Amber Diceless Role-Playing

Oh boy, another genuine classic. These are always difficult for me because the only reasonable reaction is for me to be impressed, but often as not, these classics are so steeped in a particular cultural context that my initial, instinctual reaction is to be irritated. Amber Diceless Role-Playing (Erick Wujcik) perfectly encompasses that tension by being an extremely impressive book that is nonetheless frequently irritating.

I think the Rosetta Stone for Amber Diceless's contradictions can be found on pages 142-144. This "Designing Short Term Sessions" section offers helpful GM advice on how to use these rules for "tournaments" and "cross-overs."

As a refresher: an rpg "tournament" is when different groups run pre-constructed characters through the same rpg module in a convention (or "tournament") setting and are awarded points for the speed, success, and thoroughness of their play. A "cross-over," (though less commonly used) is when you take a character from one GM's campaign and use it with minimal, negotiated modifications in another GM's campaign. 

This is a book that is radical, even by the standards of today. It didn't just get rid of dice. It was a decade ahead of the curve (if slightly clumsy) in viewing "an rpg as a conversation." It baked high player agency directly into its assumed gameplay, encouraging players to improvise environmental details, set dressing, and even whole NPCs without waiting for the GM's permission. It wrapped up its rules section by suggesting a fully free-form, GM-less experience. It is a primeval storygame, through and through . . .

And it has the same social contract as AD&D. 

Well, maybe not exactly identical - it encourages PvP far more than Dungeons & Dragons would ever dare - but certainly in its outlines. For all the various rules-systems that the wrap-up idealistically encourages you to "dump," it's still a game that assumes an adversarial GM, that foregrounds a vague idea of "player skill," that seeks to reward "tactical thinking," that wants to prepare you for running a tournament game.

An Amber Diceless tournament? Who would want that? Who would enjoy it?

Nobody, that's who, but what are you going to do, have an rpg that doesn't make provisions for potential tournaments? Sarcasm aside, it's a fascinating little dead end because it very starkly shows the normally invisible effects of culture. This is a book that was deliberately, consciously radical. It actually uses that specific word to describe itself. But for all its radicalism . . . it's still kind of AD&D?

And not in that vague way that all rpgs are at least a little bit AD&D. It carries over some very specific AD&D-isms. Thirty years later, the 5th edition DMG is not talking about tournament play. It's not talking about taking a character from your home campaign and using it in a random pick-up game. There are some very specific assumptions at work here that could only have come from the general roleplaying scene, c. 1991.

I think it's probably exactly because the rules are so radical that the social assumptions are so conservative. You're stripping away pretty much all of the identifying features of an rpg - no dice, no skills, powers that are almost purely narrative, attributes that are relative rather than absolute, weakened GM authority - so how are people going to recognize your game as a game? Why, you get downright Gygaxian in your priorities. You say things like "An experienced player with a basic power can always overcome advanced powers wielded without skill."

The combat resolution mechanic is literally two sentences: "Step 1. Compare the Attribute Ranks of the participants in any combat. . . Step 2. The character with the larger Attribute Rank wins."

I do elide a short paragraph in step one that explains which Attribute to use (Warfare for armed combat, Strength for unarmed combat), but that does nothing to diminish the absolutely unbelievable fact that Amber Diceless Role-Playing's combat chapter is 23 pages long. That's six pages longer than AD&D 2nd edition, and only 8 pages less than D&D 4th edition (funnily enough, it's exactly equal to Exalted Exalted 3rd edition).

And, on some level, this is a nothingburger. Warfare, duels, monsters, these are all an important part of the source material. So it's not like the book is imposing combat on stories where it doesn't belong. But, there's not a wilderness exploration chapter. There's not a stealth chapter. There's not a deception and intrigue chapter. Only one aspect of the Chronicles of Amber stories gets put under the microscope like this. And strangely, for all its elaboration, combat never really breaks from those two sentences. The twenty-two-and-a-half pages that follow are entirely about adding toothless narrative embellishments to your foregone conclusion. (Actually, to be fair, it could be interpreted as advice on how to telegraph the conclusion in a way that affords the weaker party the narrative space to run away and try something else . . . but you still don't need 20 pages for that, especially in a game that devotes approximately zero words to courtly etiquette).

It reveals a deep bias in the book's overall understanding of roleplaying games. Like, fundamentally, there must be a big combat chapter. It's a structural necessity, one of the things that makes a book like this into a ttrpg. And it also reveals a kind of basic naivete towards rpg theory. It is just so clear and obvious that "player skill" involves knowing the correct actions to take in any particular situation and having your character make good decisions that will justify them taking the correct actions. "Verisimilitude" is a bedrock. If you want your character succeed, just have them do something that would work in the real world. 

In modern parlance, we'd call Amber Diceless Role-Playing's approach "playing the GM, instead of the game." It's like it never even occurred to Mr. Wujcik that verisimilitude is a moving target, and "good tactics" are really "arguments the GM will find persuasive." It's an oversight that makes large portions of the book utterly unbearable. 

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Amber Diceless lacks the theoretical framework to be even remotely playable directly out of the box. Now, obviously, this is an empirically absurd claim, given all the people who have played it. But I would contend that those people were either filling in the missing pieces (whether consciously or unconsciously) or they were playing the game wrong. 

