IT'S A DOG'S LIFE

"It's a world where the dogs eat the dogs
and they kill for the bones in the street..."
("Dog eats dog" from "Les Miserables")

  This is a first draft, or at least the first attempt at a more serious draft, of what is supposed to end up as the rules of a new PBM game in a couple of years. I have been spreading some of these ideas to some people in ordinary letters and finally got tired of retyping the same things over and over. With this, things should be getting a bit more organized.

  People who know me or think they do, will probably know that I am supposed to be in the middle of developing a game called Archipelago. So why am I starting on another one? Well, actually I'm just warming up. With Archipelago it took a couple of years of planning and discussing things before I got started on the actual work with developing and programming the game, and I reckon that if I start airing these ideas now, the game will be ready to start developing around the time Archipelago should be ready for its official release. Besides, I'm not doing my own programming any more... (Well, not for PBM games at least!) So I've got time to go back to dreaming and toying with ideas.

  Alright. To start with some of the thoughts that lead to the conception of this idea, I have noticed that most postal games have "hidden movement", meaning that players only know about the places they are represented in, and on turn one they only know about their starting position. In some games this is rather plausible - in Starweb, for instance, the player's people has just discovered interstellar travel, so they don't know what's on the other planets in the "web". (To sidetrack a bit, Archipelago is set on a single world, but I have written a background which claims that people generally are peaceful and stay on their home islands except for when the valkyries start messing with the rulers' heads every 900 years. For a complete background check the Archipelago rulebook or this page.)
  There are, however, games where the idea of only knowing about one's starting point is a bit more farfetched. For instance, the game It's A Crime. This game casts the player as leader of a gang of (young?) criminals in a big city. Even though it's a modern city with all the latest communications and the members of the gang presumably grew up in the city, the player starts not knowing what's on the other side of the street!
  This is where I started thinking: How can I come up with a credible and (preferably) original game concept where the player starts on a street corner not knowing what's on the other side of the street? Maybe the player's character is a kid who's just grown old enough to cross the street on his own? Well, I may still try to invent a game like that one day if there's enough interest, but the next day I got an idea I like much better. If I say that the heading of this manuscript is the name of the game, that should give you a hint...
  Right!! In this game the player's character is a dog! More precisely, an unwanted dog whose owners just got rid of him by letting him out of their car in the middle of the street. Voilá: A background that explains the player's ignorance and is plausible enough to repeat. (What I mean by that last remark is that some postal games give the player a background for his character that sounds alright until you realize that all the players are supposed to have the same background! For instance, a "wandering tribe" game that shall remain unnamed, tried to explain the player's ignorance by claiming that his tribe is really a stranded spaceship crew. Sure! And so is every other tribe on the planet!?)

  Well, time to finish picking on other games and say a bit about my own, I guess. First of all, the name (that will be used unless someone comes up with a better idea or ABM sues) is supposed to be a hint about the concept's origin and the game type. I've also come up with an idea for a slogan (?) that could be used in ads or something: It's A Dog's Life - and you are the dog who's going to live it!

  What? Okay, forget that and let's start with the game instead! As I just said, the player's character is a dog roaming the streets of a big city. There is something to be said about both the dog, the streets, the city and various other things, so let's start with the first thing that meets the eye.

1: The Me-Dog

  One of the things I've been messing around with is nomenclature. Because this game is so different from others (?), I think it should have some different names for things as well. So instead of calling the dog run by the player a player character or something equally boring, I have decided to call it a (the) me-dog. That is, to you, "the dog that's (played by) me".
  Actually the term is only 100% correct when applied to your own dog. To me and others addressing you, your dog is a you-dog. And when discussing a third party's character, the appropriate term is him-dog or her-dog - depending on the sex of the player. This is why I use the object form of the pronouns - "she-dog" and "he-dog" would be ambiguous. If there should be a male player playing a female me-dog and vice versa, then his him-dog would be a she-dog and her her-dog would be a he-dog!
  And if you still aren't totally confused, I'll just add that the plural forms are us-dogs (when the speaker's dog is included in the group), you-dogs (when the listener's dog is) and them-dogs.
  If you think the above is a pile of cat's hairballs, you are of course free to call all player dogs me-dogs or you-dogs or SOBs or whatever damn thing you want.

