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February 27, 2004
Same Game World, Different Takes
I'd like to recommend Doyce Testerman's exercise in redesigning Amber around Trollbabe to the reading public around here. The underlying question is one I've long thought about because I love the Amber setting, but the ADRPG rules (and many of their community accretions) annoy me. It wasn't until I ran onto someone using a different ruleset to run an "Amber" game that I really got interested in Amber.
I think the kind of Amber game Doyce would get out of his Trollbabe-Amber mix is quite different from the one I got out of Everway-Amber, and I have to agree that it's because the different systems support different aspects of an Amber game. On the other hand, I've played in two Amber-Everway crosses, and GMed my own, and each of the three had some distinct tonal and stylistic differences. (I suspect Jim Henley may have some input on that, too.) I know there are some other attempts to do Amber in different systems--FATE and even d20--and I suspect they'd have different feels as well.
I've always been suspicious of GURPS versions of other games (Vampire, Castle Falkenstein, Traveller, etc.) for similar reasons. GURPS does certain things well, and I'm not so sure it does others well. I haven't even looked at the d20 versions of games I'm interested in. I'm an old gamer, and I know what I like--d20 and GURPS spend too much time on things I'm less interested in and not enough on things I am. That's why experiments like Doyce's (and, conversely, Bryant's d20 social combat system) interest me.
I'm sure that the things I'm bringing up here are old hat to many 20x20ers, especially those that hang around the Forge a lot. I drop in occasionally but am not a regular reader, so I'm sorry if I'm going over things that have been beaten to death there. Nevertheless, I'm sure there are enough non-Forge readers who follow this site to make the exercise of discussing them here worthwhile.
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» Amber through a lens of a different color from in the Shadow of Greatness
The 20' By 20' Room: Same Game World, Different Takes links to a Doyce game exercise comments by many... [Read More]
Tracked on Feb 27, 2004 12:51:04 PM
» A different approach to Amber from Flaming Monkey
There an excellent post over on Doyce Testerman's Random Encounters where he talks about the idea of running an Amber campaign using the rules from Trollbabe, a game by Ron Edwards (of Sorcerer and The Forge fame). It's my personal... [Read More]
Tracked on Feb 29, 2004 2:30:41 PM
Comments
I've run Amber games using Fate (shocker) and prior to that straight-up Fudge. Here are some references:
* http://www.iago.net/amber/crown (old, Fudge)
* http://www.iago.net/amber/kings (more recent, Fate's first rev)
* http://www.iago.net/amber/blood (haven't run this, but it's tuned to a more recent version; click through to the skill list for more particulars)
I've also toyed with the idea of using Paladin (http://www.anvilwerks.com/) for Amber -- which would put an interestingly moral, or at least "belief"-oriented take on Amber and the sources of its power.
The setting's amazingly facile for these sorts of exercises. I'm excited to see it brought up.
Posted by: Fred Hicks at Feb 27, 2004 12:14:26 PM
Neat article, and there's an odd sort of irony to it in my mind. See, I actually think the Amber DRPG is a great game...to a point. It's got one of the best sections I've ever seen on running a fight in an interesting fashion, and it's generally full of ideas that are pretty drastic departures from old school games. The DRPG is a game I wish more gamers had the chance to pick up, learn and play.
And then dispose of with extreme predjudice.
Trollbabe is similar in my mind, though much less with the extreme predjudice. While the Amber DRPG has a bunch of stuff I consider actively bad, Trollbabe (in and of itself) simply doesn't have much meat beyond the core idea. And it's an amazing idea. There's a reason Trollbabe was one of the influences on Fate.
But I wouldn't try to run an Amber game using straight, or even nearly straight, Trollbabe. The absence of multiple axes of competition, and the absence of a tie to some of the archetypical ideas I consider important to Amber would be off putting for me. That said, I think an Amber game influenced by the _sensibilities_ of Trollbabe woudl rock the casbah. The specific emphasis of the article lingers most heavily on the idea of player empowerment, and that idea can be expressed in a lot of ways.
I would posit that the virtue of breaking out the Trollbabe lens is nto the specifics of the mechanic, but the simple idea that power of that scope can go into the players hands. Once someone accepts that idea, I think the mechanic has a lot more wiggle room.
Not that I'm a big Amber fan or anything.
Posted by: Rob Donoghue at Feb 27, 2004 12:21:49 PM
I wholeheartedly agree with the "read, play, discard" opinion of the the DRPG. Something I've commented on a number of times is the fact that 'if it were a great game, more people would be running the 'straight' version of it' -- ADRPG has more home-brew variants than 1st Edition ADnD.
But I digress.
Rob, I'm really interested in "some of the archetypical ideas I consider important to Amber" -- simply because I obviously haven't addressed them and, if you pointed them out and agreed with them, I'd like to see if I could morph the system to make it work.
