[Amber] Playing with Strict Karma

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Mark,

You wrote,

Is there any way to play a Drama mechanic without everyone seeming like they're Calvinballing?

Yes. I call it "structured Drama," in which there are rules for how to talk very much along the lines of rules for how to roll dice.

Puppetland requires the GM to speak only in the past tense, and for the players to speak only in character. The net effect is ... profound, to say the least. (It needs a little work in terms of the allowable range of Director Stance, but once the group settles that, it's awesome.)

My proto-game Zero at the Bone uses cards to establish the order of narrations, and also the degree (prior to any narration) that each character can aid or interfere with the effects of others' narrations.

There are a few others as well, including Pantheon and the not-quite-RPG card game, Once Upon a Time.

But you are absolutely right that this is a sidebar topic, and if anyone wants to pursue it, we can take it up in an RPG Theory thread.

Best,
Ron

[captain_bateson]

Mark,

Good call to get back on topic. Anyone who wants to keep discussing the ruling can do so in the thread I started for it.

I do think that the ADR system is a Drama/Karma hybrid with great weight placed on both the Drama and the Karma. It is quite a rules drift to go to "Strict Karma." In theory, I wouldn't think it was such a rules drift as to be essentially a different game. But maybe it is. At least, depending on how it's implemented. I don't think "Strict Karma" explains the system well enough in and of itself.

I think in this, we end up back with comments made earlier, either in this thread or the other, about how there are a lot of vague factors in the ADR system that aren't really defined enough to be directly fit into a "Strict Karma" system. I think that a GM wanting to drift to a "Strict Karma" system will have to change and rewrite more of the rulebook than it first appears. How to deal with more than one attribute affecting a fight, how to deal with powers and their time factors, and how to deal with the intentions of the players and characters involved, as I noted a long time ago.

Yeah, on second thought, it is quite a drift, perhaps even so far as to be a new game. I think that a GM who wants to run Amber using "Strict Karma" should consider the affect of such a system on all aspects of the game and then define how he or she intends to handle them. Then tell the players. Because "Strict Karma" is kind of like "zero tolerance." It sounds simple in theory, but is actually complicated in practice.

Does anyone else have any cool insights? I think I have pretty much contributed all I have to say on this topic.

[Arref]

So what is the "roleplaying" component supposed to be in a strict Karmic interpretation of Attributes, timing, environ and such?

If only the highest Attribute matters, what role the Player?

[TonyLB]

Not to be glib, but... "Anything else".

The players in the game have taken to referring to it as a "win the battle, lose the war" sort of system, largely because we first thrashed through its ramifications in terms of warfare.

The question that got raised was this:  Can Benedict, armed with a butter knife, fall in battle against ten million commando soldiers with the best technology available, led by the second-ranked character (let's posit "Finndo") in warfare.

The answer, by the strictest of strict Karma?  No, he can't.  He's Benedict.  Eventually he's going to kill everyone on the opposite side, even if he has to do it himself, one by one.  So what remains for Finndo to do?

If his one and only goal is "Kill Benedict", he is doomed to perpetual failure just as surely as Wile E. Coyote.  Which, honestly, can be a lot of fun.  You might well just play out permutations of that for a while.  It shows something about Finndo if he can't give up, even as it becomes clear he will never succeed.

But it is exceedingly unlikely that "Kill Benedict" is his only goal.  Let's posit (yet further) that he wants to have his armies tear down Amber, for his own insane or logical reasons.

Would killing Benedict help cement that goals?  Of course it would.  But that option isn't available, so you go to Plan B.  How big of a force do you need to have gathered to keep Benedict unavoidably occupied for eight solid hours?  Ten million?  Twenty million?  Gather them.  Throw them at him.  Sack Amber while he's having his bloodbath.  The simple way for Benedict to, in turn, counter that is to stand in a pass that your troops (Moonriders, for instance) must pass through to get to Amber.  Then he has once again reduced your plan to "1. Kill Benedict,  2. Everything else".

Better yet, use any of a million dirty tactics to get Benedict to voluntarily step aside.  Find his lost daughter and train her to lead the army against Amber, then play on his love of family.  Convince him that the other Elders are just using him as a pawn, so that he heads off to sulk in his tents like another famously all-killing warrior I might mention.  

