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I heard about this game in the forums on RPG.net and after reading a bit about the resolution system, I decided to order a copy. We just finished playtesting it, so I wanted to write up a description of the experience.

First of all, physically, it's a 101-page softcover book in the "digest" format, meaning that it's about as big as a copy of Reader's Digest. It has a very impressive front cover illustration, showing two Dogs in their ceremonial quilted coats and looking appropriately grim and ominous. It's a very nice pic, which makes it kind of a pity that there aren't any other illustrations inside. I've heard that it's designed to actually resemble the way that books were laid out in the time period in which it's set, but I can't really judge how well they accomplished that.

The interior definitely looks like a small press game (which, of course, it is), with a few pages that are mostly white space (new chapters always start at the top of a new page), but it's quite readable. The author's writing style is engaging and sometimes even humorous (we adored the description of the Dog who had his mouth washed out with soap by the Dog elders). The editing seemed pretty good to me; a few little typos or grammatically awkward passages, but very well done overall. There's no index, but my paper copy came with some additional printed sheets (on full-size paper) that summarized most of the game rules quite nicely.

The premise of the game is that the PCs are all young members of the "Order Set Apart to the Preservation of the Faith and the Faithful." This is a religious order that keeps the peace and protects the Faithful in a setting based on the old West. The Faith in the game's setting is largely inspired by the early Mormon beliefs, but really, you can make it as historically accurate or inaccurate as you like. The core premise of the setting is that the PCs are the religious and secular "lawmen" of the land, protecting the Faithful from evil and punishing sinners. And towns need protecting. Since the Faith is, in the game setting, the "one true faith", Faithful towns are largely protected from harm... so long as they stay free of any major sins. Once someone does stray too far, though, the King of Life (the book's way of referring to their deity) withdraws his protection from them, and evil can move in.

And usually will. There are untold demons at large in the world, filling men's thoughts with sin and temptation and wreaking evil upon the righteous. They usually can't affect towns that follow the Faith, but once a town strays, they pounce. Their goal will be to lead the town away from the true religion by helping sinners and hurting the remaining Faithful and their ultimate goal is always to bring about murders. It's the job of God's Watchdogs to travel from town to town, rooting out sin before it gets out of hand and to pronounce God's justice on those who have gone too far.

Thus the rules could very easily be used for almost any setting with similar ideas, but honestly, the setting info here is one of the real strengths of the game. In just a few pages, the author manages to convey a ton of useful info, down to details like what their clothes are made of, what sort of guns are available, and how they make new bullets. It even includes what sort of things are considered proper social behavior, broken up by age and gender. For example, it's expected that young girls will be afraid of spiders and mice... one who wasn't might be seen as excessively tomboyish. But as a grown woman, they're also expected to grow out of those fears.

Character creation has some really novel elements, particularly your Accomplishment. After you make a character, you have to come up with something that they wanted to accomplish during their training. Then you break out the dice and resolve whether or not your character managed to do it. They'll get a d6 trait either way... either one that reflects them pulling off that accomplishment, or one that represents their failure. Since a "negative" trait can be just as useful as a "positive" one, you won't be crippled if you fail... it just adds character and depth to your background. I really liked the whole idea of the Accomplishment, and I might steal it for use in other games.

Character Stats: Making a Dog

Here's the basics of the system. Folks have four main stats, which are represented by pools of 2 or more d6 (so the minimum stat for a PC is 2d6). Stats can only ever be d6s, so increasing them always means adding more d6s.

They also have traits, relationships, and equipment. These are also rated in pools of dice, but they can be larger (or smaller) than d6s. Traits, in particular, are very freeform... you could have a trait like "Rides like the wind 2d10" or "Hates the cold d6". The only real guideline for traits is making sure that they fit into the setting.

One PC might have "Crack shot 2d8" and another PC "I love my old rifle 2d8". "Crack shot" is obviously a little better in most cases (since it applies to using any ranged weapon), but notice... if some opponent were trying to wrestle their gun away, "Crack shot" might not apply, but "I love my old rifle" definitely would.

Relationships represent your ties to other people or places, whether friendly or not. You can include them in any contest where the thing you have a relationship with is working along side, against you, or is at stake in the contest. Equipment dice apply when you use the item in question.

