RPGs day six: Amber
May. 25th, 2020 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishVia 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.
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.