Amber: WTF?

[finarvyn]

What does diceless, in Amber's case in particular, offer over using dice, more than being different. Faster? More group something? Tactical, rules-lite, diceless, not free-form doesn't really add up to me. Chess without a board or pieces I'm having difficult visualizing. Is this like a Matrix game, VLB, or Kriegspiel?

What diceless does here is to allow the story to progress without having to stop, consult charts, and roll dice. For most RPGs, the dice give the sense of the ebb and flow of battle, but in ADRP this is done verbally.

Consider a situation: You have left your favorite pub, it's dark, and your car is three blocks away. As you walk to the car you hear footsteps behind you, and you look over your shoulder to see a stranger in the shadows. What do you do?

In a dice-based RPG the player might check his or her hit point levels, attack bonuses, and such. The player might then try to size up the stranger and then decide if combat is in order. If combat occurs, dice are rolled and hit points drop until one side or the other breaks off the attack.

The real world isn't much like that. In the real world, I know something about how good I am at fighting (in my case, not so good) and I can judge if the other guy looks tough or not. Based on viusal evidence, I decide how to handle the encounter. Diceless is more like this. Rather than having a fixed number of hit points, you need to listen to the GM give clues as to who is winning the fight. The GM knows how good your character is and how good the stranger is and you figure it out through play.

What this means is that the typical RPG "random encounter" is pretty much meaningless in ADRP. If you're a lot better you just win. In D&D I can send waves of orcs at a party and slowly eat away their resources (hit points, spells, whatever) but in ADRP those encounters are meaningless and we move on to the more important stuff. The story is the important thing.

As I said before, it's not "freeform" because it has a definite structure and a set of rules to guide the GM through conflict resolution. This conflict can be physical (Strength) or mental (Psyche) or use weapns (Warfare), and can include use of spells and various powers. Having good ideas can often be better than having a better bonus.

It's not necessarily better than diced RPGs. It's different.

[RPGPundit]

What does diceless, in Amber's case in particular, offer over using dice, more than being different. Faster? More group something? Tactical, rules-lite, diceless, not free-form doesn't really add up to me. Chess without a board or pieces I'm having difficult visualizing. Is this like a Matrix game, VLB, or Kriegspiel?

Well, its like any other RPG, except the players don't roll dice.  The stats are absolute.  A "1st place" will always beat a "2nd".  But the player doesn't know what the other guy has, and knows only what he has, and has to try different tactics with his attributes to play one "piece" against the other.
Its like chess but the pieces are the player's attributes.  He must move (move with) the right one to win.
The advantage of taking out the dice is that it also takes out a lot of the thinking in terms of mechanics.  In a dice-rolling game, the player will usually think "well, i have an 89% in that skill", or "I've got a total bonus of +5 so that's a 75% chance of success rolling a D20", etc etc.
Once you're not rolling dice and comparing them to your stats, you no longer have to worry about either trying to "get lucky" with the dice, or trying to rely on the numbers part of your stats.
Instead, roleplay becomes highly descriptive, as what you DO have to worry about is what move you can make, in the situation you are presently in, that would allow you to put an attribute "into play".

Parallel universes can be cool, that's one thing I like about say Dr. Who and Tekumel. Firearms and magic cool as well. However it seems like Amber is

• very high powered - Does the game, if not the setting/books allow for non-members of the royal family? Would there be a point to playing
  such people? To put it another way how's the power range?
  

without a doubt, amber is "high powered".  There is some considerable difference in each campaign, however.  What is accepted is that Amberites, even commoner Amberites, are "vastly superior" to human beings.  Now, whether "vastly superior" means olympic-level athletes, or whether it means "superhuman" is something that depends on who's GMing.  And the game as it exists allows you to set your own scale as a GM.  You get to decide exactly what someone who's 1st place in Strength would be capable of doing.

• mostly European Medieval - Is it mostly European Medieval or does it support going full gonzo and mixing time periods and culture on a whim? I'm not asking for full GURPS TL interaction and design systems.

Its totally gonzo.  The later Amber novels themselves get highly gonzo.
You can totally mix up wild-west with cyberpunk, fictional characters, wierd landscapes out of a san francisco hippie's artbook, etc etc.