So are there ways to "counter" those dirty tricks?  Of course there are.  Say Benedicts daughter is leading the charge against Amber.  He can choose to kill her in order to defend his city.  Will he?  How should I know?  I don't exactly have a rules mechanic on hand for determining how he'll decide that (though I totally agree that such mechanics do exist).

So, IMHO, there's still a lot of messy, subjective, drama-based judgment calls that have to be made in such a system.  There are certain very specific story elements that are predecided, and the rest runs pretty much by consensus and subjective judgment.

It's probably inferior to a rules system where everything the players might want to do is supported by an objective rules mechanic, and superior to a system where nothing they want to do is supported.  Seems to be working out for my game, right now, is about the best I can say.

[Arref]

Not to be glib, but... "Anything else."

Except that in a four Attribute system that boldly encompasses all dramatic conflicts, doesn't that mean "anything else not conflict"?

So Player input is narrowed to "no conflict" because all else is decided by Attribute.

The players in the game have taken to referring to it as a "win the battle, lose the war" sort of system, largely because we first thrashed through its ramifications in terms of warfare.

Which puzzles me mightily, since 'warfare' would win the battle, the war,  the archery contest and the chess game. In fact, any conflict over any scale, with any tools, over any length of time would always have the same outcome unless you just distracted the opponent to somewhere else and then you wouldn't be sure of victory.

I guess this is the "no, he can't--he's Benedict" extreme example. Still I'm puzzled because Benedict does lose---both in small things and large. So what are we trying to portray here?

So, IMHO, there's still a lot of messy, subjective, drama-based judgment calls that have to be made in such a system.  There are certain very specific story elements that are predecided, and the rest runs pretty much by consensus and subjective judgment.

There would be a bunch of subjective elements to decide--unless an Attribute contest was the foundation to the mundane choice--whereupon the GM would inform you that your input was suddenly not required.

I'm trying to get my hands around this idea. A little more help?

[TonyLB]

Okay, let me roll up my sleeves a bit here.

I think we have different perceptions of what "conflict" is... or at least we emphasize different conflicts in our styles of play.

Example conflict from my game:  Pierce is the PC son of Bleys by a now-defunct marriage.  Fletcher is his teenage NPC half-brother, son of Bleys by a loveless political union.  Bleys has consistently favored Pierce over Fletcher.  Fletcher asks Pierce to help convince Bleys that he (Fletcher) is ready to assay the Pattern.  Pierce genuinely doubts that he is ready, but also knows that Fletcher has been belittled many times under the guise of "protecting him from things too hard for him to attempt".

So Bleys asks Pierce "On your word, gambling his life... is the child capable?"  What does he answer?

That is the type of conflict I enjoy running with.

I don't feel that such conflicts are undermined by the strict Karma system... if anything, I think they are highlighted.  Does that make my hope for it as a system any more clear?

[Erick Wujcik]

...in my scenario called "The White Road" at AmberCon...uh...maybe 6? You argued with me for like ten minutes about some power or spell you wanted use and my interpretation of it.

Yup. I made that horrible mistake....

...much like my horrible mistake in responding to this thread.

My apologies, everyone.

Goodbye,

Erick

[Arref]

OK. That's good. I'm with you 100% on centering the game on Drama.
Drama is completely the province of Player input. So the entire range of "soap opera" gaming is in the hands of Player choice.

Unless there is Conflict (meaning Attributes.) Or unless the apparent Drama is really Conflict brewing out of sight of PC.

"What do you mean I'm broke?" Pierce asks his bookkeeper.

"You agreed that Fletcher might waive his participation of warrant on that last import of silk, your highness," the bookkeeper says softly. "When the pirates took two out of three ships, you defaulted on the whole warrant. Until you can draw upon the Treasury for your annual stipend, your accounts are overdrawn."

In the above case, the PC might investigate how his finances so quickly were upset, but if there is a Warfare issue involved, he will find out nothing his opponent doesn't want him to find out.

Is this correct?

So how does the Player learn that he is overmatched and in an Attribute contest in this situation? Is it the negative feedback that no matter how he tries to straighten his money trouble, he fails?

[hanschristianandersen]

Tony,

Okay, so you want certain key plot outcomes to be decided by strict karma, at which point everyone agrees to structure their drama to make that outcome happen.  I'm with you so far.

I think your next step needs to be to articulate any guidelines or rules for "What constitutes an Attribute-conflict?"  Where would you personally draw the line between using drama-subordinate-to-karma-outcomes vs. just-drama?


