Marhault and I have this discussion periodically.

I love Amber Diceless, but get angsty at the fact that too many GMs seem to think that stats are the end all be all of conflict resolution.

Me: "Let's see, he's blindfolded, handcuffed to a chair and his knees are broken. I attack!"
GM: "His warfare's higher. He kicks your ass."
Me: "Aaaaaagghhhh!!"


Unless he's Benedict, no fucking way. Grrr.

Other than that and kind of ignoring sorcery rules, I like it. Granted, in my world systems are suggestions, not rules.

Posted By: GeekGirlsRuleMe: "Let's see, he's blindfolded, handcuffed to a chair and his knees are broken. I attack!"
GM: "His warfare's higher. He kicks your ass."
Me: "Aaaaaagghhhh!!"

Ah, that sucks. The rules basically encourage you to blindfold, handcuff and break the knees of someone (using other stats and manipulation) who you want to best in an attribute contest where they are higher than you. In the end, it's up to the GM if they succeed or not, but slavishly following the number regardless of circumstance was exactly what the game was not about, nor the behavior it was meant to encourage. Hmmm.

Unless it was Benedict. Then he'd still kick your ass. The place you kidnapped him to, and where you handcuffed him? He used suggestion to make sure you brought him there. It looks like a warehouse, but it's actually his secret ninja fortress, where ninjas spill out of the walls to surround you.

But then they step back, because Benedict simply gets up, snaps his knees back into place, and proceeds to kick your ass in a one on one fight anyway, blindfolded and handcuffed.

-Andy

There is no such thing as a single, finite Amber Diceless Roleplaying System. (No such thing as a singular system, that is.)

There is Amber Diceless Roleplaying -- roleplaying, without dice, in the Amber setting.

But there is no single resolution system; each and every Amber game uses a fundamentally different resolution system, which can be summarized with this formula:

Where x = Conflict result, and n = GM's name, x = "n decides."

Due to the fact that whatever n decides, how n decides it, and how you as the player can get n to give you a favorable outcome is in no way comparable, predictable, or consistent between different instances of n, there is no example-based evidence that the system presented in the book carries into Actual Play in any consistent way; every single Amber DRPG group is playing with a different resolution system from every other ADRPG group. Conclusion, no official ADRPG system exists in anything but theory (read: text).

((For instance, in the example Mickey gives, given identical facts about the scene, six different GMs will give 6 different results, multiplied by the number of different players in each play group, because each player will get different responses from the same GM in identical situations. I, for example, don't give a fuck if the guy tied up is Benedict or not -- lots of other GMs do (see Andy's reply for an example), and also give different weight to the other elements in the scene. Ad infinitum, ad nausea.))

--

Which isn't to say I think the game isn't historically valuable -- it is perhaps the first RPG that gave serious authorship rights to the players. However, that authorship has very little to do with the system (you merely had to spend points in one of several authorship-granting powers), and everything to do with the setting itself: you were playing characters who can define their world at will, so the players were given authorship via proxy.

I think many people gravitated to Amber when it came out because of the kind of group collaboration it (the setting, not the system) allowed.

I maintain that any game system that accurately reflects that level of world-changing ability in the characters can be used to play in that setting. In my opinion, there is no pre-existing 'Official system' for such a homebrew to compete against.

Oh, holy crow! Here it is already at 7 posts and I'm still composing! Give me a bit, I promise to have something soon.

Nope, Eero, I think you got it in one.

Posted By: Eero TuovinenPerhaps I should get the game text itself and read it through, it might explain to me what the GM was trying to do.

Yeah. Not because you haven't got it - you've got it. But because the meat of the game, the thing that made it work, is the stuff that wouldn't fit on Ralph's playing card. Which is almost all in the examples and advice.

Most games start as a formal structure of rules, and (unfold? collapse? move?) into being an informal body of action as people play them hard over a long period. Amber starts there; that's the special thing.

It's not a game, it's a Rorschach Blot.

Doyce nails it.

Most frustrating game I have ever encountered. I want to like it. I really do. But in play, it's never been anything but a total disaster. Established, long-time groups with either very well-synced-up pre-existing cultures of play or a strong social dominance hierarchy can play it well - or so I conclude from what I know of groups that have reported enjoying it. Any other formula seems to crash out in short order on issues of player skill, SiS disconnect, or just plain "sandbox explosion" - that phenomenon where everybody in a game ends up playing their own solo game that rarely intersects with anyone else's, except in violently destructive ways.

