Gaming Theory

Now, all this said, as a GM, you have free reign on your game to run it as you wish. You may think, based upon what I have said regarding my own GMing style, that as a GM, I am a bully. But … if you give your players whatever they want, without the consequinces or challenges that accompany such power, then inevitably there will come a ‘cold war’. After all, if the guys on either side of you are getting everything they want, merely by saying they are going out and getting it. Then why wouldn’t you do the same? Thus, your initial question was what we do to stop such situations. I make my players sweat and bleed for it, and if they truly want it, they will likely eventually get it. Then, they will learn what else it does…

-ChiefsFan, Amber Diceless RPG Yahoo!Group

This was part of a larger discussion of how to handle powerful (i.e., point-worthy) items in Amber, and how to keep it from getting out of hand.

The author of this particular post seems willing to call himself a bully for making the players work for stuff, but… I don’t really see it. As far as I’m concerned, you should only not have to work for Items and Creatures you purchase at game start. This isn’t because I’m worried at all about some kind of cold war – heaven knows Amberites are perfectly capable of manufacturing cold wars amongst themselves without ever bringing any more items in than what they already have – but because as I’ve already said, tools like that have costs. One of those is the process of acquisition; without working for it, do you really value it appropriately?

I’m not saying such things should be impossible to do, particularly if it’s something needed for plot. But I don’t care to run a game where everyone is The Golden Child Merlin, To Whom The Universe Hands Everything He Really Needs. (/snark)

Besides, having everything handed to you gets kind of boring after a while.

One other thing I would mention before ending my rather long rant, is that to a degree the GM must be somewhat adversarial with the players. The alternative is a Monty Haul campaign where anything can be had with minimal effort. It might be fun for the players at first, but after a while, they will grow bored. No challenges mean no sense of accomplishment. Of course I realize no one posting on this thread is suggesting that the GM not challenge the players, but powerful items should come at a price. Sure, the Elders are not sitting around just waiting for a chance to steal from the characters. However, there are more dangers to owning a powerful item then just Elder theft. The item itself will likely have side-effects associated with it’s use. The use of an item capable of functioning throughout shadow likely causes small ripples in shadow that are felt by those with the power to perceive disturbances or changes in shadow and those beings can be Elders, Lords of Chaos, powerful shadow beings who have themselves abilities to perceive such disturbances. Then of course, there are the actual Powers themselves, represented by the Serpent and the Unicorn. They set the ‘laws’ in their sphere of influence within shadow and would definitely resent having it’s ‘rules’ so disrupted. The power might in turn manipulate an Elder or one of the other previously mentioned beings to see that the item ceases to be such a disruption.

In the end, nothing is free and the players need to discover this just as we see Zelazny’s characters understanding this.

-ChiefsFan, Amber Diceless RPG Yahoo!Group

Posted with a general feeling of agreement. Guarded agreement, because “nothing is free” isn’t quite the right way to wrap one’s head around things in Amber, I don’t think – but still.

In writing a lot of this, I realize I approach Amber in a world-setting sort of way rather than focus on the players. To me, the rules need to conform to the world rather than serve to only limit the players in some sort of way. I still hold that rules are there to define the game itself and what the players can or can’t do. But the rules are there specifically to define what the world is like and the players would be limited that way, as well as everything else in existence.

-Michael Zack, Amber Diceless RPG Yahoo!Group

This is such a false dichotomy to me – not to mention that he pretty much contradicted himself there.

The rules define the world: absolutely.

The rules should not serve only to limit the players: huh? We’re… talking about the same game, right?

The players must work within the bounds of the world, or we’re playing free-form MUSH again, only we’re face to face with the other players and not staring at text on a screen.

This is what makes sense to me: The rules define the world. The players must work within those rules – the rules of the world, the rules of the game – to accomplish anything.

Breaking the rules means breaking the game – especially in Amber, where the rules are flimsy things already. And working within rules means limits. It means you can’t use the Pattern to ‘happen’ to have exact change in Amber. It means you can’t just stroll up to Wixer and give him a pat on the head, because the Primal plane is not that simple to get to. It means you can’t go up to Tir on any given night, no matter the condition of the moon.

Unless, of course, that’s part of the plot. But then it’s a plot point, not somethign the players have decided on just because it would be convenient, which seems to be what this guy is espousing.

