I've been away from Story Games for a long time, and missing it, and may have to be away again for sometime (sorry, Seth!). But I wandered back here for a moment and wanted to post something. Here it is:

Dogs (DitV) is D&D. To me, anyway.

What do I mean? I recently ran (GMed) my first session of Dogs. Although I'd played before (as a Dog), I'd never previously GMed the game. And the experience (a single session) brought me back to my memories of D&D (AD&D, I guess, in the "trad" version or something like it, not "old-school").

It felt so similar. SO similar. I mean, yeah, the content was really different. And the gameplay was a lot more focused. But there's some feeling that the two games are just... related, like two cousins who look terribly alike, even though one is a hot tub maintenance specialist and the other is an experimental subject for addictive substances.

In both games:

* The GM makes up a finite place, a location that's basically in stasis, waiting for the PCs to come in. None of that "living, breathing world" nonsense.
* The PCs jump in, havoc breaks loose, then they move on to the next such location. Repeat and repeat. If your GM's real clever, you might revisit one such place, but it's not too common.

* The players make PCs. They're all kind of alike: after all, they all do the same thing in life, really. Nevertheless, everyone tries REAL hard to make THEIR Dog unique. ("Yeah, he's a Dog, but he USED to be a salesman/Mountain Person/male prostitute... and he secretly doubts his faith." "Yeah, he's a warrior... but he's sensitive and cultured and likes to fight only with paper-thin rapiers...")
* The players may spend some time daydreaming about their character, their past, their beliefs, their backstory.

* But when it comes down it, it doesn't really matter. There's a plot hook ("You've been sent to this place. To deal with whatever needs to be dealt with there."), and all the characters go there together. They're a party (although they might fight now and then; but the assumption is that they'll remain a "party" even if they do). Once the game has started, your character's imaginary backstory usually flies out the back window. Players without elaborate backstories (whether written or daydreamed) find their characters engaged just as much as those who's mother's stepfather was once a Dog but left the Faith to marry his sister, who turned out to be a Sorceress.

[This bit is the shocking part: my experience of "indie" games has been marked by the premise that the stories we tell are all about the Issues of the protagonists, so to speak--their Keys, Beliefs, whatever, make the story. And in Dogs, it's more like D&D: a good group can find ways to work them in, but the game is still fun even if we don't.]

* Once the game starts rolling, we can happily ignore all that backstory stuff. A Dog's a Dog's a Dog. They'll all be thrown into the fire together, and come out similarly singed. Whatever your idea was at the beginning, you might find within a session or two that your character's on some totally different path. The gameplay WILL take each character in some new direction, and it doesn't matter all that much if they were a "I've been burnt by my sister" Dog or a "I'm a good shot" Dog at the beginning.

* When conflicts between characters come up, even something like "who's gonna marry who", chances are we can only solve it by pulling out our weapons and pulling out our dice. (Remember that in D&D?)

* Once we do pull out the dice, things slow down a lot. I love Dogs conflicts, but they ain't fast. Just like a D&D session might have three or four fights in one night, a Dogs session might easily just be three or four intense conflicts. The pace of play felt very similar to me in that regard: it's fun, it's intense, but the story isn't zooming by like some game where two hours later we're talking about the first characters' grandkids and how they've settled in another land.

* As a result, your characters do some bad things to other people and get scarred. (This may not be true for all D&D games, but it certainly was a feature of ours: when you wanted something, you could only get to roll dice for it by drawing your sword, so we often did. And good people died for what we wanted. From the GM's side, you know how the players will kill your innocent, helpless NPCs all the time, no matter how sweet and defenseless you try to make them? D&D and Dogs, that's right.)

All these things just made me feel like I was playing... not the same game, of course, but some version, some descendant, some family member of the same game.

You ever feel that way, playing Dogs?

See, the main difference is that that's how you played ADnD, and that's awesome. But it was not automatically the norm, nor the way presented in the GM book AFAIK (let's not dig up all the classic examples of railroads, modules, and such).

Dogs OTOH tells you exactly what you should do as a GM and as a player: it's consistent.


But yeah, they are close relatives... they are rpgs, right? :)

Dogs doesn't have 10' poles.

Posted By: renatoramYes it does. If they are big, they are d8. If they are big and excellent they are d10 poles.