2: Underdogs

  As the you-dog (that is, YOUR you-dog, but I don't have to say that because it's implicit when I use the different forms properly) starts roaming the streets, he (or she) will soon start running into other dogs. Some of them are other they-dogs, but the majority of the city's canine population consists of computer-controlled dogs. In a more ordinary game they would probably be called "non-player" or "cardboard" characters, but as you can see from the heading of this section I've got a special name for them too.
  Well, actually I am not sure yet if an underdog is simply a computer-controlled dog, or if it's a computer-controlled dog who has joined your pack. Right - as you probably have already started suspecting if you know about IAC and games like that, one of the things you are supposed to do in IADL is to "recruit" underdogs to form a pack. As you soon will see if you ever get as far as starting to play, there really isn't very much a you-dog can do alone - you need power, and the only way to get power is to build a pack of underdogs. This does not only have the advantage of more power, but you may also get access to more skills and knowledge as well as the advantage of being able to be in more than one place at once. You can split up the pack and send the parts on different missions, but you have limited control over the parts not following the you-dog. More about this when I come to order writing. By the way, the (still rather obscure) purpose of the game is to accumulate the biggest pack and become top dog (!) of the city, or something like that. We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

  An underdog is actually a more complicated being that the you-dog, or at least the part of the you-dog that is simulated by the computer (Technically, your brain is part of the you-dog, and there is at present no computer that can match that!). All dogs have various physical characteristics like strength, speed and so on (They are so trivial I'll leave them until later), but underdogs (I use the term about all computer dogs until further notice) also have a bunch of characteristics that make up their personality - sort of a crude replacement for a player's mind. Right - underdogs are not the blindly obliging pawns found in many other games ("Jump off this 6000' cliff!" - "Okay, boss!"); they have minds of their own which may influence both the way they carry out their orders and things they do on their own. Some, but not necessarily all, of these characteristics are:

3: The city

  Time for a few words about the board these intricate playing pieces perform their antics on. The city is, obviously, made up of city blocks (There may be parks; the rules for them are different from what follows). Generally, a city block looks like the illustration to the left.

  What this diagram is supposed to show, is what a city block (and the edges of its nearest neighbors) looks like. 1 is a street, 2 is a pavement, 3 is a building, 4 is an alley and 5 is a backyard.

  So the city is (generally) made up of five different types of areas: Backyards, pavements, buildings, streets and alleys. Dogs start and end their turns in/on either of the first two, and may move through the other three according to various rules that follow later.

  Back to the city at large, here's a couple of things that are supposed to make the game different and give the player a "dog feeling" (just like the strange nomenclature). Ordinarily this would be the place in the description of a game where I started explaining the coordinate system. However, dogs don't carry compasses, can't count very far and find it rather hard to get the big view. What this means in game terms is that the map has no fixed north, and there is no (visible) coordinate system. The last direction your dog moved in will always be up on your maps (at least the ones you get from the computer), and to help you navigate a totally new and different system is used. To find out where he is, a dog simply looks at the houses around him. Dogs in IADL are generally smart enough to figure out the (main) function of a building just by looking at (and smelling) it. And what's special with the city the game is set in, is that wherever you are, the combination of buildings around you is unique. I'm not sure how this will be done - either by a complicated setup program or a lot of manual labor - but I'm sure it can be done (Just as a matter of record, a dog on a pavement sees six buildings. Even if there are only ten different kinds of building, that makes one million combinations!).

4: Special buildings

  I'm making a little sidetrack here because I have some ideas about buildings. They are not only used for determining where you are, but also have special effects on the game. If, for example you are ill or hurt, the doorstep of a vet would be a good place to collapse, and so would the local SPCA office. The Greenpeace agency, however, has no effect on the game - they're out saving whales.
  Buildings can be entered by an action called raiding, that we will return to later (whenever I get around to discussing actions). For the moment there should be nothing more to say about buildings, except that some of them are unique in themselves. There is only one dog pound, for instance, so if the dog catcher should pick up one of your underdogs you'll know where to look for him.