The brilliance of Amber is that it did what a bunch of other games of its day and age did, but actually told you to do it that way.

So: Generic late 80s/early 90s game: "Here are a whole bunch of stats and attributes and gear tables and fancy background stuff that may or may not lead to you sticking together or fighting each other, huge rules for combat, detailed chase rules, and the a little tiny section in the GM's only book that kinda alludes to how the GM makes this all work by player censorship and being a black box. Oh, and secretly the players will probably all try to make characters that are cooler than the other PCs because the PCs are the real lasting measure of other PCs, but we will NEVER SAY THAT and may even say that doing it is bad."

Amber: "So the GM is a black box and the players have to stick together and fight each other and mostly get compared to each other. Make up your own universe, cause hell why not, but use these three central points (Patern, Logrus, NPC elder family members) to make sure you're all still in the same universe with each other. Fuck all the detailed rules that you won't actually use anyway, here are a million examples of how the GM uses player censorship and the black box to create drama."

It is. It requires a lot of buy-in.

Unlike Mark W, I never had anything but fantabulistic experiences playing Amber.

But its a game that relies exceedingly heavily...and balances precariously...on the group social contract.

There is nothing particular in the game mechanics that make the game Amber better than just playing freeform, however. That is, if your group has the shared aesthetic and solid social contract required to play Amber successfully...you could have had equal success freeforming Amber vs. using Amber Diceless and not really noticed the difference.

The coolest bit of the actual mechanics (and it was super cool and well worth the price of the book to have seen it) was the auctioning of attributes to establish the relative power ranking among the PCs. But after that there really wasn't much there.

But to Levi's point, the examples are pretty substantial and a GM who did Mickey's example in #2 clearly hadn't read them.

Posted By: ValamirThe coolest bit of the actual mechanics (and it was super cool and well worth the price of the book to have seen it) was the auctioning of attributes to establish the relative power ranking among the PCs. But after that there really wasn't much there.

YES. Why hasn't any other game done this?

Posted By: Bret Gillan

Posted By: ValamirThe coolest bit of the actual mechanics (and it was super cool and well worth the price of the book to have seen it) was the auctioning of attributes to establish the relative power ranking among the PCs. But after that there really wasn't much there.

YES. Why hasn't any other game done this?

Hey.

James

First thing I want to say is this, I'm not slamming the good time anybody has had with the game. The Amber is easily on my top 12 (or 10, or probably 5) games that everybody should read, because Wujcik broke a lot of boundaries with it and did some things that had never been done before. The Attribute Auction is especially brilliant.

Amber is my ultimate System Does Matter game. I've run 3 campaigns, played in 1, and everything that happened that was awesome in all of them came from either Zelazny, me, you, or us as players. The game fails to support me in play in every conceivable way from the moment character creation is finished.

So, the root of the comment I made in the other thread, which Bob quotes, is that while the game gives you a good setup for the next generation, it doesn't help you do anything with them. The conflict resolution really boils down to GM fiat. It is a direct Karma based stat comparison except that you are supposed to include Stuff and fictional positioning in the outcome as well. As the GM, it is your call to decide whether being blinded, handcuffed and kneebroken is enough to allow a 3rd rank character to overcome a 1st rank character. Is that enough? Okay, what about just handcuffed? What about the sun is in your eyes? If it's my call, it's GM Fiat. Ralph and Doyce put it better than I can.

Essentially, the game put me in this situation. Anytime I wanted to frame a PC into a conflict that is not with another PC (or to a lesser extent, pre-statted NPC) I had to decide whether the PC would win, lose, or draw. I had to decide it outright. I already know the PC scores, and would just have to say yes or no. With an NPC, I just had to say, (s)he is better at X than Drago, worse than Fabrizio, and better at Y than Edwin, but not as good as Constantine. Again, the decision was all in my court.

So, deep flaws? Yeah, there really are. Has the cutting edge moved away? Yeah. Like ten years ago, if not more. But more importantly, the game never really provided a complete framework for play. Is it that another game does better what does this one tried to do? Not really, but knowing what we know now it wouldn't be hard.

I'll read and reply more later on or tomorrow, but that's the gist of my (bad) feelings about the game. We should talk about the attribute auction later, because there's serious gold in it to be mined.

