Reflections on Amber Diceless

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noman

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Note: this is a long post that I've had to break into two parts. It's about Amber diceless and its related systems. May not be of interest to you unless you're curious, familer with the system, or just bored at work.

Part 1 begins.

The context

So let's talk about Amber and its clones.

I (mostly) remember the time I discovered Amber. It was '91 or '92 (I think). I walked into my local gaming store, to be greeted by this guy minding the store:

iu


We glared at each other as I made my way towards the comic book section. I was there to pick up my weekly load of a gazellion X-Men titles. Because I wanted to be Wolverine and Storm was hot. :sad:

Then I saw it, setting regally on a shelf on the TTRPG section of the store. This majestic beast:

AD+Amber+RPG.JPG


It was the art that grabbed me. No, not because of the redhead. I wasn't even sure she was a she. It was the abstract, almost psychedelic style of the art that caught my eye. Most TTRPGs at the time had covers that featured Frazetta-style men and women bearing swords and casting spells at some poor beastie that was just minding its business when these photogenic assholes showed up at its lair. No, this chick (or guy, or whatever), is just standing there, upon a field of possibility. She wasn't fighting anything. She wasn't casting any spells. She was just standing there, holding knives and incense burners and being mysterious.

I thought to myself, "This bitch is up to something."

So I burned my nerd budget for the next two weeks on the book: Amber Dicelss Roleplaying.

I got back to my place (home, my dorm, an apartment...I'm not sure), and cracked open the book. Within its simple, black and white script and art, its chaotic formatting, I found a world I never imagined.

It was diceless, first of all. Which was impossible! Inconceivable! It was the primary barrier to entry for my players to play the game. "No dice? How the hell do you play a game without dice!"

I got a lot of that. A lot.

But for me, it wasn't the lack of dice. It was the scale of power. No TTRPG, anywhere (with the possible exception of Nobilis, which came out later), came anywhere close to the scale of power Amber represented. A starting, 100 point Amberite could typically destroy any high-power character from other games, waltz though deadly dungeons, and make Alpha Complex's Computer his bitch, all without much effort at all. You were playing cosmic, god-like characters on a scale I had never before seen in a game. How do you run a game like that?

I spent well over a decade learning how.

I was a terrible GM. Seriously. I was awful. I did all the things that are now my major, GM pet-peeves. But I learned, I grew, and I improved. Over time, I got pretty good at it.

Amber was my jam. I ran it almost excursively. Sure, I dabbled in running a few other games, but they never lasted long. I'd get bored, end them quikcly, and return to Amber. The lessons I learned as a GM and my style of gamemastering was formed though the use of this game. It shows. My games are hella lethal and heavy on politics and intrigue.

There were some unfortunate side-effect, however.

First, I became a bit of a diceless snob for a while. I found the use of dice boring and obsolete, and while I kept my opinions to myself, out of courtesy, you could cut slices out of the disdain I felt and serve it on a plate, like cake.

I grew out of this, thankfully, as I matured. Still, every time I hear or see some gamer talk trash about diceless systems, having clearly never played one, I want to slap a bitch.

The second problem was I became a total bastard. While some religious groups were worried D&D was turning people to Satan, Amber did something much worse to me: It turned me to politics. While my buddy was reading the latest issue of Soldier of Fortune for his Cyberpunk 2020 game, I was studying Machiavelli's writings as if they were a religious text.

The reason for this was simple: my players were clever. I had to be more clever than they were. A fact made more challenging because the Elder Amberites are master manipulators and schemers with centuries of experience playing the Amberite equivalent of 3D chess against one another. I had to get really cunning, really ruthless, and really sinister very quickly just to keep my players challenged.

I mean, look. Most of the NPCs in Amber or the Courts of Chaos are evil: either lawful evil, neutral evil, or more usually, chaotic evil. And they've got that perfect combination of being too powerful for their own good and cunning as all hell. I had to learn how to manage this as a GM in such a way as it was fun for my players. For the most part, excepting a few titanic failures, I was successful.

I blame Amber for turning me evil. :eek:

I'm trying to grow out of this too, but it's a slow, difficult process. :p

The scale of power

As I mentioned above, Amber offered a scale of power unlike anything I've ever seen. Even today, with a few games that promote demigod-level gameplay such as Cypher System's Gods of the Fall, Sine Nomine's Godbound, or Savage Suzerian, none of these games come close to the power level approached by Amber. It could take months or even years of gametime for a Godbound character to take control of one of the major nations of Arcem. An Amberite could take over the whole realm in a weekend.

One of the main reasons why I obsessed over this game for so long was because of the scale of power. No, not because I was a powergamer who ran games for other powergamers. I welcomed a certain degree of optimization at my table, so long as the player wasn't a dick. The thing to remember here is the character points in Amber don't matter. What makes a character deadly isn't its points, his powers, or his artifacts. What makes an Amber character deadly is the player. Good players make deadly characters. They'll dominate bad players with more powerful characters simply because there's no gaming metric for being a cunning bastard.

No, it's the dynamic of power itself that interested me. I loved watching what my players would do. For many of them, the strongest characters they ever had was something like a level fifteen AD&D mage. Small fry to an Amberite. There was often quite a bit of system shock at first.

Some players wanted to build. They'd set down roots and build a kingdom. Then an empire. And then try to take hold of an entire universe. A few tried to take over Amber.

Others concentrated their efforts into becoming effective agents of the crown: assassin-sages who stood loyal to the King (or Queen) and gathered power for the sake of the realm.

A few wanted to explore the mysteries of the Amber universe. They were the most challenging, forcing me to scramble to figure out and write up my own universe ahead of schedule. I learned very quickly to get my notes done before I even thought about running an Amber campaign.

Others wanted to play diplomat. Stop the wars. Stop the bickering. Bring some common sense to the game politics. Some of these became very formidable, being able to actually strong-arm a few of the Elder Amberites into getting on board with the New Peace.

A few wanted to hide in their personal shadow and dick around. They did nothing. It didn't matter what I dangled in front of them to get them hooked into the game, they just wanted to fuck around in he safety of their personal universe.

Quite a few imploded. Spectacularly. They'd go on rampages. Burn their own works down. Turn on their allies. It was crazy and campaign ending. They usually did this when I threw a big chunk of new power at them. They couldn't handle it.

It was fantastic to watch. Power does weird things to people. Even fake power.

End of Part 1.
 