Please note... the author isn't really concerned about "game balance". For example, for each piece of important equipment your character has, it gets a rating from d4 (utter crap) to 2d8 (really big, impressive and well-made). There's no limit to how much equipment you can have or what quality it is other than keeping it reasonable. So there's no rules penalty if you want to rate all of your stuff at 2d8 and take extras of everything.

Conflict Resolution: Raises, Reversing the Blow, Blocks and Taking the Blow

Here's what's arguably the niftiest and most problematic part of Dogs in the Vineyard: conflict resolution.

It works like this. First, you establish What's at Stake. Whoever finally wins the contest will get to decide the result of this question. It could be as simple as "Does the bad guy get away again?" to as abstract as "Can you convince the angry boy to give up on vengeance and forgive his father's killers?"

Next you figure out what stats apply. This is usually a pair of stats, like Acuity & Heart for talking or Acuity & Will for gunplay. After that, everyone rolls all of the d6s for those stats (remember, stats are rated as 2 or more d6s), plus any additional traits, relationships or equipment that would apply. All of these dice get left out for the moment.

Once everyone has figured out what dice are involved and rolled them all, whoever initiated the conflict will make a Raise. This means that they pick two dice, add them together, and narrate some action that at least one other person involved in the conflict can't ignore.

Brother William says, "Vengeance won't settle anything, lad," and quotes from the Book of Life about turning the other cheek and not compounding sin with sin. He picks a die showing a 2 and one showing an 4, giving his Raise a strength of 6.

The target of the action (or targets, if it could reasonably affect multiple people) has to give up dice totalling that amount or higher. If they can stop it with a single die, that's a Reversal and they get to use that die as part of their counter-action.

Brother Timothy puts out a single d6 with a 6 showing to Reverse the Blow, meaning that he easily turns this attempt back on his opponent. He says that the Dogs didn't protect his dad; if they'd done their job right, he wouldn't have to avenge anyone. He picks another die, one showing an 8, and combines it with the die that he spent to stop the attack, for a total strength of 14.

If the target spends two dice to stop the attack, it's Blocked and has no further effect. If he has to spend three or more dice to stop it, then he only partially blocks it and will suffer negative effects later. This is referred to as Taking the Blow.

Brother William winces; it's true, Timothy's dad wouldn't have died if the Dogs hadn't been too busy following a red herring to realize the demon's true intentions. He spends 3 dice to block the attack (a 5, a 3 and a 6) and so he'll take Fallout later. Because he had to use 3 dice to stop it, he'll take 3 dice of Fallout. Because it was a social encounter, the Fallout dice will all be d4s.

Brother William concedes that the boy's words are true, but reminds him of his poor, widowed mother and baby sister. Who will take care of them if the boy is dead or rotting in a Territorial Authority jail? His player puts his two biggest dice into this gambit, for a total of 16.

If your remaining dice don't total enough to stop the attack, or if you're unwilling to take more Fallout, you end up conceding the contest.

Brother Timothy's remaining dice total up to 15, so he's toast. He falls down blubbering and begs the Dog for forgiveness. Since Brother William won, he gets to decide the result (does the boy give up on his quest for vengeance) and says that the boy has realized that the living are more important than the dead. They head back to town and the contest is over.

There are some additional elements. For example, you can Escalate by switching to a different form of combat. For example, the kid mentioned above could have turned his rifle on the Dog and Escalated the combat into gun conflict. Then they would have both added in the appropriate dice for their physical stats and the quality of their guns, plus any traits that applied (assuming that the Dog was willing to shoot back, of course; if the kid Escalated but the Dog refused to use his own gun, the kid might have a big advantage).

Afterwards, Brother William needs to roll his 3d4 Fallout to see how deeply the kid's words hurt him. He'll roll them all, then take the top two. If they total 8 or more, he'll suffer longterm effects. Since they were just d4s, he'll probably just feel bad for awhile or suffer a 1 die penalty in his next contest.

Social contests cause d4 Fallout dice, but guns inflict d10 Fallout, so gun combat is a good bit more serious. Here's another way in which the game sacrifices traditional balance for roleplaying- the player decides what form the Fallout takes. They could even acquire a new trait like "Feels guilty about the death of Brother Timothy's dad d4", arguably getting stronger because of it. You can't die unless your Fallout strength (the sum of the top two Fallout dice) is 16 or more, so death is rare unless guns are involved... and even then medical aid will usually save you.

Playtest Summary

Our game had a former diabolist from the East who was trying to leave his sinful ways behind, a bitter female Dog whose faith was lacking and who joined the Dogs solely to please a more faithful friend, a Mountain Folk scout and rider who had converted and the child of a family of shopkeepers.

