Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
I was doing my blog for the week of Gen Con where I give an easy compiling of the links from all the years I’ve gone (and you can find that “index” here), and rereading some of those old posts got me into a great mood for the upcoming week of gaming. However, it reminded me that somehow, someway I have never really talked about the worst experience in gaming I’ve had at Gen Con. And I feel like enough time has passed that it’s long since over due.
At Gen Con 2019, Egg, Lee, and myself played in a later night session of a game called Amber. Now before I get too into what worked and (mostly) what didn’t work, I realize that just because I didn’t have a great time during the game didn’t mean that the other 30+ players weren’t having the times of their lives. And that’s obviously OK, too. But…
First, this is what I said about the game at the time:
I kid Egg about diceless games, saying that they are Communist. Mostly I prefer games with dice… then again, I don’t have the horrible luck he does (seriously, it is odds defying). Amber is one of those diceless games that’s been around for decades, but none of us had ever played. Based on a series of novels I learned a few things about the game.
First, the people who are into Amber, are REALLY into Amber. Think of your favorite series of books (probably Game of Thrones or Dark Tower for me) and then multiply that love you feel for them by a hundred… and you’d still be short. They know everything about the world… everything…
Which can make it a little bit to penetrate such a thick history. The story seemed to trump everything throughout this session, which I’m not sure if that is how most Amber games go, or just more of a GM preference. I must admit that this one didn’t work for me. In addition, it ran over by 2 1/2 hours, so we didn’t get done until 2:30 in the morning, which threw off our schedules a bit for the remainder of the weekend (that lack of sleep starts here).
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The first and immediate thing is the diceless thing. I’m probably never going to be onboard with a diceless roleplaying system. I feel like one of the things I like about the games I play is the uncertainty factor. The idea that there is a little bit of fate being pulled and pushed in various directions for me or my fellow players to react to. The joy at succeeding on a roll that could tilt the entire session/campaign in one direction or another. The agony at failing your die roll and suddenly having to scramble to find some way out of the predicament you find yourself in as a result of the disasterous roll… those are the moments I love.
At the same time I can also admit that much of the dice rolling during the course of a game may not really matter. If you have a perception roll for everyone in the party, more than likely you only need one person to have a success for all the players to effectively get the same knowledge… leading us to the question of why bother with the rolls in the first place? And we all have had the fun and excitement of a combat that runs on for far too long due to both the heroes and the villains not quite rolling well enough to sway the battle to one side or the other.
However, within this particular session, the idea of not using dice meant that everything was more or less determined by the GM only. Roleplayers talk about adventures in the terms of railroading the players or open sandboxes which allow those same players to pick and choose what they want to do. The idea being that the GM and the players should look to build a story together and not just exist at the whims of the GM.
He had more agency as a ghost than we did as players.
The problems with the session were as follows:
The Characters we were given/came up with had very little agency within the story. And this wasn’t a case where we (personally) we not getting agency, I don’t believe anyone really was. At one point, the three of us came up with some simple way to tie our characters together only to be told that we should be at odds. OK, no big deal. So we changed that and then immediately the story changed so we were tied together.
The GM was writing his own fan fiction. That night, long-since seared into my brain, felt completely like the GM had written us a fan fiction within the world of Amber and somehow we were all unwittingly playing a captive audience under the guise of roleplaying. To the point where after we had already exceeded our time slot, he proceeded to read page after page from his notebook detailing how the adventure’s story was to end. If there was any doubt that our character’s actions had any affect on the story he constructed, I’d been hard pressed to figure it out.
Too many players. I think there were at least twenty players for this game and one GM. Many of the things that we and other characters we doing by interacting (roleplaying) was completely lost because there was no need to check in with us if another player had somehow grabbed the spotlight.
One player tried to grab the spotlight. In college you have grad students who act as assistants to the Professor. They can help teach the class when the Prof is unavailable. They can grade assignments, etc. In this session, what that meant was helping to control the narrative to make sure whatever character you were playing had the most impact upon things. Oh, the guy did it in a very shrewd way by talking with players at the beginning and then being the point man for the GM. However, it got to a weird point where his voice was simply the loudest one in the room (and we were playing in Lucas Oil Stadium, so that’s saying something).
The session went over by 2+ hours. Listen, we’re all there to play games. Sleep is for the weak. Chicks dig narratively driven scars from tortured characters. But it is one thing to go over by 30 minutes, maybe an hour, and another to just disregard everything when it comes to time so that you can tell whatever story you wanted to tell.
Could we have left early? Oh yes, we could have left at the alloted end time of midnight. But I don’t leave games early. And I especially wanted to see if it would somehow turn around or remain the train wreck it appeared to be.
***
The joke is that we actually are still playing Amber. The Shadow still grips us, and nothing we have done since is real. The three of us are forever stuck in an unending Hell where we can only watch as the story proceeds around us, never interating with anything… ghosts to a world who had long forgotten we were even there.
And much like any cautionary tale, I will not bother with trying to play another session in the hopes it was just a bad experience. I could not do that to myself. Living through it once had been more than enough.
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John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.
He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!
Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.
His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.
He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com