5: Time

  Of course time passes during the game, and as far as a dog's life is concerned, time runs in cycles of three periods. The cycle is equal to what we call a day and a night, and the periods are called Sleep, Rush and Rest. For some reason hidden in the obscurity of canine tradition, the periods get their names from what the humans do (so you should have no problem figuring out that I'm actually talking about the night, morning and afternoon) (I had planned to call them something else but forgot...). Dogs are generally more liberal about how they spend the different periods and can usually do whatever they like whenever they want - about the only exception being that they will get problems if they don't get a bit of sleep or at least rest every four or five periods or so. And of course some actions may be easier when there are few or no humans around. Every seven cycles or so there is a cycle with no Rush, only a long Rest (Right, Sunday...).
  For the moment I'm not sure how many turns a period is divided into (assuming it's divided at all), but each turn is further divided into a number of actions (around ten).

6: Actions

  Actions are, of course, what the game is all about. Without actions the dogs would just sit around looking at each other until the dog catcher got them. There's supposed to be a number of different actions that can be carried out in whatever sequence you like, up to ten (?) each turn. I have been thinking a bit about some of the actions, but the list is far from complete yet...

6.1: Movement

  This is the most obvious action - to do something, you must first go to wherever you're planning to do it. It is also a rather complicated action because there are so many different possibilities.
  To start with some general movement modes: All movement is done in units of length and duration that are called steps. Each dog has a physical characteristic called Speed which simply stands for how many steps the dog can move in one action. When dogs in a pack have different speeds, there are two possibilities. You can move keeping a "tight" pack or a "loose" one. Keeping a tight pack means slowing down to let the slowest underdogs catch up with you, keeping everyone together all the time. Keeping a loose pack means that the you-dog (or whoever is leading the pack) moves at his own top speed, and those who are slower will fall behind and have to use the next action to catch up with the pack. Keeping a loose pack can get you to your destination faster, but you may not have the pack's full strength when you get there, and there's a risk of losing underdogs with low intelligence or poor sense of smell (They follow your tracks). If you have many underdogs who are slower than you, using loose pack movement a lot tends to be bad for pack morale, and some times the loyalty of the individual stragglers may suffer - why should they follow you when you won't wait for them?
  There are two possible starting points for a movement sequence. Let's start with the pavement (which is where you got dumped on turn one). At the beginning of a turn the you-dog is standing on one of two pavements, in the middle of the block, facing one of two street corners (Actually, the dog isn't necessarily standing precisely in one specific direction; most animals tend to move around a bit while waiting for new orders, but for order writing purposes the dog is "officially" standing in the middle of the block facing one street corner). You have the following options:
 1) Turn around. This is simply changing your official facing, and is usually done only at the beginning of a movement sequence, unless you really want to walk up a street and then back down again in one turn. You may also do it as your last step if you are pursued by an enemy, as it's supposed to be easier to repulse an attack from the front. (Note: Turning around does not cost one movement point, so you can just keep turning until you become dizzy if you like - whatever that would be good for!)
2) Cross the street (your facing remains the same even though you turn 90 degrees to avoid having to walk sideways). Costs one movement point unless combined with another move.
3) Enter the nearest backyard through the alley in front of you, or the one behind you (Combine with 2 at no extra cost to enter the backyard on the other side of the street).
4) Cross the street in front of you and walk into the next block.
5) Round the corner in front of you and walk down the crossing street.
6) A complicated maneuver requiring a certain amount of intelligence: Walk straight forward, cross the crossing street... Hmm! I think I will describe this one in example form: Facing north on the east pavement of a north-south street, Rover moves northward to the intersection's SE corner, crosses to the NE corner, from there to the NW corner, walks down the north pavement of the east-west street and stops. This is generally used for exotic evasive maneuvers and costs two movement points and a headache.
7) If you can think of other ways to move along or across streets, add them here!
  Obviously, option 3 above puts you into a backyard. From there you have one option with eight variations: You can enter either of the four streets surrounding you, through one out of two alleys. A dog coming out of an alley will turn towards the middle of the block, so which alley you pick determines your facing on the street. (Note: Large packs will use both alleys to get on/off the street faster. With small packs where this isn't really necessary, you can some times get an idea about pack members' loyalty by observing which alley they choose.)
  Some of these moves involve crossing the street, which is not without dangers. The risk of getting hit by a car depends on several different variables, including the dog's speed and agility, the number of dogs trying to cross at the same time (a car swerving to miss one dog may hit another),and the heaviness of the traffic which in turn depends on what street it is, the time of day and perhaps whether it's a weekday. Observe that the risk of getting hit is not necessarily proportional or inversely proportional to the heaviness of the traffic! Just think about it - when traffic is heavy, cars move slowly and are easier to avoid, and when it gets totally constipated they don't move at all.
  Enough about movement for now; some other actions are:

6.2: Ratting

  What this means is simply hunting and catching rats, which can be good for a number of things. The most obvious is that it may improve the hunting skills of the participants (Speed, Agility etc.). Killing rats may also improve your popularity among the local humans, but only if you are caught in the act. Finally, ratting is the simplest way of providing food for the pack. It does, however, have some drawbacks. Rats may carry diseases, and they do not taste very good (No, I've never tried!). If the pack has to live on nothing but rats for some time, both pack morale and the loyalty of individuals may suffer, particularly if the neighbors have better food - you may wake up one day and find that some of your underdogs have joined the other pack!

6.3: Raiding

  This action does not only have a rather similar name to the previous, it may also have the same effect, i.e. to provide food (of much better quality!) for the pack. It can also have other effects depending on what your target is.
  Basically, a pack ordered to raid a building will (unless they lose their nerve) rush in through the door and/or windows, steal or damage something and rush out again. Because raiding is much easier when you don't have to turn around to get out again, you enter the building through one wall and exit through the other, so raiding is a kind of movement as well. The buildings do not have any windows or doors in the walls facing the alleys, which means that if you want to e.g. raid building 1, 3, 7 or 9 on the map I showed you a few pages ago, they can only be raided from the street, and you end up in the crossing street. Buildings 2, 4, 6 and 8 can be raided from either the street or the backyard, and you end up on the other side of the building. To be successful, a raid action MUST be followed by at least one movement order, or you'll get caught! Examples of some effects of a raid are:
- Raiding a butcher shop is one way of providing food of much better quality than rats.
- Raiding a pet shop may also provide food, and there may be dogs there who will join your pack if "rescued", but dogs found in pet shops do not necessarily make good street dogs! You should also be careful not to release any (yuck!) cats by accident, as this is bound to ruin your reputation if the word gets out ("Look fellas, here comes Cat-Saver!")..
- Raiding the dog pound is the only way to get back an underdog (or other s/he-dog) if the dog catcher gets him/her. It is also very dangerous, and does wonders for pack morale and loyalty if you succeed. (If you fail, you have three days to persuade someone to rescue YOU!)

6.4: Attack

  Obvious. Haven't worked out the combat system yet.

6.5: Scent Marking

  Some times politely referred to as "lifting your hind leg" at something. This is how dogs announce their claim to a territory, in addition to other things. To be valid, territory scent markers must be refreshed every three or four days and as soon as possible after it rains.
  A little note about smells in general. Dogs recognize each other by their smell, which they leave by stepping on the ground and - more prominently - by lifting one paw off it. As far as IADL is concerned, a dog's smell (whether it's "dry" or "wet") is made up of a number of components which will probably be represented by a numerical code which is unique for each dog in the game. If you come across a dog's scent before you meet the dog himself, it will be identified by the numerical code because you do not know the dog yet, but as soon as you have met him all future references to his smell will be by name.
  A little note about scent markers: Being more "advanced" than the faint smell of pawprints, they contain a bit more information which varies with the leglifter's health, mood and intentions. A sharp nose can tell if the dog who stained your wall during your absence is ill, tired, nervous or self-confident, and last but not least you can find out whether he is trying to claim your territory or just making an entry in your guest book.
  (A little bit of weirdness before dropping this subject: Why do dogs use urine stains to mark the borders of their territory? Are they telling intruders to piss off?)