Posted By: Bret GillanAnd then our characters kind of all went off and did their own thing and eventually the game collapsed from GM frustration at not really knowing how to run the game.

I've had a similar thing happen with games of Nobilis that I've run.

Huh. Okay.

This tells me that there is at least one problem that you've seen which hits Amber games, which I've never met, and don't understand.

I'd like to be all sagacious and shit. But on this, I got nothin'.

Posted By: MarhaultAnytime I wanted to frame a PC into a conflict that is not with another PC (or to a lesser extent, pre-statted NPC) I had to decide whether the PC would win, lose, or draw.

FWIW, that's only the case if you define "conflict" as "sword-fight, wrestling match, marathon or magical duel."

If you frame a PC into a conflict where (say) the stakes are "Do I convince this other PC not to trust this scheming bitch?" then you're equally unsupported by system, but nobody's calling on the GM to adjudicate.

Posted By: TonyLBIf you frame a PC into a conflict where (say) the stakes are "Do I convince this other PC not to trust this scheming bitch?" then you're equally unsupported by system, but nobody's calling on the GM to adjudicate.

My experience has been that there is literally NO WAY to resolve situations like that, because the consequences of giving in those sorts of conflicts can be huge (and often unknown). So (a) people avoid ever getting into them or (b) filibuster their way through them on sheer bullheadedness. I think this is because the game is so schizophrenic about whether the main deal is inter-sibling conflict or exploration.

I always felt punished for engaging in pure exploration OR ever getting into any sort of conflict I had not already built a sufficiently overwhelming advantage for that its conclusion was obvious to everybody from step 1. Generally speaking, in most of the games I've been in, even interacting with the other players was flirting with massive deprotagonisation. You were much better off engaging in trivial solitary exploration.

Oh, and to answer Levi's question from above: In the majority of ADRPG games I've played, textual knowledge (and textual reliance), for both novels and ADRPG rules, varied all the way from "eats, sleeps, and breathes this stuff" to "so, what are we playing? Okay. Just tell me what to do." I have not seen a whole lot of consistency, although I will say that the most "difficult" players - as in the ones who dominated play ruthlessly - tended to be those most engaged with the rules text (who seemed mostly to be very hypercompetitive types in general) OR the dedicated hardcore geeks (who could talk circles around everybody when it came to positioning), while the people who vanished off into the weeds or got stomped repeatedly tended to be the ones who were mostly interested in exploration of the setting/situation/characters/etc.

The people who I've known personally who really love ADRPG mostly seem to be either aggressive competitors who like outwitting/outselling/outmaneuvering other players, or introspective immersive players who don't really care about anything other than their own Shadow/pet project/personal subplot.

So, okay, here's what I'm getting from the conversation so far:

Amber is a real transitional design that doesn't necessarily have all the tools to play like its designer wanted, but gets partway there.

Also, there seems to be some clash between a competitive style of play ( with single character per player identification) on one hand, and basically co-operative play on the other ( GM fiat with suggestions by the system to inform that fiat).

Eenteresting. Especially as I've been reflecting on playing Archipelago recently which is specifically a co-operative game on the real people level.

Hmmm...

Posted By: Mark WOh, and to answer Levi's question from above: In the majority of ADRPG games I've played, textual knowledge (and textual reliance), for both novels and ADRPG rules, varied all the way from "eats, sleeps, and breathes this stuff" to "so, what are we playing? Okay. Just tell me what to do." I have not seen a whole lot of consistency, although I will say that the most "difficult" players - as in the ones who dominated play ruthlessly - tended to be those most engaged with the rules text (who seemed mostly to be very hypercompetitive types in general) OR the dedicated hardcore geeks (who could talk circles around everybody when it came to positioning), while the people who vanished off into the weeds or got stomped repeatedly tended to be the ones who were mostly interested in exploration of the setting/situation/characters/etc.

The people who I've known personally who really love ADRPG mostly seem to be either aggressive competitors who like outwitting/outselling/outmaneuvering other players, or introspective immersive players who don't really care about anything other than their own Shadow/pet project/personal subplot.

Huh, again.

I'm struggling to describe the thing that was *so clearly* transmitted from the text to my play, and try to figure out how much of it actually was the text. I stab at it now:

The two big things I got, which I'm not seeing in your example, were...

