Here’s a question I do have for you. (Well, one question with several subordinate questions.) In your game, if a player says their character is looking for an item of power, how does that actually work? Do they say “My character is searching through Shadow for a Deadly Damage sword with Confer Invulnerable Armor and Confer Regeneration”? Or do they need to use more of a narrative description? And what do you do at that point? “Okay, that’s a 27 point Artifact, so after Hellriding for four weeks, you’ve got it.”

In the games I’ve been in where it’s even come up, just finding the artifact is the easy part. Stormbringer isn’t just lying around waiting for someone to pick it up; Elric is wielding it (or vice versa.) And he isn’t inclined to just hand it over. If the player decides to get smart and say “An artifact with these qualities that I can just pick up off the ground without dealing with owners or traps or anything annoying like that,” well, that’s a heck of a lot more specific than just “an artifact with these qualities”, so it’s going to take longer to find. And despite Amberites being effectively immortal, in most campaigns I’ve been in vanishing into Shadow for a year basically takes that character out of the game.

No house rules involved there, no GM trying to screw over the players. Just logical consequences of actions.

-Tommy Tanaka, Amber Diceless RPG Yahoo!Group

I think there’s several directions I want to go with a reply to this.

One is the huge assumption that’s being made here. All parties involved – and there were three of them in total for this discussion – are assuming that we’re talking about items gained in actual course of play, not simply by XP expenditure, and/or that we’re adhering tightly to the ADRPG advancement schema.

Well, hmm.

Every time I’ve seen something like this come up, it’s gone something like this:

GM: OK, we have some downtime. Here’s your points; how do you want to spend them?
Player: I want X and Y. Hmm. I have enough for X.
GM: Great! The downtime is long enough to cover that, so it’s yours.

Or:

GM: OK, we have some downtime. Here’s your points; how do you want to spend them?
Player: I want X and Y. Hmm. I have enough for X.
GM: Great! I’ll keep that in mind, but I think you’ll know it when you see it in the game.

The amount of time it takes to find something isn’t a tool that I’ve seen used very often. Then again, most of the games I’ve been in are online games, played over email – where it seems to me that some of the challenge in GMing is to keep the players’ attention over the course of months or years. There’s an intended story, and to keep that story moving, it seems sometimes that the more personal stories are the first thing to fall by the wayside.

Not always, mind you. And given the attention span of some of the folks I game with face-to-face, it’s not always online where that’s a problem!

My POV is always that XP spent must be spent in a visible way. Even as a player, I look for things to spend my points on that are reasonable, given the way the game has gone; if I really want some Warfare, then I need to either set up training time immediately upon spending the points, or I need to have used that ability at least a few times over the course of the XP period – or I’m just not happy. (This doesn’t tend to hold true for me in games like D&D, where the RP often falls second to the combat mechanism; there, it’s a case of “what helps me the most,” always.) As a GM, I want to see the same: either something has been done, or will be done, to earn that advancement. Items and creatures either need to have been created or acquired, or have a clear path to acquisition (even if it’s not an easy one).

And then there’s the “logical consequences” line. That ties back to something I see all the time in posts on Bad RPers Suck: ICA = ICC. In Character Actions mean In Character Consequences.

This is something that, at least in my experience, the Amber community as a whole is very good at. (There are individuals – but that’s best not discussed…) It’s something that my particular face-to-face group is also pretty good at. I’m not sure sometimes if I’m blessed in that regard, or just set up for a nasty surprise when I forge out into the wider scheme of online gaming… :)

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