Dogs in the Vineyard

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Thu Jun 23, 2011 9:21 pm

ditv is potentially workable in that it lets the DMF archetype work alongside the god wizard archetype. the DMF just laughs when the wizard calls down a rain of meteors and then kills an army by author fiat

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Thu Jun 23, 2011 9:51 pm

Vincent Baker certainly does seem to be supernaturally charming. It's a big part of why his forums aren't that useful. A huge percentage of posters there are his real-life friends, and the conversation is absolutely full of in-jokes, weird dialect, stories about games played personally with him, and so on. Obviously he's a very good MC and none of the problems with his games come out when he's running them.

Also, if you read his actual game-books, they're full of shout-outs to random screen names. Like literally in the middle of a rules section of AW you'll read "Shreyas explains it like this:" and then quote his friend's paraphrase of his own rules.

Nihlin · Post by **Nihlin** » Thu Jun 23, 2011 10:38 pm

Orion wrote:Vincent Baker certainly does seem to be supernaturally charming. It's a big part of why his forums aren't that useful. A huge percentage of posters there are his real-life friends, and the conversation is absolutely full of in-jokes, weird dialect, stories about games played personally with him, and so on. Obviously he's a very good MC and none of the problems with his games come out when he's running them.

Also, if you read his actual game-books, they're full of shout-outs to random screen names. Like literally in the middle of a rules section of AW you'll read "Shreyas explains it like this:" and then quote his friend's paraphrase of his own rules.

Shreyas isn't even a screen name, that's his real first name. I'm pretty sure all of Baker's shoutouts are real people.

On a side note, Shreyas wrote a wuxia game that requires having a knife on the table, preferably a dagger. I played a playtest version. The blade starts out sheathed and covered with a cloth. As things get more heated and you start rolling dice, you uncover the knife, then unsheath it, and eventually you're stabbing the fuck out of people's character sheets as you off them in-game. There were mechanics for...stuff... but I remember pretty much nothing else about the game other than the knife.

Wait, no, I think I might have cut a kid's hand off to bring him enlightenment. Anyway, the knife was the star of the show. Did I mention that PvP was highly encouraged? At least during the version I played, the MC was basically there to facilitate an orgy of charsheet destruction.