(1) The things that you do which aren't intended to or expected to interact with the stuff of other PCs? Those things don't matter. They happen, yes. And they are to be handled quickly, beacuse they are not the best bits.

(2) Our characters will have tension and mistrust, likely even conflict. The meat is there. As players, it is fun for us to dig into that tension, mistrust, and conflict - but if it's all about beating the other player for you, then all you're getting is the conflict; you're missing the juicy tension, which requires a fair degree of player cooperation, and is not served by you, player, being hypercompetive.

Now...

How much of that came to me, and to our table, by way of the text? I don't know. My instinctive answer is that a very big part of it did. But "my instinctive answer" is not all the way examined.

Is the non-mechanical part of the book any good at aiding the freeforming part, though?

Andy and Levi seemed to indicate that it helped them, no?

Posted By: Marshall BurnsIt sounds like all this game needs is a clear-cut mechanic for converting Positioning into Effectiveness.

Possibly via the expenditure of a resource. Like, when you handcuffed the guy, you spend a chip, and now those handcuffs add 1 to the Effective value of whatever. The effect lasts for, say, a scene, unless you spend another chip, and it lasts for some longer duration of time.

But I've never read or played it. The above is just a random thought.

Well, that seems to be one of those points that breaks along the Co-operative/competitive clash I was seeing, pointing towards the competitive part.

From a co-operativbe perspective, that seems like tasty color, but not exactly much else.

And that clash of style seems to be a big part of the problem for people who had difficulties with this game.

Marhault is absolutely correct that it isn't represented in a mechanic.

As a weird note, this whole conversation makes me say "Oh, hey, this is why The Mountain Witch never really resonated with me!"

I already had a culture of play in my head, built over time and play, that did the thing without the mechanic. The trust mechanic always struck me as a needless device; it never occured to me that it was a shortcut.

Oh, here's a thing I want to say about what the rules has right. Tony's "only if you define conflict as..." reminded me. The game does an amazing thing with the attribute auction. It says, right up front - "Here are your four arenas of conflict. The people you're going to be in conflict with? They're right here at the table with you. The thing that determines who wins a conflict in a given arena is their rank in this auction that we're doing right now. Do I hear ten points?"

That idea, that the game defines the arenas of conflict and that chargen puts you at the starting line as to where you stand with respect to the arenas, is hell-on-wheels, and this is where I learned it.

Also:

The Amber setting always seemed to cry out for something GMless--as that would entirely eliminate the plotting in the other room thing I mentioned above.

We ended up realizing that we wanted the swashbuckling and intrigue but that we'd become less enamored of the powers/power-game element. This led to me to develop a rules hack that combined Fate and Prince Valiant (with a dash of the D6 system) that was set in an imaginary alternate earth of the renaissance (and yes I stole ruthlessly from 7th Sea as well).

Posted By: Mark WAnd in my experience, most players prefer to resolve those situations either by not getting into them in the first place (becoming sufficiently strong not to ever need to negotiate or compromise, or just lying really low and sneaking around conflict); by simply filibustering (we end up with a 45-minute intractable, sullen "debate" between 2+ people, neither of whom will give an inch unless forced); or by force.

I believe that is pretty much exactly what I covered under my "How to be miserable in ADRPG" section, above.

I'm not saying that I haven't seen it, or even that it's not common. Just that there's another way to play, and the people making themselves miserable tend to step aside and let me have my fun.

After all, if I say "Y'know what, I think that underneath that grim and bloody exterior, you're just a hurt little child," I don't need them to take that on board. I've done everything I wanted just by saying that: It shows who my character is, that they'd form and share that sort of opinion about another character.

Posted By: TonyLB... you fear and distrust the members of your family, and the specific areas in which you are right to feel inferior to each and every one of them.

Right. So why the hell should I ever, ever cooperate with them, be kind to them, deal with them in any way at all except from a position of unassailable strength. Especially when the prize is so big. I think that's the thing: you look at that situation, and see one thing. Other people will see something different.

Either that, or you look at that setup, and you say: "Screw this. I can go off and MAKE A WORLD that's whatever I want it to be, and be a superhero in it. Why the hell should I give a damn about stupid family drama - which I can't win at in any case?"

At least, that's the reactions I've seen - to be fair, I've also seen the positive ones you suggest from time to time, but it only takes a little to poison the well.