I wrote up a fairly short and simple adventure for the evening... it was really just intended to force the PCs to make several contests and try out the system, so it wasn't quite as "meaty" as I'd want for a full session. Basically, there was a Faithful town where several men had started slipping away to the nearest non-Faithful community to participate in the cockfights being run there.

The cockfights were actually being run by a demon-possessed crook, who used his powers to influence the results. Thus, the relatively innocent townsfolk won big the first time that they engaged in betting or brought their own roosters to compete... and got hooked. That left the whole town vulnerable, so he was inflicting a famine on their animals... everything except for the roosters tended to be sickly and weak. This encouraged the locals to turn more and more to gambling in order to stay afloat, which led to more sin and deception.

Anyway, there wasn't much to the plot. The PCs showed up, spoke with the Steward and his two wives, and ended up engaging in a social contest to convince him that there really was a problem with the town (he didn't want to believe it). Once they succeeded in that, they were able to get the townsfolk to open up a little... the wife of one of the gamblers gave them hints and the PCs ended up pretending to leave town and lying in wait to see where the sinners were going.

The second contest was tracking them, and the PCs lost (mostly because I only let one PC handle it- if they'd been able to pool all of their resources they would have beaten the locals easily). So the sinners realized that they were being tailed and started heading back to town.

The final contest of the evening turned out to be the PCs stopping them and browbeating the truth out of them.

After that, they pronounced judgement on them. Since the Dogs weren't particularly vicious and didn't consider gambling a really serious crime, they took away all but one rooster (and that one a crappy, not-good-for-fighting one) from each participant and gave them and any winnings to folks who had been hurt worst by the demonic influences.

I had wanted them to go on to the cockfighting ring and get into a gun combat with the possessed ringleader of it all, but they ended up settling the issue without involving folks outside their jurisdiction at all.

Anyway, that was the playtest- folks liked the heavy roleplaying emphasis of the setting, and liked the fact that the back-and-forth action of the system encouraged still more roleplaying. But they didn't care as much for the actual mechanics. I think our group needs more balance and rules than Dogs in the Vineyard provides.

In particular, it seemed like PCs ganging up on folks meant that victory was inevitable; you could easily get an extra 8-10 dice per PC and thus simply run the target out of dice even if you rolled crappily. Furthermore, the barebones advancement system means that someone who always applies their advancement to the same trait will quickly end up with a trait of 5d10 or more, dominating any situation where that trait applies. It's especially bad for really broad traits, like "I love to talk things out," that you can apply to a huge variety of situations.

Also, while the rules imply that d4 traits are generally supposed to represent weaknesses and things that get you in trouble, in play they don't. If two characters are basically equal and you give one of them an extra four d4 traits that apply, he's gonna kick butt. Since one of the common effects of Fallout is to acquire a new d4 trait, my players quickly figured out that taking low-end Fallout can make your character stronger... so I had folks doing stuff like "he's making a social attack, so I'll 'take the blow' with 4 dice in order to get 4d4 Fallout" when they could have blocked it easily.

There's not much guidance for what makes a reasonable trait... so we had one player who took "I love to settle things by talking" at 3d10 and pretty much wanted to apply that trait to every single verbal conflict. Since every time he gets an advancement he could bump that up by a die, it could easily reach 6d10 or more in just a couple of sessions. So, honestly, if game balance is a major concern for you, you'll probably want to dump the system and use your favorite set of rules instead... or add a ton of house rules about what sort of traits are acceptable and which ones you can improve.

I give the game a 4 for Style and a 4 for Substance, with some serious caveats. If you want rule-enforced game balance or lots of pretty interior art, this is not the game for you. It's a very roleplay-oriented, rules-light system that's heavy on setting and atmosphere and tosses game balance out almost entirely.

To sum up: Dogs in the Vineyard is a definite gem in the rough for gamers who prefer more free-form games. It could use a little more polish and the system is awkward in places, but it provides a great mechanism for encouraging back-and-forth actions and events. If your group wants hard-and-fast rules and values game balance, though, you won't like this system, but the setting might still be useful to you. Take a good look before deciding if it's appropriate for your group... this is not a traditional-style RPG.

The hardcopy version is $22 and the PDF download only $14. They're both available at http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/dogsources.html and the publisher even has a forum for it at the Forge.