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