This past year I’ve been majorly distracted by 4E. Between learning the rules, making characters, following the release of supplements, listening to actual play sessions, and arguing whether it’s worth it or not I’ve spent almost no time looking into alternative Role Playing systems. I still would love to play some Spirit of the Century and I love the look of Alpha Omega and would love to try it but aside from those things hanging out in the back of my mind I’ve not really followed any new developments. It wasn’t until I read Smite’s article two weeks ago about his search for an alternative dice system that I realized how much I have been ignoring all the alternative games. Well no more. If you want a completely new way to do things read on because this game gets about as different as you can from traditional RPGs. Let me tell you about a little game called:

Dust Devils

Created by Matt Snyder in 2002, Dust Devils, is a Wild West RPG with a brilliant and unique rules system. It takes the traditional concepts of plotting and narration and turns them on their head. Even the mechanics are different with Poker Chips and Playing Cards taking the place of dice. The genre is taken from the Clint Eastwood style of western ala Unforgiven and the Outlaw Josey Wales. It’s a game for people who want to play complex characters, ones that have history, secrets, and personal demons haunting them. If fact one of the central components of a Dust Devils character is their Devil. It is that dark side of the character and it will be a major component of their story. Dust Devils is also perfect for those players who like the spotlight. Since all the action is driven by the characters they are almost constantly on. Furthermore when they win narration they get a chance to show off.

Which brings me to the mechanics. The Mechanics of Dust Devils are what really caught my eye, or ear as the case may be as I heard about it through podcasts. First off the way the game progresses is based on the players. The GM, called the Dealer, is much more reactive than in a traditional role. It is no longer his duty to provide the story for the players to follow. It’s up to the players to drive the story forward with the Dealer wrangling NPCs, introducing conflicts, provoking characters, and other things to keep things exciting. Conflict resolution, which is where this gets really cool, happens the same way for all types of conflict. It doesn’t matter what is being contested, physical, social, or mental, it all follows the same system. The way conflicts are handled in Dust Devils summed up as 1) Players declare their goal in the conflict, 2) Each player is dealt a hand of cards based on their character’s appropriate stats, 3) High Hand achieves their goal, and 4) Highest Card narrates how it happens. That last step is the coolest thing about this system. It is up to the player (or the Dealer) with highest single card in the conflict to describe how the conflict resolves. It took me a while to wrap my head around this but then I found a great example. In the final fight between Mal and the Operative in Serenity (for some reason Dust Devils reminds me Firefly a lot) I expected Mal to throw the Operative down into that spinning engine thing. I didn’t know that Joss didn’t have the budget for that kind of thing; I just knew that if two guys are fighting over something spinning, then one of them is going into it. It’s like a movie law or something. Well, in a Dust Devils conflict it, if Mal’s player had won narration he could have just chucked the Operative off the platform, but the Operative’s player (probably but not necessarily the Dealer) won the narration. He wants his guy to taken out in a cooler and ultimately more personal way. His Devil is probably “will do anything for his belief” so as narrator he decides that he will not just lose the physical fight but he will take the blow to his characters core belief, which of course makes for a much cooler ending.

The narrator gets to describe how the conflict resolves. What happens to who and exactly how the winning hand achieves their stated goal. Also the strength of the winning hand determines how routine (in the case of low hands) or extraordinary (in the case of high hands) the action should be. The narrator can even make it so that the losing hands still succeed to some extent. It is an incredibly powerful if short lived position. And that is why this is so remarkable. Taking that traditionally centralized power of the GM to tell how things happen and distributing it basically at random to a player. It requires a whole different view of GM and player roles as well as a great deal of trust between all players. I don’t know about you but that sounds pretty revolutionary to me.