thread: 2005-11-10 : Open House: Ask a Frequent Question...
On 2006-02-20, Vincent wrote:
Charles, your Dogs question first.
As long as everyone plays a Dog whose first loyalty is to the actual suffering people of the towns they're visiting, moral codes don't matter. Confronted with the pain and problems of a town, they'll find common ground and not shoot each other.
If you've got two crusaders of opposite stripe instead, yeah, that can go bad. Take comfort from the fact that if it goes bad, it'll be because Barry and Kim are going to be replaying, in concentrated form, the essential struggle of America's transition to modernity.
On the GM's side, though, choosing your issues is not at all the same thing as pulling your punches, and there's nothing wrong with choosing issues where the 21st century and the 19th agree. Love triangles, child abuse and neglect, a husband leaving his wife in the lurch, rape, robber barony, the Faithful attacking and robbing the Mountain People - those are hard-hitting issues the PCs will broadly agree about.
(If you read something else in this space a few minutes ago, yeah, I edited it, it was poorly considered.)
This makes CS go "Hard hitting"
For me, the hard hitting issues of the setting seem like they'd come from it being a strongly communitarian culture, so there are a lot of square pegs that the community needs to force into round holes, and it seems like a lot of the grief the Dogs would confront come from those conflicts, where they have to decide, do we let the community fracture, or do we find some way to push this square peg back into their hole?
And those ones, many of them are about people we (as players) want to side with (queers, outsiders and uppity women) confronting a community that needs them to suppress themselves and get back in line, and the Dogs are there to protect the interests of the community of the faithful.
So not doing those stories is pulling punches.
The stories we do, that won't end up with dead Dogs, within that range, I agree I don't have to pull punches.
