I have been playing in a Lords of Gossamer and Shadow game, the regeneration of the Amber diceless role playing game, for the past few weeks. The game is being run by Steve Russell of Rite Publishing, who is the publisher of the game, and we are play testing a future Rite Publishing product for the game. This is only my second foray into diceless role playing, but so far it has been a rewarding experience.
The Amber Experience
In my first experience with the Amber diceless role playing game, there were a lot of turn offs. First, as I was playing with a group of people who had been playing Amber for a while, I really felt out of my depth. I have been role playing for over 30 years, but diceless was really a challenge in that without the structure, I really did not understand how to play a character, so I did not understand how to create one.
Next, the Amber setting is a competitive one. Characters are ranked in the four attributes, and the highest rank always wins. To achieve a rank, there is an attribute auction, in which the points one would use to buy powers and abilities are depleted blindly in order to come out better than the other players. There was also a similar silent auction for various titles that also depleted your point pool. Not knowing what the significance of the attributes was to the powers, or the value of the various titles, it was easy to create a character with stats but no powers, or to be highly ranked in a stat that was irrelevant to your powers or character concept.
Another aspect of Amber that really detracted is that you can pretty much do whatever you can imagine. That ambiguity was very challenging to someone accustomed to rules with codified situational modifiers and at least known qualities to opponents. This is where the powers, that you did not know the significance of, come into play. Players have the ability to change reality, so just having good stats is a severe limitation.
The biggest drawback to Amber, however, was the lack of a unified goal. Every character was capable changing reality, crossing dimensions, traveling to other worlds, etc., so you ended up playing one character at a time, with players doing things independently that not only took on game time, but also that time flowed differently in different places. As a result, most of the game sessions were spent sitting around while the other players all got their turn to play.
Together, these factors created such a bad experience with Amber that I vowed never to play it again.
Lords of Gossamer and Shadow
Lords of Gossamer and Shadow uses the next generation of the Amber diceless role playing system, but not the Amber setting. And while it uses a similar rule set, the rules have been tweaked to make it more accessible.
First and foremost, Lords of Gossamer and Shadow is not Amber. It uses a similar rule set, but it does not carry the baggage or canon of information required to play Amber.
The setting evokes similar qualities to Amber, such as the Grand Stair that links to the various Gossamer Worlds. However, players are not forced to join a faction that governs their powers and purpose. In Lords of Gossamer and Shadow, a character can have any combination of the powers that they can afford.
The characters still have the same four attributes that drive the various powers. But there is no “throne war” competition, no lineage dependent backstory, no titles to buy, and the attribute auction is an optional variant. Players are given a point budget with which to build characters, but this is completely independent of the other players. And while the attributes are still ranked, they are primarily used for comparison to adversaries and to measure the degree of success for activities.
Similarly, the characters are not in competition with each other. In the game we are playing, the PCs were recruited as a special operations team to complete a mission. In the game, the combined abilities of the group further the mission in order to achieve the objective.
Since the characters are working as a team, the adventure is unified. Everyone is in the same place at the same time. Unless we split the party for some reason, no one is waiting for their turn to play, and there are no mutually independent individual subplots across the multiverse.
This combination of improvements has changed my opinion of diceless significantly. I still don’t have the mental agility to make things up on the fly, but my stat centered character adds his own qualities to the game and is as equally playable as the sorcerer, or the masters of creation or destruction.
While I am significantly impressed with the improvements in Lords of Gossamer and Shadow, there is one thing that I don’t understand. It is not clear to me the order in which things happen.
Unlike the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space role playing game, where the sequence of events is always
- Talkers – any people who are just going to speak? Now’s their time to talk.
- Runners – people who are just moving? Here’s when they go!
- Doers – non-combat actions. Need to fix something, or do something, now’s the time to act!
- Fighters – combat actions go last
in Lords of Gossamer and Shadow it seems that physical activities always come before mental ones. This is confusing in a situation such as casting a cantrip, which is by definition instantaneous, in order to affect combat, such as causing the opponent to momentarily lose their balance to prevent their attack and strike first. On the surface, this should work, but in play, it was deemed to be doing a mental action, so the physical attack happened first.
Conclusion
I like Lords of Gossamer and Shadow and I am growing to appreciate the fun of diceless role playing. Most of the issues I had with Amber have been removed, at least in the game that we are playing. While it is still possible to introduce all of those elements, they are no longer essential aspects of the game.
Lords of Gossamer and Shadow is a winner.
Thanks for posting this!