Wild West RPGs

Yeah, chips are like inspiration, spend it to do cool stuff or save it and upgrade your stats.

Just a regular deck with jokers left in, you also use a deck of cards in character creation which is a lot of fun.

>Tell me more about Dogs in the Vineyard
the PCs are Mormon Paladin Cowboys in a fantasy version of Utah. Basically you're religious enforcers whose job is to travel from town to town rooting out heresy and dishing out punishment.

The dice system involves building up a pool based on your stats, traits, gear and relationships then you devote dice from that pool to attacking or defending.

The aforementioned escalation mechanics mean that if you ran out of dice in one pool you can access another one by escalating the nature of conflict into more physical one. You run out of your diplomacy dice and you can carry on by accessing your violence dice by starting to shove people around - but then it's fists doing the talking instead of words. It comes down on how hellbent you're on winning this one.

I'm really digging both of these systems, and the card play sounds fun in Deadlands. The Mormon Paladin Cowboys also sounds like it has a LOT of roleplay potential. Is there class diversity in either system or is every PC essentially the same?

There aren't really classes in deadlands, you build a character up from a pool of dice picking relevant skills, definitely a lot of room for customizing, we had two gunslingers in our group and they were markedly different.

DitV doesn't do classes, and neither does SW Deadlands nor the original one iirc (it's been quite a while since I played them). PCs are very diverse in them in my experience, and we had both jack-of-all-trades and specialists in the Deadlands game.

well for DitV PCs are defined by their traits, stats, relationships and gear. There aren't classes but a PC with the 'violent bastard' and 'gunfighter' traits with two oversized pistols operates very differently to one with traits like 'well-read' and 'pious' with his extremely well kept copy of the book of life

>Tell me more about Dogs in the Vineyard

Fundamentally, Dogs uses a pretty simple dice pool mechanic. In a given situation, you roll dice, the number and variety of which are determined by relevant attributes, skills, equipment, and relationships.

So you roll your dice, and then you pick some of them (usually two) to expend in order to dictate how things go. If someone's opposing you, they put forward their own dice of equal or greater value in order to seize control of the situation. This continues back and forth until one side folds or runs out of dice.

However, there are a lot of additional mechanics in place to make it more interesting. If you can match an opponent's dice with only a single die, you can "reverse" and force them to expend more dice in response. You can also use three or more dice when you need to, but in doing so you acquire "fallout". Most critically, players have the option to "escalate" the conflict to a tier of greater severity (talking-> tussling-> fighting-> shooting). This allows them to access a new dice pool and thus avoid having to fold, but it increases the potential damage of their fallout when the conflict is resolved. Fallout from a conflict of the first tier is unlikely to cause anything worse than sour feelings, but fallout from the fourth tier can easily be fatal. You can still get fallout even if you "win" the conflict, which is why PCs should reach for their holsters only when they neef to.

The system is very fun and fluid. It feels a bit like poker with raising and calling, and also the gambling inherent to whether you choose to escalate or fold. It allows you to really narrate the ebb and flow of a situation in a way that feels cinematic rather than having a specific action and roll of the dice to be associated with "attacking" or "intimidating" or "climbing" and so on.

Sounds neat, thanks user
I like the sound of this, lots of roleplay potential. Are you forced to be a Mormon Paladin Cowboy? Or could you be a bandido or just a mercenary if you so chose?

The original game is centered around being a mormon paladin solving the troubles of faithful, but the system itself is easy to use in any kind of campaign. None of the rules mechanics are mormon faith specific, and there's advice at the end of the book for running the game in other settings.

Awesome, could I get a link to a DitV PDF?

iirc, one of the suggestions is running a game where the PCs are Puritan witchhunters traveling between the towns and villages of 17th century New England, which is something I've always wanted to try.

Sure. That being said a central concept to the game is that the players care about the community they are in, so I don't know how well it suits to murderhobos wandering around. Something to keep in mind.

Can GURPS do Wild West good?

I'd say so. It depends on how you like your wild west. GURPS has quite a lot of support for guns and gunplay, and is probably the best system out there that compromises realism and playability, a blend it calls "heroic" or "cinematic" realism. Of course, as GURPS starts with realism, it's quite easy to scale it up to cinematic levels if you want acrobatic cowboys sliding down bannisters and swinging from chandeliers in barroom shootouts.

Basic Set has all of the rules you need for a basic Wild West game. GURPS Wild West is a third edition book that covers the genre and reality of the west very well. High-Tech + High-Tech Adventure Guns gives you more than enough material for Wild West gear, and rules that help out gun-focused games (which I assume a wild west would be interested in, at least partially). If you want more detailed survival rules for the wilderness than what Basic Set offers, Dungeon Fantasy Wilderness Adventures has that in spades.

Oh, I keep forgetting this, but After the End 2 has good survival rules, too, and general rules that, while for a post-apoc scenario, fit in right at home on the frontier.

I ran a Wild West game in GURPS. It was a simple story of simple drifters wandering around the American territory of mumble-mumble. Tons of fun. Tons of dead banditos.

>lemat.jpg
user, pls. Take a look at THIS baby.

And there is this for contrast.

Deadlands is more of a weird west setting, but I really like it. There's still magic and weird stuff but if you're not carrying a gun you're probably not going to make it for long. I prefer Hell on Earth since it's a post-apocalyptic setting that largely reverted to weird west, but the basic setting seems better for you.

>I like the sound of this, lots of roleplay potential. Are you forced to be a Mormon Paladin Cowboy? Or could you be a bandido or just a mercenary if you so chose?

Just putting in a plug for my Dark Tower DitV walkthrough and conversion

1d4chan.org/wiki/Campaign:End-World

The core idea behind the game is "your group are some sort of organization with power over the lives of the villagers that live in the various towns and outposts in this remote area", but you could just as easily be a posse of lawmen helping the community as a gang of bandits that ruled an area by force. Who you know and how well you know them is a big part of the mechanics because relationships give you dice to roll in conflicts if that relationship is somehow involved in the conflict.

Aces and Eights is only WW system I can think off that has not been mentioned.

I've not played it, but I've heard good things although it too is a bit clunky. The Shattered Frontier setting is quite fun.

Someone did a WW mod for the FFG Star Wars system called Edge of the Frontier. I haven't gotten to try it out yet myself so I can't speak for the quality of it.

Aces and Eights has that cool silhouette gunshot system, though.