Gaming Theory

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.

This is reasonable for the game in question (Take 2), but I’m not sure it’s the solution I’m happiest with. I’ve had to really think about what it is about this that bothers me – because there is something.

I went and looked up conjuration on Wikipedia:

Conjuration most often refers to the performance of magic tricks. This article discusses the older (and still common) use, describing acts of a supernatural nature.

The word conjuration (from Latin conjure, conjurare, to “swear together”) can be interpreted in several different ways: as an invocation or evocation (the latter in the sense of binding by a vow); as an exorcism; or as an act of illusionism. The word is often used synonymously with “invocation”, although many authors find a distinction between the two terms.

One who performs conjurations is called a conjurer or conjuror. The word (as conjuration or conjurison) was formerly used in its Latin meaning of “conspiracy”.

Illusion? Exorcism?

And hey, check out invocation/evocation:

An invocation (from the Latin verb invocare “to call on, invoke”) may take the form of:

* Supplication or prayer.
* A form of possession.
* Command or conjuration.
* Self-identification with certain spirits.

In other words, “conjuration” by common (albeit internet) definition has nothing whatsoever to do with summoning.

Interesting.

Conjuration presents challenges of its own. I don’t know that I like it as-is. The boundaries are ill-defined – like so much of the ADRPG – and it’s easy as pie to make this overpowered. Not to mention that nowhere is there a reasonable explanation for things like the Pattern blades and the spikards. What, were they accidental creations? “Oh, whoops, I walked the Pattern and now my sword can kill werewolves”?

I mean, “It’s become part of your personal legend” is only really reasonable – to me – for things created in backstory. What if you pay points for something mid-game? How does that work?

And where do you draw the line between conjuration and summoning sorcery?

Trump sorcery may also have issues of scale. It’s one thing to teleport someone to lower Saskatchewan in the middle of combat. It’s quite another to teleport someone to lower Ankh-Morpork in the middle of combat when you’re a hundred Shadows from Discworld.

Most of the ways in which one uses Trump are going to be much more convenient to just use Trump than to use Sorcery in conjunction with Trump. I can only see a few applications that it might be useful for, honestly: identification, jamming, defense, and traps.

Shapeshifting, to me, is much less problematic – I actually already have an example or two of spells that would fit into that application. Same scale as Pattern/Logrus sorcery, I think: Advanced power + sorcery + extra 5.

Power Words are a totally different power to me than Sorcery, though I’ve been argued with about this. Yes, they are technically cantrips, not too far off the order of the student spells in Harry Potter – but they’re not real spells. I could argue that they’re building blocks for bigger spells, but I just don’t like it. To me, there’s this clear division between the power sources of the two. Power Words come from personal energy exclusively. Sorcery uses the forces of the Shadow to work, with the wielder riding herd over them. (There’s an implication by Merlin, I think, that this is the way it works – when he discusses spikards. I can’t see why else it would be significant that the rings draw from multiple power sources through Shadow instead of just one.)

Hanging spells on Trumps is an interesting idea. One spell per card… I can see where it can and will get overpowered very easily, even if you charge the 2 points for the personal Trump deck plus, say, two points per spell storage card plus advanced on both powers and an additional charge for the Trump sorcery itself.

But it’s such a cool idea.

Edit: Both powers? Wow. Dunno what I was thinking of there. Although a properly advanced sorcery might be interesting.

Double edit: The more I think about this, the more I think it might be a good avenue to pursue… Racking 12 spells in a Trump deck would be 2 pts for the deck and 2*12 – 24 – pts for the racking part… Specify what can and cannot be on the card, maybe, since it doesn’t make much sense to me to rack on people cards…