Posted By: Levi Kornelsen

Posted By: Mark Wit only takes a little to poison the well.

This is universal to all games, in my experience.

And games that are essentially co-operative are "fail-fast" when it comes to that poison, IME, in a way other games aren't.

I'm not sure that's bad, though.

Mark, I agree with that assessment of ADRPG. I think the game succeeds despite its design, not because of it.

p.

Posted By: Mark WEither that, or you look at that setup, and you say: "Screw this. I can go off and MAKE A WORLD that's whatever I want it to be, and be a superhero in it. Why the hell should I give a damn about stupid family drama - which I can't win at in any case?"

Indeed. The central question of the game, IMHO. Different characters and stories can be created out of different answers (or sets of conflicting answers).

Posted By: Mark WMost frustrating game I have ever encountered. I want to like it. I really do. But in play, it's never been anything but a total disaster. Established, long-time groups with either very well-synced-up pre-existing cultures of play or a strong social dominance hierarchy can play it well - or so I conclude from what I know of groups that have reported enjoying it. Any other formula seems to crash out in short order on issues of player skill, SiS disconnect, or just plain "sandbox explosion" - that phenomenon where everybody in a game ends up playing their own solo game that rarely intersects with anyone else's, except in violently destructive ways.

I'm not a big fan of the ADRPG system -- I was immediately annoyed by a number of things in the book, especially setting up the PCs as vastly inferior children of the much more highly powered Amberite elders. And my first campaign playing it, our standing group rather fell apart over it, and eventually dropped the campaign in disgust.

However, I have to say that I've played a lot more Amber games since I started going to AmberCon NorthWest -- and most of the time, the games have worked fine despite being a group of people who have no history of play together.

Posted By: MarhaultCould you please talk about how the rules given in the Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game help you achieve the backbiting, lying and betrayal that we all know is what makes a game in this setting cool? I mean, what do you get out of it that you couldn't get from say D20, or PACE, or a Sorcerer hack, or any number of other games? If you can't tell me that, all you're saying is that System Doesn't Matter, and we might as well stop now because we'll never see eye to eye. Somehow I don't think that's the case.

I stab at this.

Much of the system of Amber is not hard rules, but culture-of-play. It's a culture that speaks to how to make decisions - and one that assumes that you do get to make those decisions. It wouldn't work as easily for, say, a game with dice, because those games assume (simply by including dice!) that you won't be making all the decisions.

That culture of play isn't formulated into rules, any more than the rules for getting great play with Transformers among six-years-olds are formulated... Either you absorb it through the skin, seeing it in action, or you don't absorb it at all. Which, to me, seems to be the great failing of the text - it's easy to "not absorb".

Hm. My stab is clumsy.

Tony,

The other oft overlooked thing about the system (as opposed to mechanics) is the bonus points you get for drawing trump portraits, doing game journals, and the like. Doing this right is much like building a wiki of the game together, it reinforces the fact that you're creating the world together, and are all responsible for bringing something for the game for the other players. It's an important hand-in-hand with the bidding system.

Of course, it too can go wrong. When I played Amber in high school one of the artists in the group ended up drawing Trumps for NPCs that were minor characters in his own branch of the story and never once drawing a picture of any other PC or the NPCs that were shared by multiple folks in the group. Being high school we avoided the issue for awhile, then had a fight about it.

But these days, were I to go back to it, I'm pretty sure we could avoid that pit.

I honestly think that the conflict rules as written do a tremendous job of making it hard to trust another person. If you've got higher warfare, and they've got higher strength ... do you let them say "Wow, I haven't seen you in ages!" and give you a big hug? I know people who wouldn't, simply because hey, what if this is the start of the betrayal? That's pretty cool, in terms of creating a constant underpinning of vague and irrational discomfort in the presence of your character's family.

But, frankly, I think that the thing that has changed the game for me is play-craft ... the way I, as a player, approach the game. I don't try to change my fellow players, or the GM. I don't have talks about what I need, or any of that. I just do a couple simple things: I listen really carefully to what people are doing with their characters and the world. I form opinions on that, as my character would. I express those opinions. I make that activity my center of exploration for the game ... and that's really made it a lot more fun.

Talk of GM Fiat really, really irritated Erick Wujcik and many Amber players, and there is a thread where he addresses this issue, but I don't think, resolves it. Ignore all the snark from other people and look at Eric's posts.