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Part 2

The clones

There are two clones based on Amber Dicelss: Lords of Olympus (LOO) and Lords of Gossamer & Shadow (LOG&S). I own both, read them both, and ran them both. I've got every book in the LOG&S product line, including the recently released The Long Walk.

They're both excellent. I recommend both of them to anyone who wants to run/play a diceless game.

IMO, LOO is mechanically superior. Pundit cleaned up the rules, debugged it from most of the bugs that were a problem in Amber, and (my personal favorite) got rid of the sorcery power and replaced it with a set of powers that are much easier to handle and don't break the game. It's a tight, well-designed game that runs much smoother than either Amber or LOG&S out of the box (without house rules).

The downside for me is the setting. A purely personal issue, and not an objective criticism of the game. LOO is set in a cosmic multiverse based on Greek mythology. Boring. However, I should note that LOO has the best, well-researched catalog of Greek gods I've ever seen in an RPG. It's worth buying for just that alone.

LOG&S has the superior setting, by far. Again, this is just my opinion, but the core setting, the Stair, the associated realm books, all capture my imagination in a way LOO's Olympian setting doesn't. There's so much to explore! So many questions? What is the Stair? How big is it? What about sections that cater to non-human sized entities? I could go on an on. I want to world build in this setting. In this regard, It's very much like Amber.

What's more, the Elder Amberites are replaced by the Greek gods in LOO; they're just as much a bunch of dysfunctional bastards as the Elder Amberites. The Lords of Gossamer are...whatever you want them to be. The way the setting is set up, the way the NPCs are presented, you can make them scheming bastards, or not. You can scale the degree of bastardness in these NPCs in a way you can't with LOO. This is a very good thing. Sometimes everybody gets burned out on the scheming and backstabbing.

There are a couple of downsides to LOG&S for me (again, my personal opinion). First, to put it bluntly, LOG&S is reskinned Amber. Rite Publishing cleaned up the rules and changed the major powers in order to fit the new setting, but otherwise kept all of the mechanics from the original game. This is not a good thing.

The original Amber system was buggy as all hell. Some parts of it were just plain broken (sorcery). LOG&S keeps many of these bugs and broken parts in a way that LOO doesn't. LOO is a much cleaner game, mechanically. LOG&S requires me, the GM to fix the game preemptively before I run it else it'll blow up at my table.

The second downside for me is this: If you want to run LOO, you only need LOO. If you want to run LOG&S, you need three books: The main rulebook, Addendum: Shapeshifting, and The Long Walk. I consider the main rulebook to be incomplete. The other two books are needed to make it complete. Why? There's always going to be a player that wants to play a weresomething-or-other (Addentum: Shapeshfiting) and The Long Walk is needed for the players who want to play exotic creatures like elves, dragons, or borgs. Plus, the additional two books provide the GM with much-needed supplemental rules that will help keep you from wasting time coming up with houserules to fill the gaps left in the main rulebook.

So what's the future of these two clones?

Uncertain.

Pundit has stated that he has no plans on expanding LOO. Disappointing, but understandable. LOO is complete, as far as I'm concerned; I'm just greedy for supplements.

LOG&S? I don't know. Rite Publishing recently released The Long Walk, and are working on finishing up their Gossamer Worlds Compendium kickstarter. However, there's been no signal from Rite Publishing about any other supplements to the line. Theyr'e talking about Pathfinder a lot, but not a peep so far about their diceless line.

This is understandable, given Rite's recent tragedy and what I suspect is a precarious current, business situation. I'm not complaining. I am, however, noting this for anyone who might wonder if there's any news about new supplements.

It's my hope that they prosper, whether they publish more diceless books or not.

The system

I'm not going to spend a lot of time describing the system. It's an attribute vs. attribute resolution system that's very simple and extremely narrative. Whoever's got the better attribute wins, with outcomes being modified by Stuff (good or bad) and GM or player tactics. Very, very narrative. More so than Nobilis, in fact.

Almost all conflict resolution is judged by the GM with only a skeleton ruleset to help him judge an outcome.

This puts a very heavy burden on the GM. Consider PC death, which happens sometimes in my games, and understand that the only arbiter for that character's death is the GM. This is but one example of how challenging it can be both for the GM and the players. There has to be a lot of trust at the table. Ironic for a game that encourages PVP. Sometimes that trust just isn't there.

The end

I'm wrote this for two reasons: I wanted my first thread on this board to be about a game I really loved, and I wanted to explain why I'm mo longer running this game.

I've come to truly dislike the game system.

A while back thedungeondelver posted this thread. Sage words, but this particular part caught my attention:

Pointing at any RPG and saying "It's broken, therefore I must fix it, and my fix will make it better than it was before" when what you think is broken is that it is 180' from what you want stem to stern...IDGI. That's not "broken", that's you just playing the wrong game. Basketball isn't broken because it's not played on grass with an oblong ball and two discrete "sides" of offense and defense - that's football! Saying "We're going to fix basketball by playing outside, on the grass, with an oblong ball that can be carried, thrown, handed off or kicked, and you can run in to other players, so everyone will wear pads and helmets...but it's basketball because I say so." <shakes head>

This sums up my relationship to the Amber Diceless game engine, going on for years and years.

I've long considered the system bugged at best, and broken at worst. Maybe it's just me, and I'm the only one who's experienced the problems I complain about, but the number of house rules and conversions for Amber back in the day, and the constant bitching about sorcery, make me suspect I'm not alone.

So, I tried to fix it. For years. I never succeeded. I tried to convert it, but converting Amber to another system just doesn't feel like Amber.

Almost half of my time as an Amber GM was spent fighting the system -- trying to get it to do what I needed to do.

I ended up writing a house rules set for Amber that was well over seventy pages long. I came up with an abstract, 1:10 ratio point system that made Amber even more freeform. I rewrote sorcery, but only ended up making it even more stupid.

The more I did this, the more I failed. The more I changed Amber, the less like Amber it became. In the end, I realized that all my efforts were a waste. I should either run Amber as is, with minimal changes, enjoying both the bad alongside the good, enjoying the game as is, or I should run something else.

So I retired Amber. LOO, LOG&S, all of it. Locked away in a special place on my harddrive on a special, virtual bookshelf.

I just can't run this game anymore; I've got to move on. For reasons. I could go into detail about the disaster that was the last Amber game I ran, describe in detail the game-stopping problems this system has created for me, etc. etc. But this post has already grown overlong.

I'll end by saying two things.

First, YMMV. Just because I had problems doesn't mean you will. If you're a GM, and you're looking to try something different, something on a whole different scale, I highly recommend given LOO, LOG&S, or both a try.

