RPGs day six: Amber

Via James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Day six: Amber Diceless Roleplaying.



I suspect, based on no evidence save timing, that I picked up the Amber Diceless book and its supplement Shadow Knight at Technicon 1996, the same convention where I met Vond and played Changeling with Ian Lemke. That was a good con. Whenever it was, I started running a weekly Amber game in Owens Food Court that fall, and it ran for the entirety of the school year. (If you're wondering when I found time to keep up with my classwork with all the role-playing, well, there's a reason I think of undergrad as the best decade of my life.)

The thing about Amber is that it's a truly diceless system. It gets away with this by having the PCs be either inherently superior to most beings they encounter, or inherently inferior to a handful of other beings (their elder relatives, mostly), and resolving conflict between PCs by a fairly clever system of rank in four attributes. Amber games, the way I run them, aren't about finding the Big Bad and beating the crap out of it; they're about figuring out what the hell is even going on and if there's anything we can do about it.

The other thing about Amber is that it is a beautiful garbage fire. The aforementioned attribute ranking, where relative rank matters but the actual point values don't, is inextricably entwined with incredibly expensive and necessary Cool Powers, other cheaper but stupid Cool Powers, and a trivially breakable item (etc) creation system. Not to mention the concept of "Good/Bad Stuff," ie leftover character points / character point debt, which indicates whether the universe (aka the GM) smiles on your character or sends plagues of locusts to dog your every step. Erick Wujick's GM style is fundamentally adversarial: he's a believer in doing awful things to characters (and lying to players) in the name of Character Growth. Every time I go to look something up in the rulebook I spend half my time getting mad and saying "that's stupid, I'm not doing that." I like to think Erick would have approved, since one of his final pieces of GM advice is "make the game your own."

Ultimately, Amber is the game of my heart, the one true role-playing game, of which all others, including our own Changeling, are but shadows.

bone dancing

"When have I ever done what I was told?"
"Always. Because it's the easy path, and the one you're least noticed on."

I read Bone Dance, by Emma Bull, several times in high school. I liked it quite a bit. The explicit mix of fantasy and postapocalyptic low-tech, with some background Sufficiently Advanced Technology, worked really well for me. Plus I was just getting into tarot so I greatly appreciated the use of a tarot spread as a structural device. I enjoyed Sparrow as a character; I related to them, though I don't think I would have said so in those words. The worldview of "keep yourself secret and safe" and "nothing's for free" resonated with me to such a degree that I didn't even notice it, it's just how things worked.

I last read it just under ten years ago. At that point I could recognise that Sparrow is a pretty messed-up character. That recognition hit me kinda hard.

A couple of weeks ago thanate mentioned on Twitter that Sparrow looked a lot like "Murderbot lite" and the correspondences therein might be interesting. And it had been awhile, and Network Effect hadn't arrived yet, so I figured, what the hey.

I can confirm that Sparrow does, in fact, look a lot like Murderbot Lite, and it was, in fact, Interesting, though likely not in the way she intended.

It is a really weird feeling, to read something that you've read a bunch of times before and suddenly pick up on all kinds of implications and subtext that you just never got before. It's like... I understand it now. I understand Sparrow burying or burning the dead past, learning to be themself, learning to be part of a community. To have friends, to be a friend.

Partly, of course, this is because I'm a better reader now than I was ten, or twenty, years ago. More of it's because I'm a better human being than I was then, and I can see myself in Sparrow a lot more clearly. I always understood well enough who Sparrow was... but it wasn't until a decade ago that I could understand why Sparrow's friends might see that as ... not a problem, exactly, but hurtful. And even then I couldn't understand Sparrow's catharsis and transformation. I could see what happened, but not the why of it.

Maybe I'm learning how to human. Maybe I'm healing some very old damage.

It's a start.