Resolving conflict in Amber without GM Favouritism

All games have GM judgement, but Amber relies a lot on people being willing to give over a lot of power to the GM or else negotiate on a social contract level. The rules are clear for certain types of conflicts, and it wouldn't take much to extend the mechanics to decrease the necessity for fiat, but as they stand, the game relies on it heavily. I don't think that in itself is a problem, particularly if you allow yourself to buy into the black box model of GMing for the purposes of the game.

I've played it with players who trusted my judgement in determining the outcome of conflicts, and it's been enjoyable.

Pelgrane hit on something important. Adjucation come down to trust in amber. There may be some 'drive a truck through' holes in the rules but the players in my games know that I want them to have fun and look cool doing it. There are times when I ask them 'do you really want to do this'. Since amberites are supposedly smarter and faster than us I'll slow down the deliberations to make sure all the players get exactly what there looking to do. I will tell them that if you do this your character is able to anticipate that this will happen. They move with pretty sure knowledge through challenges. I teach my players to want to slow down and discover more when I don't give them these clues. I don't assume they know everything I will walk them through each conflict. This way no one feels hosed when they fail. They knew they would fail but they were in a social situation that made their choice the best of all the bad choices. I've heard the term "social meatgrinder" before and that's what my games are about. It doesn't matter what your warfare is if killing them just is not an option.

As the GM, it is your call to decide whether being blinded, handcuffed and kneebroken is enough to allow a 3rd rank character to overcome a 1st rank character. Is that enough? Okay, what about just handcuffed? What about the sun is in your eyes? If it's my call, it's GM Fiat.

Fiat as a concept has an inherently negative ring to it. I'd call what you describe GM discretion and a perfectly valid technique of play. In experience I've found that people are pretty good at guesstimating these 'what would happen' situations in a way that accounts for both in-fiction and out-of-fiction variables in a reasonable way. I admit, Amber could be more clear on the basic assumptions of this method and perhaps divide authorial powers a bit differently but, hey, it was the first of it's kind and the power structure at the table kinda rhymes with the setting.

Amber has definitely had a big impact on how I've played. When we play diceless, I still use much of the guidelines in the book. The stuff about fencing and the examples of fighting gorillas or whatnot are excellent.

Isn't it a political game with adventure and social flavor? That's what I've usually seen. "Diplomacy is warfare by other means" and all that jazz.

I really, really don't see a lot in the text to support the idea that the game is primarily social, unless you define "social" as "anything that isn't direct physical conflict". I think you can extract an exploration-centric "look at all the cool places you can go and all the neat things you can do with powers" premise from the text, I think you can extract a "Machiavellian politics on a grand scale" premise from the text, and I think you can extract a "Zelazny pastiche" premise from the text... but some sort of vaguely Dying Earth-style drawing-room mannerpunk? Well... maybe. I don't see it.

Posted By: TonyLBIt's about family.

I think "politics" is the character's collective delusion. "Yes, yes, we're acting like Machiavelli and Genghis Khan and notat alllike your annoying Aunt Irene who ruinsevery single Thanksgivingby getting into the same argument with Aunt Lois about that thing that happened a bazillion years ago."

So what I mean by social, in this context, is trying to get along with these people who you can't avoid, whose opinionsshouldn'tmatter to you, but do.

Heh. That perfectly illuminates the player disconnect I've run into. I would say that most of the players I've played the game with share that particular delusion. ADRPG is an opportunity for them to act out their own fantasies of Machiavellian (or Randian) autarky.

Posted By: TonyLBI'm actually on the other side of this whole "GM-Fiat/GM-Discretion" setup ... I think that, as anaction game, Amber is a massive failure.Not, let me point out, because it does a disservice to the players ... but rather because it does a disservice to the GM. Conflict mechanics are meant to be there so that the GM isn'trequiredto make these kinds of choices when the stakes are high. It's tiring and (in the long run) frustrating.

QFT.

Tony, do you get something out of ADRPG that you wouldn't get from using FATE with the same players, situation, setting and characters?

Posted By: TonyLBBut, like I said, I think that the setting, structure and most of the text itself slant heavily toward a social game with adventure flavor, rather than an adventure game with social flavor.

Huh. I like this. Looking at the game this way I get what you're saying. Very interesting. I can also look back at five years of playing with like a hundred plus different people and I can see why it was alternating between great and frustrating.