Resolving conflict in Amber without GM favouritism

[jibbajibba]

This is in reply to PGiverty's request on the litmus test thread on how to settle close contests in Amber in a non-arbitary fashion.

The game can be interpreted in 2 ways. The rigid model says if I have a higher attribute that you I win that contest. You can't have draws becuase the auction model forbids it. The only draw can be against npc/environment and the GM has to make that an identical score so, why would they do that.

The less rigid model says okay I am a rank lower in Warfare but in advance I deliberately made sure the sun was high in the sky and behind me and I am using an enchanted blade that has mobility and ranked combat and I slipped a thumb tack into your boot before combat started. Or more simply the guy with first rank warfare isn't as articulate as the guy with second rank.

So in most games the more articulate player can mount enough small arguments that they can sway the GM. I have a player just like that since we were kids his was always the guy that covered an eye in the tavern so that when the party went into the dark ally outside he hadn't lost his night sight.

So the question is what needs to be done to resolve these issues if anything. Does the game need a tool that goes beyond players discuss GM decides.

I for my part will all defer to roleplay. I don't want players that get into fights and say. I hit him, I hit him, I hit him. I want players that say "I start with a guard in tierce then watch what he does with his feet. If it look like he can deal with my Italiate stlye I will switch to a Savat stance and feint with the blade and try and land a kick on his leading knee". To which my players would expect me to reply "he looks baffled by your stance and tries to adjust his position. You see an oportunity and land a solid kick on his knee, there is a loud crack followed by a howling shriek as his leg gives way and he falls to the ground in agony" or "He smiles and shakes his head slightly then beats your blade so hard you almost loose your grip. He pushes forwards striking at your head and trunk it is al you can do to parry the blows and retreat.. etc'

So I guess I am saying you don't need a mechanism. Let the story lead. A good GM has to encourage the shyer less forceful player to live the fight and colourful descriptions and NPCs doing smart clever stuff is always the best way to do that. If players see that making a fight interesting profits them they wll do it.

Outside combat this is more dicfficult. I had a situation once where a player had fallen into an obvious trap. They had taken a mysterious trump and studied it a little too closely, ending up being pulled in. The trap was laid with the pysche of the trump artist which was more than a match for the character in question. They found themself on a wind swept beach. Now this wasn't a shdow it was a trump constuct , a living painting if you will and the only route out was sourcerous or to remove the outgoing trump block though Advanced trump artistry. The character, who had advanced pattern and mid ranked psyche, was trying to use Ad pattern to change the shadow properties, was trying to do all sorts of stuff but had no access to sorcery and no way out. Now I was using this as a plot hook to link the trapped character to a subplot involving his tormentor's daughter and hoped they would follow a Corwin type path and wait in the pleasant beach house and drink a little wine til morning. However they grew insensed and ended up burning the place down and insisting I was "cheating" cos Advanced pattern should get him out of this.
Now here you have a comparison between 2 differnt advanced powers. Ad Pattern costs moe than Ad Trump so under Amber rules would the pattern have been sufficient to get him out? In retrospect I think I should have let the pattern give him more information about where he was and perhaps described the nature of his prison to him but his reaction did not engender him to me and so I didn't. A mistake on my part I think.
I think these types of conflict are the hardest to resolve more so than a head to head compare of attributes.

[Django]

There's nothing really to add here, except that there is a precedent in the rulebook for looking for other attributes e.g. strength which might swing the contest in a well-described situation.

[PGiverty]

Thanks for starting the thread.

In disclosure - I understand and enjoy the role of GM as arbiter, and I am not advocating any change to this in Amber. I'm also perfectly capable of deciding which player is making a better argument about what their character is up to in a conflict, although I do get a little irritated at the weaseling that goes on - it's a kind "mother may-I" thing.

"Use your judgement as a GM" is not the answer I'm looking for. I can do that already, and do it well.

I can and do play "GM decides", but I was just wandering, are there any guidelines here? Ideally, I mean mechanical guidelines, such as, "the third ranking character will almost never beat the first ranking one", or "environmental factors can adjust an ability in a range of X." These are examples, not suggestions.

