Thoughts on past threads

[TristramEvans]

If you're struggling to find out what number of Strength the Hulk has, you're missing the point.

//Panjumanju

When I explain the ranks in MSH to new players I always tell them it's best to think of them like 'weight classes' in organized sports.

[jibbajibba]

I see no one liked my idea for a Strength chart. I dunno, but I see such a chart as quite handy. A PC wants to pick up a motorcycle and heave it thirty yards at a target. Or a PC picks up a 20 foot long dining table and uses it as a huge club. Or a PC tries to rip a car's door off, or even roll over a car. Or a PC wants to wield a 2-handed weapon in each hand, with no penalty. Or a PC wants to wrestle a bear to the ground. At what point do these acts become plausible? Base Rank? (10)? (30)? (70)? Some hint would be nice. Champions/Hero provides such a chart. I don't think it would be so onerous if ADRP did too. Maybe with an accompanying note on sliding the scale left or right depending on the tone of the campaign.
(Of course this is just to be consistent between characters and play sessions. If different characters try similar maneuvers I'd like the results to be predictable. I can just imagine myself allowing something in one session then disallowing it in another despite the Attribute being the same or higher.)

Enough for now. Thanks for listening.

what about shadow? I go to a shadow with different gravity, how much can I lift now? A shadow with different physical laws?

I made up my own amber game with a mate in about 86-87 we had a summer and we thought an maber game with 2 dms and just one player who know nothign about Amber and woke up in a hospital bed with amnesia would be really interesting.
I was working on rules and my mate suggested we did it diceless. No dice.. so I worked out a complex combat system kind of like en garde I suppose but rerally more inspired by Top Secret and a year of fencing. You string together sets of moves the limit based on your fencing skill. You compare these moves with your fencing skill in a duel and the result of each comparison combined witht eh skill and the moves before and after determin the result.
Diceless complex if you will.

Now we had a 10 character 1-10 identifier for each shadow so 9872463712 might be earth. Each number represented a feature of the shadow, like Traveller planets. So location in shadow, magical-ness, ang gravity were all on there. to work out lifting etc you compared your Strength to the gravity of the shadow got a ratio that detrmined what you could lift.

Now I am saying this becuase stuff like Strength tables pushes you down the same path, diceless complex.

The game worked roughly but wasn't fun to play the crunch I added to compensate for no dice was really chrunchy. We never played it properly but when Amber came out with a game we grabbed it as soon as ...

Yes I kept some of the bits I had, a skill system I still use in my Amber games, although now its far more flexible, Political Influence and Succession as Attributes.

Believe me Amber works really well without crunch. You can just decide stuff, 4th rank strength guy tried to pull a door off a car, nope sorry not going to happen. Just imagine the world and the characters and go with it.

[Evermasterx]

Believe me Amber works really well without crunch. You can just decide  stuff, 4th rank strength guy tried to pull a door off a car, nope sorry  not going to happen. Just imagine the world and the characters and go  with it.

Completely agree.
Charts and rules are not good or bad. But adding them to Amber is like adding white wine to red wine: in the end you got slob.

[RTrimmer]

I always match Strength ranks to weight.
 
I like to know what what sorts of feats of strength any Amberite I'm playing can do. It's really annoying when my notions of what a character's Strength options are don't match the gamemaster's -- because there's no effing Strength chart.

I make sure my players have a good idea of their characters' capabilities. Knowing that you can throw this guard at those guards, or kick the heavy door down, or go out the window because the 30' drop is nothing to worry about... makes for more fun. It helps the players bring the awesome.

[finarvyn]

How about this for a Strength Chart -- consider the D&D character scale for strength. (The old one, not the d20 version.)

Shadow level = 10.
Chaos level = 15.
Amber level = 18.
Ranked with XX points = 18(XX).

In older D&D (and maybe newer, too; I don't follow the rules) if you had a fighter with 18 strength you could roll percentile dice to gain some edge over another character with 18 strength.

I think of Amber as being a lot like that.

All Amber attributes are a leap over Chaos, and a giant leap over Shadow. What ranked does (in my opinion) is give a small adjustment above the standard Amber level. I don't think that 1st Rank is supposed to be twice as strong as Amber, or anything like that. I see the different values as tiny variations.