Dude, fuck guns and their whimpy dice. Big excellent 10 foot poles are the way to go. Especially as you don't have to escalate to gunplay to use them.

This is how you game the system folks. Do pay attention.

In other news...

Vincent has said, a couple of times, how his game design is often very conservative. Which seems funny, given that Dogs seems/is so revolutionary in some ways. And yet, many of the issues the OP pointed out are there, and that's the sort of stuff I think Vincent was talking about. Dogs is a very focused sort of play, and has a very strong thematic stance and tightly designed mechanics... but the fundamental structural nature of play is very much like that of a well run, successful old guard conservative RPG.

Ummm.... you play any game and don't meaningfully engage with the fiction beyond what's on your sheet and gives you dice, it plays flat. You play any game, engage with the fiction, and you get something interesting.

And the structure - party, site, problem, go - is just plain the smoothest, simplest way to reliably get something interesting to engage with.

All gaming is either D&D or Vampire. You either play a team of characters (of some varying degree of unity and team-ness) who engage with challenges (of some sort) and defeat them, or you play an unorganized group of possibly antagonistic avatars who mostly emote a lot and attempt to manipulate each other to little lasting impact.

NOTE: Above paragraph has tongue deeply inserted into cheek. Do not attempt to use rigorously.

In basic structure, Dogs is very much like D&D. If you've ever played a group of all Paladins then it is shockingly similar... at the beginning!

Dogs is interesting in that it starts out very, very familiar. Even rules wise, you could break it down to stats, skills, and stuff. But even just playing 3-4 towns, most of the characters change dramatically. Especially if you play with the suggestion in the book to create successive towns as way to challenge ethical decisions the Dogs made in previous towns.

As you play Dogs, your characters scar. Damage changes them. And they are even rewarded for losing talking conflicts. They are rewarded for losing! And giving up. One of the reasons I'm a Dog is a required trait or relationship is so that you can use fallout to change it mechanically. I've seen several times someone takes fallout at the end of a Town and says... I'm done with this... I've seen and done too much... and they used Fallout to get rid of their I'm a Dog trait.

The fact that Dogs is so familiar is part of its subtle charm. Hell, a lot of people get all excited about it and proclaim it is a game where you shoot people in the face. But after shooting people in the face so easily, quickly, and with authority, it quickly loses its charm and what's left is very interesting to explore.

Oh, boy!

It sounds like people are really interpreting what I wrote in different ways (surprise, surprise). I, for one, definitely DO see a huge difference between "trad" games and "indie" games. And a huge part of that is the realization that something like AD&D is a painful struggle (for a certain type of story-oriented gaming) whereas something like Dogs can make it easy and fun. For those of you who have played AD&D and Dogs, compare the ease and "success ratio" of Town Creation to prepping a story-based scenario for an AD&D group. I know that for me, for us (my friends), trying to get "meaningful story" from AD&D was a tough fight. Dogs is clear and to the point, and makes it easy.

But my realization is that Dogs' "story" is not like, say, Primetime Adventures' "story". The thing I found surprising is that running Dogs felt completely _unlike_ all those other indie games I've played and designed. In most "indie" games (those I've played, anyway), if your character is a blacksmith who is in love with his own mother, the story is going to focus on that. Maybe he's going to forge jewelry and give it to her--and that's what play will be about. But, were we playing D&D, the game would say: "Ok, great, you're a blacksmith. Now pick up your sword and go fight monsters." In the same way, Dogs says, "You're a blacksmith in love with his own mother? OK, great. Now go judge sinners and shoot people." The difference is that it still works (perhaps, and for certain people, maybe not for everybody, universally--I'm just trying to describe my own experiences here).

Like how in D&D we'd play out a bunch of fights, and maybe it would make a story and maybe it wouldn't, but, if that's what you were looking for, it would be satisfying. In Dogs, we go and play out a bunch of conflicts, and maybe it will make a "story" (in the literary sense) and maybe it won't, but it's still a Dogs game, intense and full of tough choices.

Of course the games are TOTALLY different. In goal, in execution, in focus, etc. But running Dogs (as a GM, note: oddly enough, I didn't feel this way as a player) was the first time I played an "indie" game and felt like the procedures were at some level similar to my old experiences playing AD&D. I think a big part of it is the constrained premise, character "party" composed of people all fitting into the same role, and the fact that conflicts take a lot of time to play out.