I have textual support for this position. Whenever Mr Wujcik takes a moment to relay anecdotes from his personal games, he always sounds like he's inadvertently confessing to a crime: 

Don Woodward came up with Carolan, noble and forthright, an honest innocent among the cynics of Amber. . . Carolan was a Good Stuff kind of guy. Trusting, honest, and earnest about Amber. As Game Master I stomped all over him, abused his trust, and sent the worst of the elder Amberites to manipulate him shamelessly. . . Carolan, embittered by fate and his own gullibility, managed to maim a feared Uncle, and kill a beloved Aunt. He experienced betrayal of his every honest emotion. And turned to denial, denying responsibility for his own actions.

Don, the player, complained bitterly about a game where nothing was "fun" and where he found pain everywhere. Worse, he seemed to bring pain to everyone he loved.

Eventually he got through it. Full circle, Carolan faced his guilt, and conquered it.

As a GM, you would not be able to drag that story out of me. Hell, as an author, if I ever felt compelled to write, "playing Amber is not always a pleasant experience . . . sometimes it's sheer mental torture" I'd be forced step away from the draft and contemplate my life choices. I mean, I trust I'm not being too much of an uncultured swine by believing that these silly little games where we get together with our friends and tell each other stories should, in almost all circumstances, be fun. Or, at least, attempted fun.

But I don't actually believe Erick Wujcik tortured his friends with manipulative mind games. I think he's trying, without the proper vocabulary, to inculcate an author-stance approach to character ownership. The idea that seeing your character face hardship, and suffer defeat are actually a reward, because having things to react to, having melodrama to milk for spotlight time, having hooks for unexpected character development - these are also fun. 

And this, too, is a cultural bias. It's aiming for pure story in an environment where "there's an attitude among some people that roleplaying games have to be cold and calculating. . . that players shouldn't get emotionally involved in their characters." We're seeing the shape of Amber Diceless's ambition in the ideas it feels compelled to push back against. 

I can't help but see an ironic echo in the OSR movement. Amber is out here feeling like it's using solicitousness to the scene's sensibilities as a way of buying the opportunity to be radical in its mechanical form, whereas OSR is trying to use a conservative approach to mechanics as a way to recapture older scene sensibilities. I also can't help but think about White Wolf's storyteller system, which saw its debut in the same year as Amber Diceless. White Wolf would push, in its Storyteller chapters, a sensibility very much at odds with the "old school" scene, even as the actual rules of their games were about as traditional as it's possible to get. If, somehow, you could combine Amber's near-free-form rules anarchy with White Wolf's English major approach to gamemastering, you could make the most pretentious indie game anyone's ever seen. It's wild to think that the technology for this theoretically existed as early as 1991.

I suppose I should, at some point, address the game's setting. The premise of Zelazny's Amber novels is that our Earth and everything in it is not "real." It is, in fact, but one of an infinite number of "shadows-" alternate universes that are somewhere between dreams, fictions, and unrealized possibilities. The "real" world is a place called Amber, and Amber's royal family has the unique magical ability to "walk through shadow," essentially allowing them to use the infinitely varied multiverse as their personal playground.

Metaphysically, I find this concept to be absolutely fascinating. In our everyday lives, we can notice a difference between the experience of dreaming and the experience of being awake. . . but only when we are awake. While we are awake, we notice an extra "realness" to our perceptions, and when we are asleep, we are not capable of perceiving the lack. So what if our waking lives were not the bottom of that particular hill? What if there were a deeper experience of realness, a waking beyond waking, and we forget it, just as we forget normal waking while in the throes of our dreams? What if your whole life was spent in this middle ground, this . . . dare I say it, shadow? And then, one day, your life was interrupted by one of the truly real people?

What would that feel like? What would it even mean? Sadly, the Amber novels don't really get into it. The infinite shadows are primarily used as a backdrop for some interesting, well-written, but fairly unchallenging pulp adventures. Though I doubt it was an intended message, the series kind of gives off the vibe that only aristocrats are real human beings.

But as a setting for an rpg, the world of Amber and its shadows are an admirable compliment to Amber Diceless Roleplaying's near-freeform system. Having a private universe where everything is exactly as you want it costs 1 character point (out of 100 for a standard character). The default attributes are enough to put you at a "comfortably superhuman" power level (I'd say upper street-level scaling) and you can buy additional supernatural powers on top of that. You definitely get the feeling that your characters are reasonably beyond the need for dice.

The fly in the ointment is that, for all the PCs' power, the canon characters from the books basically run the place. They're called the "elder Amberites" and the PCs are meant to be their children. You're a badass compared to almost everyone in the multiverse, but as far as mom and dad are concerned, you will always be a baby. This is only barely a metaphor. Corwin, the narrator of the books, ranges from 300 to 500 character points. Player start with 100 points and are supposed to get 5-20 per major adventure. It's theoretically possible to triumph over them, if you can persuade the GM that your plan is sound, but you'll never get out from under their shadow. 

I suppose it's properly thematic, all things considered, but there's a timidity to it, like we couldn't really be trusted with the keys to the Amber universe. I do appreciate that each canon character has multiple possible interpretations (both character-wise and in their stats). The setting may be a playpen, but at least it's not a railroad.

Overall, I'd say I . . . toxic frenemied Amber Diceless Role-Playing. Like, I'm kind of obsessed with how cool it can be, but I am definitely not up for paying the price of admission. I want something almost exactly like you, but without the . . . you know . . . baggage. So let's say instead that it's one of my favorite historical artifacts, and leave it at that.

Ukss Contribution: Going real basic with this - an aristocratic family where everyone is constantly scheming against each other. Sometimes the classics are the classics for a reason.