Dogs Versus Shadows

Playing Dogs in the Vineyard recently, I had a sudden realization about how it works. I mean, it’s there in the book, plain as day, but it took having a certain design-focused view to get it.

The realization is like this: Traits and Relationships in Dogs work like Keys or BITs do in Shadows of Yesterday and Burning Wheel. In one way, they work better, in theory: the Traits are good for driving conflicts in a particular direction, and Relationships drive the story in a particular direction.

Now on the one hand, Traits do this without explicit reward. If you hit the Trait, you get the dice. The bigger the dice, the more you want to hit the Trait. So that’s the reinforcement on the Trait.

But it gets weird if Traits are too broad, or if you don’t understand how your Traits work when you make your character.

And I find myself dubious about how well Relationships work with the Dogs premise of making decisions of morality. Does it make sense to commit to a Relationship with a character in a town that you might not be back to? In some ways, it might make more sense to relate to the other PCs, or to organizations (The Dogs, the Faith, the TA, the Mountain People), or sins or demons. Which then does serve as a guide for the story.

All of this musing has gotten me off the track. What I’m specifically fascinated by is that Dogs manages to accomplish what The Shadow of Yesterday does very directly with Keys and XP, in a very elegant, indirect way.