6.6: Spring Games

  This is simply an euphemism for sex. Right, in addition to the physical characteristics I mentioned a while ago, IADL dogs also have the physical characteristic of being male or female. And unlike certain other games this characteristic does a bit more than just "add color"!
  Actually the sexes and their activities by the same name are already implicit in all games where the population of a city, starship etc. increases with time, but IADL goes a bit more in detail (Nothing explicitly graphic, though - I don't want to make an X-rated PBM game!). Both you-dogs and underdogs may mate with each other - some times even without being asked! - but only if the bitch is in heat. Underdogs must also have high loyalty to let you order them to this kind of activity.
  The most obvious effects of this action are the increase in morale (if you let them rather than order them) and - after several turns - a possible increase in the number of your underdogs. However, making puppies is not a particularly efficient way of increasing your pack - not only does it take several weeks of game time before the puppies are born, but they take a couple of years to grow up as well!
  A bit less obvious is the fact that Spring Games can be used strategically. As any vet will be able to verify, mating dogs are physically locked together for some time. So if you e.g. send a loyal bitch to seduce the enemy's best fighter right before you attack, he will be effectively grounded for several turns (Since I promised not to get excessively graphic I'll stop here...). A clever (and still loyal) bitch may also be able to "persuade" a member of another pack to join "hers".

6.7: Checking out a location

  When you stop on a pavement or in a backyard, you will only get slightly more info than what you get by passing through. To find out everything that's worth knowing, you must Check Out the place, i.e. spend one action sniffing around. This will tell you all about scent markers, recent tracks (including who dug the open holes you saw when you came), filled holes (see point 7 below), and maybe even additional things about the adjacent buildings or buried "treasure".

6.8: Contacting another pack

  This action can only be carried out by the pack leader, i.e. the you-dog (he may bring an escort, though). When ordered to contact another pack (which must be "next door") the you-dog will walk peacefully over to the other pack and talk with its leader, who will tell you his player's address, which makes it possible for the two packs to start negotiating, working together or trading insults. This only works if the other pack is (ordered to be) friendly towards strangers - if it's not, the you-dog (and his escort if any) will be chased away by the other pack's perimeter guard, and withdraw without meeting the leader.

6.9: Memorizing a spot

  Memorizing a spot makes it possible to refer to it in a kind of short-hand (short-paw?) notation when giving orders, i.e. instead of giving a long string of movement orders you can simply say "go to point 5" (Well, actually you will refer to the place by a name you have chosen...). There are a couple of limitations to this order. First of all it can only be given to the main pack, i.e. in the presence of the you-dog (So you can't tell a subpack leader to e.g. "go there and there and there, memorize that spot and come back"). Second, plain dogs can only memorize one location. To memorize more than one place and remember its name a dog must be an assigned leader (see below), and even leaders can only remember as many spots as their intelligence permits.
  There are two variants of this order. The first is given without parameters, i.e. "Memorize". This tells ALL dogs in the pack to memorize the current position as the "home" position of the pack. Dogs that get lost (or scatter, see below) will try to get back to this place if their loyalty holds and they don't get lost (or recruited by a different pack) again. The other order takes as a parameter the name you give it (e.g. "Memorize Sanctuary"), and tells all leaders currently with the pack to memorize the place under that name. In both cases the dogs will also memorize the pack's facing, which can be useful to remember if the pack is to keep moving from the memorized point.

6.10: Assigning a leader

  For technical (and rather obvious) reasons we can't have every dog in the game running around following a separate set of orders. The computer that is supposed to be running the game, will set off a certain space for storing orders given to subpacks (I just got the idea to call them Paws. The subpacks, that is. Or maybe that's what I should call the subpack leaders. What do you think?). Being certain, this space is of limited size, and so you can only have a limited number of packs with independent leaders. When you assign a dog as a leader, you tell the computer that you plan to use this dog for leading an independent pack, and so he will need some extra brain tissue for remembering orders and memorizing locations (see above). Once you have assigned the available maximum of leaders, you can not assign any new dogs as leaders until a leader dies (I could have an order to "unassign" a leader, but that would mean you could order a leader to forget what he's memorized, and that sounds a bit too weird even for this game!)