Second, even though I'm not running this anymore, I'll continue to support Pundit or Rite Publishing if they choose to publish any more books for their game lines.

That's it. Thanks for reading. :smile:

End of Part 2. End of post.
 
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If I wanted to get into Amber (neverread or played it), and I could only get one and only one game, which would you recommend? LoO, LoG&S or hunting down a copy of the original?
 
I just can't run this game anymore; I've got to move on. For reasons. I could go into detail about the disaster that was the last Amber game I ran, describe in detail the game-stopping problems this system has created for me, etc. etc. But this post has already grown overlong.
Bah, you don't get away with making those posts you say are overlong, and then hold back the money shot, how the systems spectacularly exploded for you. That would be fun as hell to read.

Butcher I'd say it matters if you read Zelazny or not. If you've never read any Amber, a familiar setting of the Lords of Olympus along with the cleaner mechanics might make for easier reading according to Noman.
 
If I wanted to get into Amber (neverread or played it), and I could only get one and only one game, which would you recommend? LoO, LoG&S or hunting down a copy of the original?

LOO.

It's the best iteration of the rules, it's complete in its ruleset and setting, and the Greek mythological setting is one you could truly make your own without the Amber setting bugs or having to rely on LOG&S' expansions.
 
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Bah, you don't get away with making those posts you say are overlong, and then hold back the money shot, how the systems spectacularly exploded for you. That would be fun as hell to read.

Fair enough. I'll see if I can post something when I get the time.

Butcher I'd say it matters if you read Zelazny or not. If you've never read any Amber, a familiar setting of the Lords of Olympus along with the cleaner mechanics might make for easier reading according to Noman.

I have quite a few problems with Amber, but there are two that are relevant here.

The first is the rules organization and layout for both Amber and Shadowknight are terrible. LOO and LOG&S both don't have this problem; everything's cleaned up and presentable.

Second, IMO, the only reason to run/play Amber is if you want to play in Zelazny's setting. That's fine. Zelazny's Amber is awesome. The problem is the Amber game does a shit poor job of emulating that setting. This was half the reason I spent so much time trying to rework the rules; trying to get the powers and abilities to match the books.
 
Bah, you don't get away with making those posts you say are overlong, and then hold back the money shot, how the systems spectacularly exploded for you. That would be fun as hell to read.

I'll get into the general before I get into the session itself.

Ironically, both LOO and LOG&S fixed a few game issues that plagued many GMs in Amber that never actually bothered me: Time shadow tricks and transport by trump.

Time shadow tricks is a trick where an Amberite goes to a shadow (realm, word, etc.) that has a different time stream than Amber, the Courts, of Chaos, or other key locations. He can use this time difference to his advantage while his opponents are stuck in a different time stream.

For example, you can go to a fast-time shadow and prepare your spells, get a bite to eat, take a nap, etc. Then return to your original shadow and point in time a few seconds later than when you left it, fully restored and ready to go. You can use the same trick to prep an army, conjure items, make plans, contact allies, and otherwise have time to prepare in the face of an enemy.

Another example is when the player just says "Nope". Goes to a slow time shadow, holes up, and waits out whatever disaster / doom / danger he's confronting. Years go by in Amber while minutes go back where you are. He just waits it out.

I've seen this kind of thing drive other GMs mad with frustration. Weirdly, it never bothered me at all. I mean, most of the other characters had similar tricks, so it was an level playing field. I didn't see the problem, and it never frustrated me when my players did this.

It just goes to show that YMMV. The complaints I'm making aren't necessarily universal.

BTW, LOO (I think, I maybe wrong) and LOG&S both eliminated this problem with a simple fix: set, consistent time rates across realms. Easy peasy.

No, I've got two, broad issues with the system:

(A) The Amber system is extremely narrative. I daresay it's not merely narrative, but it's a storygame. It's the most storygame storygame that ever storygamed. :eek:

The rules do a fair job at resolving PVP. In fact, they encourage PVP at the table, with default character creation system using an auction system to buy points for their attributes. Characters are ranked (1st, 2nd, etc.) in each attribute. This sets a tone for interparty conflict before the game even starts. That's not a bad thing, if you understand that and accept it from the beginning. The problem is not all players are equal in skill level, and for some of my players, it turns out something like this:

PvP-Demotivational_o_102941.jpg


But that's not even the real problem.

The problem is while Amber is fairly good at PVP, it tends to fail at PVE.

Killing bad guys is easy. GM: "Is your [Insert active attribute here] higher than the bad guys'? Yeah? Great! You killed it!"

No, it's resolving conflict against the environment itself.

Player: "How fast can I run? How far can I climb? Can I jump that ravine? How long will it take me to pick this lock? How much better at riding a horse am I compared to the posse chasing me? How long will I last in this blizzard?" And my personal favorite: "How strong am I?"

Fuck if I know.

There is no real metric for success and failure in dealing with environmental factors. There is no real scale of ability when determining the capability of a character's attributes. The only real metric that's offered is how one attribute compares to another attribute.

There's an unwritten (?) rule that if a character can logically, reasonably accomplish a feat, he succeeds. This is bullshit. There's often a lack of consensus between GMs and players on what's "reasonable".

AFK, I used to rag on Hero System for it's slow combat. I stopped doing this when I realized that a table of experienced Hero players could finish an involved combat in the time it took me, as a GM, to get past the player arguments and nitpicking that naturally occurs when you try to resolve a critical combat with a rule system as narrative as Amber.

And nowhere is this more evident than when there's character death. No doubt, you've seen a player flip his lid after a beloved character gets killed by a bad roll. In Amber, the damage system is very, very narrative, and there are no rolls. When a character dies, there's no bad roll to blame; it's all on the judgement of the GM.

And games tend to be more than a little deadly.

This brings me to (B)...

EDIT: Old pic dead; replaced with new pic.
 
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Oh yeah. Let's do this.

(B):

iu


Let me begin by tipping my hat to Pundit. When he wrote LOO, he eliminated sorcery and conjuration, and replaced those powers with a set of magic abilites that are much more balanced, reasonable, fun, and not game breaking.

LOO isn't included in this rant. ;)

Now, with that out of the way...

I hate sorcery. Hate it. Hate it with a passion I usually reserve for Airlines, people who talk during movies, and fire ants. Why?

Because it's terrible. :mad:

And no, I don't mean it's subjectively terrible in the way Fate is subjectively terrible* I mean it's objectively terrible. I could prove it mathematically if I could, you know, do math.**

Sorcery is presented in Amber as one of the weakest powers in the game, that sorcerers can't stand up to characters wielding the greater powers of Pattern Imprint and Logrus Mastery.

