Amnesia in sessions, for or against?

[Warder]

Thinking about this topic i have thought about how it influences the overall story a GM is presenting, it takes part of the narrative away from the players. Im not sure if its railroading or not, the players dont know who their characters are when they start playing them, the GM kinda does(unless its freeform, which may end in places nobody expected). In Amber its fun to read a story based on this, yet the solution is to just walk the Pattern and bam, problem solved. Now how would one circumvent this?

Make the solution part of the problem? Make the memories overlap, make up memories that the players misinterpret, present false memories? Isnt this in essence rewriting the character if the GM does it, the player shoudnt be able?

Has amnesia even come up in your games? Why the heck hasnt it been covered in the main rulebook, supplementals or so(unless i missed it on other amber forumsi guess;/) or the zines?

[zircher]

I'm cool with it, but then I might be handling it differently than some.  For me, a character with amnesia is a wildcard and development is actually in the player's hands as they build their character through flash backs.  The one proviso I'd make is that if the player plans for the character to walk the pattern, then they need a filled out character sheet written up and approved. There are some downsides to this type of character creation; you can never be first in any rank since you have by default forfeited any bidding in the auction, and just just you have 'unallocated' points - doesn't mean you can instantly whip out a fully hung magic spell.  There still is the narrative element of how you character recovers their memory that triggers things.

[GriswaldTerrastone]

I was going to post something here, but forgot what it was. 

(Dodges many thrown objects)