Arref,

So how does the Player learn that he is overmatched and in an Attribute contest in this situation? Is it the negative feedback that no matter how he tries to straighten his money trouble, he fails?

After the player makes one or two attempts, couldn't the GM just straight up reveal that "You're not going to win this one", permitting the narrative to jump directly to the consequences of the failure?

[TonyLB]

Hans... ever so close.  Close enough to give me warm fuzzies and make me feel that I've been understood.

But even so, I'll clarify one point.

I don't want to have key plot outcomes be decided by strict karma.  That would be restrictive and annoying.  Key plot outcomes should be in the hands of the players, not the rules.

I just don't think that who wins or who loses in a duel is key to the stories my group is telling.  It is useful, perhaps unavoidable, background against which the main story is told.  But it's not what the story is about, and it doesn't embody the mode in which the most important player choices will occur.


I agree with you that the next step in the game should be (and was) defining clearly for everyone what the attributes covered and what they did not.  That was one of the first orders of business after the debacle that showed me that the ground needed to be thoroughly surveyed, mapped and agreed upon.

I don't know whether specifics of what assignments we're experimenting with in my game will be helpful, though I'll provide them if people are interested.

Generally speaking, I think that it's best to describe one limited but practical story element that is dictated by the attributes.  Make very sure that it's not something that the players want or expect to have be critical to the structure of their stories.  

So, for example, our version of Warfare decides who lives and who dies in an armed conflict (in the final analysis).  Any armed conflict that a first-ranked warfare character persists in will eventually end with him in a field littered with his dead enemies.  And that's all that is certain.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I don't want to have key plot outcomes be decided by strict karma.  That would be restrictive and annoying.  Key plot outcomes should be in the hands of the players, not the rules.

Which again makes this impossible to understand. If you solve only meaningless conflicts through stats, why have stats at all? If you don't use stats in meaningful conflicts, you aren't actually using any kind of rules. How are the meaningful conflicts then regulated? Who decides who wins? The GM? Seems awfully freeform to me. Not that that's bad, but I wouldn't saddle the system with the extraneous karma mechanics in that case.

I just don't think that who wins or who loses in a duel is key to the stories my group is telling.  It is useful, perhaps unavoidable, background against which the main story is told.  But it's not what the story is about, and it doesn't embody the mode in which the most important player choices will occur.

All fine and good to use karma in insignificant situations, but I wouldn't trust on any given story element to be insignificant before the story is actually told. To say it in another way: what do you profit from using the karma mechanic? I mean, the only thing you get out of it is that you close off certain venues of conflict from your game. The players will avoid basing their interest on the aspects covered by the karma system, so the potential points of interest are lessened for them. Hopefully they can still construct an engaging story out of what you leave outside the system, but I fail to understand how shutting off the main venues of Amber conflict helps in playing Amber.

Consider: if you used no system at all, you could have engaging stories that hinge on the martial prowess or knowledge of deep mysteries the characters may possess, all in the exact same system you currently use to resolve the important conflicts. On the other hand, if you particularly despise those story elements, wouldn't it make sense to run a game of Prides & Prejudices, where there's no combat aspect at all? What use is it to focus character concepts and character creation on something that you think has no interest at all?

Generally speaking, I think that it's best to describe one limited but practical story element that is dictated by the attributes.  Make very sure that it's not something that the players want or expect to have be critical to the structure of their stories.  

Not trying to offend, but IMO that sounds like a dumb kind of rule. "Let's auction the abilities... first off, we have the ability of doing nothing at all interesting. Any takers?" Wouldn't your rules have to be about things players find interesting, what's the point of using them otherwise?

It seems to me that you yourself are unclear about whether you want to do karma or drama. Maybe you could tell us more about how you resolve the important conflicts? If you just decide them by GM fiat (as I suspect), this is quite a clearcut case of the exact thing I suspected at the start of the thread: you use the karma system to justify and camouflage (possibly from yourself, too) your extensive use of GM force in deciding conflicts. You don't have the balls to just say that you will decide everything, so you instead take a "strict karma" system, but only apply it to a narrow band of conflicts that you yourself are not interested in. The main part of play is however effectively controlled by the GM alone.