Powers/Sorcery/Demons - potentially interesting but no idea how they fit/work in-game

How do you mean?
There's a variety of powers; one that only Amberites can use (Pattern), one that only chaos lords can use (Logrus) and the rest open to anyone.
Sorcery is among the most powerful thing most "shadows" (normal humans) are capable of using, and it is the weakest of all powers Amberites will use.  In Amber its rare, mostly for the family nerds; in Chaos it appears to be something you learn in kindergarten.

Demons are the "commoners" of the courts of chaos.  They come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, not all of them malevolent (in fact, most of them aren't; they're the peasants and butlers and nannies of Chaos, as well as the footsoldiers). In game terms, demons are an "item" you can own if you play a chaos lord, just like you can own magic items or creatures of other kinds.

Chargen - ok I see and somewhat get the auction bit, but what are characters like in Amber, all offshoots of the royal family? Any say servants or "normals"? Is there much difference both rules and backstory between characters? What happens if a player comes to me with a concept, can I model that or is chargen more random due to the bidding?

It would be possible to run a game where you were Amberite commoners, or family servants. That wouldn't be hard at all.
It would be a lot harder to make a game where you were all normal humans. The game's mechanics aren't made for that.  Even an Amberite peasant would be a significantly superior specimen here on earth.

The difference between characters depends very much on what build you give him (what rank he has, what powers he buys, what items, what Shadows (entire universes) he owns, etc), and also on his parentage.  The royal family of Amber is huge.  The courts of chaos are even huger. As such, PCs can have just about any backstory a GM wants to allow.
Some examples from my own campaigns over the years:
1. An amberite who was the son of Bleys, and spent most of his life in one of Bley's shadows, a place reminiscent of Musketeer-era france.
2. A chaos lord from a Chaos house that was heavily political. Lives for being in the courts of chaos, and was very pissed off at having to go serve as ambassador to Amber, a place he despises and doesn't really understand.
3. A butler in Castle Amber, who has no idea that he is actually an illegitimate child of King Oberon.
4. A son of Random who grew up in a shadow where the wild west never ended, and the wild west, cyberpunk, and Jazz music all combined to create a very wierd anarchic western north america.
5. A daughter of Llewella who grew up in Remba, the city under the ocean.
6. A spoiled New York kid, son of Flora, who grew up living in Flora's manhattan flat; snorting coke by the time he was 8, having sex by the time he was 12, his godfather was Andy Warhol and he was surrounded by all the "Beautiful people".  Has no idea what to do with his life.
7.A son of Gerard who grew up in Amber, raised with all the Amberite ideals, taught that defending the realm is tantamount.
8. A son of benedict who grew up abandoned in a fierce shadow near the border of the Black Zone (the shadows that Chaos controls) fighting in a Norse fantasy world that suffered constant war from the influx of demon armies.
9. The son of a Grand Moff in the imperial fleet, raised on Coruscant. Finds out only later that he was actually given in secret to his "father" by a strange man in brown robes.
10. A living creature created by the Chaos Lord Mandor to serve as the perfect assassin. A shapeshifter that was created from the composite of the brains and souls of many of the greatest fighters and killers of the entire multiverse.

And those are just a few of the many, many, characters that have passed through my campaigns.

Anyways, if a player comes to you with a character concept BEFORE the auction, you can model that, but you should also then give that player some strong advice about which attributes will be important to that kind of character, and encourage them to bid liberally on those attributes.
Its really not hard at all, since players always choose when and how much they bid.  

Hope this gives you some ideas, sincere ones I hope, about what the game can and cannot do.

RPGPundit

[RPGPundit]

Where all worlds but one are successively more pallid and deviating shadows of the one "true" world at the center of it all.  And in that one "true" world, everyone is white!Er, well... :mischief:

!i!

You have bought into the Amberite ministry of propaganda, my friend.  There are actually at least TWO "true" worlds. One is Amber, the paragon of Order, where yes, all the royals at least are of european stock; but the other is the courts of Chaos, the paragon of... well, Chaos; where the much more numerous chaos lords look like anything and everything!

