Friday we continued our Galactic game. Enjoyable enough, aside from my having misplaced my character sheet. Fortunately, most of the info was up on Doyce’s wiki, but not some of the accumulated tallies against various things. Which is an interesting thought I’d not considered to date: while there are some in-game advantages to having a dynamic character sheet (something that the player feels they’re
contributing to as the track various things), the big dis-ad is when the charsheet gets lost or misplaced. And given that Galactic has sooooo many things to track, that’s even more of a problem.
At any rate, some amusing scenes, the best of which was Margie’s captain, Boyd, being captured by primitive emu-people. My own encounter trying to establish credibility with arms dealers was also entertaining, even if I nearly got very badly hurt.
We’re putting the Galactic game on hiatus a bit — it’s a playtest, after all, and Doyce hasn’t gotten any feedback from the writer for some weeks, rather than play with some not-working-quite-right mechanics that are going to get changed, we’re going to let the rules catch up a bit. That’s the right decision, I think, though it raises the issue of What Next?
Sunday afternoon/evening, we continued Doyce’s Dogs in the Vineyard game, in the town of “fair Virtue.” Bigger and bloodier conflicts awaited, as Jackie and I finally hooked up with Hezekiah Cooper, the paterfamilias of the suspiciously-lucky-and-powerful Cooper family, and Randy and Margie bumped into Cyrus Cooper, Hezkiah’s mad dog younger brother.
Okay, problem the first — I had problems coming up with a straightforward hook for confronting Hezekiah to learn more about the previous troubles in the town, twenty years ago. That’s a combo of both my being polite (I don’t usually grill people when I’m a guest, sipping lemonade on their front porch) and my character, Suzannah, still being a bit uncertain of herself and her authority.
We got past that, and managed to extract at least some information before he bailed out of the conversation. There’s more (obviously) than meets the eye going on.
Meanwhile, after a long chat with two other supporting characters (Beulah the shopkeeper’s wife and Thaddeus, her son and, as it turns out, one of the “star-cross’d lovers” in town, who should come wandering down the street than Cyrus, looking to get Thaddeus to draw on him or, once the secret was out, looking to gun him (and anyone around him) down in the street.
Big battle ensues, with callow Thaddeus, wily gunslinger-turned-Dog Eli (Randy), and fast-talking blessed-earth-toting Destiny (Margie) squaring off against Cyrus — who, everyone agreed, was under demonic influence, and, thus, even more formidable. A great deal of gunfire, knife fighting, and blessed-earth tossing later, Destiny was badly injured, but still upright, Eli was even worse off and healed only by Destiny’s intervention, Thaddeus was almost untouched, and Cyrus … well,
Cyrus was pretty close to dead, too, but Destiny made an attempt at healing him, briefly, before he passed on.
Well, that lances the obvious boil on the town, but there’s little doubt there’s a lot more to go to figure out where the (social) sickness in the place is coming from. Looking forward to the next game (not, at least, for 3 weeks).
It’s interesting contrasting the two games, since I got to be involved in significant conflicts in both of them (two conflicts in DitV, in fact, since I got to roll for Thaddeus). The advantage has to go to DitV, in my opinion, where the conflict felt more personal and perilous. I don’t know if that’s a matter of different “feels” for the character or the setting, or a different (or more integtrated) sort of resource pool for DitV. I think it’s the more (though not entirely) latter,
since the different sorts of things that can be grabbed into the conflict in Galactic (archetypes, gear, red shirts, ship traits, personality bits, etc.) feel more abstract than the more personal stuff hauled into a DitV fight. After the conflicts on Sunday, I felt exhilarated; after the one on Friday, I was simply pleased.
Of course, I was a lot more tired on Friday, so that might have made a difference, too.
Good stuff, anyway — good players, and a good GM. And I’m percolating ideas for a Dogs game of my own …