Sam and me just finished a game of The Hour of Dog and Wolf and reflected on our experience. This is a discussion about the themes/shared experiences, and the use of plot points.

Sam played Angelo Scabo, a disorganized killer with visions of Saint Barbara in the small ex-industrial town of Charleroi, in Belgium. It was a steel and coil mine industry city with lots of working class people being from Italian origin. Belgium made a deal with Italy to bring labor forces in those industries after the second world War. I was born in that city and that’s why we chose it. Belgium is also know for a famous serial killer, whose case revealed the vast disorganization of the justice system and rivalries between police departments. So we started with that idea. Saint Barbara is the saint of coal minors, a very well known fact in that city, and Angelo believed he could achieve some salvation through her by killing victims the way Saint Barbara was martyred – beheading.

I was playing Alice Lejeune, a young police detective, the daughter of a cop who worked on the famous Belgian serial killer. Her father killed himself for having failed the case and she’s the youngest detective of the department and the object of discriminating behavior about the inability of a young girl to work those kind of case. She has a stable life with friends, although she is foreshadowed by her successful sister and have doubts about whether her boyfriend cheats on her or not.

It went sadly bad for Alice Lejeune who was never able to solve the case.

Some things in the rules felt a bit awkward but we felt so much enjoyment with the good parts that we decided to play the game again, with a few tweaks and maybe a better understanding of how to play better. Here are the main elements our post-game discussions so we can discuss them together.

Plot points

The plot points have various functions and some of them just seem to be badly designed. Three things can be done with a plot point:
1. Make a fictional input or change in the other player’s scene.
2. Change a theme written on the theme map.
3. Add dice to your roll.

During play, we only used plot points to add dices to our roll. The resolution mechanics is identical to the one used in Sorcerer so one or two dices more are really making a difference. It’s really not trivial.

The “impose your will” mechanic, which is adding a fictional input or change in the other’s scene didn’t make sense to us. We were giving ourselves input through tabletalk and this mechanic felt like breaking the process by just, well, “imposing your will” by taking control of a small bit of narration in the other’s narration. We refused to it as it feels like creating a power relationship where it’s not needed, but also at the sacrifice of dice for you roll? Really?

We only realized at the end of the game that plot point could be used to change a them on a sector of the map., so we didn’t use it. It leads us to two consideration.

First, we relied too much on a static view of the themes. Thus, when we rolled “my boyfriend is cheating” for the third time, we would think how to frame a scene with that idea. Sometimes, it was blocking us because it was like reframing something by starting at the initial point. Most of the times, we used it efficiently by ignoring the initial state of the themes (what we established at preparation) but reincorporated the established evolution of that theme. Two examples of scene: one when we blocked, one when we did it well.

“My grand mother needs medical attention” was one of the killer’s theme. She was hospitalized in the first scene then a few scenes were framed in her former house or in the hospital room. It would have made sense to frame a scene at her funeral at some times, but it didn’t happened. We saw that them as static context and not as a possibility for change. It would have been better to bring her either dead or treated at some time.

Another example was Alice’s “I think my boyfriend is cheating” theme. I made an investigation scene related to that theme. This was my last investigation scene so that sense of cheating had been played a bit, with some resolutions in personal scenes sometimes (including one scene where I realized that he actually did not and got reassured). So we decide that I had actually a date with him that I ghosted and just went with the investigation scene.

In the same time, we thought that changing a theme should not need a plot point expenditure. But we want to play it differently. This is what we think: each time we start or close a scene, we review the related theme to see if it has changed. This should not be the result of a mechanic but just us acknowledging if there is a situational change as established by the previous narrations. The caution here is to use that with the established fiction and not as a “hey I want this to happen so I’m changing it!”. The initial mechanic (change through plot point expenditure) doesn’t avoid that last caution.

We may also get totally rid of the plot points. You only earn them through luck, there use for adding dice is hugely consequential. But in the same time, it works as an incentive to focus on improving the two traits who define the character meta-role in the fiction (Obsession about the case, Compulsion for killing).

Themes and shared experience

It sometimes felt a bit of storyboarding to create the themes. The game asks you to bring 4 themes and 4 “shared experiences”. The only difference is that the shared experiences are themes brought by one player through the prompting the other player. So you have to make up 16 themes to write.

Preparation. The process was a bit too long and we were starting from nothing. It felt like the prompting questions from Apocalypse World, with the same problem. This is the problems I identify: as I understand the “questions” in Apocalypse World through the various examples of the Bakers online, their goal seems to be situational framing. Things like “how do you get your gas since the bridge has been destroyed” establishes that the bridge has been destroyed. But then there is no clear explanation of what a good question is, why and to what function. So we had those questions who will create the context of some scenes but we were starting from nowhere to create them and sometimes faced a blank page or just making things up. The process felt too long and at the edge of storyboarding. A possible solution we see is “be boring”. Let’s not try to get a super-cool theme and performance about it, let’s just take the simplest stuff and get t his into play.

In play. In retrospect, we realize that during play, we used the themes only to frame scene and that we could use them a little more loosely. See my “boyfriend is cheating” investigation scene described earlier for a loose use. Sometimes it was really easy to use the themes as a framing device, sometimes it was not. Again, a possible solution may be “be boring”. But also, we think that the theme doesn’t have to be brought as a constrain for framing. Maybe it can just relate to the scene before or after the resolution, by whoever is narrating there – not only the player framing the scene.