Giusto una cosa che mi era piaciuta e quindi la riposto qui... :-)
Vincent Baker, in un thread riguardante il rischio di morte dei PC nei gdr (
How do you make character death not suck?), spiega come funziona in Cani nella Vigna:
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Random PC death in Dogs in the VineyardFirst, a most important feature of the game's rules: taking damage is a side effect of fighting, it's not how you resolve fights. You can take all the damage, yet win; you can dish out all the damage, yet lose.
When you take damage, you take it in the form of damage dice, which you leave on the table unrolled. The stronger the hit, the more damage dice: 3 damage dice for the weakest hit, up to 6 damage dice for the strongest. The more dangerous the weapon, the bigger the damage dice: d6s for a punch, d8s for most weapons, d10s for a gunshot. So a basic solid punch gets you 3d6 damage dice, while a basic solid gunshot gets you 3d10, and the most serious, decisive gunshot gets you 6d10. (In fact it can go even higher than 6 dice, but I've seen that in play only maybe once or twice.)
Because you're accumulating the damage dice unrolled, you can tell generally how badly you're hurt, but not specifically how badly you're hurt. This creates a powerful sense of risk in play. You can feel when the fight turns against you -- just look at all those big damage dice you're accumulating -- but maybe they'll roll well and you'll be okay! Or maybe they won't! It's your choice whether to stay in the fight, and you don't know how bad the consequences will really be, and you feel it right in the pit of your stomach.
At the end of the fight, you roll all your accumulated damage dice. For purposes of living and dying, we care only about the highest two: sum the highest two and set the rest aside. If the highest two damage dice sum to 20, your character's dead or dying, and there's nothing anybody can do. If they sum to 16-19, he's dying, but immediate medical aid could still save him. If they sum to 15 or less, he's hurt, maybe badly hurt, and he might need medical aid after all, but basically he's not going to die. Worth noticing: a 20 is possible only if you've taken a bullet, but a 16 is possible if your enemy's brought out any weapon at all. This is because Dogs in the Vineyard is a western, so guns are where it's at.
So here's you. You've seen a fight through to the bitter end. You've taken a couple of bullets but you don't know yet how bad they are -- I can say more about this if you like, some people choke on it even though it's very good sim -- and now it's time to sit down and pull open your shirt and see. You roll your big pile of damage dice, pull out the highest two, and...
...They sum to 20. This is, by far, the least likely result. A cool feature of the sum-the-highest-two mechanic is that no matter how many d10s you roll, a 19 is always more likely than a 20. The worse you get shot up, the more likely you are to die from it, but the more likely still that you'll cheat death by 1 point on the dice.
When you do get that 20, it's guaranteed dramatically appropriate, because you stayed in the fight when you knew the risks. If you'd wanted to be safe, you'd've run away when the guns came out.
...Or else...
...They sum to 16-19. You've cheated death for now, but here's the cool thing about 16-19: now it's somebody else's job to save your life. The old risk -- that you've gotten yourself killed -- becomes a new risk, and you feel it in your stomach again.
If there's no healer who can reach you in time, you die. Again, you knew it was possible when you stayed in the fight.
If there is a healer, now the healer has to roll dice to save your life. The odds are stacked on the healer's side, so again, narrowly escaping death is the most likely outcome, but dying remains just possible enough to make you feel it.
...Or else...
...They sum to 15 or less. This is the most likely outcome if you've taken only one bullet, or if guns never came out. In fact, if it's been a knife fight or something, 15 is to 16 as 19 is to 20: the most likely outcome of a gunfight is that you'll narrowly cheat death; the most likely outcome of a knife fight is that you'll narrowly cheat the possibility of death.
Whichever the case, you spend the whole fight acutely, viscerally aware of what you're risking, so that when the most likely thing happens and you cheat death, you feel like you've cheated death.
I'm happy to go into more detail if you're curious about any part of it, but that's how it works in broad.
-Vincent