And besides those two, there is still a very strong philosophical debate over just how "unreal" the shadows really are.

RPGPundit

[RPGPundit]

I never read anything beyond "The Courts of Chaos," but there's no reason to think that Amber really was the center of everything. If anything, it was furthest from where everything springs, and, even further, Amber where people lived was actually a shadow itself, of the Amber where there were no people at all.

Now that i think of it, though, are there actual physical descriptions of the entire Amber family that precludes any of them from being races other than white? I remember a lot of hair and eye color descriptions, but hell, at least one of the sisters had green hair...

Well yes, Llewella is Green-haired, and in fact is bi-racial (she's half merman).

And Amber is only the "center" of things in the sense of importance to the narrator of the novels, who is an Amberite.  In fact, it becomes apparent eventually that in fact Amber and Chaos are on opposite poles of each other, with an infinity of shadows between them. So some kind of shadow or place of power is in fact in the "center", the place where chaos and order have perfectly equal influence (maybe the keep of the 4 worlds?).

RPGPundit

[Ian Absentia]

You have bought into the Amberite ministry of propaganda, my friend.  There are actually at least TWO "true" worlds.

At least two.  When I read the novels, I always thought the perceived radiation of the Pattern seemed rather two-dimensional.  I began to consider worlds that radiated on a third axis of Pattern that posited higher and lower orders of Shadow as well (not that I was trail-blazing bold new frontiers here or anything).  Amber didn't necessarily have to be the "highest" order of reality.  Personally, I favor a "highest" order of reality where the royalty of court are Black Muslims who are, in fact, blue and Taoist in an order of reality higher still.

Veering back to Amber in game form, I set my stillborn Amber campaign in a splinter reality based on a different Pattern as was suggested in Corwin's actions at the end of one of the novels.  That Pattern wasn't necessarily derivative of the previous Pattern.

!i!

[Arref]

I'm going to condense a reply to this question from another source, "What makes Amber Diceless so great?"

1.  It's unobtrusive.  One of the reasons that Amber gets credit for
great roleplay experience is that people can so internalize the game
aspect of the game so that it basically disappears.  

2.  It's extensible.  Amber allows people to create new
mechanics more easily than any other game currently in existence.

3.  It's flexible.  Any of you guys play Exalted?  They've been trying
to get a mass combat system integrated into the game for a couple of
editions, now, and the results are only starting to come together.
Amber?  Been doing it since the start.  It's a game that allows you to
simulate one combat down the the level of hundreths of a second, and
the next on the level of hours.  Combined with the extensibility
mentioned above, this really is what gives Amber a lot of its
longevity, I think.  It's a game where you can shift from silly to
serious, from detailed to vague, from personal to national,
effortlessly.  That's REALLY hard for more detailed systems.

4.  It's approachable.  A lot of people are put off by the amount of
sheer system that exists in other games.  Ninety page rule-books are
eerily slim by RPG standards, but mind-bogglingly complex to people
who aren't used to the concepts.

5.  It's portable.  I was stuck in traffic with a friend once, we knew
we'd be there for a few hours, so I just started GMing him.  It's easy
to keep a whole character sheet in your head, and you don't need
surfaces for die-rolling or whatnot.

6.  It's got a surprisingly large amount of 'Amberness' stuck into that
small system.  It's evocative of its source material, and its source
material is very exciting to game in.

The above by Epoch, to which I added:
1. the system is fair across genres/shadows
2. the system plays action scenes faster than anything I've ever played
3. the system encourages intangible/surreal conflicts
4. the system is easily grasped by folks who have never played rpgs
5. the system encourages player/gm additions and stylings that actually mean something and add value (for that play group)

and the number one answer: the critical PC info fits on a business card (for those memory challenged folks.)

It's a combination of things hard to beat in any other game I've heard of.

[Otha]

I would only quibble with one of the items you list; I don't think it's approachable.  To anyone unfamiliar with the canon, it can be a lot to digest, not so much in terms of rules, but in terms of background.

Yes, this can be overcome, but it is a barrier.

