Trump Scrying

RPGPundit · June 02, 2009, 06:11:31 PM

In most of my campaigns, its rarely more than once or twice in a multi-year-long campaign that anyone ever bothers to do a trump scrying. I've tried occasionally to use moments where NPCs do it, but it seems that few of my players are very interested in this.

How often does trump scrying figure into your games?

RPGPundit

Schattensturm · June 02, 2009, 06:51:39 PM

I had a trump artist in my troupe who built an artifact that did the scrying for him, it constantly scryed on Caine. Pretty useful I must say.

Croaker · June 03, 2009, 12:38:56 AM

I used it in PBEM throne wars, giving people with trump scrying a copy of other PCs calls.
With a "normal" PBEM game, this would be harder to use, but still possible.

The hardest, for me, is with a normal, face-to-face game.

jibbajibba · June 03, 2009, 11:06:38 AM

Quote from: Croaker;306028I used it in PBEM throne wars, giving people with trump scrying a copy of other PCs calls.
With a "normal" PBEM game, this would be harder to use, but still possible.

The hardest, for me, is with a normal, face-to-face game.

I had players record their trump conversations in a secured wiki (in a PbeM game). The player that had a trump construct that would gather all calls into a database and replay them at will got a password into the trump chat section of the wiki and could review them at will :-) Sounds complex but was much easier than the guy who had a network of psychically linked agents that were ubiquitous in shadow and so he could pretty much tune into any not secret event he wished to.

Croaker · June 03, 2009, 12:39:00 PM

Exactly :-)

For these, IMO, PBEM games are a lot easier than face-to-face ones.

Schattensturm · June 03, 2009, 04:12:06 PM

Quote from: jibbajibba;306110I had players record their trump conversations in a secured wiki (in a PbeM game). The player that had a trump construct that would gather all calls into a database and replay them at will got a password into the trump chat section of the wiki and could review them at will :-) Sounds complex but was much easier than the guy who had a network of psychically linked agents that were ubiquitous in shadow and so he could pretty much tune into any not secret event he wished to.

It was pretty much the same in my PbeM. I had a database of all trump conversations and a handle that allowed me to set who was able to view which conversation. Pretty easy to handle, just as jibbajibba wrote.

Xenon · June 03, 2009, 04:44:54 PM

You seem to be discussing trump spying, not scrying. Trump scrying is the use of the trump deck to tell fortunes. (ADRPG, p. 112-114)

we dont really see it used much in the books, although its more prominent in the Bentacourt prequels. It can be a good way for players who are stuck to move back in the direction of the plot. I havent ever used it in a game myself though.

Schattensturm · June 03, 2009, 04:56:03 PM

Right there, Xenon.

No, I never had any player actually using trump scrying. Probably - although it is stylish and fluffy, it's hardly very informative.

Croaker · June 04, 2009, 12:36:43 AM

Oh. My bad.

I had a player who used scrying a lot. I just gave him cards in various positions, based on their meaning for me-as-the-Amber-Universe and let him have his fun

gabriel_ss4u · June 04, 2009, 05:27:27 PM

Same here, I use Psy-Cards, (they're like Tarot), IRL, and they help me get an idea of various ways to give readings if a player is attempting a Trump Scrying. Repeat attempts may give more info, rephrasing questions help too, but really they tend to be slightly ambiguous as fortune telling is.
I like working with dreams IMC more. Visions tell more of a story, broken as they may be. Much like Tir-na Nog'th may work.

boulet · June 05, 2009, 11:19:16 AM

Never had any player either scry or spy with trumps. For the latter the reason is probably that nobody bothered getting Advanced Trump Artistry. For the former, I'm not sure why. Maybe the players didn't even think about it, plus IMC you don't find "complete decks" in every room of Amber's palace.

jibbajibba · June 05, 2009, 11:28:48 AM

I built this tool for scrying.
http://www.jibbajibba.com/Amber/trumpreading/trumpreading.html

It's just some DHTML and it had a bug i never bothered to fix in which the same card can appear more than once. Its just a tweak as I would need to just subtract the card from the array once it was seected but just never got back to it. The slow bit was designing all the cards :-) the code took about 5 hours (should have been 2 but I kept tweaking teh card positions by degree and spend an age lookign for a way to rotate the covers card by 90 degrees

Players woudl do a reading send me a screen shot and I would try to incorporate into their plot. USed it in F2F as well as live but via a laptop woudl like to have printed out an entire deck but never got to it.

jibbajibba · June 05, 2009, 11:59:52 AM

Sample trump scry