6.11: Scattering

  This is a kind of movement order that is sort of an exception to the as of yet unwritten rule that a pack can only move together. When you tell your pack to scatter, the underdogs will run off in all available directions at random, which can be a quite efficient way to get away after a raid or attack. The disadvantage is that after a successful Scatter, your pack is literally scattered to the four winds, which makes it more vulnerable, and you may have a bit of trouble with getting the pack back together again.
  There are two variants of this order: The plain "Scatter" which does not tell the underdogs what to do next (you can't give more specific orders until they're assembled again). When an underdog stops running (either because he has shaken off the pursuers or because he's out of breath), it's more or less up to him what to do next. Some dogs will just sit down and wait for you to find them (some will do so in hiding), others may start searching more or less metodically for you, and some may try to get back to the "home" location if they have memorized one and can find it. Some may decide to forget all about you and return to being "unpacked" (oops...).
  The other variant is "Scatter and Home", which tells the underdogs that as soon as they finish scattering, they are to head for the "home" location. Obviously, this will not work with dogs who have not memorized a "home" location.
  Both of the above are "controlled scatters". There are also "uncontrolled scatters", which have the bad habit of happening all by themselves without being ordered (just like dogs may follow their own heads when you're not ordering them around). Uncontrolled scatters do not happen very often, and are usually caused by some dramatic event such as the sudden and unexpected appearance of the dogcatcher, someone firing a gun at the pack, and if you can wait until Melvin has read this, I'm sure he can come up with something silly that will cause an uncontrolled scatter as well. If your underdogs are jumpy, an uncontrolled scatter may even be caused by a scattering dog running into your pack, but the probability of this is not quite high enough to make chain reactions very likely. The risk of an uncontrolled scatter is lower when the you-dog is with the pack (The you-dog itself will never scatter, so remember to give some movement orders for it!).

6.12: Howling

  Contrary to popular (human) belief, dogs do not howl at the moon. Or at least they do not howl specifically at the moon. Most dogs are rather undiscriminating and will howl at whatever is in the sky at the moment.
  Howling at whatever is in the sky is not very productive, but it makes the participants feel good and strengthens their sense of community, whatever that means. Like everything else that is fun, howling is good for pack morale and bad for your popularity with the humans, particularly during Sleep. Howling is also loud and may attract strays from your and other packs - or the dog catcher! People have been known to throw different things at howling dogs to make them stop, and this may be a way to get some useful objects, but don't count on it - you are more likely to get a headache or worse if you get hit (particularly if the bricklayer has brought some work home for the night)! There are stories going around about a couple of dogs who used to work a kind of racket - one of them would sit in a backyard and howl until people started throwing things at him, then the other would "chase him off" and start earning rewards by bringing the "missiles" back to people who had just started missing them. However, no self-respecting dog has ever believed this to be more than a legend.

  Since I seem to have run out of action ideas for the moment, here's a side note about actions that reduce your popularity with the humans. This can be turned to your advantage by "impersonating" another pack - if you're lucky the stupid humans will think you are them, and their popularity - not yours - will suffer. This works best if your packs look more or less similar. Remember, humans can't recognize dogs by their unique smells, and most of them can't tell e.g. one Alsatian from another either! However, before you get all carried away, do remember that if your pack looks like someone else's, it means that his pack looks like yours as well, and as the humans say: "Two can play at that game"!

7: Holes

  There's a couple of actions that sort of sidetrack into this subject; they are "Dig" and "Fill". But there are some other things to say about holes as well, so I put this under a separate heading.
  Holes can only be dug in backyards and parks, where the ground is soft (if this game gets totally weird there may be a special artifact that enables dogs to dig holes in asphalt and concrete, but not yet...). When a dog is ordered to Dig (and he's in a backyard or park) he will create a hole in the ground. All the scratching of paws against the earth causes the hole to become rather distinctly marked with the dog's scent, so a hole is identified by the scent of the "digger" (the dog who dug it). For technical reasons each dog can only dig one hole in each area (so there won't be holes identified as Rover's second hole etc.). For some reason I haven't figured out yet, most dogs (except for the most crooked) regard holes as sacred - they can only be filled, redug and otherwise manipulated by the digger. The digger can dig the hole deeper, fill it up again (which, curiously enough, doesn't make it disappear - it's still there, only it's full of earth), redig it if it's filled up, put things into it and take them out of there.
  Holes are mostly used for hiding things in (dig, drop something, fill up) and will even provide some protection (but only against dogs!) if they are left open. They can also be dug to find useful things, but such things don't happen very often (though your chances for finding things are improved if you have a good nose).

