Hello, I’m Mark, and this is Armoured Gaming Reviews. Today I’ll be talking about a minimalist RPG called Dog bite The Man by the inestimable Steve Dee, a highly experienced game designer known for a number of games, including hit game The Score. In Dog bites The Man you play socialist super powered dogs with a three pronged mission – kill fascists, bite cops, and smash white supremacy.
Provenance
Steve and I have corresponded from time to time on game design, and he reached out to me when he heard I’d begun podcasting and sent me this game as a PDF for the purposes of review. I haven’t played the game, and so this review is based off reading it, but in this case I suspect this would also be the case for the majority of people who have this game.
The Form
Dog bites The Man is written on a single page. While the PDF indicates this is in A2, I can only assume it isn’t designed to be printed out this way, and my printing on an a4 page is entirely readable. On the page there are over a dozen pieces of art, mostly of cute, cartoon style dogs in heroic or cute poses.
On the page there are numbered parts, which explain the rules, and text outside this, which explains the setting. On the outside edges are further illustrations such as the indigenous flag and the pride flag. The black lives matter slogan is mentioned twice.
Some parts of the text are highlighted with artistic fonts, which are both readable and evocative. Of particular interest here is the image of the dog Negro Matapacos (The Black Cop-Killer), a famous dog from real life that became a symbol of resistance to police brutality that I had not heard of before.
Games Like It
As a minimalist game with a two concept system, I can’t help but see mechanical similarities to Lasers and Feelings, Honey Heist, and the thousands of other minimalist games of it’s type. This game was designed before those were though, so was a trailblazer in minimalist design. In terms of theme, the game has a strong love of animals, so I see similarities with games like Catthulu and other more complicated games, and games about fighting the power such as Cyberpunk or my first review, Make Our Own Heaven.
Mechanics
There are two concepts, dog, and super. You place a number in both of those that combined add to six. On a d6 roll, if you roll equal to or less than that number, you do the thing. If you roll over, you don’t. There’s some bonuses depending on what superpower you are best at or what dog skill you are best at, but generally, that’s it.
A little side effect here in superpower is that these dogs don’t just have one superpower; they have a type that they are best at, like attack or control or enhance, but in fact, they are all cosmic dog beings with every superpower.
What is nice here is the dogs are created with a human they love and their favourite smell, which gives them a nice little personality. There’s no talk here about breeds or anything in this game, though I expect people will default to those classifications.
Discussion
As always, I have some questions.
- Thought Experiment
- Black Lives Matter
- Minimisation
- Dog vs. Super
I’ve played a few minimalist games before. I have books filled with one and two page games, and I enjoy reading them for their evocation of theme and the art of design.
But for the vast majority, I don’t play them.
Even the minimalist games I do and have played in some depth, like John Harper’s 1974 World of Dungeons game, or his Lasers and Feelings, or the exceptional Traveller clone Rovers, are far larger, taking two pages or more. More than that, those games are basing what they have off an established genre within roleplaying or science fiction, and are designed with that concept in mind; that the rules they have are not really designed to be, and can’t be, used without connection to these other games.
Single page games I find even more difficult to bring to my table. My players are hungry for something different, something more solid or long lasting, and these one shot games never seem to hit the highs or lows that we are after – simply because there just isn’t enough time to gain investment. The political themes in many of these games wouldn’t go over the heads of my players, but neither would they achieve anything meaningful in the time we have with them.
I doubt many game designers write these games to change peoples deeply held beliefs, though. And I’ll take a possibly wrong guess here, and say only a very small amount of people end up playing these games. Instead, I think these games are as much designed for the artistic experience, to witness the thought and design and skill placed into them.
In the case of Dog bites The Man, this game had me thinking about resistance, protest, and mostly, dogs. This game had me interested enough to research a dog that became a political symbol, and a second dog that went to space.
As a thought experiment I feel this game gets it’s readers to consider the need for civil disobedience and violence against authority.
The Australian indigenous flag and the Black lives matter slogan use a significant part of the page, especially as they are both written twice. On a one page game, where space and layout is everything, this doubling up clearly shows the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement to the designer.
Unfortunately, I don’t know if the game itself really involves in the movement here. I believe the designer cares about this topic, but the game doesn’t investigate it – or, as a thought experiment, make the reader consider it other than as a label, any more than the pride flag or gender symbol also on the page.
While the imagery of Black Lives Matter and pride are there, when we look at the things the super dogs are supposed to do according to the rules, they smash property, rescue police dogs, save humans and destroy capitalism. Unfortunately, none of those activities other than saving humans really speak to me about the Black Lives Matter movement; - in focusing the game on destroying stuff and righteous rage, I wonder if what is lost is the reality that violent protests with superpowered canines won’t achieve social change.
I can’t help but imagine that in playing this game that my super dog would save someone from police brutality by biting some cops and destroying their cop car… and in so doing have that sort of fun you get from breaking or flouting the law first and foremost, with the idea of working to change society for the better far in the distance.
And then the game is finished, and we cheer, and we sit there thinking either that only a superheroic dog causing enough violence could cause the Man to feel that black lives matter – or stop the man at all.
I wonder here if the use of super dogs – which is a cute and wholesome idea – within the framework of resistance, protest, and the grief, trauma, and pain causing those protests isn’t a bit too minimising of a complicated situation. Even if the protests the dogs are at are not Black Lives Matter protests, but are perhaps environmentalist protests or some such, the idea that super dogs will save the day leaves me with a sour taste, because while they might save the day for the people at the protest, the core problems behind the protests are not being solved no matter how many cops are bitten, fascists killed, police dogs are rescued or business districts damaged, and minimising the problems by indicating super dogs can stop police brutality by wrecking stuff just doesn’t sit right for me.
The mechanics here have two abilities – your Dog abilities and your Super abilities, which both have a number than in combination add up to six. I can’t help but wonder how many players will pick their Dog abilities as higher than their Super abilities. If one ability represents everything a Dog can do, and the other represents every super power available, it strikes me that it won’t take a particularly cunning player to pick their Super as higher than their Dog. The difference of capability between a PC superdog with Dog 5/Power 1 and Power 5/Dog 1 is so dramatic than one dog will do everything and the other will wag it’s tail – and around the table, one player is MVP and the other one gets to clap.
I don’t think the mechanics are that important here, because I don’t think this game is really meant to be played so much as engaged with as a text. But if you are playing I get the feeling that you are supposed to do and act like smart dogs – without human intelligence. But that isn’t stated, and with every superpower under the sun available, including, I suppose, magical speech, telepathy, or intelligence, I worry that the playing the dog aspect would be lost.
Maybe it’s just me, but I wonder if the theme of this game would have been more realised if all the dogs had a single superpower, but otherwise must be roleplayed as dogs in all their cute and lovable glory. This would force the ‘dog’ part of the game to the fore, while keeping the super part of the game still valid, but doing this would require a significant change of the mechanics.
Conclusion
Overall, Dog bites The Man is a fun little game and could be played for an hour or two for some cute super powered dog hijinks. I think it’s a good text for promoting thought about resisting authority. I don’t feel that it invests or deals with it’s black lives matter branding, that it’s rules lead to a playstyle that doesn’t suit it’s theme, and with a GM who isn’t careful, may drift into minimizing the systemic issues that face us all today.
So that’s my thoughts on Dog bites The Man. If you want to play a super powered doggo fighting The Man and saving the world, this one is for you.