[jibbajibba]

I don't actually use ranks. I rank the players but I use numbers for arbitration. So I use absolute difference rather than relative. So if my rank 1 and rank 4 were 5 points appart and rank 5 was 20 points behind rank 5 would be an awful lot worse and a fight between ranks 1 and 4 would be much closer than ranks 4 and 5.
This allows me to assign a number value to a tactic or a move and I can adjust , I tend to do this without reference to players though  If you issued a list of strategems/environmental factors the players woudl just manipulate it outrageously

[PGiverty]

Keeping the exact details of such a mechanic hidden sounds reasonable.

Does anyone know of any detailed actual play conflicts descriptions with environmental factors in? I'd love to see how other GMs deal with this.

[TonyLB]

FWIW, I ran an Amber game once where I explicitly told people that I was going to hold to the hard-line of the rules, and further that I was going to disallow switching to different attribute-arenas ... that if you have higher warfare you will always win a warfare fight, no matter how hard someone tries to influence the environment or to change the nature of the conflict.

Then I had to deal with the questions of "How fast?  How bad?" ... which turned out to be equally challenging.  More challenging, in fact, because the person with the higher warfare felt entitled to any outcome they could ask for.

Our first conflict was two on one, with the two people each being half a rank below the one.  I said that the one person with the higher warfare was going to win the fight ... and that person immediately demanded that he be able to chop the legs off his opponents on the first sword-stroke.

Sadly, things went downhill from there.

This is hard territory.  I'll be very interested to hear what people make of it.

[Arref]

The game can be interpreted in 2 ways.

The rigid model says if I have a higher attribute that you I win that contest. You can't have draws becuase the auction model forbids it.

The less rigid model says, okay I am a rank lower in Warfare but in advance I deliberately made sure the sun was high in the sky and behind me and I am using an enchanted blade that has mobility and ranked combat and I slipped a thumb tack into your boot before combat started. Or more simply the guy with first rank warfare isn't as articulate as the guy with second rank.

There is a third way to read the rules that is not as biased for 'articulate players' altering Attribute Conflict.

Code Select Expand

GM informs Players of environ
what are Player conflict choices?
which conflict resolves first?
what are Player attempts (roleplay) to modify consequence of result?
result modified for Stuff?
GM reports result

In my experience (and as I read the rules as written) there is nothing in the rules that says the Players can keep the GM indefinitely engaged in the roleplay step like an infinite "redo" loop. Each Player gets his "say" and then a ruling is made. The roleplay is a modifier of an outcome determined by the previous steps.

Another way of saying this is: Your choices will influence how your win or loss is described, your planning may alter the environ in your favor.

The value of ranking attributes is that you can put judgment to the steps between PCs.

[Erick Wujcik]

In answering this thread, I'd like to focus first on the following post:

...Our first conflict was two on one, with the two people each being half a rank below the one... and that person immediately demanded that he be able to chop the legs off his opponents on the first sword-stroke.

The problem is, you are ignoring one of the most important rules of combat. How time is used in combat.

You'll excuse me as I go ahead and quote myself from Amber Diceless:

page 95, from Time and Combat:

Combat is resolved fastest when the characters are mismatched.

For example, a character ranked very high in Warfare need take only a single stroke to dispose of someone ranked Human. Against one of Chaos rank the first stroke would only be a serious wound. If the enemy were Amber rank, then even the first wound would be slow in coming.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, when two characters are equal in rank, then Combat can take as long as it takes for one of the characters to be exhausted.[/b]

Yes, if your numero uno in Warfare were facing a couple of Human Rank characters, he could certainly specify leg lopping in the first stroke.

That's nowhere near the situation you had. Facing against two Warfare Gods (half a rank below first would qualify as deific in most all my campaigns), would come awfully close to "as long as it takes for one of the characters to be exhausted," which could be hours, or even days, depending on the Endurance involved.

As a Game Master running combat you have several objectives, not least the obligation to entertain:
 
page 80, from Combat: Following Zelazny's Example:

   Present your players that is always exciting. Not boring with details, no matter how "accurate" or "true to life" that may be. You want them always to experience Combat as something tense, challenging and exhilarating.

