Gaming Theory

“It obviously makes shadow that much more dangerous place, since there will be shadow people of extreme power probably collecting these items and being their own little warlords waiting for a challenge.”

-Michael Zack

This. And one other thing. Even if you go with the assumption that Shadows spontaneously come into existence when an Amberite goes looking for them, *within that Shadow* it has an entire history going back thousands or billions of years. The Shadow may have just popped into existence, but the item of power within it was still created by a weaponsmith or enchanter or god or dragon or whatever.

These aren’t new ideas. They probably aren’t even new ideas to you. My point is that they’re ideas that are totally supported by Zelazny’s writing and Wujcik’s rules. Look at page 108, Shadows of Desire, and pages 138-9, Artifacts of Power.

-Tommy Tanaka, Amber Diceless RPG Yahoo!Group

I can’t add much to this – other than to note that many of the games I’ve been in do not treat Shadow as a dangerous place. Then again – a lot of the games I’ve been in are post-Patternfall and lean towards Merlin’s more relaxed view of the world, where the only challenges are relatives…

Now there’s something to think about. Working from that assumption, why is it the only artifact we see [Fiona] using in the entire series is her mirror which – it can be inferred from her words – she made herself. Even at the climactic scene of the Patternfall War, where you’d think she’d pull out all of the stops. there’s no indication that she’d pulled out her magical toybox.

Tommy Tanaka, Amber Diceless RPG Yahoo!Group

This jives nicely with how I tend to view first-series Amber.

Corwin’s Amber is about the subtle magics, the kind that doesn’t walk up and slap you in the face, and it’s about relying on yourself and your powers, not on your tools.

Fiona only uses the mirror once.

Corwin only uses the notable powers of his sword, what, twice? Three times? Once to kill weir, and once to speak to beings in Tir. And of course the silver arm incident.

And your tools can kill you. Eric may have relied over-much on the Jewel, and he died. Corwin, when he pulls too much from the Jewel, experiences ill effects. (What price did Corwin pay for Grayswandir? What price was Morgenstern? What dangers do they have to avoid? I’ve seen the swords addressed, but rarely the horse…)

These are lessons Merlin never really learns.

As a consequence, Merlin’s series is flash-bang, high-tech, wield what you can when and how you can for as long as you can. He doesn’t even learn the right lesson from Ghostwheel’s going rogue. The spikards come with such mild consequences – oh noes, a controlling spell that’s easily avoided – what price is he going to pay for them later?

We know the price Jasra paid for the Font at the Keep of the Four Worlds: her husband. What about Mandor’s spheres? What about Werewindle? What will they cost their wielders?

I can see no reason for any Amberite to have a limit on the number of spells in their spellbook.

I’ll use one of my own characters, Beatrice, as an example here.

Suppose she learned sorcery, as advanced as she was able to get at the time, by the age of 20. She had a small set of spells – say, 12.

Suppose she’s 50 now.

What was she doing in the intervening 30 years? Anything but sorcery? Even if you suppose it takes years to research any given spell, she ought to have more than she started with.

Suppose she reaches 100, takes the Pattern, studies until she has Advanced, and learns how to hang spells on the Pattern and incorporate it into her magic. She’s going to have more than 12 by then, surely!

Suppose she reaches 1,000. Does it make any sense for her to still only have 12 spells? Not even a little.

Now, why did I start with 12? Mostly because it was a nice round number, to be honest. A given character could start with 1 spell, or 1,000. A lot will depend on who taught them – a character learning sorcery mid-game should, to my mind, have most (if not all) of their starting spellbook in common with their teacher. I’d ask the player who their tutor is, and sit down with that player (if applicable) to go over their spellbook and find out what they might be willing to teach. Then I’d sit down with that list and the potential sorcerer and let them choose as many as they wanted off that list. This supposes, of course, that the teacher’s and student’s players are reasonable and don’t have any reason to screw each other over out of character.

In the end, I don’t care if a character starts with 1 spell or 100 as long as it’s reasonable that they’ve researched or learned that many in the time they’ve been alive. Where I’m concerned is the number of spells a character has racked, and that the spells that character does know are of reasonable power level.

(For the record – at 50, Beatrice had 31 spells. )

“They could look for just such a shadow as Corwin’s sword. However, it would not be the real Greyswandir. There is only one of those and Corwin already has it. And the copy that was found would lack the Pattern abilities that have been incorporated into the true sword of that name. And here is the thing, that is actually in the rules. And more importantly, it’s explicit in the books.”

– This is inconsistent with the reflections of Pattern, however. Greyswandir is considered to be the most powerful sword in existence. In game terms, we cannot imagine any sword more powerful than that one. The books talk about only Greyswandir. You will have to tell me the book and page number that deals with the reflections of the book because I double checked it all and couldn’t find it. What I’m saying is this: if the Pattern can create other Patterns that possess attributes of the Pattern in it as well as Broken Patterns that are incredibly powerful in their own right, then it stands to reason that the ultimate sword in existence should be able to have its own reflections that would mirror something of its power as well.

-Michael Zack, Amber Diceless RPG Yahoo!Group

This is an observation I hadn’t considered before, and it applies to a wider situation.

How does one treat items and creatures paid for through points when a character stays in one place long enough to create Shadows of themselves? I only remember specific mention of people casting Shadows, not items…

This bears thinking on.

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.