In gameplay, it's the exact opposite of that.

Sorcery is the most versatile power in the game. It can't go directly toe-to-toe with greater powers, nor can it directly affect "real" objects not made of shadow. However, in the hands of a creative and competent player, sorcery can wreck just about anything in the game.

Imagine you're playing a mage. You can summon things. Anything really. Anythig you want or can imagine that's not made of "substance". That's most things. Earth. Air. Lightning. Meteor strikes. Liquid nitrogen. Micro-gravity wells. A torrential rain of diamond-hard crystals that carpet bomb an area with hypersonic speed. I could go on and on.

Combat? Try Merlin's Concerto for Microwave and Cuisinart.*** I don't care how high your warfare is. You're not dodging that.

And that's nothing. Some of my players were as creative as they were evil. The weaponized use of sorcery in my games eventually degenerated into every spell being an insta-kill, attributes and armor be dammed.

Logistics? Not a problem. Custom teleport + shadow time trick = logistical superiority. Combine with conjuration and you can teleport your whole basecamp anywhere you want any time you want. You get Howe's Moving Castle if Howe's Moving Castle was the offspring of Mordor and the Borg, and hates you.

Healing? Sure. Why not. How about healing every single person in your army in the middle of a battle. Because with sorcery, you can.

In the original Amber rulebook the rules on sorcery explain that the Elder Amberites tend to ignore sorcery due to its lack of general usefulness when compared to the greater powers, as well as it's investing in time (preparing spells). It's just not worth it.

o_O

I took this at face value when I first started GMing the game. Then my players figured things out before I did, and killed most of the Elder Amberites.

With sorcery.

Lessons learned?

It has a funny affect on people as well. All my sorcerers, the one that really lost it, started out with good intentions. They started out like this:

iu


And after they realized the true power they held, they became this:

iu


And by pencil he means a spell, and by magic trick he means the flaming destruction of my campaigns.

As I mentioned upthread, I spent years trying to mod this power, with mixed results.

I streamlined casting times, put caps on temporal changes, forced the sorcerers to visit a shadow and study it before being able to teleport or summon from it, and a bunch of other bullshit that didn't really made much of a difference. It was like painting a tank cheerful colors:

tank-01.jpg


Cheerful or not, It's still looking to ruin your day.

The last Amber game blew up in my face, in part, because of (A) and (B). Later, I ran a short LOO game once, and a somewhat longer LOG&S game after that. New players. The game went okay. It didn't collapse underneath me, but I could feel it creaking as I traveled over it.

That was the last time.

I'll see about posting a short (?) summery of my last Amber game over the next few days.

Until then, peace. :smile:





*Apologies to Fate fans. Fate is awesome. I just don't like it.

** I'm not that bright.

*** it's as bad as it sounds.
 
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Most TTRPGs at the time had covers that featured Frazetta-style men and women bearing swords and casting spells at some poor beastie that was just minding its business when these photogenic assholes showed up at its lair.

This amused me to no end as this is the cover to my copy of the Chronicles of Amber...
91H-EI859IL.jpg


Anyways, curious if you are at all familiar with Theatrix, a diceless system from the late 90s I grew rather enamoured with and whose author caused quite the controversy on Usenet back in the day?
 
Anyways, curious if you are at all familiar with Theatrix, a diceless system from the late 90s I grew rather enamoured with and whose author caused quite the controversy on Usenet back in the day?

I literally lol'd at the picture, Tristram. Literally. I never do anything literally. :grin:

Anyway, to answer your question, no, I've never found a copy of Theatrix to read, so I don't really know anything about it.

I'm a big fan of Active Exploits, though. IMO, it's the best diceless system I've ever read/tried.
 
To the matter of further supplments for Lords of Gossamer & Shadow. MIranda Russel made the following post on THE GREAT PURPLE SITE. In fairness to her and Rite publishing, I'm quoting it below.

Hello

Miranda from Rite here! Thank you for the kind words, we've been hard at work finishing up all the kickstafter projects and are in the home stretch of Gossamer Compendium. We also had a number of supplement stretch goals we've been working to get through the process as well.

We do not have an official release schedule for 2018 for the Gossamer line....yet. However; we (Kit, Perry, and I) are in discussions with a few folks like Jason Durall and Matt Banach on working out those details. I can't promise we will turn out as much material as fast as we have in the past, but we are dedicated to continuing the line and bringing folks top quality products to continue playing in the Gossamer world and setting.

We will post information on our website ritepublishing.com and on our Facebook page! We will soon have a contact us form on our site as well for any inquiries folks may have.

Miranda


(Qullian (Miranda), RPG.net Forums, 2017)

Also, the Rite Publishing Forums are back online, with a good deal of discussion about the game.
 
Fascinating post. I ran Amber for years in college. I disagree with just about everything you've written here, with the exception of the conclusion; I also no longer enjoy Amber Diceless, simply because it's the ultimate Mother-May-I system.
 
Fascinating post. I ran Amber for years in college. I disagree with just about everything you've written here, with the exception of the conclusion; I also no longer enjoy Amber Diceless, simply because it's the ultimate Mother-May-I system.

It seems to be our day for disagreeing with one another. ;)

I'd like to know what you disagreed with. I'm not really emotionally invested in what I wrote above, so please have at it if you want. I'd love to see some counterarguments and discussion on this thread. :smile:
 
I'd like to know what you disagreed with. I'm not really emotionally invested in what I wrote above, so please have at it if you want. I'd love to see some counterarguments and discussion on this thread. :smile:

Oh, I've been resisting the urge to write at least as long a counterpoint. If I could offer one slight bit of advice on Sorcery, though - it's only as powerful as you let it it be. Taking your cues from the Zelazny texts and not the game (which I admit gets many things howlingly wrong) means anyone with 50 points of Pattern Imprint can shut down any Sorceror in a heartbeat simply by saying "I take three steps to the left through Shadow and leave him behind." Moving through Shadow is really hard and/or time-consuming for a Sorceror, and even if he follows you you can just keep moving and telling the GM "I screw with the laws of magic with every step."
 
Oh, I've been resisting the urge to write at least as long a counterpoint.

