The Gaming Den

Mod Edit: Split from Teen Titans thread to keep that thread on topic.

Desdan_Mervolam at [unixtime wrote:1097521486[/unixtime]]Or Amber, where the party splits as soon as the opening adventure is over, and never get back together again. Seriously, keeping the party together is like trying to keep magnets with identical polarity together.

You are totally wrong about that. Amber parties rarely wait for the opening adventure to conclude before splitting off into various planes of existance.

Well, yes. You have a point.

-Desdan

Since I'm as familiar with Amber as I am with Josh's Strongbad hat, would either one of you care to fill me in?

Amber is a diceless game, which means that if you can put yourself into a sufficiently advantageous situation, you win. It also means that people should go to some pretty outrageous lengths to get circumstantial bonuses.

The backstory is also that any player character can dimensionally travel on foot anywhere in the infinite multiverse, and can travel secret pathways by trial and error to find hidden dimensions full of circumstantial bonuses.

So the entire party runs off into the multiverse like rats dumped out of a bag as soon as the campaign starts, everyone looks for crazy crap to give them circumstantial bonuses on whatever they are doing, and never sees each other again ever.

-Username17

It's a game based entirely off of the multiverse presented in Roger Zealzney's Chronicles of Amber novels. It's well worth reading the first series.

If you're not up for that, Frank's assessment of the RPG setting is only slightly more cynical than the actual game. What Frank omits is that due to the nature of the setting, roughly 95% of everyone you are ever going to care about is either trying to "win" by accumulating similar piles of bonuses or playing flunky to someone who is.

In practice this means that sooner or later, you are going to cross swords with another character who is after the pile of bonuses you thought you had dibs on. And sooner or later you're going to run into someone who not only has the jump on your sweet sweet pile of bonuses, but has also harvested more of your bonuses than you have, and therefore you need to enlist the aid of allies to reclaim the bonuses which are rightfully yours.

This also means that whenever someone somewhere in the multiverse starts to get close to "winning" you have to get characters together to prevent him from winning. This is generally best done by convincing other PCs to stop him from winning so that you don't have to stop harvesting your bonuses. Or occasionally by convincing other PCs that the only way to defeat the "winner" is by helping you harvest your bonuses.

Thus, while the party will inevitable scatter through the multiverse at first opportunity, player characters will tend to gravitate back into contact with other player characters during the course of a campaign. You will just never ever see the whole party together again unless someone really is about to conquer the multiverse first.

Now you guys have gotten me really curious about this Amber game... It sounds really weird.

It can be, and it's really fun PROVIDED you have a good DM, and a group of players who will a)not be opposed to betraying other PCs in theory, but not betray other PCs constantly, and B)be cool enough to not take it personally when your character eventually has to hand their character their ass in order to see one of your goals completed.

This creates a game that is intensely political, not only between the party and other power groups, but within the party as well.

The game runs like Epic-Level D&D is supposed to run in theory. The characters are on the power level of small gods, and some can take on whole armies singlehandedly if nessissary. The threat comes from even more insanely powerful forces, which in turn sees your characters often called upon to save a world, or a universe, or even all of creation.

-Desdan

But it's diceless, so the smoothest talker wins?

Not exactly, that would be Munchausen, where combat is actually handled with a round of "That's not what I heard". While Amber is diceless, and non-random, it is not actually non-numeric. It does have numbers, and if yours are bigger than someone else in a contest with you, you overwhelm them - every time. In other aspects, victory goes to the most thorough - if you "look behind the couch" you see anyone hiding there, if you don't you don't.

To a certain extent during character creation, you have the opportunity to trade likelihood of success for degree of success - and at no time would you even consider doing that for obvious reasons.

-Username17

How... Bizarre.

So Amber is not only diceless, but it's not the same kind of party-is-supposed-to-play-together game that D&D is. Which clarifies the comment... How does the DM deal with having the characters all be in separate places at once?

By just dealing with it. As I said, you need a good GM, and that's part of the reason why. The DM has to switch between whatever groups have formed within the group.

-Desdan

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1097596944[/unixtime]]It does have numbers, and if yours are bigger than someone else in a contest with you, you overwhelm them - every time.

This is sorta true and sorta false. With larger power-gaps, absolutely. You will never win a duel with someone who is clearly a better swordsman than you. However, if the power gap isn't so wide, you can attempt to convince your GM why your character should be able to make this strike connect by roleplaying out the combat.

Maj at [unixtime wrote:1097603963[/unixtime]] How does the DM deal with having the characters all be in separate places at once?

In my longest running Amber game, most of the players stayed in the room and played Cosmic Wimpout, while I pulled one or two at a time out into the hallway to run their particular part of the game.

Desdan_Mervolam at [unixtime wrote:1097605786[/unixtime]]
This is sorta true and sorta false. With larger power-gaps, absolutely. You will never win a duel with someone who is clearly a better swordsman than you. However, if the power gap isn't so wide, you can attempt to convince your GM why your character should be able to make this strike connect by roleplaying out the combat.

How do you run PvP without dice? Sounds like it'd become a favoritism contest pretty quickly.

I always liked Amber Sorcery, which seemed to involve "I'm more creative than you, so I win fvcko."

The Broken Pattern was also cool. "As good as the Logrus and the Pattern at half the cost of one of them. Just don't put anything it brings you into your mouth."

RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1097628751[/unixtime]]How do you run PvP without dice? Sounds like it'd become a favoritism contest pretty quickly.

