Dogs in the Vineyard is a game of bad-ass holy cowboys travelling from town to town righting wrongs and shooting sinners in the face by D. Vincent "Lumpley" Baker.  Ok, it's more complicated than that, but that's the heart of it, setting-wise.

Player-wise, it's a game of morality, whatever that means to you.  But don't let me turn you off to it with these oversimplifications.  DitV is a very cool game that's fun to play.  Basically, you're out in the foothills and plains of an Old West that "never quite was".  Essentiallly it's the American Old West with Mormon settlers and Native Americans and horses and six-shooters and soldiers and city-slickers living "back east" in their big, sinful cities, but not.  It's like some kind of parallel alternate reality.  The players take the roles of "troubleshooters" for The Faith, nicknamed "Dogs" (as in "God's Watchdogs").  They have ultimate authority while out patrolling the towns of the Faithful.  Their job is to root out sin and evil in the towns for the town's own good.  The people themselves aren't as important as saving the community as a whole from sin.  Sometimes it's better for one to die than for many to suffer.  Then again, more often than not, the people of these close-knit communities are your friends and relatives, brothers and cousins.  Would you kill your own blood for the good of the community?

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"If you fudge dice rolls, your system is failing you!" -Sons of Kryos

"I genuinely think that some people measure their free will by reading how unhappy their GM is." - TonyLB

[dice type=fudge]3dF[/dice]

It really is a fun game, the dice system is great. It's different but not tedious like other games that try to break away from the d20.

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You call down the Thunder, and I'll reap the Whirlwind

Wow, you seem to be working your way through the list of famous indie RPGs...

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-Nova

IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. --The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky. The New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967.

Ha!  Yeah.  I've got more (My Life with Master, InSpectres, Sorcerer, Polaris, Lacuna Part I) but Dogs in the Vineyard is the only one I've had a chance to play so far.

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"If you fudge dice rolls, your system is failing you!" -Sons of Kryos

"I genuinely think that some people measure their free will by reading how unhappy their GM is." - TonyLB

[dice type=fudge]3dF[/dice]

The important question: Would this make a good forum game or not?

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-Nova

IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. --The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky. The New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967.

Well, we've got a pretty decent little game going on HERE.  I've been blessed with players that post regularly, so that helps, but I don't see why it can't be played in the forums, especially these forums with our dice-rollers.  I thought it might be tricky keeping track of the pools of dice rolls, but it hasn't.  Without the dice-roller, it would be trickier, but only if you didn't trust your players.  And there are always those online dice-roller sites you could use if you wanted to keep an eye on the rolls.  Also, since each town is an "adventure", it breaks things down into nice, discrete chunks that work well in a PBF environment. 

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"If you fudge dice rolls, your system is failing you!" -Sons of Kryos

"I genuinely think that some people measure their free will by reading how unhappy their GM is." - TonyLB

[dice type=fudge]3dF[/dice]

Good review mate, apart from stealing my line but yeah it is a damn fun system to play with, I'm not sure how well it work over tabletop though, I like the fact that the PBF version lets you think of what you're going to say and do for the role playing aspects, having the dice rollers here help a lot as well. The combat system is really flexible as well, and the fact that the same system is used for arguments/physical stuff/actual combat, with escalations makes for a really interesting time.

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No. What you have are bullets and the hope that when your guns are empty I'm no longer standing, because if I am, you'll all be dead before you've reloaded.