Do it. You know you wanna. :grin:

If I could offer one slight bit of advice on Sorcery, though - it's only as powerful as you let it it be. Taking your cues from the Zelazny texts and not the game (which I admit gets many things howlingly wrong) means anyone with 50 points of Pattern Imprint can shut down any Sorceror in a heartbeat simply by saying "I take three steps to the left through Shadow and leave him behind." Moving through Shadow is really hard and/or time-consuming for a Sorceror, and even if he follows you you can just keep moving and telling the GM "I screw with the laws of magic with every step."

My houserules made sorcery a lot harder to use, kept the flexibility and most of the power, but but some heavy caps on some things (time manipulation, area of effect, etc.). Even handicapped, and allowed for power-based anti-sorcery tactics, it's still OP. It remained a catalyst for player/GM arguments.

I found the best option, tested in my last LOG&S game, was to scrap socery and repace it with somewhat buffed version of LOO's elementalism. This seemed to solve the OP problem, but it takes away a lot of the atmosphere of the setting.
 
Even handicapped, and allowed for power-based anti-sorcery tactics, it's still OP.

I'm honestly not seeing it. If you read the Corwin Chronicles closely, even though there's little magic in them it's pretty clear there are a ton of ways a regular Pattern Imprint wielder can simply ignore a Sorceror as the ADRPG defines it. It's only 20 points for a reason. If characters with Sorcery are trouncing (I almost wrote trumping there, hah) people with Pattern Imprint, you're not playing one of the Powers correctly.

It remained a catalyst for player/GM arguments.

I'm not surprised. I had a lot of powergamers come and go through my two year campaign who thought they'd found some loophole in the rules, only to eventually realize that they should have been reading the source material.

This seemed to solve the OP problem, but it takes away a lot of the atmosphere of the setting.

Keep in mind that Sorcery as written in ADRPG is only Sorcery as Merlin uses it, and it works like it does - like computer programming - because that's Merlin's schtick and at that point Wujcik only had the first book of Merlin's Chronicles to work with. By the time you get the end of Merlin's Chronicles, it's clear that Mandor's David-Bowie-balls sorcery, Julia's flower sorcery, Luke's whatever sorcery all work entirely differently.
 
I'm honestly not seeing it. If you read the Corwin Chronicles closely, even though there's little magic in them it's pretty clear there are a ton of ways a regular Pattern Imprint wielder can simply ignore a Sorceror as the ADRPG defines it. It's only 20 points for a reason. If characters with Sorcery are trouncing (I almost wrote trumping there, hah) people with Pattern Imprint, you're not playing one of the Powers correctly.

Oh, don't get me wrong. The primal powers trump (ha!) sorcery in a power vs. power contest. And yes, the skillful use of said powers can ruin a sorcerer's day. We're on the same page here.

But sorcery is still the most flexible power in the game, and as it's written in Amber, once linked to a power source, it can easily compete with the other powers. Because of this, IME, a skilled player can lay waste to pretty much anything if he's smart about it. Limiting sorcery only does so much.

You're not the first person I've encountered to make these arguments, and they are quite valid. But here's the problem with the Amber games themselves: they're so narrative that the experience can vary wildly from table to table. So sorcery isn't a big deal at one table while it's Hell on Earth at another.

I'm not surprised. I had a lot of powergamers come and go through my two year campaign who thought they'd found some loophole in the rules, only to eventually realize that they should have been reading the source material.

Complete agreement. The Amber game system draws powergamers like flies to feces.

Keep in mind that Sorcery as written in ADRPG is only Sorcery as Merlin uses it, and it works like it does - like computer programming - because that's Merlin's schtick and at that point Wujcik only had the first book of Merlin's Chronicles to work with. By the time you get the end of Merlin's Chronicles, it's clear that Mandor's David-Bowie-balls sorcery, Julia's flower sorcery, Luke's whatever sorcery all work entirely differently.

This is an excellent point. However, this also shows the difference in our perspectives and GM styles with regard to Amber. I knew the source material, but very rarely made use of it my games. So for my players, the source material was much less relevant than one would expect.

The reason for doing this was simply that half my players were familar with the books and half wasn't. If I relied too much on the canon, it (A) give the players who knew the source material an advantage over the players who didn't, and (B) it'd be boring and predictable for the players who had read the books.

And your point about sorcery being modeled on Merlin's magic rather than that of other sorcerers is spot on. But it's the only sorcery ruleset Amber provided. Makes it more relevant than the actual fiction.
 
as it's written in Amber, once linked to a power source, it can easily compete with the other powers.

Define "power source"?

Because if you're talking about Logrus Sorcery or Pattern Sorcery, well, duh. That's an investment of at least 70 points, it should compete with basic Pattern Imprint or Logrus Mastery. If you're talking about a random source of power out in Shadow...again, I disagree. Both Logrus and Pattern can screw with a Shadow Sorceror pretty trivially.

But here's the problem with the Amber games themselves: they're so narrative that the experience can vary wildly from table to table. So sorcery isn't a big deal at one table while it's Hell on Earth at another.

Yes. That's ultimately why I set the game aside, the difficulty of getting everyone on the same page in terms of the milieu.

This is an excellent point. However, this also shows the difference in our perspectives and GM styles with regard to Amber. I knew the source material, but very rarely made use of it my games.

Well, I suspect this was the root of many of your problems. One reason I'm lukewarm on LoO and LoGaS is that the Amber system is inextricably tied to the setting and particularly the Throne War of Corwin's Chronicles. There is no reason for the Attribute Auction otherwise. ADRPG never says this explicitly, but it's an early instance of the narrativist "fiction first" concept. If everyone at the table doesn't have a solid grasp of the fiction, then you don't have a game. By contrast, I simply made "you have read the first five books of the Chronicles" a prerequisite for playing in my campaign, no exceptions.

And I disagree about it being boring for those who have done so. Knowing the milieu and the general tone doesn't mean you have to slavishly stick to the canon, Star Wars RPG style. My standard campaign frame was "Corwin is King of Avalon, the home of the Great Pattern and the center of all reality and Shadow, he's gone missing, you're all fighting for his empty Throne. Go." "Wait. Are we in the universe of Corwin's Pattern, then?" "That's a great question. How do you intend to find out?"

And your point about sorcery being modeled on Merlin's magic rather than that of other sorcerers is spot on. But it's the only sorcery ruleset Amber provided. Makes it more relevant than the actual fiction.

My response to that would be "just write up some different Sorceries, then". It's a rules-light narrative game. It's not going to break anything. We had Mandor's balls Sorcery and a colour-based Sorcery, as I recall.
 
Define "power source"?

