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Amber Diceless
Jun. 13th, 2009 11:55 amThis started out as an email to a friend, and then I realized that it would make a pretty good blog post. So:
In my ongoing quest to find the RPG stuff I should have read donkey's years ago, I got hold of Amber Diceless.
Seriously, people played this?
I'm nowhere near through it, but:
1) to even begin to play the game you need to have pretty much memorized the source material. Not necessarily a problem, but I don't think Amber's popularity was ever up there with, say, HHGTTG, so your initial audience can only be a few thousand people who are *that* into Amber, right? Seriously, was there ever a time when you could get enough people together who knew enough about Amber, except in, say, New York, Los Angeles, and maybe Chicago, to actually play this thing?
I read a *lot* of fantasy and SF. I've read Amber in the last ten years, maybe the last five. I enjoyed it. I don't walk around with the kind of knowledge-in-depth of it that is an assumed pre-req if-you-don't-have-it-don't-bother-showing-up for this game.
2) The whole bidding for attributes thing seems to imply a remarkably stable group of players: once you've set up your initial cast, you seem to have, by design, a closed society. Yeah, I realize that this is consciously done and it fits the source material. But even in college we never had *that* stable a group: most weeks, at least one, and usually more, of our players couldn't make it. I think in Amber that means not having the session. And of course there's no way to have new players join unless using GM-generated pregens.
3) Diceless is a really cool idea but also a terrible one. Combine that with the extraordinary amount of narrative creativity required of the GM and the whole Good Stuff / Bad Stuff mechanic and this looks like the perfect way to destroy friendships. Right up there with Diplomacy. The source material actively encourages interplayer conflict, and the game actively encourages really-deep-immersion roleplaying, which to me screams that you make up grievances with each other in-game and then bring them out of the game.
4) The whole awarding bonus character points for meta-game activities. I mean, quite apart from the cringe-worthy 10-points-for-writing-a-poem-at-least-a-page-long for each session (seriously, I'd pay good money to NOT have that inflicted on me), where are the proposed sanctions if someone *doesn't* keep the campaign journal? And the Example, where the one guy extorts points from his GM for taping the session because Joe's gonna need to review the tapes as he writes up the campaign journal? Is it just assumed that Amber players don't have jobs, or indeed other interests in life? This also...well, I'm *sure* that in real life, assuming anyone ever played this, there was at least one GM, who said in all seriousness, "I'll give you five build points if you suck my dick." Hmmm. Note to self: try this in the campaigns I run.
The sanctions question interests me: "Hey, Mary, that's the second week in a row you haven't contributed your 10-point piece of Fanfic, so you can no longer Walk the Pattern! Muahahahaha!"
So, in summary, wow, this is a fascinating system. And there seems to be one thing that it's really good at. Unfortunately, that thing would be: taking a group of slightly-creepily obsessive fans of something, who hang out with each other based on their shared adoration of that thing, and making them hate each others' guts, while giving them tons of homework. This is an EPIC FAIL on a scale I've never encountered: _Spawn of Fashan_ was a terrible game, but it wasn't going to end in broken friendships and people moving to Seattle in a sulk. This game seems designed to do exactly that.
In my ongoing quest to find the RPG stuff I should have read donkey's years ago, I got hold of Amber Diceless.
Seriously, people played this?
I'm nowhere near through it, but:
1) to even begin to play the game you need to have pretty much memorized the source material. Not necessarily a problem, but I don't think Amber's popularity was ever up there with, say, HHGTTG, so your initial audience can only be a few thousand people who are *that* into Amber, right? Seriously, was there ever a time when you could get enough people together who knew enough about Amber, except in, say, New York, Los Angeles, and maybe Chicago, to actually play this thing?
I read a *lot* of fantasy and SF. I've read Amber in the last ten years, maybe the last five. I enjoyed it. I don't walk around with the kind of knowledge-in-depth of it that is an assumed pre-req if-you-don't-have-it-don't-bother-showing-up for this game.
2) The whole bidding for attributes thing seems to imply a remarkably stable group of players: once you've set up your initial cast, you seem to have, by design, a closed society. Yeah, I realize that this is consciously done and it fits the source material. But even in college we never had *that* stable a group: most weeks, at least one, and usually more, of our players couldn't make it. I think in Amber that means not having the session. And of course there's no way to have new players join unless using GM-generated pregens.
3) Diceless is a really cool idea but also a terrible one. Combine that with the extraordinary amount of narrative creativity required of the GM and the whole Good Stuff / Bad Stuff mechanic and this looks like the perfect way to destroy friendships. Right up there with Diplomacy. The source material actively encourages interplayer conflict, and the game actively encourages really-deep-immersion roleplaying, which to me screams that you make up grievances with each other in-game and then bring them out of the game.
4) The whole awarding bonus character points for meta-game activities. I mean, quite apart from the cringe-worthy 10-points-for-writing-a-poem-at-least-a-page-long for each session (seriously, I'd pay good money to NOT have that inflicted on me), where are the proposed sanctions if someone *doesn't* keep the campaign journal? And the Example, where the one guy extorts points from his GM for taping the session because Joe's gonna need to review the tapes as he writes up the campaign journal? Is it just assumed that Amber players don't have jobs, or indeed other interests in life? This also...well, I'm *sure* that in real life, assuming anyone ever played this, there was at least one GM, who said in all seriousness, "I'll give you five build points if you suck my dick." Hmmm. Note to self: try this in the campaigns I run.
The sanctions question interests me: "Hey, Mary, that's the second week in a row you haven't contributed your 10-point piece of Fanfic, so you can no longer Walk the Pattern! Muahahahaha!"
So, in summary, wow, this is a fascinating system. And there seems to be one thing that it's really good at. Unfortunately, that thing would be: taking a group of slightly-creepily obsessive fans of something, who hang out with each other based on their shared adoration of that thing, and making them hate each others' guts, while giving them tons of homework. This is an EPIC FAIL on a scale I've never encountered: _Spawn of Fashan_ was a terrible game, but it wasn't going to end in broken friendships and people moving to Seattle in a sulk. This game seems designed to do exactly that.