[Arref]

I would only quibble with one of the items you list; I don't think it's approachable.  To anyone unfamiliar with the canon, it can be a lot to digest, not so much in terms of rules, but in terms of background.

Yes, this can be overcome, but it is a barrier.

The background is not hard to "pitch" in the cliche-Hollywood sense of giving someone a blurb in fifteen minutes.

Immortal badass family (Amber) thinks they run the infinite universe but weirdness large and small may say differently. Who's right? Does it matter?

If you strive for emulation of the canon novels, you have a higher threshold to cross, agreed.

I've also run the Amber Diceless system with 'no background' and 'no setting' and 'no genre' with novice RPGers.

[James McMurray]

No setting? Were they all floating around in an infinite void? Well, I guess that would actually be a setting, albeit a big and empty one.

[Arref]

No setting? Were they all floating around in an infinite void? Well, I guess that would actually be a setting, albeit a big and empty one.

LOL
Look around you. The default rpg setting is the one we all live with.

[James McMurray]

So the setting was Modern Earth? How is that "no setting"?

[Arref]

I don't want to derail the thread completely, but here's an answer:

You are on a sloping hill of grass under a sky filled with wispy gray clouds spread across a soft blue sky. Some trees in the distance seem to have birds darting about their branches. There are no man-made structures in sight in any direction. You can't remember your name.

What's the setting? Is it modern earth? Is it terraformed colony? Is it alternate history?

To me, it is 'no setting'.

[James McMurray]

The setting is "a sloping hill." If you mean Campaign Setting / World, that's different. Thanks for the clarification.

[SunBoy]

As for why "freeform"? Amber isn't actually Freeform, its a very tight and focused RPG, that plays sort of like Chess or Diplomacy (more like the latter than the former, really, but less people know Diplomacy).  In other words, its very strategic.  Its also a game where, in spite of this, players rarely have to worry about stats or mechanics.  Its a great game if you don't want to play loosey-goosey "rules lite" games that are mechanically unsound, but you also don't want to have to spend your time keeping track of feats/skills/points/dots whatever.
RPGPundit

Well, mate, you know I share much of your views of Amber, but you can't be more wrong here. Comparing Amber to Chess it's about as wrong as you can be. Chess, by definition, it's rigid, you only have three types of movements and eventually every strategy comes down to about the same: threaten the bloke with the cross and don't let him escape. You might be talking about strategic management of resources, but even that is far from Amber, where you have infinite options at your disposal, ending only with your imagination. That's because of the setting, where you can do anything, and because of the system, that lets you do anything. You have to be creative, while in chess you only get to choose between some possibilities.
After all, chess is just a silly game covered by Warfare
And now to something completely different.
What's cool about Amber?
What the hell, it's a bloody excellent series, and when you can find anything you can imagine, it's bloody hard just to make a list. So you get no list. You get a toolbox. When you are better than the other bloke, you'll beat him. Then there are no critic rolls. But wait, ninety percent of the time you fight with people who sucks at fighting. So no random shite. Screw the dice. And when you have to fight with someone who actually can beat you, you will: a. run away, or b. die, or c. cheat. And if you cheat well, no randomness there, either. So it's a great game in at least two major levels. It's great in evoking the spirit of the novels, and, well, the system is great, too. And really, I still find the system easy. It's really fast to learn and easy to apply, and while yeah, there's a lot of background that can be a little too much to swallow at once, and knowledge of it can be a fairly important difference between the players, well, try to play Star Wars if you never saw the movies (and Arref sorted that one out neatly, for instance). And of course, Star Wars it's only good to play Star Wars, or something very much like Star Wars, but you can play nearly anything with the AmberDRPG system. (Of course, SW it's only an example, I actually like it). It won't be that great, probably, but you could. You need to be creative to play Amber, what's great, since you don't have either a system that replaces your wit nor a system that makes it worthless. It's the more role-play focused game I know, one of those games where it's your role-play that makes your character, not your numbers, where the setting and the game are a whole, where having the five o'clock tea with your auntie it's not fluff, it's part of a bloody war.
But maybe that's just me.

[SunBoy]

Wow.  And *I* get called worthless.

You are. So is he, but you are. Well, sometimes at least.