Dogs in the Vineyard
Back in 2008 i first started to encounter and deconstruct independent role-playing games. I'd known about them for a while, and first thought of hacking Dogs in the Vineyard not too long after i'd first played. At the time my want to alter the setting was a childish reaction to the things about the game that made me uncomfortable, unhappy, or uncertain. Now, almost three years later, i'm going to write that hack, and see what happens.
Mostly this is an attempt to finally see what it would be like to write a book from start to finish, including art and layout and editing. I know it's not the real thing, because a true book is born from the heart and all it's labor. But i need to go through a practice run. It's the good advice of Muscle Joe, saying to do exactly what i'm doing: you start out making a thing. Then you quit in frustration or boredom, pick up the great works, re-make them in sloppy honesty, and then you go back to the first thing. That's how you do it, that's how you make your big dreams small enough to handle.
So i'm taking the first indie game i played and 'fixing it.' Now, this doesn't mean what it sounds like, and please believe me when i say that it's not as pretentious as it seems. I am fully aware that Dogs deals with heavy issues, and that it really creates a very flavorful and very worthy kind of story that is perfect to a lot of people. But i'm not one of them, for a lot of reasons. Most of these reasons are going to seem childish and naive, i'm sure, and they probably are. But there are things about Dogs that make it so i can't play it and not feel emotions that i'd rather not feel. And, sadly, there's no other way of putting it than that. If it sounds like i'm sticking my head in the sand, then perhaps you're right, or perhaps i just can't explain it.
What i am going to do, though, is talk about the differences between my game and Dogs, and breaking the original to fit my own mold has taught me a lot about Dogs, a lot about the Darkness, and a lot about myself. It's an after-school special from here on out, so get ready to roll your eyes.
People In The Vineyard
The first thing that i suddenly, inexplicably discovered about Baker's game is that there is next to nothing in the system that allows for conflict between anything but people. It's probably pretty sad that i didn't recognize this off the bat, but for some reason the way that i assimilated the game just gave me this impression that it was 'how you encounter folks' and 'also how you encounter them demons.' It didn't occur to me until the reverse-engineering of the whole thing that there is really only a minor mechanic for non-people conflict during character gen, and a simple mechanic for flavoring the game with demonic influence at any point after...and the rest, all of it, is the clash between people. You don't have a conflict with the trap in the dungeon, or the pack of wild wolves, or the army of undead. Not unless it's tied to the actions, intentions, and relevance of a character. In Dogs you create NPCs that are the focus of the story. Wolves and dungeons are only there if the NPC demands it.
Now, i'm no scholar, and i've only read a trite amount about the game from others. I've only played it once. But i've read it a dozen times, cover to cover. A lot of that was to reverse-engineer it over this last month, yeah, but also because there was something lingering about my experience with it the first time i played, and how it made me feel among a group of my closest friends. And none of the reports about how the game has gone have given me any clue to what that dischord is. All i can say is that i don't like being a Dog. I don't like the Order Set Apart. I don't like them, or what they seem like, or what it makes me feel in regards to institutionalized religion. I can't say what, or why, but it doesn't produce a feeling of good in me to see how the game is slanted toward going. Of course, i've only played it once, so maybe my idea is different from what would really happen. I don't know. Even after ten years of serious effort, i'm still pretty new at this.
The Secret Wisdom of Project Sandstone
The Wizard and the Ninja helped me to playtest a dry run of my hack Knights in the Darkness just the other night. And they mentioned how it was very similar to the game they started putting together some time ago; a game about people who would be overcome by the Darkness in their world if they did not have connections to a community. Last Houses is the name of the game, and it's a spiritual sibling to Knights.
But there are differences (and not just that mine is a hack while theirs is a driven device of original design). I realized one difference after the game, riding home with the Wizard, when we talked about the common problem of making people care. In Last Houses you play people on the verge of being lost. You are brought into the Last House, where those who are lost or don't belong are kept together, to learn jobs, and to learn to be with each other. In Knights you play Knights, going from location to location to help people in various stages of suffering, and often play a part in pushing back the Darkness that threatens them. In both cases it's hard to play a game where you speak to people out of compassion. For members of the Last House, you feel almost pushed toward creating the brooding bad-ass, or the broken loner, or the tragic stray. It's hard to mash that character up with an archetype that's going to play the sage or savior to other people being pushed out of their community. It's hard to play flawed and inspiring at the same time.
In the same vein, it's hard to sell someone on a game about fighting monsters after you spend time playing 'guidance councilor' (the Wizards words). And Knights is starting out wrong by being a game that gives you sacred weapons (the Ninja said the glowing swords in my game were lightsabers. he's right). Especially if the game is more about you chatting people up while your weapons wait in a bag back by your horse. And that's right. But that lead me to realize that making a game about 'good people' going from burdened place to burdened place and seeing what they can do to help is a pretty boring game. And my formula for fixing it was, "But when you've said good things to people, you get to swordfight demons!" And that's just gluing a different game onto the boring one.
