Dogs in the Vineyard (Character Creation)

Last night the indie group began character creation for Dogs in the Vineyard.

If you haven't heard of Dogs in the Vineyard before, it's a lauded indie RPG where you play the equivalent of Mormons in the Old West. You are the literal hand of God, and your decree is the word of God. Here's a brief summary of what the game's about.

So far, there are several aspects of the game that impress me. Character creation is very thorough and very... well, "character focused." Everything on your sheet gets a dice pool assigned to it, but all of those details have something very personal to do with your character. How to explain that... In D&D, you can roll up a character, assign him feats, skills, and powers, and then tack on a background if you want to. In Dogs in the Vineyard, it works kind of opposite. You can't stat out your character until you've decided who your character is; once you've done that, you decide how many dice (there are given numbers in the book) to divide amongst each of the character aspects, or "traits," that you've made up. You're essentially deciding how good your character is at whatever it is you want your character to be good at. Then the GM interviews you and starts up some role-play interactions between your character and the others, and between your character and NPCs.

Once the GM has all of that information, he or she takes some time to "create the town." Now, not having read the rules, I can't tell you what goes into this, but I'm assuming the GM simply sets up the scenario based on threads from each of the PCs' stories and picks one of the standard challenges that the Dogs might face (exorcising demons, making deliveries, pronouncing the word of God, or whatever) and weaves it in.

Although this is nearly identical to the way I set up my D&D games (filter through my early "Strongwood" posts on this blog), that's a stylistic choice I've made and applied to D&D because my passion is character development and human drama. "Dogs" incorporates that style into the core of the game so that I don't think it's possible to play "Dogs" as-written without going in that direction.

This goes back to something I was musing on yesterday in the post on Star Frontiers and how the way a game's mechanics are focused determines the way most people will play that game. I know that sounds terribly obvious; I'm just making an observation--particularly in relation to D&D, which is part war/board game. Personally, I love the war/board game elements of D&D; I think they bring a level of strategy and fun to the game that you don't get in an indie RPG--heck, in most other RPGs period. Nevertheless, the board game elements of D&D take up a lot of space in the rulebooks, so how are most people going to play the game? They're going to play it like a board game. There's loads of story guidance in the various DM supplements, but the players generally aren't seeing that stuff--they're seeing the mechanics and they're trying to quantify everything in the game by those mechanics. I think that's regrettable, the cart being pushed a mile ahead of the horse as it were. This is why there are 15+ page threads about the physics behind the mechanics of a pixie's altitude limit while flying or the mechanical categorization of the witch subclass... instead of any discussion whatsoever about what it might be like to BE one.