Feedback from Manhelios

 Rules Discussion on Conflict and Advancement wrote:

Lurker37 and I discussed at some length about Combat determination, posing a number of hypotheticals. 1st Rank beats 2nd Rank and 3rd Rank; but 1st Rank will beat 3rd Rank faster than beating 2nd Rank. We searched the LoG&S rulebook for any information that Attribute point totals matter. For example if 1st Rank is 50 points and 2nd Rank is 49 points, does that make it a closer contest? We concluded that the Attribute point totals do not matter. Nowhere in any of the examples does it appear to matter. It is all about Ranks and the difference between Ranks, not the Attribute point totals. That is very different from the way that Lurker37 and I have seen Amber DRPG run in the past (where Attribute point totals are compared), but then we talked through the implications of this. 

The ranks in Psyche are currently: 1st Rank - 25 points (Ethan), 2nd Rank - 5 points (Grant), 3rd Rank - 1 point (currently vacant).

So if Ranks are the only thing which matter, why would Ethan bother pumping additional points into increasing his Psyche? What does it matter if he is 25 points or 26 points or 30 points or 75 points? He's still 1st Rank and if the point difference doesn't count then pumping up the points doesn't matter…. or does it?

Then the penny dropped. It's all about *Advancement* and what happens to the ranks once someone in 1st rank upgrades their point total. Suppose Ethan is awarded 5 points to advance and he puts all of those points into Psyche. The new ranks would read as follows:

1st Rank - 30 points (Ethan), 2nd Rank - 25 points (vacant) 3rd Rank - 5 points (Grant), 4th Rank - 1 point (vacant).

The advantage to Ethan is by putting more points into an attribute, he's creating new Ranks between his 1st Rank and the lower ranked characters. The difference between Ethan and Grant would now be 2 ranks difference rather than 1 rank. Interesting - possibly open to abuse - but interesting.

After playing Amber DRPG for so many years, this never dawned on me/us that it was probably Erick Wujcik's original intent. I can't even remember a game where it didn't come down to Attribute point comparisons to determine how quickly a conflict was resolved.

This, to me, is a crucial insight into Amber and LoGaS, not to mention the other game based on Amber (Lords of Olympus). 

One interesting innovation that Lords of Olympus uses is that NPCs aren't given numbers for their Attributes. They're ranked as Tied for 1st Rank, Low Ranking, High Ranking, Dominant Rank +1, Dominant Rank +2, and so on. I wonder if Erick would have benefited from writing his NPCs that way. 

And quite frankly, it may be open to abuse, but I think a GM could correct any potential problems with insisting that the Dominant-ranked player has to bid a certain amount of points in order to make a vacant spot between the ranks. If he or she's doing things in the Amber spirit, the player will have to guess how much is to be bid, which leaves him/her open to accumulating bad Stuff unknowingly... 

Now the question becomes: does the Dominant-ranked PC then move up in the ranks against superior opponents? Or do the more powerful NPCs simply auto-adjust?