Kind of like military rank. Private, Captain, General. The number of stars of the General is fine-tuning. General is clearly better than Captain and Captain is clearly better than Private.

That's why a chart isn't really needed. Amber clearly trumps Chaos, and Chaos clearly trumps Shadow. Beyond that you get into a place where we're all pretty much the same but one is a tiny bit better than another. You could have a chart but it wouldn't tell you much, other than the fact that Shadow can do what a basic human can do, Chaos is really impressive, and Amber is a lot more impressive.

Just my two cents on the thing.

[jibbajibba]

How about this for a Strength Chart -- consider the D&D character scale for strength. (The old one, not the d20 version.)

Shadow level = 10.
Chaos level = 15.
Amber level = 18.
Ranked with XX points = 18(XX).

In older D&D (and maybe newer, too; I don't follow the rules) if you had a fighter with 18 strength you could roll percentile dice to gain some edge over another character with 18 strength.

I think of Amber as being a lot like that.

All Amber attributes are a leap over Chaos, and a giant leap over Shadow. What ranked does (in my opinion) is give a small adjustment above the standard Amber level. I don't think that 1st Rank is supposed to be twice as strong as Amber, or anything like that. I see the different values as tiny variations.

Kind of like military rank. Private, Captain, General. The number of stars of the General is fine-tuning. General is clearly better than Captain and Captain is clearly better than Private.

That's why a chart isn't really needed. Amber clearly trumps Chaos, and Chaos clearly trumps Shadow. Beyond that you get into a place where we're all pretty much the same but one is a tiny bit better than another. You could have a chart but it wouldn't tell you much, other than the fact that Shadow can do what a basic human can do, Chaos is really impressive, and Amber is a lot more impressive.

Just my two cents on the thing.

Not sure about your model.
I think Gerard probably has twice the strength of Random.

I see Amberites more like archetypes, I guess this might fall into Pundit's Olympus dodad too. Gerard is like the personification of Strength, he is Hercules, Samson, Magni etc Benedict is like Musashi, Achillies, etc So I have no issue with the top rank Amberites being twice as strong as a normal Amberite.
Generally I think A chaosite is twice as strong as a human, an Amberite is twice as strong as a Chaosite and the top ranked guy is twce as strong again. So Gerard is as strong as 8 ordinary men. That doesn't seem too out of whack for me.
I would say that whilst Chaosite works for the game  it doesn't really match the books very well as the people of Chaos, like Mandor for example, seem to be on a par with Amberites pretty much. But it does work for demons and other super naturals.

[RTrimmer]

The main strength feat in the books that we can come close to putting numbers on is when Corwin and Random lift a car out of mud and carry it a ways.

The original car was probably a Mercedes deluxe touring car that weighs 4,000 pounds. The steering wheel, at the least, changed several times in the course of their ride but Corwin doesn't mention the car shrinking.

If it all doubles, and Human Strength = a leg lift of 200 lbs
Then 400 at Chaos
800 at Amber
and 1600 at max, which isn't enough and C & R aren't nearly as strong as Gerard anyway.

So, say 1600 for low-Ranked
3200 at mid-Ranked
and 6400 for Gerard, sufficient to pick up and throw a big Angus bull a short distance, or leg-lift a rhino.

Or H= 100 kg, C= 200, A= 400, low Ranked= 800, mid Ranked= 1.6 t, top= 3.2 t

[RPGPundit]

I think Lords of Olympus does a pretty good job of giving more of a contextual framework to things like "attribute levels" without becoming a completely-stratified "strength chart" type of situation.

RPGPundit

[Croaker]

I, too, like my ranked characters to be clearly better than non-ranked ones.

I usually have the top rank (gerard and all) be about 6 times better than amber, which is 4 times better than chaos. A mid-ranked elder would be at about... 4 times that, and a low-ranked one around 2 times amber.
I never bothered much beyond that.

Going by the mercedes exemple, that'd make what? If human lifts 200lbs, then gerard lifts 4 800lbs.
So it random and corwin are, on average, slightly above mid-ranked, they pass, although not by much.

Saved! My HR roughly passes the strength test


About LoO, despite pundit sometimes sounding like he's promoting his game right and left, I agree that you should take a look at it.
The background and story seeds aren't of Amber's level (but, well, duh!), but, rules wise, it's, IMO, a clear improvement, and the way it's been done would have been good for a 2nd edition of Amber. I was pleasantly surprised. For what it's worth, pundit's articles here about specific topics of LoO are good reads, very informative and enlightening, too, especially about how power design will influence the game.

