Time to write down a bit more about this game idea, I guess... First of all, a little (?) correction. In the first draft I said something about having more time for new ideas as I was not doing my own programming any more. That was true when I wrote it, but not any more. At least at the time being it looks like I have a lot of work with Archipelago in front of me anyway, which means less time for other things, but not too little time to keep playing with ideas!
  The new comments and ideas in this supplement are partly based on comments and suggestions from a couple of my PBM contacts. More may appear later when more people have read the original draft and this...

  First of all, a bit of general drivel about the suggested title. One suggestion I have received twice is to change the game's title because it is too similar to It's A Crime. You may be right (though I do not think ABM would have the nerve to claim the copyright on the words It's A!), but neither I nor anyone else has so far come up with a title I like better than the original. One idea I have to make it a bit less similar to IAC is to leave out "It's" and call the game A Dog's Life - certainly a game title starting with the indefinite article would not cause any problems?! And it would still allow me to think up "funny" slogans, only I would have to remember to say "It's A DOG'S LIFE" rather than "IT'S A DOG'S LIFE", if you see what I mean.

  Øystein Sørbo finds all that stuff about he-dogs etc. difficult, and takes me to task for using Rover as an example in the movement orders. Well, as I mentioned at the end of section 1, the different terms are just for people who insist on correct grammar, and their use is entirely voluntary. As for Rover... Let's just say I'm using him in the most complicated examples because he's an old dog with more experience than your brand new you-dog, okay?
  Actually all this is more or less irrelevant nitpicking, so let's see if our first consultant has something more interesting on his mind... (I'm translating his comments from Norwegian as I type this, and may misinterpret occasionally):
  "The purpose of the game is rather unclear. What about some more original ideas, such as becoming most wellknown among the humans? This could be done either with good or bad deeds. This would automatically lead to a split-up between the dog gangs: the good and the bad (You forgot the ugly!) As dogs don't carry weapons or armour (so far) it would be rather boring to base the game on attacking other dog gangs to become the strongest."
  As the last speaker took the liberty to nitpick on my writing, let me return the favour: If you want the game to be different from IAC, why do you keep referring to groups of dogs as "gangs"? I agree that the victory conditions should be rather original, but the idea with being good or bad to humans seems a bit out of character for "alley dogs" (Well, you say "alley cats", don't you?). Most semi-wild city dogs wouldn't care much about what humans think of them as long as they leave them alone!
  By the way, I think there are other ways to become better at fighting than collecting a pile of weapons...
  "How about introducing dog races? Some dogs are bigger than others, some are smarter, stronger, fiercer etc. This also makes recruiting more interesting. Some races don't like each other; the chances of recruiting are better if you are of the same race."
  Sounds like a good idea, though I'm not so sure the relationship between races is quite as simple as that last sentence claims. If I was a small weak dog I would like to have some big strong friends.... (Actually I've been thinking more or less subconsciously about dog races, but not enough to write anything about it. One disadvantage with having a lot of different dog races is that it would make the game design more complicated...)
  "Forget about Greenpeace. Don't bring politics into the game; you are certain to meet someone who disagrees with you and starts complaining."
  You mean, someone who thinks GP does do a lot of good for alley dogs? I thought I made it relatively clear that GP (and other organisations) won't be in the game. They are mentioned in the first draft (just as a kind of joke), they may be mentioned (in the same way) in the rulebook, but they won't be in the game! (After all, while most dogs may be able to figure out that a building contains an office, they would have to be damn clever to be able to read the sign on the door or otherwise figure out who owns it!)
  Relax, Greenpeace won't be in the game. How about Bluecalm?
  "Try to "fade down" the heat periods a bit, don't make it an important strategic point."
  Whatever the final title of this game will be, it won't be "Lady and the Tramp"! (Remember that movie? About halfway through it, L&T have dinner together and go somewhere to watch the moon. In the next scene they wake up in the morning and go home, and at the end of the movie Lady has a litter of puppies she apparently doesn't even nurse.) We're dealing with alley dogs here, and I would find it more unnatural if they didn't go into heat, mate and have puppies - but of course they don't do it all the time.
  If it's my suggestions for "strategic use of sex" (last paragraph in that section) you object to - well, it's just an idea I got one day I was in a naughty mood, but I do think something like this could work occasionally - only more subtly than in that outline. I.e. instead of going on about anatomics I would let a couple answer an order that comes immediately after a mating order with "We're not finished yet!"
  "How about contact with "tame" dogs, perhaps some heroic rescues? "Tame" dogs could perhaps be "agents" smuggling out food and information."
  First there was Lady and the Tramp, now you seem to have been reading 101 Dalmatians! There may be some interaction with domestic animals, but not exactly in this way... Letting characters live in houses would sort of violate the rule that houses can only be entered by raiding...
  "Or how about special dogs: police dogs, guide dogs, guard dogs, fire dogs?"
  What's a fire dog?? And to throw your question back, what about them? The way it looks for the time being, IADL is supposed to be a game about stray dogs, and those specially trained animals are even less likely than others to become abandoned or go stray, or have any contact with dogs that have. You might as well ask "What about the queen's corgis?"
  "How about a "standby" order for interacting with other dogs/packs. Hide if they see other dogs. Ignore other dogs. Assume a defensive position if they see other dogs (a rather agressive order). Attack other dogs. Run away from other dogs, or meet the other dogs."
  The dog packs (at least the organized ones) will most likely have some kind of standing order for dealing with unexpected encounters. Most games have. (Do you really think getting ready to defend yourself in case someone attacks sounds so agressive?)
  "Who is Melvin, by the way?"
  Wrong question, my preciousssss! What is Melvin? He is weird...
  "Why use birds? Why not be original? How about using squirrels instead?"
  Squirrels probably won't be very useful outside parks. However, the dogs could theoretically use any kind of animal as pack "extensions" provided they could learn the language and befriend them. Birds (used as scouts) was just the first thing that came into my mind... Using birds is not original? So what other game do you know about that uses birds this way (apart from Trolls Bottom which uses one bird in a completely (?) different way...). Anyway, using other animals for anything should probably be an exception rather than a rule - this is supposed to be a game about dogs! (I'm a bit surprised you didn't mention cats...)

