labcats | Doing Things One Shouldn't Do to a Dog

Actually, most of the systems hacking is legit. It's just the use of the system that's breaking the big rule.

I'm running a pbem game, Cthulhu High, the third iteration of my original Cthulhupunk game. The Lovecraftian horrors, by and large, are gone for the next few centuries. The world has begun to recover from the damage caused by these horrors, a plague, unrest, and so on, and several other threats have been quashed. The focus of the game is on strange students at a strange school

The system I had planned to use is Over the Edge. One of my players fell in love with the Dogs in the Vineyard system, and some of us have used it. Most of the time, we use consensus-fiat, or what Vincent Baker calls Vigorous Creative Agreement.

The first important point is this: NO ONE EVER HAS TO USE DITV IN THIS GAME!

That point is on our wiki, in the page about systems, in all caps, as above. I am very, very serious about this point. Players, including me, signed up for this game on the understanding that, to the degree we'd be rolling dice, we'd be using the OTE rules.

The second important point is this: We are breaking the one rule that Vincent Baker, who wrote Dogs in the Vineyard, thinks should never be broken.

Dogs in the Vineyard is about a group of roving lawmen / priests going from town to town, digging up dirt, passing judgment, and administering punishments. There are rules for creating a town, and the cycle of the game calls for the PCs to travel from town to town. Vincent is very supportive of people who use different settings, but he is adamant that the town creation rules must be used.

I think I am beginning to understand why, although I am not sure if I can put it into words. But I think that I am beginning to get a glimpse of how the system breaks down if one does not use town structure. Technically, I think we are not using the DitV system so much as some of the mechanics from DitV.

That said, while trying to stat out some NPCs in DitV terms, I discovered a couple of oddities, thanks to this strategy page for DitV. Because of it, I started writing down not just the Stat values, but also the Conflict values.

The levels we were using were these:

Talking = Smarts (Acuity) + Heart
Physical = Heart + Body
Scuffling = Body + Will
"Real" Fighting = Will + Smarts

I took as my baseline character a more or less normal character, Tadeusz, who had the following Stats:

Smarts (Acuity) 3d6
Body 5d6
Heart 3d6
Will 4d6

This means that he has:

Talking: 6d6
Physical: 8d6
Scuffle: 9d6
Real Fighting: 7d6

I looked at other PCs and NPCs, focusing on the Real Fighting value.

Tadeusz (originally an NPC, now

daftnewt's PC) has 7d6 Real Fighting
Ambrose, NPC, supposedly at a real disadvantage to Tadeusz, has 7d6 Real Fighting
Reijn (

mylescorcoran's PC, shapeshifter) has 8d6 Real Fighting
S'kei (daftnewt's PC, serpentboy) has 8d6 Real Fighting
Aleksei (NPC, 16-year-old vampire in a 10-year-old body) has 8d6 Real Fighting

Okay, so Ambrose is a bit buffer than intended, but... not necessarily a problem. The boy vampire and a couple of PCs having more raw ability at this, before taking escalation and traits into effect, not really a problem. Then, I looked at

ebartley's PC, Brooke.

Now, ebartley will probably never use DitV resolution, and thought long and hard about even statting up her PCs up in DitV. But, she decided to go ahead and do it.

So, 12-year-old Brooke, our young geek genious who's probably never been in a real fight in her life, has 9d6 in Real Fighting.

I wish I'd seen the look on ebartley's face when, at my urging, she looked up Brooke's stats and calculated the value for Real Fighting.

Worse yet, I found myself unable to make a Brick as weak in Talking as I'd wanted. I started statting out a werewolf student, using the Complicated History, giving him 15d6 in Stat dice. I divided these as follows:

Smarts (Acuity) 4d6
Heart 2d6
Body 3d6
Will 6d6

This gave him:

Talking 6d6
Physical (not fighting) 5d6
Scuffling 9d6
Real Fighting 10d6

I would have preferred to have my werewolf NPC wind up with 6d6 in Physical (not fighting) and 5d6 in Talking. But, I simply could not do this, because I wanted to keep the 9 in Scuffling and the 10 in Real Fighting.

I didn't mind him being less effective at Physical (not fighting) things like Flirting (physical) or Intimidation than one would expect. Okay, it's weird, but not really a problem. But, because he is good at Real Fighting, he must be better at Talking than I had intended. All Bricks are on the Debating Team??

When I explained all of this to

mnemex, complete with the helpful diagram showing how the stats interacted, he agreed that it was a mapping problem and suggested redefining the levels as follows:

Heart + Smarts (Acuity) is Talking
Heart + Body is Physical

Body + Will is Fighting. "Fighting" means "Any physical fighting". If it's gone past just physical, it's Fighting.

Will + Acuity is Harmful Words. "Harmful Words" are words meant to inflict consequences, not just persuade people; gossip, words meant to mortify, or get people in trouble, or get them to lose their cool.

The most lethal thing in high school is a cutting remark. Enough nasty talking to the right people can get someone kicked out of school -- or drive them to a nervous breakdown, as happened offstage with one NPC. Clearly, she took too much fallout to remain a student.

mnemex also noted:

Under this setup, each stat has its own place in the scheme:

Acuity is your understanding of other people, your ability to understand what will get them to see your way -- whether you have to hurt them or not. Basically, strength of mind and ability to win social conflicts, serious or no.

Body is your ability with physical stuff -- strength of body, not perception, and ability to win physical conflicts.

Will is your ability to follow through when it counts -- getting your goals even when they hurt others.

Heart is your ability to get your way without risking harm to others.

Now, I'm not sure how a game that actually used DitV in toto, but with the high school setting would work -- what the town-equivalent would be. What we have hammered out does work for our purposes, but we are using it very much at our own peril. By ignoring the town aspect and all related baggage -- hierarchy of sins or equivalent, logical periods for experience, and so on -- we are doing things that the system quite simply is not intended to do.