The above might be true or not; how do you solve it if two characters have a conflict the players are invested in, and the karma system does not apply? Say, the inheritance of Amber hinges on a legality after the strongest heir has declared that he will support the one with the strongest case and abdicate himself. Two players both want very much to win, so it's a matter of library skill against library skill when they and their supporters race to find the legal support they need to rule. How do you solve it? The karma mechanic won't help (assuming you really apply it narrowly), so you have to somehow decide which one wins the conflict. Where goes the player input, how is the result arrived at? This is the real system of your game, and the karma mechanic is only a mask.

Do you see the problem? A great majority of roleplayers uses rules to find resolutions to conflicts, but you seem to think that rules should be used for all other things instead. Leaves me completely baffled as to how you think you solve it when two players want different things.

[hanschristianandersen]

Hmm, okay, so key outcomes are meant to be decided by drama, not karma.  With that in mind...

As Eero said, it looks like you're fundamentally playing freeform, with all its associated pros and cons.   However, you've got this vestige of the Amber mechanics (the Karma scores) still hanging around.  I think you're keeping that vestige around to reinforce some "Amber Color" and allow for really fast adjudication of who's winning what war, et cetera.  All so you can you can get the Amber backdrop "out of the way" so you can frame your way into the bangs you care about.

Thus, your de-facto system has this big value judgement in it that says "The following things are interesting to keep in mind, because they're what provide the Amber Color, but ultimately they're not what the players are supposed to be caring about."  And those "unimportant" things include pretty much everything that's mechanically relevant in the published Amber game book.  That's some seriously[/] heavy Drift right there.

I also agree with Eero that it's important to acknowledge that you're not playing Amber Diceless Roleplaying.  Not even close.  You're playing a game that maybe once was the Amber game but has now been Drifted past the point of all recognition.  It's also vitally important that your players understand that as well; if any are laboring under the assumption that you *are* playing Amber... that situation is a ticking time bomb.

Am I anywhere near the mark, or am I reading too much into this?

[TonyLB]

I am totally clear, at this point, that I am not playing standard ADRPG.

And I don't think that the players don't care about there being fights.  Fights have gotten real popular since we clarified the system, in fact.  Folks are lining up to beat each other up.

But they aren't, as players, being competitive about it.  Which makes a big difference in the feel of play.  So I don't think that the karma system is an iirelevant vestige.  It encourages cooperative story-telling.

Am I making any sense here?

[Mark D. Eddy]

Am I making any sense here?

Yes, you are. I'd want to make sure all of the players are on board with this not being standard Amber Diceless to avoid future problems, but that's my only quibble.

[Mike Holmes]

Wow, go to one game convention...

Erick (if you're still reading - heh, this is why, as I understand it that Greg Stafford doesn't get into rules debates any more, too), I understand your point about the Gamemaster. Everyone agrees that there has to be a raport there, and I think it's obvious in this case that there wasn't one. But, well, you know the position that System Does Matter. Not only, but as well. Does that mean that Amber is doomed to failure in play? Obviously not. It just means that I think this is a chink in the armor (of what's otherwise a very innovative, and interesting game).


Captain, if I clarified that by "system" I meant the system being used at the moment - not what was in the book, but the system as it was being interpreted (or even altered if you like) by Tony - if I said that, would your opinion change? You say, essentially that the drift (and that's what it is) to Narrativism is playing a different system. It's precisely my point that the system as written makes Tony feel that such drift is neccessary.

1. Tony drifts neccessarily.
2. Cap'n is used to the other most likely drift.
3. Mayhem ensues.

Again, it seems to me that you're behaving defensively about behavior that I said was, in fact, expected - would have done myself maybe. As I said, if this is Calvinballing, then you can't blame the Calvinballer, making you right - just calling somebody a Calvinballer isn't enough. You were in a trap with no graceful exit, so you struggled against it in the only reasonable way you could. No surprise. So there are malicious Calvinballers, of whom you are not one, and those pushed into a bit of Calvinballing by incoherence. (BTW, the fact that you don't "need" the book is actually evidence in my favor, if you think about it).

Was the problem exacerbated by the social level problem? Of course, and the model predicts that. Unfortunately there's nothing that we here can do about your social problems. That's between the two of you to fix by kissing and making up.

Mike

P.S. Mark, yeah, that about sums it up nicely. The way around this problem in the future is to make people understand your version of the rules, Tony - meaning far more than just a phrase or two. Like the book, copious examples would help.