In the end, i can't think of a solid reason to convince people that it can be fun to play a character that is strong, good, and steady in a world of people falling apart. That it can be fun to play a game where you put other characters together, instead of one that puts yours through changes. People say that's a skewed look at characterization, and that it just isn't good storytelling, but i don't see it that way. For me, one of the reasons i keep going back to Anima Prime over and over again is because i can play a real freakin' hero. I don't have to have a D4 trait, or a Humanity score, or an alignment that someone else can change, or a background that must involve some kind of rape. I can just play a good guy. And that character doesn't have to change, or grow, or fuck anything up. They can just show up, speak from the heart, and try to fight the badguys. Like real life.
The Problem With Heroes
Now here's the real trick. It occurred to me today/tonight, thinking over and again about what i must do to fix the game i'm supposed to have written up by the end of this week, why i haven't solved the problem. The first issue is the Knights. The second issue is the Darkness.
The issue with the Knights is the wisdom of project sandstone. How do you convince people it's fun to play a static character in a world that's changing? More importantly, how do you encourage a game about playing vulnerable, honest, and hopeful characters that really, genuinely care about the people in a bleak and dangerous place? For that i don't know. I can't explain it. I know i've felt like an outsider for some time now. It's hard for me to like the characters i play in a lot of the games i'm in because they are detailed more by a series of meaty, cinematic flaws, rather than their potential for good. And that always leaves me flat. For Knights i wanted to make a game about heroes, and the threats to the story were not in the suffering between people, but the loss of surviving with ideals in a frightful world. How do i sell that? It seems boring at best and emotionally exposing at worst.
The issue with the Darkness is how it's tethered to the people in the game. I already talked about how the system for Dogs is contained in the exchanges between people. But when i took that into a strange bi-polar setting, where interaction could be classified as 'vs. people' and 'vs. darkness' the nature of the conflict had to shift. Everything had to be doubled up. There was a separate fallout track, a separate experience list, a separate means of escalation, for the Darkness and the Knights and the People. But that's not the problem. Mechanics can change, it's the heart of what i'm saying that's at stake. It begs questions about free will, causality, idealism, optimism, and rights. But it's written like Medieval Jedis. How do you make a game about supernatural evil and still work from a 'realistic' angle? How do you make a game where the badguy is this slaughterable thing, and still center the story around unanswerable, human questions?
What I Learned
I have no solution for the inspiration of heroism in a game. And i can't offer much about the issue of which came first, the sin or the sinner? All i can say is that there is one way to play a game of Knights in the Darkness and it involves uncertainty.
Your job as a Knight is not to tell people what to do. It's not to perform services. It's not to speak to them until they spill the beans. It's not to figure out what is going to happen or how it's supposed to go down. It's not to control them in any way. As a Knight you're not there to set things right by making people line up or behave or explain themselves. You're there to serve. That's the heart and soul of what i think has been going wrong with a lot of our institutionalized Orders Set Apart in the real world. It's lost the real gist. This isn't about exposing people or speaking the truth or pointing anything out. It's a game about service. Not judgment. It's about asking the question, 'how much will you give to help someone?'
And how you help is the big deal i can't fix right now. Because we get this weird impression that you're supposed to answer questions, and 'say the right thing,' and play that hero the way we've seen them played before. (which often leads to us not liking those heroes...)
But the truth is, at least to me, real heroes only rarely say what a person should or should not do. Real heroes don't seek out suffering to tell you how things are going to be. Real heroes have one phrase they use the most: "I don't know." Because it is way, way more important for a person to believe you love them and you're fighting on their side, than it is for them to have any answers at all.
In my next draft of Knights the Darkness will not be the cause of peoples suffering. And people's suffering will not be what creates the Darkness. The two are not symbiotic, and their connection is as mysterious in Valoris as it is in the real world. Suffering is sometimes external, and sometimes internal. Sometimes it's a matter of perspective. Sometimes it's a matter of honest reaction. Sometimes it's just too much for us to comprehend. (Thanks for helping me figure that one out, Mac) In the next draft you don't have to talk to people to complete the quests, and you can't blame the misery in the town on the presence of some supernatural force. In the next draft you can't necessarily save the town by killing monsters, and you can't protect the people without caring about them. And if you don't want to play a game that revolves around caring about people that can hurt you...you should probably play a different game.
Where I Explain Myself (Again)
I think the Dogs system, at its core, can do this. I think it can work for a game that i'm imagining. No, it won't be as good as a system that's designed to do exactly what i just described. But it's a good system, and that will make a good game, even if only by a small margin.
As for the carrot on a stick, i don't know. It feels cheap for me to reward town-rescuing blatantly (i'm currently going under a 'the Darkness has twice your die pool at the start, and the only way to fight it is by getting other people in town to rise up with you'). But i don't know how else to make it obvious in play that you're supposed to care about these people.
What i do know is that, when you assume the players are going to enjoy speaking from their heart to other people, and they're going to spend a lot of their time just listening, and they're going to say 'i don't know' a lot, then this game works. When you assume that the characters riding into town are going to make promises and get beat up by angry people just to convince everyone they're here to help you're going to see a cool game emerge.
Now all i have to do is figure out how to make that game happen. :/