Because if you're talking about Logrus Sorcery or Pattern Sorcery, well, duh. That's an investment of at least 70 points, it should compete with basic Pattern Imprint or Logrus Mastery. If you're talking about a random source of power out in Shadow...again, I disagree. Both Logrus and Pattern can screw with a Shadow Sorceror pretty trivially.

I'm talking about both, and in both cases the outcome tends to be the same.

Yes. That's ultimately why I set the game aside, the difficulty of getting everyone on the same page in terms of the milieu.

In this, we're in complete agreement.

Sorcery is only the most obnoxious of my Amber hobgoblins. I don't mind narrative systems (Fate and Jenna Moran's systems work quite well), and while Amber is a narrative system, I think it's a bad one. 'Bad' in the sense that there's limited mechanical consistency. I mean, look, I didn't just put the game away because I was sick of wasting precious time arguing with my players over ill-defined or non-existent rulesets. I realized I could scrap the rules, assign everybody a random number from 1 to 10 to represent their relative power level, say "My rulings are absolute, even if I'm wrong", and get the same output I've gotten with the actual rules for years.

Well, I suspect this was the root of many of your problems. One reason I'm lukewarm on LoO and LoGaS is that the Amber system is inextricably tied to the setting and particularly the Throne War of Corwin's Chronicles. There is no reason for the Attribute Auction otherwise. ADRPG never says this explicitly, but it's an early instance of the narrativist "fiction first" concept. If everyone at the table doesn't have a solid grasp of the fiction, then you don't have a game. By contrast, I simply made "you have read the first five books of the Chronicles" a prerequisite for playing in my campaign, no exceptions.

Except no.

The Amber system is not inextricably tied to the setting or the need for throne wars. Evidence for this is provided by the many GMs, including me, who, over the years, have run the Amber rules without the setting, run the setting without the Amber rules, the fact that some of the better games I ran and played in were completely independent of the Chronicles, auctions, or any PVP elements, and the fact that, despite my complains, LOO and LOG&S both run the engine just as well as the original Amber setting.

I also reject the idea that reading the books is mandatory to play the game (run it, absolutely). That's like telling people who want to play Vampire that they need to read up on their vampire mythology and fiction. In can help, sure, in the sense it helps the player get a better feel for the characters involved. It can also be a detriment, setting up expectations that my not be met or even need to be met. Either way, it's irrelevant, as anybody can sit down to an Amber game, having never read anything from Zelazny, and still have a good time.

My response to that would be "just write up some different Sorceries, then". It's a rules-light narrative game. It's not going to break anything. We had Mandor's balls Sorcery and a colour-based Sorcery, as I recall.

True, and this is fine.

But why should I?

I judge the quality of a game system, in part, by how little I need to mod it. While I don't mind making some adjustments, I have no interest in making major changes to a game. I'll do it if I'm experimenting with something, but not because I'm trying to fix a poorly implemented game mechanic.

Sorcery should work. Not well, not great, but at least enough to not blow up in my face every other session. I'm not going to waste my time fixing something that should have been fixed when I bought it. While I'll tolerate some bugs in a game, I haven't the patience or time to build something that should have been already front-loaded and ready to go in the core material.

I already did this. I wrote a whole new sorcery power, and that snowballed into writing a whole new ruleset. If I've got to go to that much effort to get a major game mechanic to work to my satisfaction, what does that say about the game I'm running?
 
The Amber system is not inextricably tied to the setting or the need for throne wars.

We're not going to agree on this, and you've clearly got an emotional investment in the issue so I'm going to bail out now.

In response, though, I will point out that lots of people trying to use a socket wrench to drive a nail does not mean that hammers aren't explicitly designed to drive nails, nor that a socket wrench is a good tool for that task.
 
We're not going to agree on this, and you've clearly got an emotional investment in the issue so I'm going to bail out now.

I don't have an emotional investment, nor am I responding emotionally. If I gave you that impression, or offended you in any way, I apologize. That wasn't my intent.

I agree that we're not going to see eye to eye on some things. I'll point out, however, that I've agreed with you on a few points, both here and our last argument.

I don't mind if you disagree with me, Daniel. It's cool. I was enjoying our discussion. We have very different Amber gaming styles, I suspect. There's no harm in that.

However, if you want to bow out from this discussion, I fully understand. Thank you very much for contributing to this thread and taking the time to share your thoughts here.

In response, though, I will point out that lots of people trying to use a socket wrench to drive a nail does not mean that hammers aren't explicitly designed to drive nails, nor that a socket wrench is a good tool for that task.

I get the metaphor, but I don't see it as relevant to our disagreement. This is the problem we're having here. The Amber system is so narrative and freeform that you can use a socket wrench if you want to. It's wholly relative to the individual game table and people involved. So your approach to Amber is just as valid and useful as mine. I had problems with sorcery; you don't. We're both right, and perhaps we're both wrong.

My point to my response to your statement that much of the problem was due to not investing enough in the canon was that the canon is irrelevant to how poorly sorcery works at the table. It's just as screwy with the canon as it is without.

That's all.

EDIT: I had a brain fart towards the end that needed to be corrected.
 
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My response to that would be "just write up some different Sorceries, then". It's a rules-light narrative game. It's not going to break anything. We had Mandor's balls Sorcery and a colour-based Sorcery, as I recall.
That's called the Oberoni or Rule 0 Fallacy. Which in summary says, just because you can house rule something to be better than the published rule doesn't mean the published rule wasn't bad in the first place. Or,
  • "There is no inconsistency/loophole/mechanics issue with Rule X, because you can always Rule 0 the inconsistency/loophole/mechanics issue."
 
That's called the Oberoni or Rule 0 Fallacy. Which in summary says, just because you can house rule something to be better than the published rule doesn't mean the published rule wasn't bad in the first place. Or,
  • "There is no inconsistency/loophole/mechanics issue with Rule X, because you can always Rule 0 the inconsistency/loophole/mechanics issue."

I didn't know this was a thing. Thank you for posting it, Steve.

I'm going to repost this again:

Pointing at any RPG and saying "It's broken, therefore I must fix it, and my fix will make it better than it was before" when what you think is broken is that it is 180' from what you want stem to stern...IDGI. That's not "broken", that's you just playing the wrong game. Basketball isn't broken because it's not played on grass with an oblong ball and two discrete "sides" of offense and defense - that's football! Saying "We're going to fix basketball by playing outside, on the grass, with an oblong ball that can be carried, thrown, handed off or kicked, and you can run in to other players, so everyone will wear pads and helmets...but it's basketball because I say so." <shakes head>

TheDungeonDelver grasped something I've been struggling with for years. While making some changes can be necessary and fun, trying to reengineer a major, broken part of the system is self-defeating. More importantly, it leads to making the game something else; its spirit gets lost in the process.

