thread: 2006-02-20 : Open House: Ask a Frequent Question, pt 2
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 "communalist morality"
For me, the really hard hitting issue in Dogs is the communalist morality questions.
The morality of the community needs to be upheld, not because it is in and of itself right, but because the community depends on it, or else the morality of the community is so bad for the particular individual that the morality of the community needs to be rejected, no matter how much harm it does, or some compromise needs to be found, where this dissenter gets some sort of free pass, but it gets papered over so the community survives.
The issues that hit at the guts of the players, where they feel that the community needs their dogs to uphold what they, as players, think is wrong, seem like the easiest ones to get there, but you are right that there are other ones that can get there too.
