At the height of my passion for Amber Diceless Roleplaying I signed up at my local RPG convention to run several Amber games. Now, I've had a lot of success at this convention - "Phantasm", in Peterborough, Ontario. It has been running almost 25 years. I've been going for about 15. I've won Gamemaster of the Year 3 times, and Player of the Year (somehow) once. Amber, however, was an unwieldy beast, and although it is my favourite roleplaying game system, I will never run it at a convention again. Why?
5 Reasons I Will Not Run Amber Diceless at a Convention
This is in roughly "not as big of a deal" to "deal-breaker" order:
1. SPACE IS AN ISSUE: In Amber, as much happens away from the table as at the table. Notes, notes, notes. When you're in someone's house and you can basically take over the living room and the kitchen separately - and occasionally have to hide in a closet with someone to have a secret meeting - this isn't a problem. At a Con, you take up not just your table, but the back corner, the front desk, all the territory where people should be LARPing, and you end up having important pivotal character conflicts in the bathroom.
2. IT'S EXHAUSTING: Without dice, players don't need you to form cabals, have secret meetings, and make plans. They just need you for when they set those plans into motion, to know what happens. Exciting? Yes. Also exhausting! Everyone wants a piece of you.
3. CHARACTER CREATION: How are you supposed to care about your character unless you make it, and experience the auction? Pre-generated characters do not have the motivation that you have if some jerk across the table from you just outbid you for 1st place in Strength.
There just isn't enough on a character sheet (four stats and powers) for a new player to look at it and understand what they're supposed to be playing, no matter how big of a backstory you write in; the auction does that so much better. However, if you do run the auction, it takes up half the session.
4. LEARNING CURVE STEEPER THAN MOUNT KOLVIR: It happened a few times that I had groups that were a pretty even split between players who had played before (and so couldn't help themselves signing up even though I could have run it for them any time) and people who were new, curious, and probably wanted their friends who played before to shut up about the game already.
The problem was, Amber Diceless expects a huge amount of self-determination and initiative. Players who have played before, in the vanilla setting, are roughly familiar with the geography and what it can do (even if you fiddle with the details as a GM) whereas new players need to ask that many more questions ("So, if you get to the centre of the Pattern, you can go anywhere?") in order to catch up.
The more experienced players - like race horses out of the gate - corralled, manipulated, or murdered all the noobs within the first hour of play. It was clever, and brutal. It was like watching a few Bruce Lees enter a few Japanese Dojos. In the end, the new players were left with their heads spinning, no matter how much I tried to help them.
5. PLAYERS OVER INVEST: The only time I've had a player openly weep, in the middle of a convention, was over Amber Diceless. It wasn't other players being mean to him that caused tears. His character was the Warden of Arden once Julien absconded. Through a series of circumstances, mostly involving agents from the Courts of Chaos, a big chunk of the forest of Arden burned. I don't know if I narrated the action too effectively, but...well, it was too much for this guy.
I think part of the problem is, without the buffer of a character sheet and dice and other separating gimmicks, people play their character in Amber much closer to the chest. This can be a good thing and a bad thing. But - while a wild story - it's not really something I want to deal with in public.
Conclusion
I think I won the GM of the Year prize that year, and I think Amber was to thank, but I came out of the weekend with as many confused players as zealots. I also think I aged a year. So, I decided I'd much rather run Amber privately, maybe with passwords and secret handshakes.
I don't know how the AmberCons ever functioned - maybe they were all players who played before? Who knows. I would love to hear about other people's experience with Amber at cons.
//Panjumanju