Most of you (reading this) haven't played Amber or any of its variants, but many of you have played Rifts. I think a lot of you will agree that Rifts' mechanics haven't aged well. Some parts might be considered broken. So what do you do? Fix it? Rewrite large sections of rules? Sure, you can do that, but at some point it stops being Rifts. The spirit of the game gets lost in translation.

I love Rifts. I have Savage Rifts. Savage Rifts is a good game, but it's not Rifts.

I think the best approach, the one that requires the least expense of time for the GM and players, is to either play the game as written (with a few, minor alterations) or just play another game.
 
Most of you (reading this) haven't played Amber or any of its variants, but many of you have played Rifts. I think a lot of you will agree that Rifts' mechanics haven't aged well. Some parts might be considered broken. So what do you do? Fix it? Rewrite large sections of rules? Sure, you can do that, but at some point it stops being Rifts. The spirit of the game gets lost in translation.

I love Rifts. I have Savage Rifts. Savage Rifts is a good game, but it's not Rifts.

I think the best approach, the one that requires the least expense of time for the GM and players, is to either play the game as written (with a few, minor alterations) or just play another game.

This is a good insight, and one I've had for quite a few years as I tried to convert Rifts to several systems without success.

Most trad systems didn't handle the disparity of player character options well, unless you'd build e.g. the Dragon Hatchling, the Headhunter and the Vagabond each at a different tier (say, 600, 300 and 150 points in GURPS, or PLs 8, 3 and 1 in M&M).

Abstract, narrative systems like PDQ or FATE or Heroquest make quick work of the problem, but I'm not crazy about these and I'm not sure they'd feel conductive to the glorious over-the-top Murderhobos & Mega-Damage playstyle I foster in my beloved players.

I think Savage Rifts was actually doing fine until I hit the gear chapter. So many of the weapons and cybernetics are reskins of Science Fiction Companion material... pity.

Still. I'll be giving it a try in the near future. I strongly suspect it'll end up with me digging my old Rifts books out of storage, but I'll try it nevertheless.

With one little change — fuck the Tomorrow Legion. Fuck Erin Tarn and the Siege On Tolkeen. Dial back the timeline to 101-103 PA. CS troops in classic Dead Boy armor, ARCHIE-3 and his robot minions, Splugorth Slavers, Kingsdale as a base of operations... in due time I might spring the Mechanoids on them. Maybe even the Four Horsemen.
 
This is a good insight, and one I've had for quite a few years as I tried to convert Rifts to several systems without success.

The insight is DungeonDelver's. I just copied from him and adjusted as needed. :smile:

Abstract, narrative systems like PDQ or FATE or Heroquest make quick work of the problem, but I'm not crazy about these and I'm not sure they'd feel conductive to the glorious over-the-top Murderhobos & Mega-Damage playstyle I foster in my beloved players.

This has been my experience as well, and your experiences with Rifts are similar to my experience with Amber-type systems.

I could solve a lot of my problems by just running the Amber or LOG&S settings with Active Exploits (it be a good match and still be diceless), but it wouldn't be Amber or LOG&S anymore.

I think Savage Rifts was actually doing fine until I hit the gear chapter. So many of the weapons and cybernetics are reskins of Science Fiction Companion material... pity.

Still. I'll be giving it a try in the near future. I strongly suspect it'll end up with me digging my old Rifts books out of storage, but I'll try it nevertheless.

With one little change — fuck the Tomorrow Legion. Fuck Erin Tarn and the Siege On Tolkeen. Dial back the timeline to 101-103 PA. CS troops in classic Dead Boy armor, ARCHIE-3 and his robot minions, Splugorth Slavers, Kingsdale as a base of operations... in due time I might spring the Mechanoids on them. Maybe even the Four Horsemen.

I totally get this.

Urg. I remember I brought the Horsemen into one of my Rifts campaigns. My players hated it. I'm still not sure why.

If I ever get around to running Savage Rifts, I've decided I'm not going to try to emulate the spirit of RIfts itself, nor will I rely too heavily on the original source material for my campaigns. I'll probably draw from other game systems and/or come up with my own ideas. Not because that's in any way better, but becuase I don't currently own any Rifts sourcebooks, and I don't want to buy-in to the original source books. Every Rifts book I buy is a Savage Worlds book I'm not buying. :p
 
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Like Daniel_Ream, I disagree with some what you've said about Amber Diceless, Noman. Sorcery never bothered me when running a game. It's too slow putting the lynchpins in, compared with a sword or any power. Time manipulation, however, gave me a horrible headache as a GM. I was never really sure how to synch that. Thank you for posting all this, though, I was worried when I made the jump from therpgsite that I'd never get to talk about Amber again.

My main problem running Amber is actually very different from yours:
a) It's a tremendous investment as a GM. There's just so much to prepare to run any game, it's insane. It's like running a marathon. Relatedly;
b) Players get too invested. People call me in the middle of the night because they have a new plan for their character. Without dice, it can be played anywhere. I find myself getting wrapped up into secret meetings at coffee shops between game sessions where surprise cabals are being formed. "What is she doing here?" / "She's one of us now."

It's all consuming.

I love it, but, goodness...there are other hobbies.

//Panjumanju
 
Time manipulation, however, gave me a horrible headache as a GM. I was never really sure how to synch that.

People tend to gloss over the logistics of using the Powers. I think it comes from years of RPGs where all supernatural powers are quantized, instant, and fire-and-forget. There are very few problems with the ADRPG that can't be resolved by simply reading the Zelazny books and understanding how the powers are used.

Fast- or slow-time Shadows are presented as gamebreakers because people gloss over the simplest reason they aren't: you have to get there. The farther your Shadow is off from Amber baseline, the longer it's going to take to get there, either by Hellriding, the Royal Way, or Logrus searching. And to get there you have to pass through a ton of other Shadows, all of which likely have pretty screwy time streams, too. So in the process of finding your time Shadow exploit, your schedule has just gone to hell and you've opened yourself up to a lot of potential interference. I hope you didn't take any Bad Stuff.

In the extreme case of a player just turtling in a slow-time Shadow - that player clearly doesn't want to play in your campaign. No rule set can fix that. Politely disinvite him.
 
Hey, Panjumanju, welcome to the Pub!

Like Daniel_Ream, I disagree with some what you've said about Amber Diceless, Noman.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Ahem.

Sorry.

