Dogs in the Vineyard and me

Okay, this keeps coming up and I find myself defending my experience more than I'd like.

I had a poor experience with my one time playing Dogs in the Vineyard.

I really wanted to like it... I was excited about it, bought a big box of brand new dice straight from Chessex so my dice colors would be coordinated, and even bought a hand-made ceramic bowl in an "earthy" pattern to hold them in. I really wanted to like this game.

And it fell very, very flat. The dice mechanic didn't create the tension everyone said it did, and I found the dice getting in the way of the natural flow of give-and-take in a social situation.

Now, the caveats. None of us had played it before. The players didn't quite seem to know what to do, even when half the town was confessing the other half of the town's sins. So that certainly didn't help... but on some level, we just didn't grok how Dogs was supposed to be working, and the mechanics didn't drive play in the expected direction. I realize, in retrospect, that a lot of my problems came from poor stakes-setting... my biggest balking at the outcome of the dice came in a scene where I realize that I'd let the players set stakes that were too high. I wasn't willing to let the shepherd spill his guts just yet, so I shouldn't have let the stakes be, "Does the shepherd spill his guts?"

So I'm willing to accept that, despite my feelings about the dice mechanic, we didn't properly experience how Dogs was meant to work. I would really like to give Dogs another try, but with a group of experienced players. My ability to travel to any big conventions this year is very limited (blowing my budget to attend my brother's wedding in San Francisco), but I'd be willing to drive a ways to play a game.

I live in Wichita, KS. I could drive to Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, or Joplin. If someone were willing to put me (and maybe my wife) up for the weekend, I might be able to go as far as Dallas or Omaha, maybe even St Louis or Denver.

I'll drive five hours, maybe even seven or eight under the right circumstances, each way to give this game another chance, but it's got to be a group that has experience with the game (i.e. make it really worth my while to drive that far). Good food and good conversation outside the game would entice me further.