I had the opportunity today to play an introductory session of Dogs in the Vineyard, following an invitation posted by Jim Henley on his site. I had heard of the game third-hand before but didn't know much about it, and was interested in trying it out. It's one of those boutique role-playing games, with a fairly unusual setting and a different resolution mechanic, so most of my time was spent trying to figure out both while also entering into my role. After a thirty minute backgrounder on the setting and philosophy of the game from Jim and Bill, we spent the next thirty minutes creating our two characters, then spent five hours solving the town problem that Jim had prepared based on a download from the internet.

The setting itself is based somewhat on early-to-mid-19th century Utah, where settlements of the people of the faith are presided over by both territorial authorities (read: marshals) and religious authorities (the Watchdogs referred to in the title). It is, however, supposed to be a fantasy world--the Dogs are as much paladins or holy warriors as any in D&D, and the forces opposed to them can be as evil. The game focuses much more on the role-playing aspect than the roll (although there is plenty of that, I'll get to that in a moment) and what is at stake is a moral question to be confronted rather than evil dead to be slain or loot to be obtained. As I'm very much more interested in character and roles these days, I found this to be quite interesting.

The rolling mechanic is somewhat related to poker in that it is based on a call and raise/response. As in poker hands when betting, you use the dice to meet someone's bluff or to increase what is at stake. This can escalate a situation from being simply a verbal spar to a physical fight and, the ultimate in this setting, a gun battle. Each level of escalation has additional risks as well as possible benefits for the character in terms of "fallout," experience, injury, or death.

Although we got to a resolution of the town's problem, as I told Jim in the post-mortem, I'm not necessarily sure that the choices we made were the right ones, even if they seemed so at the time, and that may be the power of such games. To take a morally ambiguous situation, it forces one to look at the problem both as oneself and as one's character, to try and understand not only what you would do but how would your character react. Too often role-playing games gloss over these kinds of hard decisions by making the game's goals fairly clear-cut although the method to obtain them are not. I can't see Dogs in the Vineyard taking the high school set by storm , but it's a worthy system for more experienced or jaded players.