Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard occupies a strange place in TTRPG history. The game’s thematic content relating to Mormonism in the wild west was unusual in itself, and it was the reason the game ultimately was removed from circulation by Baker. Games disappear all the time, but because Vincent Baker was an acclaimed designer even before he created Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard has gained a certain level of mystique. Of course, we live in the age of the internet. If you really want to find a PDF of Dogs in the Vineyard, you can. But there’s a newer option that divorces the mechanics of Dogs in the Vineyard from its setting.

A designer named KN Obaugh received permission from Vincent Baker to make a genericized version of Dogs in the Vineyard, which he named DOGS. Yes, the S is capitalized, GURPS-style; the extremely sweaty full name of the system is Dice pool and mOral predicament based Generic roleplaying System.

I could’ve read Dogs in the Vineyard before reading the book, but I decided not to. Games can sometimes poorly explain things, and I didn’t want Baker’s game to “fill in the blanks” if Obaugh’s writing was unclear. I went into DOGS more or less completely blind.

After reading the brief tome, 44 pages excluding an included setting, I was left with two impressions. First, DOGS is written in a clear and easy to understand way; almost everything is illustrated with comprehensive examples, which clears up any ambiguities. But, and this is a big problem, DOGS feels like a strong core mechanic in search of a game, in a way many other generic systems don’t.

A game that uses the DOGS system is designed to be about a group of people with some kind of authority doing some kind of investigation. DOGS is a system built around conflicts. Conflicts in DOGS are mechanically rich while also being simple. While most players would probably need a reference sheet to acquaint themselves with the mechanics, it probably wouldn’t take anyone more than a session to memorize the fundamentals.

Each character has four main stats; Mind, Body, Soul, and Spirit. Notice that ¾ths of these are mental stats, with physical taking a backseat. Characters also have Traits, Relationships, Equipment, and, if it makes sense for the setting, Powers. Players are given dice to assign to each of these, and Traits/Relationships/Powers are specific phrases that refer to specific things rather than skills or abilities. It reminds me a lot of Smallville, the Cortex Plus game.

Whenever characters get into a conflict they roll all of their relevant dice. They then start putting these dice forward in turns, and can either Counter, Block / Dodge, or Hit their opponent. These all sound like physical actions, and if a character was rolling with Body, they would be, but these can also be used figuratively in the case of mental debates.

Let’s say that a non-physical and non-violent confrontation is starting; the relevant parties would roll their Mind and Soul dice, plus relevant Trait, Relationship, Equipment, and Power dice. Initiative is determined by who rolled the two highest numbers, unless some element of surprise is involved. The first character to act Raises by putting forward two dice, not necessarily their highest dice, and other characters can Call in response.

Characters can Counter, which means using a single die that they can reuse later. Or they can use two dice to Block / Dodge, which negates the effect of the Raise. Finally, a character can Call with three dice to Hit, which results in the affected character having to roll Consequence dice.

There’s strategy here; players won’t want to put forward their best dice immediately, because that means they won’t be able to defend themselves as the conflict continues. Something else to consider is Escalating, which usually means rolling Body dice when moving into violence, but de-escalating a physical conflict by talking someone down is also possible.

Even though the game is built around characters interacting with one another, it is possible for action resolution to happen in relation to inanimate objects. It’s just not something expected to happen very often in the game; DOGS defines these as “Niche Situations”.

Treat Conflicts like this just like any other, just assign dice to the GM’s side of the Conflict as if the building the players are trying to break into or the passage of time were an NPC just like anyother. And the individual Raises and Calls can be environmental effects, they don’t have to be the actions of specific people. – DOGS pg 26

DOGS is not a game where the GM doesn’t need to do extensive prep like Apocalypse World or In a Wicked Age. The GM needs to think of moral predicaments that will cause player characters to ask themselves how far they’re willing to go. Thinking of these complex moral situations is not exactly an easy task; if it was, RPG scenario design would be a cinch.

While DOGS does include some random tables to help generate dice pool spreads for NPCs, making NPCs in DOGS is not as simple as it is in many other games that just require a few numbers and one or two details; an NPC in DOGS is basically as detailed as a Player Character.

While reading about DOGS on forums, I noticed two things. The first was that at least a handful of people had already stripped the core mechanics out of Dogs in the Vineyard to use in other settings¹. The second was some references to a procedure from the original game for creating scenarios.

If there’s anything DOGS really needs, it’s something to help with creation situations. So, I decided to read the relevant sections of the original game.