Nah, man. It's cool. To be honest, I'm really excited that this thread is getting some action. :smile:

Sorcery never bothered me when running a game

In all the years I've played this game, and all the other Amber GMs and players I've met, there are two types of people: folks have no problems with sorcery, and folks who do.

It's too slow putting the lynchpins in, compared with a sword or any power.

This is where I disagree with you. It takes a lot of time to prepare a spell. Casting a preprepared spell takes < 1 to 2 seconds. Slightly longer to use a power word, shorter to summon the Pattern (in my games).

This isn't merely my opinion. I asked Jason Durall to clarify the amount of time it takes to activate a lynchpin (in LOG&S). It's about as much time it takes to speak a word or make a gesture.

So this being the case, sorcery is faster than most powers (depending on GM to GM in terms of ruling how fast a character can invoke a power).

Time manipulation, however, gave me a horrible headache as a GM. I was never really sure how to synch that.

See, this is what I mean. Most shadow tricks using time (fast time shadows and whatnot) were never a problem for me. Sorcery's ability to manipulate time was (the spell that freezes a target in place forever) becuase allowing magic to manipulate time crosses over into the realms of the other powers while, at the same time, allowing for endless forms of cheese.

Thank you for posting all this, though, I was worried when I made the jump from therpgsite that I'd never get to talk about Amber again.

You're most welcome. :smile:

I'm happy to talk, argue, bitch, and whine about Amber, LOO, and LOG&S whenever.

My main problem running Amber is actually very different from yours:
a) It's a tremendous investment as a GM. There's just so much to prepare to run any game, it's insane. It's like running a marathon. Relatedly;
b) Players get too invested. People call me in the middle of the night because they have a new plan for their character. Without dice, it can be played anywhere. I find myself getting wrapped up into secret meetings at coffee shops between game sessions where surprise cabals are being formed. "What is she doing here?" / "She's one of us now."

It's all consuming.

I love it, but, goodness...there are other hobbies.

//Panjumanju

Most of the focus of this discussion has been about my issues with sorcery. It's only one of my issues with the system.

I agree with what you wrote above. Part of the reason I've retired the game is it's just so damn exhausting, for all the reasons you listed and more.

And what you wrote about players becoming too invested? Spot on. I've noted that Amber players seem to be far more invested in their characters than players from other games. And imagine what happens when PC death occurs? Guess who's fault that is?.
 
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The first Amber game I ran I had to call to a stop when two players, friends, became so wrapped up in their character's behaviour they started acting like enemies.

One told me he wasn't sleeping well because he was worried about what other players might be doing with his shadow.

As a GM I found it hard to invest that much. I was mostly dumbstruck. Still, it was a lot of fun on the outside looking in.

//Panjumanju
 
The first Amber game I ran I had to call to a stop when two players, friends, became so wrapped up in their character's behaviour they started acting like enemies.

One told me he wasn't sleeping well because he was worried about what other players might be doing with his shadow.

As a GM I found it hard to invest that much. I was mostly dumbstruck. Still, it was a lot of fun on the outside looking in.

//Panjumanju

Yeah. I get it. It's weird, really. I knew a few people that were really into their characters from other games, but Amber? Amber seems to invoke some of the nastier bits of some people's personalities.

Like playing Monopoly with some people, you know?

My last Amber game, I nearly had to break up an actual fight between players. No fun.
 
Coming back to this.

I believe some explanations might be in order.

I've been very critical of the Amber Diceless games in this thread. These are my honest opinions. However, they are merely opinions, and not meant to be taken as objective declarations of the worth of the game system. This is a game system that needs honest criticism beyond just "It's diceless therefore it sucks".

It doesn't suck. It can suck, and lends itself to sucking under certain, bad circumstances, with certain types of GMs and certain types of players who approach the game with the wrong attitude. I think it was Wujcik himself who said something to the effect of "Humans are the randomizer in Amber". This is true. This is Amber's greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

It can suck. It can also be incredibly awesome. The best, most memorable gaming experiences I've had to date were within the confines of this system.

The heart of my issue with Amber is humans are the randomizer of the game, and humans are mathematically inconsistent. Managing that inconsistency as a GM can be exhausting at the worst of times, and thrilling at the best of times.

The purpose of my criticisms was not to push people away from the game. I had two goals here. The first was to organize my own thoughts on the matter. The second was to be proven wrong.

While I don't mind if people agree with me, that was not my real purpose here. I wasn't looking for support for my opinions. I wanted people to disagree, then prove me wrong. I wanted my arguments to logically dismantled, and dismantled publicly.

Daniel took up that challenge, and he was just beginning to chip away at my assumptions until we both got sidetracked into the Star Trek discussion. He seems to have left the Pub, which is regrettable. I respect his decision to do so, and I hope he returns. His participation was most appreciated and his arguments of great value.

I've retired the system, but I love it, even now. It's a beautiful, if greatly flawed, system with a great deal of potential.

I dream of what could have been. Wujcik had planned for supplement after supplement after Shadow Knight. Rebma would have been a thing of beauty. Then a master game designer fell before his time, and that dream faded away. The same with Steve Russell. Rite Publishing produced a respectable array of minor supplements, the set of many more to come. There was going to be more threat books, a faction book, a new sorcery system, and all manner of wondrous work. But that dream too faded as the result of tragedy.

Steve left behind his wife and newborn child. That woman, in the midst of enormous sorrow and loss, managed to complete the kickstarter rewards for the Long Walk and the Gossamer Worlds Compendium. She got those books out to us backers, despite it all. I think of other designers or game companies that fault on their obligations because "Real life happens", and I want to kick them in the face.

I respect very little, but I respect Miranda Russell.

There's still hope. Rite Publishing has been focusing on Pathfinder and D&D 5E. There's no development work being done on their diceless line. I'm okay with that. I truly am. According to Steve, diceless was profitable, but it ranked below their other main product lines. Rite needs to do what it needs to do in order to make a profit, and if that means focusing on more profitable markets, then I support them fully. But Miranda has stated that they may be able to restart the line in 2018. So, hope. And there's nothing wrong with hope.

If you're interested in the system, I encourage you to try Pundit's Lords of Olympus or Rite's Lords of Gossamer and Shadow. Even if you never run or play them, LOO is a wonderful resource for Greek mythology, and LOG&S has some of the best artwork I've seen in the hobby.

So, I think I'm done here. Thanks for reading, thanks for everybody who replied to this thread, and thanks again to Daniel for disagreeing with me (hope you come back).

Noman out.
 
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