Re: Axes of competition -- I'd argue that competitions of physical prowess, powers, and social interaction pretty well summarize how competition occurs in Amber, but I'm sure folks could point out other ways.
(One of the things I'm also playing around with in the back of my head is Trollbabe/Hellboy (I really need to finish reading Octane and the last half of Paladin), in which I would probably add an 'Academics' score that works opposite of Social and gives the player the chance to decide whether Social or Academics is on the 'better' end -- may not be necessary, though.)
It's one of those reasons I'd like to write the game out in full, so I can fully strip out the Trollbabe specific stuff and put in the nuances that would capture the Amber setting. Won't happen, except maybe as a playtest at some point.
Posted by: Doyce at Feb 27, 2004 1:33:00 PM
(from Doyce's blog copied here)
!?Hellboy via Trollbabe?!
Sounds like a winner!
For the Gamer who can realize that they already 'improvise' to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune when they respond to GM narration, I think it is a very cool system.
I'm very intrigued. Enough so that I would actually try to weld this to the Twylighters romp I'm still toying with. A game about "bringing back the magic" welded to a mechanic where PCs dictate reality would be tres cool.
Posted by: Arref at Feb 27, 2004 2:54:32 PM
As far as the idea of "different takes on the same game world" goes, there are two ideas that I've been playing around with for a little while.
The first is pretty simple -- with the release of books like Savage Species and Draconomicon for D&D, I'd been contemplating taking one of the classic Vampire: the Masquerade citybooks and translating it into D&D, replacing the scheming elder vampires with dragons. Add template creatures and dragon disciples to taste... then drop in a set of adventurer-style player characters and see what happens.
The other is something I'd been calling Ocean City, which involves the themes of In Nomine filtered through something like Adventure. It's a seaside town where the G-Men, the gangsters, and a few costumed mystery men are trying to establish control. The actions of these larger-than-life figures shape the way the people in Ocean City behave and expect the world to work.
Posted by: Jadasc at Feb 28, 2004 9:10:45 AM
I've done a lot of Amber-via-other-rules efforts, many at AmberCon, The Black Road, or AmberCon North.
I've done Amber in Feng Shui (briefly), Amber highly influenced by Feng Shui (Nine Princes in Hong King), Amber using Puppetland (Punch and Flora, at TBR), Amber using Baron Munchausen (Tall Tales of Pattern and Shadow run at ACN last year and to-be-run at AC this year), Amber heavily inspired by Sandman ("Second Chance" at AC several years back), Amber gone anthropomorphic via Ironclaw ("Amberclaw", at the last TBR)... I had a GM put me and the rest of the players through an Amber/Power Trip (the back part of Puppetland) session, which was one of the more extreme RP days of my history and something I'm glad to have done exactly once. I've also got an Amber/My Life With Master cross half worked out in my head, too.
I like the Amber cast for these experiments because they are very archtypical as characters, and because I know I can take such an idea to an AmberCon and get a nice level of player who are familiar with those characters to work from.
I think Trollbabe is a great idea to use here, as its narrative structure nicely fits to Amberite's casual control of their immediate surroundings. This is something ADRP does by leaving it up to the GM, and shifting that control to the player is, IMO, a great idea. Of course, I'm a big fan of sharing narrative power between player and GM rather than hording it, which is likely why I like HeroQuest so much.
(And yes, I've been part of at least two different discussions of doing Amber using Hero Wars/HeroQuest... I don't think that's quite as good a match, though.)
Posted by: Jack Gulick at Mar 1, 2004 10:07:56 AM
Jack's comments point to what i was thinking about archetypes. I generally want amber characters to be able to drawn up very strongly in a few strokes, ideally by having some sort of strongly archetypical role. Certainly, that's nto the case for every character in the novels, but it's true for many of them, arguably the most strongly evocative ones. I'd want a system that really takes into account that strong distinction between the characters.
Now, the theory is that this would be handled by the nature and depth of the connections the character has. Julian's role as Protector of Arden would mean he'd just have lots of Arden-related rerolls available to him. And that's fine, to a point, but It doesn't quite satisfy my itch. If he were to come into conflict with one of his brothers, I can't imagine either one _not_ having the depth to push the conflict to the third reroll (A situation I think is going to be true in many cases), so the nature of those connections becomes simple window dressing.
That's hardly awful, I admit. Julian's Story is always goign to be about Arden and self-control because that's where all his rerolls are coming from. But on some level, I want it to have a little more mechanical weight.
This dovetails with the question of axes of conflict. I'll admit that Combat, Powers and Social probably cover the bulk of conflicts, i can think of a few things that woudl still need to be covered, most notably administration and matters of deception and perception, but settng those aside for a moment, I'll reveal a simple bias. The fact that the Social element is folded into the single number system feels like a kludge to me - It's fine for how Trollbabe likes to use it, but I'd find it a bit too ham-fisted for what I'd want out of an Amber game.