  So much for Øystein's comments. Here are some more thoughts from another gamer... Hans Fousert has the same objections to the title and also thinks the game should be more original. Sounds reasonable - the final version of the game should be about as different from IAC as Archipelago is from Starweb. Once I've worked as much on this as on Archipelago, it should be.
  "Why do the blocks always have the same size? Why not include some bigger or even rectangular blocks?"
  Because I'm lazy, and that was the first idea I got. There are a couple of problems with your idea, though. Picture a long block facing two short ones:

A dog at B, told to cross the street, would end up at A, and so would a dog at C with the same order. But to a dog at A the order would be ambiguous: should he cross to B or to C? One solution could be to make A two locations - in effect, treat it as two blocks without a street between them. But that could have some undesired effects, e.g. a dog ordered to walk down this block and turn down the side street (which isn't there) would either turn down an alley instead or run straight into the wall.
  In short, a more complicated city layout would require a movement system that is either much more complicated (with special orders for all special cases, e.g. "Cross the street to the left corner and..."), or oversimplified. An oversimplified system would have a square grid where each square is either a corner, a stretch of pavement, an alley, the inside of a house or part of a backyard (or, in more advanced areas, part of a park etc.), and just a few movement orders - Turn left, turn right, turn around and move forward. The trouble with this is that it makes it possible to write illegal orders. Let's try to persuade old Rover to a demonstration (No, Øystein, you don't want to use your own dog for this).
"Where are you, Rover?"
"On a pavement outside a warehouse with the street on my left. What do I do?"
"Turn right and move forward!"
"Alright..." THUMP! "Ow, that hurt!"
  While my assistant takes Rover to the vet, I'll just say one more thing about similar blocks: They make it possible to move through unmapped terrain without trouble (well, without other trouble than that caused by the local population at least!) All this does not necessarily mean I am totally against a completely different mapping/movement system, though. Keep those ideas coming...
  "You could include height levels in the game: up (roofs, hilltops, trees), normal (streets, shops) and down (cellars, holes, sewer, subway)."
  That would certainly make it different from the inspiration source! But I have some difficulty with picturing "alley dogs" climbing trees or riding (?) the subway! Sewer adventures could be interesting. Are there really crocodiles down there?
  "A graveyard is full of bones: a real paradise to dogs. But then the occultists might try to catch a dog to sacrifice it."
  I've got the feeling that someone is trying to outweird me...(Occultists? What occultists? (pause) Oh, those occultists!)
  "Some people do hate dogs (I know, Øystein is one of them!) so much that they try to poison their food.
  "People should be able to hire dogs as watchdogs. Payment could be in food or small "add-ons", e.g. a flea collar."
  Actually I've never heard about people "hiring" stray dogs for anything - they either adopt them completely or leave them alone. Letting dogs interact with humans in this way seems to me like over-anthropomorphizing...

