Attribute Auctions/Bidding War love and stories

[RPGPundit]

I freaking adore this part of the game. Its like a mini-game in and of itself, its often really unexpected, it sets up future conflicts right from the get-go, and the players usually love it.

Do you have a similar love for the original Diceless character creation mechanics?
Do you have any interesting stories of bidding wars gone wrong, funny, or dramatically right?

RPGPundit

[Panjumanju]

I've done a few bidding wars for various Amber campaigns with several of the same people. By the third auction everything got very tactical, and a high degree of depth was revealed in the way you approach bidding and what your tactics say about your character. There is certainly a poker game there, where you can basically suss-out other player character's statistics with fair guesses of what they were spending.

The really exciting thing happened the second time we did an auction, however, when two players got into a bidding war over Warfare. The bid kept climbing and they did not stop bidding, until one of them bid 100. There was a pause before the other bid "105", because then everyone looked confused - "can you even do that, bid over 100?". They all looked at me, because I was running the game. "Sure you can. It will just come out in bad stuff."

They continued bidding until the point where they had to sell down just about every other statistic and started the game with no powers and bad stuff. What happened in the auction very much extended into the game itself. The two characters ended up killing each other.

//Panjumanju

[RPGPundit]

That's a very good point, about the tactical side of it emerging with experienced players.  The same thing has happened to me, where if you run a campaign with newbie players they all go apeshit on the points, whereas the second or third campaign around they're all much more restrained.  I guess its a case of the system teaching you life lessons!

RPGPundit

[RTrimmer]

How did that work out in the game?

Doesn't the presence of a couple of characters with 150 points in Warfare, Chaos everything else, no powers and 10-30 points of Bad Stuff distort the entire campaign?

Can you really have fun -- Amber type fun, not 'gack anything that annoys me' fun -- playing such characters for any length of time?

[Panjumanju]

How did that work out in the game?

Doesn't the presence of a couple of characters with 150 points in Warfare, Chaos everything else, no powers and 10-30 points of Bad Stuff distort the entire campaign?

Can you really have fun -- Amber type fun, not 'gack anything that annoys me' fun -- playing such characters for any length of time?

It didn't distort the game at all. Most of the pressure that kept them from any ganking was the controlling helping-and-hinder influence of the Elder Amberites and other more powerful NPCs. The two characters became incredibly paranoid of their vulnerabilities and spent most of their time maneuvering allies against each other, until all the other PCs just stepped back and had them settle it in bloodshed. It was a very different dynamic, certainly, but it worked.

//Panjumanju

[RPGPundit]

I had a similar scenario in the Amber campaign before last; two players bid against each other on Psyche until they ended up spending 110 and 100 points, respectively.

And so of course, they're totally screwed.  But its not "debilitating" to the campaign in any meaningful way.

Remember that 1st rank is still first rank, and 2nd is still second; it doesn't matter if they spent 100 points or 4 points for it.  So if one guy spent 100 points for 2nd rank, and the next one down spent 12 points for 3rd rank, that makes him EXACTLY the same difference as if the third guy had spent 99 points.
Except of course that third-guy is going to be a much more well-rounded individual having spent only 12 points instead of 99 to get the exact same rank.

This tells us something about the story of these people, too: the first two are insanely competitive, powermongers, obsessive, and what's more not even well-balanced in how they went about it (they exercised their raw power, spending so much time training their psyche that they didn't even bother training in the more useful powers that they could apply that psyche to).  The third guy looked at his two relatives and said "fuck that, its not worth it", went for an all-round education, and probably ended up being the much healthier character for it (both mechanically and in persona).

Both of the guys who competed with each other in that campaign had long careers and their players had fun in the campaign; they did both end up being amongst the most fucked-up of characters, of course. But that's sometimes part of the fun in Amber.

RPGPundit