Small Press, Big Game
It’s a status that Vincent manages to be simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable with. On one level, Vincent realizes that his second game, Dogs in the Vineyard, is generally regarded as one of the top five of all small press games ever and one of the best selling of all time.
On another level, he still seems more than a little amazed when praise is heaped upon him. He considers himself just another guy who doesn’t want people to treat him like a star. In fact, he hates it when people are afraid to ask him questions online or approach him at cons. There is a deep part of him that feels he’s just another guy.
Just another guy who wrote Dogs in the Vineyard.
But, before there was Dogs, there was Kill Puppies for Satan. Like you may have guessed, the game is about the wanton murder of innocent puppies in order to curry favor with the dark lord. Good times ensue ...
Given it premise, it might be tempting to dismiss Kill Puppies for Satan as nothing more than the typical violent role playing game. However, Vincent explains that the game is, at its heart, a critique of those typical violent role playing games which permit/encourage death, destruction, and murder as avenues to power. Sadly, it’s also, Vincent says, “a product of its time” and has largely fallen out of favor as the games it focused on have, themselves, fallen out of print.
The game did well at the time, but Vincent really came into his own in 2004 when he released Dogs in the Vineyard. On its surface, Dogs is a game about teenaged quasi-Mormon Paladins dispensing justice with guns in an alternate Old West. Unpacked a little, players take on the role of Dogs, teenaged peacekeepers anointed by God Himself to travel the countryside and root out sin. And kill it.
This simple premise leads to a game with layers of complexity. On one level, it can be played as a problem solving/action game. However, it’s only once questions of morality start to figure into the game that it really gets interesting. Fortunately, moral questions abound in Dogs, most of them surrounding questions about the Dogs’ God and their religion.
The questions are not so much about sin, which abounds in our world and the world of Dogs in the Vineyard. Everything we consider sinning: lying, cheating, stealing, adultery, etc. is a sin in Dogs. The questions start when the characters, who have not even reached the age of twenty to walk into town armed with a gun, and cleanse the town of that sin.
Dogs are judge, jury, and executioner. It falls to them to interpret a town’s problems and how God says they should be taken care of. It also falls of them to apply punishments. Therein lies the conflict in the game. Players may see the law differently and may decide who is guilty and who needs to be punished differently. More often than not, the Dogs stop cleansing the town and end up cleansing each other.
After the phenomenal success of Dogs in the Vineyard, it took several years before Vincent released another game. In 2007, he finally released a game called Poison’d, which is a game about pirates who must trust each other even though their captain has been poisoned. It’s a game which leads to (and to a certain extent) rewards acts of brutality as player characters torture, rape, and kill non-player characters and other player characters alike.
While Dogs in the Vineyard was Vincent’s most famous game, Poison’d might have been his most fortunate. “You don’t ever want to be the guy who has to write the game to follow Dogs in the Vineyard,” Vincent said. To that end, shortly after Dogs in the Vineyard, he started working on In A Wicked Age, a game he would eventually release in 2008. However, he felt blocked by the tremendous expectation and pressure to live up to the reputation he had built for himself.
The block would stay with him until a random comment on an Internet forum. The post was a challenge: Vincent was to write a game about cooking. Vincent took the challenge, which turned into a game about being poisoned. Which turned into a game about pirate brutality after the captain had been poisoned. Poison’d practically wrote itself and was met with great acclaim. In fact, one person called it the game “he uses to introduce new players to role playing.” Not something one would do with an inferior product.
Not only was Poison’d good, it also freed his block and he finished In A Wicked Age for release at Dreamation in 2008. In A Wicked Age is a swords and sorcery game, which uses Oracles (short sentences) to both imply a setting for the game and give players a range of choices for the characters they can play in the game. Characters then are put into situations where their interests come into conflict, leading to the rolling the dice.
Of all his games, In A Wicked Age has had the most varied reviews. Vincent admits that it was written for a certain audience and may not be as approachable to players outside that core audience. This has led to some gamers feeling the text was incomplete. Expect a new edition to come along which will fix these issues, though no concrete plans have been made.
All of these games are worth playing on their own. Still, it’s interesting to take a step back and look for themes amongst Vincent’s entire body of work. One theme that arises time and time again is conflicts of interest between players. This is by design. Vincent says “The only reason to have rules is to take the unity of players’ interest into conflict of interest in the game. The games do that in a more sustained way than a freeform game.” Therefore, you know when you crack open a Vincent Baker game, you will be given a character who believes something strongly and then is forced to defend that belief, usually at someone else’s expense.
Vincent also, as Ron Edwards once observed, explores questions of morality in groups he believes are immoral. This includes those who would kill for power (or for what is Right) and pirates who rape, murder and kill. This is also true of In A Wicked Age, where characters’ behavior morality is driven by the randomly selected Oracles.
Mixing morality and conflict of interest makes sense. Because Vincent’s goal is to give players a reason to go into conflict, there is no better way to get them fighting than to argue over morality. If all the characters cared about was getting more xp or power points, he would be right back to the types of games he was satirizing in Kill Puppies for Satan.
From top to bottom, Vincent Baker’s body of work is groundbreaking and brilliant. Its creator is a intelligent, thoughtful, and a very skilled game designer. All of his games are worth trying, but if you only manage to play one, play Dogs in the Vineyard. It’s worth it for its mechanics and for the types of stories it produces. However, once you play one game, you will want to play more.
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