  "Talking about fleas: The dogs should also take care not to catch any diseases etc. Searching in a dustbin is in that case more risky than robbing a butcher.
  "Don't forget that for a dog to be able to produce kids the female must be in her fertile period. So if you want to include it, you'll have to drop your one day per turn as this would take too long. Why not make it a week? To be able to use the days of the week as a variable factor why not divide orders into blocks e.g. order 1-2=monday, 3-4=tuesday etc. Or even 1-5=monday-thursday."
  Actually dogs would have a lot of trouble increasing the pack's size by breeding in any case because the puppies would need time to grow up as well! Bending the time scale won't help much, and I'm not that crazy about letting dogs carry out one or two orders per day either!
  One possible solution to the problem with things that take time would be to let underdogs carry over from game to game. For instance, a bitch first seen in game 1 could go into heat and mate in game 3, give birth in game 4 and spend the next dozen of games raising her puppies in a safe place until they were ready to assume independent roles in game 17. Personally I would find it rather charming to discover that the underdog I just picked up is an old friend or maybe even one of "my own" puppies grown up! It's always a bit sad when a game ends and all the characters just disappear, but this rule would change that. Of course, it would be a possible problem that underdogs keep developing while you-dogs have to start from scratch every time - the underdogs could become too powerful!
  By the way, is this talk about "kids" another example of over-anthropomorphisation, or just a slip?
  "You could use different fences and walls to separate blocks/parts of the city from each other. Some fences/walls are higher than others or dug in deeper. So dogs with better jump capabilities can cross higher fences, others should dig their way under the barrier. In this way certain parts of the city can be excluded from the beginning of the game. Only experienced dogs can cross the walls. In this way, you can always bring in some new parts in the game, which gives some new things to explore/discover (like in RPGs upgrading a level)."
  Having different "levels" sounds like a good idea, but splitting up a city with fences and walls like that would not work. At least it doesn't sound very plausible. No town I've ever been in had any dividing features of that kind... (I've never been in Berlin, though!) And requiring dogs to dig under a fence would only stop the first one!
  For some alternative solutions, let me first say something about the general structure of the game - a subject that hasn't been mentioned so far, but everyone seems to assume IADL will be of the kind with several separate game boards each existing for a finite time, rather than the kind with everyone on one big board that lasts "forever". (One thing that can be said in favour of the second kind is that I won't have to think of any victory conditions!) Actually both options may still be open (it's even possible that we may end up with a hand-moderated game even though I keep talking about using a computer...). Or how about a hybrid? Imagine a large ever-expanding "country" full of cities of limited duration. Rather than each city being a totally separate and independent unit, there would be ways to move dogs (even whole packs) from one city to another. That way, each city could be one "level" (more or less like Heroic Fantasy, where each "level" you pass through is really a separate game). It would also provide a new way of dealing with games where a lot of players have dropped out or been eliminated: Just take the still-active packs from two or three old games and put them together in one new city.
  Moving like this can obviously be justified and explained from the gaming viewpoint, but there are a couple of problems when you see it from the characters' viewpoint.
1) How? To be realistic, you can't just tell the player that his pack is suddenly in a different city - he'll want to know how they got there, and won't accept teleportation. One possibility is that the dogs walk all the way, but in that case it would be rather strange to travel for several days without anything happening, so this would make it necessary to "create" the countryside as well, and since most countries have more countryside than city (area-wise), this could even reduce the significance of cities altogether. Another option would be to move the whole pack together without stopping on the way. The mechanism for such actions does exist - trucks and freight trains are just two examples (I think planes should be left out, though - a single greyhound could perhaps make it, but not a whole pack of mixed races!). By the way, moving the pack with some kind of vehicle would make it easier for the moderator to put the dogs wherever they fit in - dogs can't read, so they are generally not able to figure out where a train will take them!
2) Why? Moving out of town to start over elsewhere is a rather drastic action, and a pack of dogs would need some rather strong motivation to do it. From the moderator's viewpoint it's perfectly acceptable that he has to get everyone out of town because the game is ending, but the players thinking for the dogs need a different kind of motivation. The problem is to make them do it without feeling forced (even though that is exactly what they are...). For instance, stating that all the city's dogcatchers suddenly got together and rounded up all the stray dogs in the city within an hour, and then loaded them on the first train out of town does not only sound ridiculous, it would probably also make the player feel like he hasn't got as much control as he would like ("But I was just going to attack Brutus' pack, and dig some new holes, and raid the drug store and... and..."). Besides, if the dogs were moved by the humans they probably wouldn't find very much freedom at the end of the line...
  The alternative would of course be to persuade players to move without actually telling them that they have to, which leads to two problems:
1: Players want to stay even though everyone else is leaving. The only solution I can think of at a moment's notice is to make the game so boring the player will have no choice but to leave. But a player who suddenly finds the game boring might just decide to quit altogether rather than move "up" a level! Besides it does not sound very plausible that exciting things just stop happening because there are so few dogs in the city...
2: Players who get bored and want to leave before they're ready. Well, you can't just tell a player than there won't be any trains or trucks leaving the city for the first couple of months after his arrival, can you? Fortunately (?) I've got a better idea here. It's quite simple: Dogs boarding a vehicle have no control over where they are going, so it's up to the moderator to decide where they are going. A pack that's ready to upgrade could go to a "higher level" city, while one that is not would be moved "sideways" to another game of the same level!
  "Does the weather affect anything? (Yes, I do play Trolls Bottom!)?"
  I have already mentioned the effect of rain on scent markers, and yes, the weather would most probably affect several other things as well. Digging, for instance, would be harder both when the ground is very dry and when it's very wet (particularly if the hole fills up with water even as you're digging it!). Weather even interacts with a dog's race, e.g. a dog with thick fur would get problems in hot weather, and would feel very uncomfortable in heavy rain unless its coat is thoroughly waterproof. Strong wind would make it harder to smell things (and so would dry dust). And these are just a few examples of things that could be affected by different weather types. What someone ought to do is take a big sheet of paper and make a table where each row stands for a weather type and each column for an action, and then go through all the squares and figure out what effect that weather type would have on that action - maybe even making it impossible! Just for an example, here is an attempt to list the weather's effects on the Howling action.

