[Amber] Favourite Attribute at Auction

[Panjumanju]

During the character creation auction I find certain players favour specific Attributes. What do you go after in a character auction of the Amber Diceless roleplaying game? Explain your choice below.

//Panjumanju

[finarvyn]

I wish you'd left the poll with the four attributes only. Those last two choices messed me up because they are also strategies I employ in my ADRP games.

I voted for Endurance. Also for the last two.

[Artifacts of Amber]

I honestly despite all my years of playing have never done an Auction.

Every game has been put your points where you want then find out how good you are and such. Plus I use more stats now (only one more split warfare into dex and warfare)


But since I always go for power characters ( with one exception ) I chose that because with powers you know what you are going to get.

I think auctions are a poor idea in campaigns and good for one shots (Not necessarily throne wars). I run silent auctions in most my games but the bidding never seems as outlandish as I have heard of and a few times witnessed at cons.

[finarvyn]

Auctions are great if the players are already competitive, and I agree that they are probably best for one-shot convention play since folks don't know each other and are less likely to allow sentiment to get in the way. My regular group has a lot of family (parents and kids) and they won't stab each other in the back. For that group I do character-point builds instead of auctions.

[Panjumanju]

I wish you'd left the poll with the four attributes only. Those last two choices messed me up because they are also strategies I employ in my ADRP games.

I voted for Endurance. Also for the last two.

That's why I included the ability to vote for more than one option. Some people really don't care about the Attributes much and go for powers, others have no care about what Attribute they want and act opportunistically. I feel they're legitimate choices.

//Panjumanju

[jibbajibba]

Most players I know come to Amber with an idea of a PC they want to play.

When I GM I know these ideas up front usually and I "fill" the amber deck with NPC siblings that fill out some of the major gaps. I want to have round about 9-13 siblings so in a 5 player game I will typcially add 4-8 NPCs to the auction.

I am entirely capable of compartmentalising these NPCs and will create a character for their player as well as one for their character so I can compete as they would in the auction. I have even had 2 NPCs getting into a bidding war with themselves ...
however what also works is to get a pile of cards and to assign the maximum bid and minimum rank that each NPC wants in each attribute and to reveal these in the auction as required with NPCs typically bidding 5 point jumps (unless they are going to have a specific animosity to one PC when their card might say "bid one point more than Frank on each attribute" )

However for speed of play I usually run a 3 round Blind Dutch auction and then announce the highest bid at the end of each round setting the maximum in each attribute at the end of round 3.
However I don't use the ranks to establish steps at all and in the post auction phase anyone can spend up to one less than the highest bid in each stat.
This is to block the "I bid 100 in warfare" in round 1 effectively meaning there are now just 2 ranks between Amber and 1st rank and they are 1,4,100

Anyway most players show up with an idea and its very very rare that a player picks their character after the auction. You might not be able to secure "best at Warfare" but can you definitely secure "really really good at Warfare".

You want to encourage that because character engagement is something that is key to the Amber experience. If you are running a game when you kind of expect players to phone each other up and have trump contact in character outside the game session and to send you details of said trump contact then you need them to be engaged.

[RPGPundit]

I've found my player groups tend to have someone who likes just about every attribute.  However, Psyche and Warfare are always popular among more than one player, they're always hard-fought in the auction.