This is the last of the thought-provoking snippets from the extended flamewar on the Amber Diceless RPG Yahoo!Group. Now back to your regular programming…

For me, the books were limited. Amber itself was not so interesting as to warrant the attention. With “infinite possibilities” in Shadow, why should they all congregate in Castle Amber? I just don’t think that Zelazney took the idea far enough, and the stories were merely ‘OK’ to me.

-PantherShade

Well, I think Zelazny attempts to answer that question through Corwin’s explanation that while the Amberites can in fact go out into shadow and create any setting or kingdom they wish, even their own Amber, it would never be the real thing. Kind of like how I can easily have gone out and bought my wife a larger diamond for her engagement ring, simply by going cubic zirconium. It would look real, in fact she might not ever know the difference–and it would certainly have been easier on my wallet. Yet most women want the real thing, even if it results in a smaller stone. It’s simply the knowledge that something is real as opposed to a duplicate. A shadow of Amber might be fun for a time, but the Amberite would always know it was not the real thing. For beings with egos such as they have, I suspect such a substitution would prove intolerable in the long run.

-ChiefsFan, Amber Diceless RPG Yahoo!Group

I am a woman. I am not, I’ll grant you, most women – but I have no problem with cubic zirconium. I have less than no problem with cubic zirconium, in fact, because I don’t see a point in mortgaging large portions of one’s life in order to buy what is, in the end, a very hard, clear rock. (My engagement ring is sapphire and cubic zirconium, in fact, because I dislike diamonds that much.)

In short: this is, to me, a false comparison.

And anyway, there are much more interesting directions to go with the question of why Amberites always return to Amber.

The simplest one is that it comes down to family. No Shadow of Amber can ever perfectly reproduce every Amberite perfectly, and when you’ve grown up with these people – well, you can tell if Random’s got a tell when he plays poker, or when Flora’s hair is just that tiny bit off from perfection, or when Benedict fails to parry with his usual grace.

(This always leads me to the question of just how close these Shadows are. Do the Royals of the Shadow-Ambers walk in Shadow too? Are the Shadow-Ambers also nigh-impossible to shift in? How perfect are their Patterns?)

Then there are other aspects that could be brought into play.

Perhaps walking the Pattern instills the loyalty to Amber, and exerts a pull even on those Elders supposedly lost to Shadow.

Perhaps it’s a geas instilled in all of them as infants by Oberon or Dworkin, urging them to return to Amber time and again, if only to aid in its defense.

Maybe Corwin was wrong, and you can’t get to these Shadow-Ambers after all; they’re too close, so close that anyone trying to shift to one of them is sucked into Amber proper instead.

Erik did a fine job bringing his vision of Amber into a game form. However, it’s very obviously one sided in viewpoint and geared toward political intrigue. The powers are ill defined, and their point values are inconsistent. I understand the competitiveness angle of the attribute auction, but it’s poorly designed. I’ve never heard of an Amber game without House Rules, which tells me that the system has serious flaws.

-PantherShade, Amber Diceless RPG Yahoo!Group (italics mine)

“I’m always really interested in GMs who use house rules, because it says to me that that GM is experienced and knows what they’re doing.”

-My husband (paraphrased from memory)

I agree wholeheartedly with PantherShade regarding the issues with the ADRPG when it comes to powers and point values. I don’t disagree regarding the political intrigue. The ADRPG ranges from useful to revolutionary to ill-advised to jumping the shark entirely – from good to bad to indifferent.

My stumbling block is really the idea that you must have House Rules, which I find is implied here and in the full version of the post, which I’ve trimmed down. He basically says, “The ADRPG was so bad, I ended up creating a new system entirely to run my Amber games.”

I don’t know. It wouldn’t be pretty – but I’m pretty sure it could be done. I mean, someone must have, somewhere, right? And this was part of a larger discussion started by someone trying their best to run the game straight out of the books.

Would I do it? Hell no.

But it can be done.

Regarding the quote from my husband and the italicized part of the post – this is an interesting dichotomy to me. It was a fascinating discussion with my husband. He’s progressed very traditionally through gaming: D&D, Rifts, Traveller, and lots of wargaming. When I started gaming, I picked up White Wolf first, then went straight on through to Amber.