[Arref]

I have other questions and points but this is enough for now.

Welcome to the forum. Dive right in with starting threads on topics you care about.

In particular, as someone asking for help to enter the fantastic world of Amber Diceless.... you may legitimately ask lots of "how do I make this easier for myself?"

[daniel_ream]

I can't remember the page number, but in one spot in the rules, Erick contradicts himself and puts all hand-to-hand armed combat under Strength, instead of under Warfare. It's not a typo, but instead I think was something he fiddled with over the course of the game's development.

Given Erick's pedigree in Ninjas & Superspies the consensus on ADRPG-L back in the day was that this was simply a way of balancing Strength out,  as it really didn't seem very useful by comparison to the other Attributes.  Giving it all hand-to-hand combat didn't really sit well with anyone, but moving to Warfare really gimps Strength.

Despite its quirks, though, the one from the book is reasonably close to what Merlin described spellcasting as, though I suspect Zelazny would have tied sorcery more into the Pattern or Logrus than making it as agnostic as did Erick.

It's clear from the source material that sorcery is idiosyncratic to each sorceror.  The sorcery system in the book looks like Merlin's because at the time of writing Merlin was the only sorceror we'd seen - and his sorcery works the way it does because Merlin is a computer engineer by nature and his sorcery resembles Unix command-line utilities.

Zelazny's later Amber stories post-ADRPG makes it clear that sorcery is a shadow thing.  Merlin himself can tie it into the Logrus because he's a unique individual, being the Hamlet of the setting.  There's no indication that Luke used the Pattern at all in his Sorcery, nor Mandor the Logrus.

I think this is a common misperception people take away from the rules. In terms of the Attributes, Amberites are vastly superior to Shadow folk, but the question is more how vast is the gap. The laundry list of abilities possessed by the top-ranked character is probably the biggest issue... by showing what someone can do when their Attribute is somewhere in the 100s (1st Rank amongst the Amberties and/or Chaosians) it tends to imply that everyone can do those things.

The biggest problem with those lists is that they are wildly out of whack with everything we see in the source material.  If the elder Scions of Amber really can do all those things, then virtually none of the iconic scenes in the books could have turned out the way they did.

I made up my own amber game with a mate in about 86-87 we had a summer and we thought an maber game with 2 dms and just one player who know nothign about Amber and woke up in a hospital bed with amnesia would be really interesting.

It worked for Zelazny.  And pretty much every fantasy author ever, for that matter.

One of the problems with translating Amber into an RPG is that we only see the whole setting through the eyes of two people, neither of whom is inclined to lengthy exposition on the Nature of Things, one of whom is self-admittedly lying to us.

Yes I kept some of the bits I had, a skill system I still use in my Amber games, although now its far more flexible, Political Influence and Succession as Attributes.

I've done this a lot.  Favour of the King/Queen if they're still around, Dworkin's Lore once, and Silver Crown once in a very localized game.

I wouldn't use Succession, though, as one of the conceits of the setting is that any member of the family can make a supportable claim to being the rightful heir. (The Royal Succession Argument is one of the weak points of the series, as it's not clear exactly why anyone should care about birth order and legitimacy in the Amber setting.  Zelazny's intent may have been that arguing legitimacy was more of a way of showing up a sibling using sophistry than anything anyone took seriously).

What ranked does (in my opinion) is give a small adjustment above the standard Amber level. I don't think that 1st Rank is supposed to be twice as strong as Amber, or anything like that. I see the different values as tiny variations.

Doesn't match the source material.  Corwin ranks himself as the second- or third-best swordsman in the family and he is clearly scared shitless of Bleys.  No one even remotely entertains the notion of contesting with Gerard in a wrestling match.  Now, that may simply indicate that First Rank Always Wins and everyone else is packed together way down the ladder, but there's clearly a wide spread in ability.

The original car was probably a Mercedes deluxe touring car that weighs 4,000 pounds. The steering wheel, at the least, changed several times in the course of their ride but Corwin doesn't mention the car shrinking.

He does, however, mention that there's something funny with the gravity.

Can we have the argument about what colour Flora's hair is next?