Well, let me do a quick rundown of how stats work. You have four stats: Strength (Raw strength and unarmed combat), Endurance (natural healing, toughness and staying power), Warfare (strategy and weapons combat), and Psyche (Intelligence, force of will, and the ability to use magic).

All these abilities start out at Zero Points or "Amber Rank". Amber rank is pretty piss-poor for characters but boss for normal humans (Amber strength for example is roughly equivilant to twice the strength of a professional weightlifter. No, you don't really need the bulk that implies unless you want it). If you need points, you can buy your stat down to Chaos Rank (-10 Points, about as strong as a human is able to get), and further to Human Rank (Standard human average. This is either -15 or -25. I don't recall because I've never seen anyone actually take this). Aside from that, stats are uncapped. Somebody with 75 points in a stat is always better than someone with 50 is better than someone with 25 in a stat.

But what happens if someone's only 10 points better than you? Or 5? Or 3? That's where you have to get creative. In Amber, the element of surprise is your best friend. Never let on anything you can do until you need it to save your neck. After all, how can someone hope to block your attack effectivly if you have a sword that can cut through their sword? Or, more cleverly, why would someone fight to their full effectivness if they think that you're a much worse swordsman than you really are? Don't be afraid of dirty tricks. Corwin of Amber (PoV character for the first five novels) is notorious for not fighting fairly if he could manage it.

Now granted, about your original question, favoritism can be a problem considering everything comes down to DM fiat, especally if the two dueling PCs have similar stats and similar focus. You pretty much just have to trust that your DM is being as fair and impartial as possible.

-Desdan

Unrelated to gaming, but this thread has totally bumped up Chronicles of Amber in the TKD books to be read queue. It now falls after the Lensman books and that's only because I already checked them out.

The Corwin books are great. The Merlin books are less great, but still pretty cool.

Desdan_Mervolam at [unixtime wrote:1097691686[/unixtime]]Well, let me do a quick rundown of how stats work.

Desdan, you left out mention of which stat is the most important.

Hmmm. You're right. How embarrassing

(There is a running joke that during attribute auctions, the GM describes each ability individually as the most important attribute)

-Desdan

This amber game sounds pretty fun. I wish I knew people who played it.

Mega-bump.

I just got back from the official TKD honeymoon in which I read all of the Corwin books. I didn't even know that the story continued with Merlin until coming back here to double check this thread, but now I'll have to track those down at some point.

Anyway, my question is who makes this game, is it still being made, and if not how easy is it to find (read how expensive) if I wanted it. Amber was a cool world, for the first 5 novels at least and owning the material could be fun.

Secondly, who do you play in the game? Is it like Dragonlance where you actually play the novel characters are you unknown sons and grandsons of Oberon? Do you actually play Chaos beings since they can manipulate shadows as well?

Ah, my favorite subject!

ADRP was originally published by Phage Press, and is now owned by Guardians of Order. You can buy electronic versions of both the original "Amber Diceless Roleplaying" book (which deals almost exclusively with the Corwin books) and the "Shadow Knight" supplement (which has additional rules and background for the Merlin books) [counturl=21]here[/counturl] . You can also buy physical copies of SK from Guardians, but they appear to be out of the original book for the moment. Presumably they intend to reprint it.

Who you play in the game really depends heavily on the game. It is somewhat rare (but not by any means unknown) to play the actual book characters. Sometimes you play their children or grandchildren (this is the default mode of the game, partly because Erick Wujcik enjoys reminding you of how much you suck compared to the book characters). Sometimes you play the children of an entirely different set of "main" characters that the DM made up. Sometimes you play members of said entirely different set of "main" characters. Whatever. Chaos characters are also available (though sort of discouraged in the first book; Shadow Knight has a lot more rules and background for Chaos).

I would be remiss if I did not mention that there is a long-running (currently in its 14th year) on-line text-based Amber game based more or less on the rules used in the DRPG, though the setting has by now acquired a large number of divergences from the books. You can find more info
[counturl=22]here[/counturl] , or you can pester me with PMs if you like.

--d.

Tae_Kwon_Dan wrote:Anyway, my question is who makes this game, is it still being made, and if not how easy is it to find (read how expensive) if I wanted it.

As far as I know it is out of print. I grabbed my copy off a second-hand shelf.

Tae_Kwon_Dan wrote:Amber was a cool world, for the first 5 novels at least and owning the material could be fun.

The Merlin parts are much worse in my opinion, but still worth a read. The world just seems to make less sense, probably because it is explained more.

Tae_Kwon_Dan wrote:Secondly, who do you play in the game? Is it like Dragonlance where you actually play the novel characters are you unknown sons and grandsons of Oberon? Do you actually play Chaos beings since they can manipulate shadows as well?

All of those work. The recommendation is that the players be the generation after Corwin, Brand, Random and the rest of the gang, at least for the first go.

dbb wrote:You can buy electronic versions of both the original "Amber Diceless Roleplaying" book (which deals almost exclusively with the Corwin books) and the "Shadow Knight" supplement

Hey, I didn't even know something like this existed. Nice, very nice.

dbb wrote:Sometimes you play their children or grandchildren (this is the default mode of the game, partly because Erick Wujcik enjoys reminding you of how much you suck compared to the book characters).

I dunno, compared to DnD level 1 to 20 Amber starting character to Oberon doesn't seem like a large difference at all.