It's totally unlike the character-focused experience of something like PtA, where each roll or draw moves the story forward in giant steps. I remember this being a huge contrast between "trad" games (with task resolution, long, drawn-out die rolling being carried to resolve even small bits of the story, and sometimes not even then), and "indie" games (ones where each roll of the dice really pushed the story forward and led to new developments). My first "indie" experiences were playing "trad" games with enforced stakes and conflict resolution, and one big shock was how much more one had to prep for a single session: now the story could really move forward in one session, whereas before (playing something like AD&D or GURPS), throw together a couple of fights (or whatever) and that's your session, because the speed of resolution is such that those two or three fights are going to take up your whole session. Dogs felt similar: Town Creation can be simple, because the dice are going to make a whole session out of a handful of arguments or a couple of fights.

The _procedures_ of play (all the way down to formulaic Town Creation), from the GM's perspective, felt very "trad" to me. Of course, gameplay itself ends up making you think and worry about other things altogether--the moral judgement aspect of Dogs, etc--all the stuff that goes into Dogs' "Fruitful Void". But the trappings, in a sense, are D&D-esque in a way no other "indie" game has felt for me.

(John: It's interesting what you say about characters being changed and scarred. Because when I think back to my AD&D games, the ones that really worked were ones where we really emphasized the pain and troubles that scarred and changed the PCs. So, that too was Dogs-like. But, of course, that's not in any way a standard feature of AD&D--just something we'd tacked on to make it work for us.)

We've played Advanced Dungeons and Dogs and it worked very well. Simon has run it with AD&D and DitV and the Dogs game was better.

Posted By: GB SteveWe've played Advanced Dungeons and Dogs and it worked very well. Simon has run it with AD&D and DitV and the Dogs game was better.

Oh, yes, I remember this.

King's Marshalls.

Actual Play 1
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=23372.0

Actual Play 2
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=23415.0

I've got more detailed docs somewhere, too.

Posted By: noclueI think Dog's is superficially like D&D, sure. But there are some things in there that make it play very unlike D&D.

Frex, in D&D the GM does not generally say something like "Up ahead, there are some dudes waiting to ambush your ass. Your characters have not seen them yet. What do you do?"

Hm. That's technique-based rather than rule-based. There's really nothing in Dogs or D&D that mandates or requires this kind of gamemaster technique, is there? It's a technique I enjoy using in GURPS (Old West. . . "The outlaws are coming up behind you, but you haven't noticed them yet. Whatcha doing?" "Hey, my guy is really good at perception. There's a chance he'd notice them, right?"), D&D, Burning Wheel, and a bunch of others.

Dogs does a decent job of explaining how the mechanics can be used to frame scenes like that, but 4E permits similar scene framing. Dogs rules might make the scene cooler, since the raises and sees could go on for quite awhile before the good guys even knew the bad guys were there, but I bet you could do the same thing with a 4E skill challenge.

How is "I have a 10 Foot Pole 2d6" and "My dad gave me this 10 foot pole 2d8 " mechanically different. I mean his dad must have gave him a bigger or better stick and all but I don't get this bit, care to explain (I'm amoung those poor people who only got the read the book , and please don't give me the stock lumpley THESE ALL ARE DONE MACHANICALLY WITH NO ILLUSSION, I don't see the mechanical difference between A and B, for the "My Dad gave me this can of whoop ass" to matter , wouldn't there have to be a mechanical difference between A and B?

If this is tangent, just ignore me.

Posted By: phargleThere's really nothing in Dogs or D&D that mandates or requires this kind of gamemaster technique, is there?

I dunno. These are essentially examples in the book and explicitly recommended in the text.

Also, its interesting that in Dogs you have as much perception, or as much of any skill, as your raise.

Dogs is actually Pokémon, in that there are people in it, and they do stuff. Total rip-off.

I love this thread.

However, a 10-foot pole is 10-foot long.

D6 means normal, 2D6 means excellent,d8 means big, 2d8 means big plus excellent, d4 means crap.

But 10-foot is 10-foot. How is a ten-foot 2d8 pole bigger than a ten-foot pole 2d6?

(I *just know* you are going to say width.)

And, Vincent, as it should be, wins the thread ^___^