8: Birds

  This idea was conceived while I was under the influence of an overdose of Trolls Bottom (?) and belongs (if it belongs at all) in the Advanced Options section. Particularly clever you-dogs may be able to "recruit" not only dogs, but birds as well (No, his name isn't Kehaar...), which will be rather useful for scouting - an average bird will probably have a Speed around 50 or something and can cover a lot of terrain in one action. However, the intricacy of orders that can be given to a bird are limited, and you shouldn't even dream about it until you have learned Avian. Learning Avian (as well as other advanced skills) requires first of all that you find someone who masters the skill/language well enough to teach it, then you must befriend this character and spend a lot of time together, not moving. There will probably be one or two "hermit" dogs who know Avian at the beginning of the game - just finding them is going to be a tough job!
  By the way, when trying to befriend a bird it's an advantage to be small and innocent-looking! (Perhaps this could be a job for puppies?)

9: A little dog told me...

  Communicating with birds may be one way to find out things, but there are other, more common (& reliable) ways. The best way to find out something is of course to go there in person and find out for yourself, and the second best way is to send an underdog to find out, but you can also find out quite a lot by simply talking to your underdogs, or even just listening to them. As you start building your pack, you will find that your turn reports contain not only descriptions of your actions and their effects, but also various remarks from the underdogs. They may make some comments about what's going on, or their own condition ("Rover remarks that he is hungry again, which surprises noone."), or they may suddenly feel like telling you (or whoever bothers to listen) something they suddenly remember. A few hints if you like to listen to other characters talking: Dogs talk more when they have breath to spare, so comments will be scarce during movement and raiding, and more frequent when all or parts of your pack is resting. Some dogs are more talkative than others, but don't listen to everything the chatterboxes say. As a rule of thumb (or, for those hooked on canine terminology, rule of big toe) you can assume that the quality of a dog's remarks decreases with their quantity and vice versa. A dog who speaks once a year will probably say something very important when he does, while a dog who loves the sound of his own voice will say anything, no matter how stupid, just to break the silence.
  A little side note about telling dogs to go and find out something: If the dog in question already knows what you want to know, he may react in three different ways: He may tell you right ahead that he knows already, he may move just out of sense range for a while and then come back pretending to have been wherever you sent him, or he may actually go there and find out what he already knows.

10: Skills

  Let's return to something related to the "chapter" before the last (Birds). While the you-dog is just an ordinary dog (just a little smarter, as he is controlled by a human rather than a computer), some underdogs may possess special skills which can be useful for whatever pack they join. It can just be that the dog can do something better than ordinary dogs (e.g. track better, or dig holes faster), or it could be something that (as far as the pack knows) no other dog can do (i.e. speak Avian or be able to detect the dog catcher ten blocks away). Both types can again be divided into two types: Innate skills that can't be passed on, and aquired skills that can be taught e.g. to the pack leader. Generally, you-dogs can learn a limited number of skills, while underdogs never possess more than one skill each (This is just to make the learning order simpler - instead of asking an underdog to teach you a particular skill, you just ask him to teach you. However, you must know that he has a skill before you can learn it!). The excuse for this limitation is that underdogs are more singletracked and prefer specializing in one area rather than becoming half-good Jacks-of-all-trades (or rather Rovers-of-all-trades).

That's all so far. It's a dog's life...

You have now reached the end of part one of this rule daft, er, draft! Before you keep reading, I would like you to write down your reactions to this part.
The reason is that the following parts contain reactions from other people, and I'd like to see if you agree with them before you know their opinion...
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