Oberon's tricks

[boulet]

What's your take, from the game point of view, on Oberon's doing ? Here I mean specifically two tricks :
- Shapeshifting as Ganelon and attracting Corwin to visit him and this in a discreet way so Corwin doesn't realize what's happening for quite a while.
- The mechanical arm trick in Tir Na Nog that played such an important role in countering Brand's plan.

What would you answer, game mechanic wise, to a player who wants his/her character to do something similar to Oberon's tricks ?

[jibbajibba]

I think both of these are GM only tricks. The first to a lesser extent though.
I would allow an advanced pattern user to make their pattern able to intercept a shadow walker lookign for a certain type of place. The hard bit would be the player pursuading the other player to go looking for that sort of shadow without the second player realising it.
Mechanic wise there is also an issue in a face to face game in that the GM is playing the Ganelon NPC. In a play by mail game you could do this (and I have) by giving the first player the Ganelon character, own email address, chat server account etc. Since I run all the Major NPCs as separate entities this works really well.
In a face 2 face game the only way I could think of it would be if I suggested that since the players were heading off on their own maybe we should split the sessions and so the other guy didn't get bored he could run the Ganelon NPC with these caveats (pass blank peice of paper to Ganelon player).

The Arm is a whole other beast. It has no internal logic as its basically Oberon creating a plot device, you could even argue it's lazy on the part of Zelazny, almost a 'you wake up and Bobby is in the shower' moment. It would be impossible for a player to pull it off as it requires a fore-knowledge of a future scene in the plot. It's actually even pretty hard for a GM to plan future events like this.
Yes you could construct a false arm that was linked to the magic of Tir (a new Dream power or similar) and as such could combat dream creatures and was immune to some other powers but ... the forshadowing bit is the clever part.

[weilide]

The Arm is a whole other beast. It has no internal logic as its basically Oberon creating a plot device, you could even argue it's lazy on the part of Zelazny, almost a 'you wake up and Bobby is in the shower' moment. It would be impossible for a player to pull it off as it requires a fore-knowledge of a future scene in the plot. It's actually even pretty hard for a GM to plan future events like this.
Yes you could construct a false arm that was linked to the magic of Tir (a new Dream power or similar) and as such could combat dream creatures and was immune to some other powers but ... the forshadowing bit is the clever part.

I agree that this kind of thing should be more or less off limits for players. I would only add that I would consider making an exception if they really earned the hell out of it somehow by making it the crux of the campaign, ie, spending forever acquiring special skills and powers, planning it like Normandy, figuring out all the intersecting timelines with colored yarn and wallpapering their walls with scribbled memoranda like a crazy person, etc.

[RPGPundit]

I think that was some of Oberon's greatest power: he could see how future events were going to play out; apparently not exactly in the literally "seeing the future" sense, but in some sense of exceptional predictive powers.

RPGPundit

[Croaker]

Maybe it was just very good planning/paranoia? Like "I'll do this, just in case we have to face intangible opponents or are otherwise paralysed"?

I agree that this kind of thing should be more or less off limits for players.

Funny, I consider that, given enough time and efforts, nothing should be off limits for them :lol:

[RPGPundit]

I once used a trick like this to royally screw over another player in one of those few Amber campaigns I participated in as a player.

RPGPundit

[boulet]

I extrapolate from the blood curse of Amber described page 43. If one can summon bad  stuff to curse someone, I would also allow less heinous use of this faculty. I would probably be anal over the formulation of such "gheas". And the cheaper the expense the more complications I would impose on the effect of the curse.

[Nihilistic Mind]

The fanzine 'Hellrider' had an article with "Champions of the Pattern" game options.

The Champion of the Primal Pattern could pull off tricks like Benedict's arm, so long as the item created was also going to be looped so that it wouldn't last too long or be permanent in any way.

I've got to look for it, but I think a friend might have borrowed it and not returned it (bastard!). Anyone remember this?

[SunBoy]

What? Borrowing the mag from you? Nope.

[gabriel_ss4u]

The Library of Gabriel does not have a lending policy either... LOL
Like Trumps, they have a way of vanishing into the nether realms.
But if anyone can find that publication name & date, I'll be on the hunt for it. Sounds cool, and 'tis a needed volume in my semi-vast repository of tomes.

[Nihilistic Mind]

What? Borrowing the mag from you? Nope.

Ahem... Come on, 'fess up now...

[SunBoy]

Alright! I confess. I took it, and I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for these darn kids and their dog!

[Nihilistic Mind]

Found it! (the article, not Hellrider)

Here's a link to the article itself: http://www.indiana.edu/~fantasy/ambertexts/patternchamps.htm

[SunBoy]

In all honesty, it seems a little... off. I don't know... made of water... environmental adaptation without shape-shifting... doesn't really match the "physics" of the rest of the setting, in my eye. It could work, maybe, as a one-in-a-million thing, and certainly not readily available for PCs, at least without a shitload of work.

[weilide]

Wow! Visiting that page and its parent site is like being terrifyingly hurled back into the early nineties… like being twelve all over again…

Anyhow, I like (in principal) the idea that different Patterns (Kolvir, Rebma, etc) would give different powers but given what we've seen in the books it seems that they would have to be pretty subtle or only manifest under extraordinarily rare circumstances.