Sunshine:	No effect.
Rain:	Dogs generally stay under individual cover, which tends to lessen the feeling of "togetherness". A dog howling in the open with his head thrown back will get his mouth full of water (!). The noise of the rain may drown out the sound and reduce its effect.
Wind:	Carries away the sound, reducing the psychological effect on the pack. Also, your downwind neighbours may hear you even though you can't hear them.
Snow:	The effect is slightly ruined by the occasional sneeze when a dog gets a snowflake into his nose.

And so on, and so on...
  Now I'll say a bit about the opposite question: Do the actions of the dogs affect the weather? Well, certainly not in the same way as in Troll's Bottom! (For those who don't know the game: A TB troll's voice is so loud he can change the weather by shouting! This is handled rather simply by asking each player to fill in a special space on the turncard to indicate whether he wants the weather to get better or worse. Other actions don't affect the weather.) However, some weather experts talk about something they call "the butterfly effect". The idea is that a small disturbance in the air - such as a butterfly flapping its wings - may set off a chain of effects that finally results in the weather being different from what it would have been if the butterfly had stayed at home. Dogs are obviously more powerful than butterflies, so let's have a look at what e.g. howling does to the atmosphere. First of all, the dogs stir up the air and release more heat than normal in their breath. As a secondary effect, people who are disturbed by the howling dogs may open their windows to shout and throw things at the dogs, which releases even more heat... Even digging holes can have a slight effect by releasing some of the moisture in the ground. Even a dog just standing in a particular place could alter the wind patterns... However, even the effects of a large dog pack would probably be much less than the effects of human activities. Just a single car is enough to produce much more heat than even the largest pack of dogs going through the most strenuous exercises you can think of, so the "butterfly effect" of canine activities is probably to small to bother with. In other words, weather in IADL is most probably not "interactive".
  A third question about the weather before we change the subject (Everybody's talking about the weather but noone does anything about it!). In Trolls Bottom there is not only weather - players get a weather forecast for the next turn as well. So the question noone else has asked is: Can dogs predict changes in the weather? My first reaction to my own question was "not likely". Then I started thinking. Dogs have rather sharp senses, and I've heard of animals being able to sense earthquakes and other disasters (including, I think, storms). So why not? However, I do not think I would handle it the TB way, which is to give the player one clear and unambiguous weather report each turn - i.e. this is what the weather will be like. No, it's much more interesting to put this in the dialog, let each underdog offer his personal opinion ("Gruff mutters something about a storm coming, he can feel it in his bones. Chico snarls at him to shut up with his bloody portents, suggesting that he wouldn't smell a thunderstorm if the lightning struck his nose!").

  Finally Hans comments on the title again and suggests calling the game D.O.G. but hasn't thought of a fancy interpretation of that acronym yet. If I should use this idea I would prefer the acronym to be D.O.G.S. (If "canine" was spelled with a G it could stand for Days Of Ganine Strife...)