Look at the combat between Corwin and Eric, in the Library of Castle Amber. Here was a match between just two, and two who might have been full ranks apart, yet the fight was from from swift, and there were many decisions that had to be made... decisions that made the whole thing a piece of entertainment, rather than simply a judgment call.

If you really want to follow in Roger Zelazny's footsteps, you need to constantly obfuscate and confuse. Yes, the #1 Warfare guy should believe that he can absolutely win against any of the player characters.

But...

Is he really facing the player characters? Might one of them be wearing the guise of someone else altogether (bear in mind it's possible to run things so even the player doesn't know he's 'running' a substitute)? Could it be that one or both opponents is getting offstage help? Or that our Warfare guy is being secretly crippled? Or that it just happens to be Opposite-Day for a visiting sorcerer from the Courts of Chaos (tip of the had to Calvin Ball)? Or maybe you lied, and one of those also-ran characters really did find a way to overbid the number one?

I'm not saying that any of these things were happening, just that you always need to create enough tension so the players are guessing.

From my perspective this combat would have to take, at the very least, an hour to resolve. In that time there should be many stories, and the opportunity to answer many, many questions.

I'll come back to the original question (from Jib) in a day or two.

Thanks!

Erick

[Erick Wujcik]

There is a third way to read the rules that is not as biased for 'articulate players' altering Attribute Conflict.

Code Select Expand

GM informs Players of environ
what are Player conflict choices?
which conflict resolves first?
what are Player attempts (roleplay) to modify consequence of result?
result modified for Stuff?
GM reports result

In my experience (and as I read the rules as written) there is nothing in the rules that says the Players can keep the GM indefinitely engaged in the roleplay step like an infinite "redo" loop. Each Player gets his "say" and then a ruling is made. The roleplay is a modifier of an outcome determined by the previous steps.

Thanks, Arref! That's pretty much what I was going to say.

It's the responsibility of the Game Master to break every combat (and sometimes every conflict) down to the decision points.

Again, I'm hoping that I'll be able to post a more thorough reply later this week.

Erick

[TonyLB]

The problem is, you are ignoring one of the most important rules of combat. How time is used in combat.

I totally agree.  I mean, I wasn't ignoring it ... the question of "How long?  How bad?" (as I said) was the very next step after I compared the stats.  But the player who jumped to the leg-chopping was clearly not expecting that next step to be part of the equation ... and he wanted to kvetch and complain about it in order to try to socially achieve the result he wanted.

My point was that removing the ability for the players to roleplay for advantage in the end result didn't in any way slow down their desire to jockey for favor, it just shifted it down to the next arena I had to judge on (How long?  How bad?)

Now if I wanted to have objective standards for that too then I could write up some formulae about how many ranks, what type of endurance, how long they fight and how slowly the damage accumulates.  I could modify that by combat stances and all of that.  But that's an awful lot of house-ruling.  As it was, I just said "Guys, I'm usin' my judgment here, let's move on."  It didn't work too well, but that's down (mostly) to the people involved.

I do think that the first step of saying "I'm not going to use my GM judgment in this way" undermined my ability to later say "But I am going to use my GM jugment in this different way."  People heard me as having promised different degrees of objectivity, and having divested myself of different amounts of authority.

That can get tricky to communicate.  Very tricky indeed!

[RPGPundit]

Why the hell shouldn't the game include GM judgement??! Every other roleplaying game ever designed uses it!! Hell, as far as I'm concerned its one of the landmarks of an RPG, any thing that doesn't have a GM or doesn't let the GM arbitrate isn't a real RPG.

Meanwhile, as to the situation: first of all, obviously switching from one attribute to another is a key area. As is stuff. As is description of what's actually happening "on the board".

And a fair GM will not let the more bossy or forceful players always get their way because the Shy players won't be descriptive. They'll try to encourage the Shy players, and ask them for specific descriptions of what their character is doing, step by step.  Now of course, the more inventive more intelligent players should always end up winning against the players who are just less intelligent. But it shouldn't be about who's louder.