My husband sees house rules as the mark of a skilled gm. I see them as par for the course. They’re very different viewpoints… but we game together happily, because there’s a comfortable middle ground.

I suggest that ADRPG, perhaps more than any other roleplaying game I have played, depends on conforming to Zelazny’s style and vision for the multiverse. While items played a larger role in Merlins’ chronicles than Corwins’, it was still the brains and abilities of the characters (including emergently sentient items such as Ghostwheel) that dominated the story; as the GM, I believe it’s up to you to keep items from dominating your story too, however you choose to do that.

-David Van Dyche, Amber Diceless RPG Yahoo!Group

This makes enormous sense to me as a GM, and I think I’m going to present it without otherwise commenting.

It is not merely that the PCs all know each other, rather that they are all parts of the same community, so they know (and, importantly, are known[ by]) the whole community. A member of the group who is not a member of the community is an anomaly.

(from Rob Donaghue, here)

I had to think a while – and read the whole post a few times – to see how what the author was saying applied to Amber.

In the end, it was those two sentences that made it all make sense.

Dalt is an anomaly, where the redheads are not, even though both attacked Amber: they are part of the community, he is not. The same could be said at first of Rinaldo, although he quickly joins the community merely on the strength of knowing first Merlin and then Vialle. Brand is part of the community and chooses to leave it, becoming the anomaly.

What a fascinating thought.

Spawned from a question in the game I’m running.

Antimagic is something that’s always bothered me. I’m fine with the idea of its existance, but I have two deeper problems: the assumption that antimagic is magic, and the lack of explanation as to where it comes from if it isn’t magic.

Things antithetical to magic aren’t really a part of sorcery to my mind; I see counterspells as entirely different than anti-magic, since you’re countering X by doing Y and nullifying the effect, not the fact that it’s magic. Dispersing magic is the same sort of thing as counterspelling, only you’re returning a particular node of magic back to the ambient magic of the area – negating an effect rather than that it’s magic.

Negating the magic itself is best reserved as the province of gods and other world-altering beings.

Why gods and other world-altering beings?

Actual anti-magic – negating the presence of magic itself – is not unlike antimatter. Antimatter comes from matter, technically, but it destroys matter in the process of becoming antimatter, right? It does this by a process outside itself – collision. Why should antimagic be any different? It moves from magic to antimagic via a process outside itself.

There’s really only a few options outside that of magic – the mundane and natural, and the supernatural. The mundane, being mundane, has the ability to create antimagic – and that’s been used, to great effect, in fantasy literature. Xanth is the first thing that springs to mind, and Peter Pan the second.

Nominally, the Force could be considered magic, and as such, there are several almost “anti-magic” creatures; the one that comes closest to anti-Force to me is the ysalamiri. And because they are natural creatures, they fall under this category of the mundane. It’s just something they do, right?

But we’re talking Amber here, and the heart of Amber is not mundane – and the mundane negating magic is, in general, the exception in fantasy literature and not the rule. Gods and supernatural beings, on the other hand, are likely to go about this sort of thing. “Your magic annoys me, puny human. No more.”

And yet – this one is harder to find examples of. Why? Because virtually everyone else uses option 3, the one I don’t like: magic negating itself. But anyway…

Amberites, being supernatural creatures (whether they want to admit it or not), should be perfectly capable of negating magic using the thing that makes them uniquely themselves: Pattern. I’ve seen hints of this, thoughts of this, in various campaigns and campaign logs – games where sorcery simply does not work in Amber, or is unreliable in the extreme there. It could even be argued that Oberon and Dworkin made it so that sorcery does not work in Amber so that it could not be used against them by their ancient enemies. Personally, I’m up in the air about that – as long as one is not using sorcery on or directly around the Pattern, you should be OK. After all, Merlin used sorcery in Amber all the time. (We don’t see this in Corwin’s chronicles… but then, Corwin wasn’t much of a mage, now was he?)

Better yet – one of the things you can determine about your pet Shadows is whether magic works there. If you are in the camp that Shadows are created and not found – well, then, antimagic should be an obvious conclusion, right?

I have a feeling the Logrus can generate anti-magic fields, just based on comments made by Merlin about the experience of walking it. However, given that the only world-effecting power Logrus seems to have is that of calling down the Primal Chaos, such fields would be temporary, fleeting – where Pattern could simply turn off magic for a given world.