The original Dogs in the Vineyard has a nearly 20 page chapter called Creating Towns that details a very thorough procedure for generating scenarios that will last at least a session. A lot of the stuff in this chapter is very setting specific, but the fundamental aspects, thinking about how the characters at the core of a mystery cause inciting incidents because of jealousies . . . I don’t think it would’ve been impossible to try making some more universal tools, even if they would’ve probably been less useful or not always applicable. After all, if DOGS is not an especially flexible game, its scenarios should be optimized into somewhat similar shapes. Obaugh says he tried to genericize the Town Creation stuff but wasn’t able to.

There are ultimately two closely related questions to consider with DOGS: what value does it have as a product in itself, and how does it stack up in comparison to other generic systems?

The answer to the first question is simple; DOGS does a great job of presenting the core mechanic of Dogs in the Vineyard. The GMing advice / help is pretty rudimentary, excluding the stellar examples. The game includes eight small “example settings” and one full magic school setting complete with NPCs and other information. The magic school setting might be even more morally questionable than the Mormon setting of the original game. I purchased a copy of FATE Accelerated in the same order, a book that’s roughly the same size, and it feels much more like something worth owning in physical form.

If the most important pages of DOGS could be printed in a format optimized for US Letter sized paper, I’d recommend doing that instead of buying the whole book.

Comparing DOGS to other generic systems is more complicated. Like most generic systems, DOGS is optimized for a specific purpose. The system is designed with a certain group of player characters in mind;

One, the players should all be a group that makes the characters officially affiliated with one another in some way. And two, they should have some modicum of authority and/or respect, but not be beyond reproach. In addition, the system works best when the players have to solve some sort of mystery / are put in the position where they have to make moral/ethical decisions. These goals work together to make the players not just mindlessly spend their two biggest dice each turn in a Conflict, and think about the consequences of their actions.

There are two different systems I’m going to compare DOGS to; FATE, and Cortex, specifically the Cortex Plus Drama variant seen in Smallville.

FATE wonks love to illustrate how FATE can handle detailed, multi-stage dialogue interactions. This Reddit post by ParameciaAntic details a conversation between Spider-Man and Aunt May. This illustrates two things; FATE can do dialogue mechanics that are more mechanically rich than the ones in DOGS, certainly more flexible, but they can also be more complicated and less immediate. If you want to do a game that focuses on more than confrontations, FATE might be a better choice, but if you just want the arguments then it might be better to go with DOGS’s simpler, less contextual set of mechanics.

Cortex is more directly analogous to DOGS, and this isn’t surprising; Cam Banks cites Dogs in the Vineyard as a direct influence on the Cortex Plus system, which in hindsight is extremely obvious. In Smallville characters have Traits; Values, Relationships, Resources, and Assets. The big difference here is that, unlike DOGS, characters don’t have “normal” stats like Body and Mind.

In Smallville characters roll their pool and use the two highest dice. Opposed characters can either respond by rolling dice in turn or Give In. Each time a player loses a roll they can take one of five different kinds of Stress; Afraid, Angry, Exhausted, Injured, and Insecure. When they take more Stress in one of these categories it increases that category’s die size, and opponents can exploit that Stress. Players also have a metacurrency that allows them to do various different things, such as include the three highest dice or allow a PC to use their own stress die.

There’s perhaps less strategy here, but I definitely prefer the way characters gain Stress in Smallville to the way conflicts end in DOGS.

The thing about DOGS is that it’s derived from a game that wasn’t meant to cover a lot of bases. Cortex comes from the opposite angle; it was originally created as a generic system and turned into something more specific in focus.

Something I noticed while looking at reactions to the release of DOGS was that a lot of people who were hyped about it were people who not only were familiar with the original Dogs in the Vineyard, but had even hacked it into being a generic system already. DOGS clearly is of great appeal to these people, but I’m not sure if it packs the same punch for newcomers.

DOGS is really built to do one thing, and it does that thing very well. It’s built for episodic campaigns. Its mechanics aren’t super flexible. If you have a certain kind of investigative game concept in mind, and you want something completely devoid of cruft, you might really enjoy DOGS. I can’t say that I’ll be reaching for DOGS in the near future, but I’m still glad I read it.

You can find DOGS at DriveThruRPG in PDF form for $6.75 and physical for $11.20-$11.95.

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1. Examples mentioned in the RPG.net thread and Reddit post include Star Trek, Star Wars, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Pathologic, and superheroes. ↩︎