I think part of Erick's point is also that the CLOSER you are in ranking (and one 1st ranked guy against two 1.5th ranked guys is REALLY REALLY close), the longer the battle should go, the more description should be needed.  So the closer you are, the more your actual moves and choices will make all the difference.

The 1st-ranked guy in that example is not "always going to win" (unless you're intentionally crippling the system and making it broken the way Tony was; a way that has FUCK ALL to do with how Amber is really played). In fact, a GM running the combat correctly will make the contest close enough the battle will last a long time. If either of the other two guy's Endurance is superior, they'll probably win. If either of the two guys can switch to another superiro attribute (possibly while the other keeps 1st-rank-guy busy), they'll probably win.

The example is PROOF that the old criticism people try to make up for amber is just plain false.  Unless the two players running the 1.5s are utter retards, or the guy running the 1st rank guy is really brilliant, 1st ranked guy is in a LOT of trouble in that scenario.

RPGPundit

[TonyLB]

Why the hell shouldn't the game include GM judgement??!

I'm pretty sure people aren't saying that it should.  They're examining the various ways that the system and its structures can aid GM judgment.

I've given the most extreme example here, and even I'm not saying that it's Ye Olde Right Way to Play.  It's a way I tried running the system.  It's not one I'd recommend.  Lots of other ways of running the system (many of which I've also done) work much better.

I'd be interested to hear how you run it.  You seem to be saying that the ranks should only make a difference when either (a) both players are equally matched on their personal strategic ability or (b) one character is so far and away superior by the numbers that the opposing player never gets a chance to strut his strategic chops.

That sounds like an interesting way to run it.  Can you tell us something about the types of results you get?  Are less strategically minded players motivated to improve their skills, or do they just resign themselves to constant defeat?  Do you have any techniques to recommend on how to not merely be an objective GM, but to keep the players convinced that you are an objective GM ... especially when you have to make a hard call that really goes against one player in a close judgment?

[RPGPundit]

I don't pretend to be objective. I look at the stats, compare them, and then hear what the players have suggested, and then decide. That's it.

Anyways, your assessment:

You seem to be saying that the ranks should only make a difference when either (a) both players are equally matched on their personal strategic ability or (b) one character is so far and away superior by the numbers that the opposing player never gets a chance to strut his strategic chops.

doesn't sound to me like what I said or what I do. To me, ranks make a difference all the time, but the closer two ranks are to each other, the more important strategic contribution from the player is.

Tiger Woods playing golf against Joe Ninehole can afford to be sloppy and not think too hard. Whereas against a serious professional-level opponent he has to be more thoughtful, even if he's of superior rank.

Batman fighting a goon will just plain take him out. Batman fighting Karate Kid has to be more careful and work things out.

And yes, obviously the underdog always has to work harder. If you have one guy ranked 2nd in warfare, and the other ranked 5th, that 5th ranked guy is going to have to do a hell of a brilliant job to be able to figure out how to overwhelm rank 2 guy.  If rank 2 guy just tells me "I keep striking at him, trying to kill him", then that's all he needs to win. If rank 5 guy says "I keep striking at him, trying to kill him", then he's bound to lose. Get the diff? The times when a player has to be extra-descriptive is when he's facing a closer opponent; and if he's the underdog he has to try all the harder.

RPGPundit

[TonyLB]

Oh, oh ... I see where I misread.  The more intelligent, more strategic thinker is going to win every time all other things being equal.  Sorry, yeah, that makes much more sense.  Thanks for bearing with me.

I think what folks are looking for (or at least what I'm thinking about) is whether there's any sense to adopting or creating some guidelines for a rough sense of "How much cooler do you need to be?"  

Like what you said about the 2nd vs. 5th rank.  One could (hypothetically) say "Man, there's a three rank difference there, so I will want to see them exceed their opponent in three categories ... the guy excelled in strategy and taking advantage of the environment, but his better opponent beat him out in pulling in other strong traits, so that's just a net of one.  That's a pretty decisive loss for him."

I'm not saying that one must do that, or should do that, but one could do that and it would help to give a structure that would make it easier to make decisions consistently.

[RPGPundit]

Yup, you got it now.

RPGPundit