This game was brought to my attention by Betsy, Hottest IT Attorney in Los Angeles. I saw it on the list at PegCon, but there are two kinds of people at cons: the ones who tend to shy away from rules systems or milieus they don’t know unless the listing says “beginners welcome/you don’t need to know anything to play,” and the ones who will show up at a game called “Jorune for Experts” asking hey, I’ve never played this before, what’s it about? I’m in the first category. In any case, Betsy is smart as well as hot, so when she raved to me about Dogs in the Vineyard‘s system I figured I would pick it up.

It’s a bit like Esoterrorists in that you could lift the game system out and ignore the world setting — which is exactly what was done at the PegCon game — but the world setting is pretty neat in and of itself. The rules are written in a conversational style by D. Vincent Baker, who very clearly loves the game, loves Westerns and thinks his players are the bee’s knees.

Dogs is a fantasy Western world, set in an alternate-universe Utah Territory, among people very much like the Mormon pioneers of the mid-19th century. The PCs are circuit riders, trained in the Faith, going around to the settlements and communities to solve problems. “Wait, so I’m going to play a Mormon Inquisitor?!” No, not really. The PCs can certainly shoot people if they have to, but they’re not rooting out heresy; their goal is to help people, not blow their heads off if they stray from the path of the Faithful.  This can mean an awful lot of talking, investigating and working with NPCs, instead of ending the game in a shootout.

The game mechanics are a bidding system tied to traits, relationships and objects. The more important something is, the more dice you’ve got in a pool at the beginning of the game. To resolve issues players roll the dice in their pool, and then bid, a bit like poker. Anyone effected can counter, raise the stakes, switch to an entirely different method with different abilities (“T’hell with all this talking, I’m gonna sock him in the jaw”), or win in a way that creates fallout for them later. There are no limits on how players can do this. As Betsy described the game she was in, one player escalated a conflict over “will this NPC get changed into a vampire?” by Raising and announcing “It’s two days later and she’s already been bitten,” and the timeline going from what-happened to flashbacks back and forth for an hour as the players roleplayed their dice down to nubs.

I’m already thinking about how much fun it would be to use the game system to run Grimjack.

You can get it from their online store, and when I got a paper copy it was shipped to me quickly and with no fuss

Well, Jonathan Tweet just managed to prove LeGuin right. Robin Laws tries to moderate the dumbth of this post a little, but good grid, I thought the “but girls just don’t naturally WANT to play D&D cuz they’re girls!” thing was something most gamers got out of their system after, oh, losing their virginity or so. I didn’t realize there was a kind of middle-aged Saturn Return on this one.

I already commented on Tweet’s blog, but for the slow or LJ-averse: “they just don’t want to” is a convenient excuse. It means never having to think about whether something about, I don’t know, behavior puts females off gaming; much less stressful to pretend instead that was fixed in our genes for all time hundreds of thousands of years ago, as Early Man strode across the savannah with his spear in a Museum of Natural History-approved manner, hunting for wildebeest. (No doubt these thrifty hunters carved primitive 20-siders from animal bone.)

I’m old enough to remember when gaming-store owners gave me funny looks, instead of helping me find the latest Trail of Cthulhu supplement; when I literally had guys crowd around my gaming table at a con staring at me, not because I had a nice rack or killer boots, but because I was a female DM and such a thing had never before been heard of. I rather like not being the only girl in the room. I just wish clueless dorks would quit fucking that up with their half-assed evo-psych intellectual masturbation.

(“Ma’am,” says the concerned GameStop clerk as I hand him my $5 for pre-order, “you know that this is an M game?” I’m not sure whether he thought I was buying it for Kid Peligro, who was impatiently waiting for me to pay for a DS game, or whether he thought that as a mommy, I would faint on finding out that my new MMORPG had explicit bloodspatter and quests involving a whorehouse.)

I obviously haven’t had time to play it much, but I give it a D- on implementation given the lousy launch and backfilling on things like buddy passes, and an A on flavor and gameplay. It clearly wasn’t ready for launch. Surprisingly, though, they did a fantastic job on capturing the flavor of Conan. And there is a surprising lack of d00dz on the PvE servers. Yes, you can run around topless, but nobody does. Amazing.