, shot, insulted, or whatever has no direct consequence during the conflict. If you "give", it basically doesn't happen. If you "block" or "take the blow", the only immediate consequence is that you've used up some dice in your pool. But after the conflict, the "blows" that you "take" do affect you, causing "fallout". The bigger the dice, the more severe the fallout, although there are limiting factors--you can die from "taking the blow" when someone shoots at you, but not when someone makes a theological argument at you, even if their argument is 2d10 totaling 20 points.

So as you can see, physical combat is very straightforward. You can narrate any kind of mayhem, whether bashing each other or shooting, and the strength of your attack is the dice you push forward. If you were being silly you could take 2d10 out of your pool, totaling 18, even if those dice initially came from gesturing while holding up a big, fancy copy of the holy book, and push them forward with "I poke him in the adam's apple with my pinkie finger". If it doesn't win the fight outright, it'll still be hard to stop without "taking the blow"--you may cause serious damage. This does seem silly, but it doesn't break the narrative flow or logic (if you will).

The place the game runs into trouble, in my experience, is that "talking" isn't really the same as "fighting" in real life, and the game fails to reflect that. If I've got massive dice on my side, I can make a completely nonsensical argument, and you won't be able to stop me. Conversely, if I've got massive dice, and I start with a good argument that you block, I may well run out of things to say before we finish going back & forth with the dice.

Now, the game basically says: if the PCs do something that just "makes sense" they should win; the GM should "give" even if he's got dice to oppose them. And similarly, there's advice to limit the "raises" according to the sensibilities of the group. But you see what's going on here: the hype around the game and the "scene" that it comes out of is that there's no need for "rule zero". Whereas in fact, when you aren't taking the direct approach of hitting or shooting someone, "rule zero" has to be invoked repeatedly. Even if it's the player/GM invoking it on themselves, when they're trying to figure out if X raise is "legit", or whether they "should" give even though they've got the dice to pigheadedly stay in the conflict.

So in this game, if a player wants to accomplish a task where the only source of conflict would be time (let's say they need to seal all the doors in the church before sundown and some vampires come riding into town), the GM would just say 'yes you succeed'?

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;427291So in this game, if a player wants to accomplish a task where the only source of conflict would be time (let's say they need to seal all the doors in the church before sundown and some vampires come riding into town), the GM would just say 'yes you succeed'?

My understanding of it would be yes, you succeed. (As an aside, this would probably be the same thing as GM that I would say in Call of Cthulhu or D&D or whatever unless for some reason the materials to do the sealing were a problem to get hold of.)

I suppose a conflict might erupt if, let's say, someone then said it was wrong to seal the church doors because it needs to be open to the faithful no matter what. Then that conflict would need to be resolved. But again this is just from reading the rules not actual play.

I don't know if i'm cool with that level of handwavium.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;427301I don't know if i'm cool with that level of handwavium.

Why does there need to be a roll in that situation? As in, you feel the game ought to require a carpentry roll or something like that to do it successfully? Or do I misunderstand what you're saying is hand waved that ought not be?

You would have to identify the conflict. In GW's initial scenario, the conflict would most likely be between the PCs and the vampires, although if the immediate problem was that someone in town disagreed, then your conflict would be with them.

You need to identify goals or stakes--at least something that one side is trying to accomplish and the other side wants to prevent. Since the vampires probably don't give a crap about sealing doors, that probably isn't where the real conflict lies. More likely you'd have something like: the vampires are coming to town to take Lucy, who's the reincarnated wife of the king of the vampires. The vampires would start by riding into town and surrounding Lucy. That might be a physical action so they'll push a couple dice; the players then block it (which means it doesn't happen), by pushing dice and saying "before they get there, we take Lucy to the church and seal up all the entrances". The the players might narrate shooting bullets out of the church, that have marked with the sign of the cross or something. But as long as the vampires still have dice, they can keep pushing them and narrating ways that they break through the barricades, or hypnotize Lucy, or whatever.

It all sounds nice on paper, but in practice I found that narrating anything other than straight attacks didn't have much substance, since the nature of what you do or say has no real effect, only the dice you push.