Additionally, I want a little more fine grain in my conflicts, if only to allow for signature strengths and weaknesses to show their heads. When Corwin fights Gerard, there's no real question that Corwin is a better fighter, but Gerard has manuvered the situation so his strength (literally) can be brought to bear. There's a little resonance there with selecting the conflict type in the Trollbabe rules, but it's a bit more complicated than that. Similarily, but less importanly, I want to be able to reflect a character like, say, Flora, who's bad at both magic and fighting, but socially capable.
Ultimately, I think Trollbabe (In and of itself) is going to fall down for Amber because of its conceptual roots - Trollbabe is really designed for a character creation where most of the decisions (Race, Gender, General background) are already decided and reasonably uniform. I could see playing Amber with that sort of thinking, but I think that in disposing of many of the complications, muck of the flavor would be lost.
All that said, it might be possible to address a fair number of these things by adding some manner of Archetype layer to Trollbabe. Suppose you do chargen per normal, but add on a one line archetype or summary of a strength (Strength of Legend, Inhuman Self Control, Deceiver, Fleet-footed, etc.) as the thing that's going to figure most strongly in the story of the character. In any situation where that is directly brought to bear, there's no need to roll intitally: The die is simply a success. Rerolls can be brought in per susual, but it means they start off on stronger footing in that field. I imagine there are some unseen flaws to that approach, but there might be something to it.
Weirdly, in talking, it's struck me that Trollbabe might be a stronger match for something like Moorcock's Eternal Champion. there's a certain thematic overlap with Amber, but it lacks that central social network where I'm feeling Trollbabe isn't matching up so well.
Posted by: Rob Donoghue at Mar 1, 2004 2:09:54 PM
It's interesting that you see Trollbabe as lacking a central social network when Relationships factor so heavily into the relative strengths of any given character.
Granted, once you hit a certain saturation point, relationships become less important, because there are so many of them, but it seems like that might answer some of the social aspects of the game.
Were I likely to be at an Ambercon in the near future, I'd almost certainly run something using Trollbabe... perhaps as a two-parter. I'd be a fun thing to test out.
Posted by: Doyce at Mar 1, 2004 5:26:00 PM
It is true that Trollbabe characters are, as presented in the rules, only thinly differentiated from each other, probably insufficiently to draw the game into a broader storytelling structure without it showing some cracks here and there.
I would think, however, that it would be fairly easy to modify Trollbabe's "color only" specialties into something to fill this need. I would think making them into something like a Relationship, allowing a reroll if you can bring your specialty into the scene. This allows for considerable extra identification of the individual character (with associated game-mechanical impact) at the cost of being a significant power-up (there are three extra rerolls available each session, much as if you granted them three additional Relationships). But it really doesn't seem to me that would break the game.
Posted by: Jack Gulick at Mar 2, 2004 7:47:18 AM
Heh. The social split is a bit of a contradiction, but I think it holds up by virtue of the roles these relationships play. In trollbabe, the folks who you have relationships with are only as much of the story as you want them to be. Amber, on the other hand, assumes (usually) a certain number of characters who will be part of the story, or at least be tangential to it. What's more, in Amber, there will be a lot of relationship overlap, as most of the characters will have relationships (of different kinds) with a common pool of NPCs. To my mind, Trollbabe has definate strengths in establishing the sense of a character's social network, but I'm less confident in its ability to play inside of that network, especially with other players.
Saturation points a big one too.
And I'd love to hear how running it goes. I'll cheerfully spout off about the potential problems, but that's mostly because I'm a big wonk, not because I think it's a bad idea. :) I think it could be a lot of fun, and for a con game, I think it could be absolutely awesome.
Posted by: Rob Donoghue at Mar 2, 2004 10:40:39 AM
Weirdly, in talking, it's struck me that Trollbabe might be a stronger match for something like Moorcock's Eternal Champion.
How quickly they forget! http://www.20by20room.com/2003/12/mashups_of_my_o.html
Posted by: Jim Henley at Mar 4, 2004 4:16:18 PM
I was contemplating similar matters recently, though not specifically involving Amber. I tried making the various PCs that I play regularly in a variety of different systems, to see how it affected the interpretaiton of the character. To some degree, I use Nobilis characters as a measure of the limits of a given system. Only a handful of systems are not clearly broken at that sort of godlike power level. Similarly, trying to condense a D&D character, with hordes of numbers, into an Over the Edge character, consisting of three abilities and a fault, makes you evaluate what the really essential parts of the character are.
Posted by: Mr. Teapot at Mar 10, 2004 3:53:37 PM
"I think an Amber game influenced by the _sensibilities_ of Trollbabe woudl rock the casbah."
Wujciiiiik won't like it - DAMN you, Donoghue!
Posted by: IMAGinES at Mar 10, 2004 5:28:47 PM
