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August 28, 2006
Plans for the Next Session
We've been playing a lot of Dogs in the Vineyard recently, and it's been good. (In fact, the last session we had our first unambiguously no-fooling happy ending.) Then, this morning on rpg.net, I saw a thread about whether all games can start in media res. The thread is kind of a hairball, but I started thinking about whether it's possible to run DitV this way. At first, I thought, "Nah, the players need to learn the town before they can pass judgement", but then I realized I was wrong. So the next town is going to start with the players standing in the town square, with people on their knees pleading for their lives, and then we're going to run backwards to the moment when they ride into town.
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Comments
Sweet. Very Battlestar Galactica. Are you actually going to run backwards or are you going to jump back to the arrival and then run forward to the town square?
You could be vague at first about exactly whose life the townspeople were pleading for, if you wanted to give yourself more wiggle room in the way the story went. There might even be a way to nest the whole session inside a single conflict with flashbacks. I was rereading the part in DitV about how the GM can set the stakes of a conflict as "he cuts off your head" and imagining a session that begins: "The lynch mob tightens the noose around your neck. The hangman kicks your horse out from under you. Go."
Posted by: Rob MacD at Aug 28, 2006 12:52:27 PM
Is there any concern that this really limits the players' ability to choose their own course of action? I mean, this is Dogs, so the odds that they WON'T be shooting somebody are pretty slim, but you may find that some players resent feeling as though the "final scene" is already written and they have to act in ways that will get them to that scene.
Posted by: Chris at Aug 28, 2006 1:42:32 PM
Cool. Ginger started a town in her campaign where the players rode into town and faced a mob that was about to hang someone. Murder or justice? It certainly set the mood very quickly.
Posted by: Michael at Aug 28, 2006 2:14:28 PM
I'd really like to hear how this goes. I bet it'll go great, but I'd like to hear!
Posted by: Vincent at Aug 28, 2006 2:22:20 PM
I'm thinking actually backwards, scene-by-scene in Memento style. Happily, the conflict framing rules pretty much shut down the railroad, since the players all have to happily buy in to any conflict. The interesting thing is running backwards in time, so as long as we're setting each conflict before the last one, we're good.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Aug 28, 2006 6:37:11 PM
Sounds like a wonderful idea. I'm working on a game right now that starts at the end, and then jumps back scene by scene to the start. I'm having a little trouble justifying to people why I can't just tell the story forwards though ...!
Posted by: Andrew Kenrick at Aug 28, 2006 7:10:13 PM
This sounds deeply neat, and with my Dogs game starting up pretty soon, I'm eager to hear how it goes.
Posted by: James at Aug 29, 2006 10:42:02 AM
Hi Andrew: I'm afraid I can't help you, since I think what you're doing is cool enough that it justifies itself; I can think of no further justification. :)
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Aug 29, 2006 2:43:15 PM
I posted a report of how the game went over here, which I figured people would want to know how the experiment went.
Posted by: Nick Wedig at Sep 10, 2006 4:49:16 PM
Sounds very neat... Of course, another approach to the In Medias Res idea is an amnesia idea- where the characters must piece together what has happened to them thus far- or even simply one where the characters start in the thick of things and get to decide for themselves how they got there- kind of like a more elaborate character background, except the background deposits the character in the middle of a battle instead of at an Inn table.
Posted by: StevenL at Sep 12, 2006 8:37:19 PM
