The Culture: There Was An Attempt At Cosmic Wargaming Once

(Following from yesterday's post.)

Sooner or later, two questions would come up. "What if we dealt in cosmic conflict?" and "What if we did away with rolling dice?"

The latter, though unintended, was a revival of the earliest Kriegspiel rulesets (which lacked randomizers). The former, by the time this Game got published, had been addressed before but never in this context. Combined we saw a Fantastic Adventure Wargame recreation of the original wargame, for all intents and purposes, put into a new context and it delivered on a gameplay experience few others attempt.

That game is Amber Diceless, the masterwork (and final work) by Eric Wujick, and he unknowingly brought Kriegspiel back from the 19th Century.

The Game

You play, by default, a Scion of the Amber Royal Family- legitimate or not. As such, you are past Peak Human and are in fact a demigod- and thus godlike by default across the board in the Attributes of the game: Strength, Warfare, Psyche, and Endurance.

As this is a diceless game, character generation is by spending points. You start with a budget of 100, you can downgrade Attributes, do Referee-permitted chores, or take a permanent penalty in terms of overall "Please screw me over!" shifting of how events go for your man to get more. The catch? You buy Attributes at auction, so other players can bid you out of where you want to go and--once concluded--that result ranking is permanent. Whomever got 1st in (X) is ALWAYS 1st at (X) thereafter.

Other powers and permanent things also cost points. This includes the signature abilities of the licensed setting: Walking The Pattern and using Chaos. Those 100 points can go very fast, or not, depending on how adversarial (and stupid) the other players are- and it's that adversarial quality that we'll build out upon below.

Your man, barring downgrading his Attributes to the floor of an ordinary Human, is far tougher than most Big Two superheroes and can learn powers that instantly put them on par with Doctor Strange, Doctor Fate, the (Anti-)Monitor, and so on- Thor is a basic-bitch Amberite, as is The Doctor.

And you have a vast multiverse of parallel dimensions and timey-whimy bullshit to fight your war upon.

This is best played in the true double-blind format of original wargaming, with non-verbal orders passed to the Referee unless two or more characters are in direct contact with each other, and the Referee adjudicating outcomes on the spot. You will never know for certain if you won or lost, even if another character tells you in truth, because there is always an unknown element to interactions that doing it truly double-blind recreates. Was it due to your Attribute rank, the Stuff you have, or something else that you did not notice? Unless the Referee spills the beans--don't do it, Ref--you can never be certain.

The Pillars

Rules As-Written: As-is, it works, and be glad that characters are so damned hard to kill because inserting new ones permanently puts them behind the curve due to how the Ranking system works. (See below.) It is far more common for characters to be taken off the board, so to speak, for an indefinite time than to permanently kill them off. It can be done, but it needs work, and depending on the individual merely maiming them severely and leaving them to rot is just inconvenient (and makes them very mad at your man).

The catch is that the scaling issue is nigh-irrelvant because any mass action depends entirely on the Warfare attribute of the leader (as does armed combat generally), so you're not matching your man against his so much as you're matching him and hoping some combination of bullshit and comparative advantage can make up a difference in Warfare long enough to shift the fight to someone your man can beat his at.

Strict Timekeeping: Not irrelevant, and that's because of the timey-whimy element. Some parallels run faster or slower than others, and access therein can be controlled; need to heal up, so dip into a fast-time parallel to do and return having barely missed anything, and that's just the most obvious one. If your man is based at (X), but (Y) moves at a different rate, knowing the ratio between the two is necessary to keep track of anything going on in either- and all of them will be tracked compared to where Castle Amber is, as that sets the norm. Recovery and improvement take time, of course, but some things cannot be learned so readily and both time in transit as well as on location needs to be tracked vs. what others are doing to avoid needless paradox.

Unfortunately, due to timey-whimy bullshit, deliberate paradox is on the table (and there's an example in the source material). Ensuring that your man can pull off the plot from the later Back To The Future films, believe it or not, requires Strict Timekeeping just as much as campaigns where this is not a thing.

Faction Play: Let me state this again- the game is meant to be adversarial. The "con game" scneario is called "Throne War" for a reason. Faction Play, therefore, is baked into the cake and on the table from the point of purchase, nevermind gameplay. This is pagan pantheon gods-and-demigods doing Cosmic Soap Opera with a side of The Sopranos well before that fat farthuffer wrote word one of Game Of Bores and Gen X goths decided that playing Totally Not A Mafia Game Because Fangs & Claws & Anne Fucking Rice was a thing.

You want palace intrigue? You want coups? Civil Wars? Proxy wars? Wars fought because Mommy didn't like the girl you banged at the sock hop so she decapitated her? Wars because Grandpa named you his heir and not your father or one of his many, many, many siblings? Wars that are fought across multiple worlds, multiple galaxies, universes, planes of existence, and yet always come down to beating each other with sticks, brain-raping each other, or bare-handed brutality that makes MMA legends squeamish? Amber.

You'll get so much Faction Play that even Alcibides will show up and say "Dude, seriously, enough with the backstabbing" while the Greek chorus of Roman senators known for literally doing just that sing condemnations about how petty this can get and the ruin it brings. Real Classical Drama hours, and not the Theater Kid kind. Naturally, it's a hit with a cult audience for this reason.

Always On: When your man can come out of the gate ruling a multiversal empire, yeah that's a thing. When you can win, lose, and win again over the course of a week in real-life downtime, yeah that's a thing. Especially due to all the multiversal and timey-whimy bullshit going on.

The Brands

Directly, we have Lords of Olympus and Lords of Gossamer & Shadow. The core of the game, without the licensed branding and put in a new context.

Indirectly we can put in the LARP side of the World of Darkness, which tones things down by a lot but the play context and dynamic is the same (and really shows how much this is a fantasy version of dynastic power struggles, be it Imperial China, Medici Florence, or The Godfather.

The Primal Order, as an add-on to other games, tries to do this explicitly for fantasy campaign settings generally.

A lot of non-contact LARP draws on this, knowingly or not, for its design and play structure and tabletop diceless games cannot help but to touch on it accordingly.

Shorn of its full-on wargame context, where the Braunstein-style format of Throne War makes it obvious, it is no surprise how Theater Kids mistook it for a Writer's Room or Improve Acting exercise; put back into that context, and you have a hell of a fun time ahead for some folks wanting to play very human demigods acting far more like mortal men of power than anything transcendent.

And Now, A Comment

Were I to make a Brand derivative, one thing I would remove is the Auction and its Ranking. Just spent the points, map it to an objective scale (because one already exists; it just points down instead of up), and have players shut their mouths on how they spent them. Let everyone find out the hard way who's good at what, and it leaves open the door for someone to surpass another (and thus makes it easier for players to join, or rejoin, later).