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September 02, 2006
All Roads Lead to Amber . . .
Reading Fred's Story Games thread on "What's Good About ADRP?" and thinking about the ways that the Elders can be used and abused in an Amber campaign, especially Rob Donoghue's remarks on respect and the power differential, including:
Well, for Amber, the part of me that wants the web to be a little more complex says that an NPC really is what they want and what they have (and perhaps what they _appear_ to want and have), and where those things intersect with players makes for rich, delicious play.
Amber is a bit weird in that sense, and varies from a lot of indie games in that it has strongly proactive NPCs, which is a bad thing in the forgotten realms, but for Amber, where players are _inside_ the circle rather than outside looking in, it's an essential part of flavor. To contrast, Dogs NPCs don't need to be important beyond their relationship to the Dogs. Amber NPCs need to be (or at least seem) more dynamic.
I find myself thinking that, actually, an Amber campaign could profit from adding a step between character creation and the first session of the campaign: a Dogs-style "What they want from the Youngers" list. But not "the Youngers" as a whole: a matrix listing what each elder wants from each PC. It could be anything from "Flora wants Brigit to be more ladylike" to "Bleys wants Alexander to help him conquer Amber" to "Corwin wants to keep Gustav from finding Yg."
Here's the mechanical effect I think the exercise assumes and promotes: The PCs have to have enough power relative to the Elders to be worth wanting something from.
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Tracked on Sep 3, 2006 9:53:35 AM
Comments
Ginger's bellwether for this is "how does the game treat Martin?" If Martin (and by extension the other two canonical younger children), Merlin, and Dara have enough power to be worth considering, then the game has scope to allow the player characters to be effective. If the PCs can't change the world, then they're not so interesting.
One of the parts of the family dynamic that I like is that you can't kill the villain because she's your best friend's mother, and there are consequences to that. It also works both ways. The villain may spare you because she doesn't want her daughter complaining about it for eternity. That's a lovely complicating factor that is hard to capture in other games, without similar familial relationships. Mind you, I was always more interested in the DNPC relationships in Champions than in the "how many dice of knockback?" crunchiness...
Posted by: Michael at Sep 3, 2006 1:33:01 PM
Depending on how proactive you want the relationship between PCs and Elders to be, though, it may make more sense for the youngers to define this more: "I want [thing] from [Elder], but I can't get it because [conflict]." The other Dogs-y thing that would rock for Amber is instead of the Accomplishment, you've got to do a round-robin "remember when [my PC] and [your PC] were in [situation] and [Elder] found out/interfered/helped/whatever?" thing. That would be the sort of thing I so seldom get from Amber play. Family crap.
Posted by: Mark Woodhouse at Sep 3, 2006 6:02:22 PM
The matrix seems rather large.
I'd probably pick a few, and have the rest only fill in what they want if the PC does something that catches their attention.
Posted by: Vaxalon at Sep 3, 2006 6:15:14 PM
Fred: Elders are also capable of spotting the main chance in an interaction and winging it well. That's hard to plan for by the GM, but we certainly have textual examples of it.
The Matrix reminds me of the "Ha, Ha, Only Serious" Designing Your Team - the Scooby Way! analysis tool. You could have the matrix start out as mostly lightweight and heavify it as attention was paid to the glossed relationships.
Posted by: Michael at Sep 4, 2006 2:37:37 AM
I am big fan of the intermediate step, though I think that a true matrix would be a bit too cumbersome to use in practice. It's a weakness (and a strength) of Amber that most modellign systems, like diagramming, break down under the sheer _weight_ of the interactions. If you were to map the named characters from the books, virtually every character on this theoretical map has strong ties to virtually every other character, which means it's mostly one big black scribble.
The problem to avoid, and I support any intermediate step that does this, is having this incredibly complex network and then have each PC have only _one_ line connecting them to it. Not only is that an invitation to disaster, it's a disservice to the players (excepting the occasional character whose story is about making these connections, but the "fresh meat" story can bear only so much repeating.)
I've tried a lot of different things to try to handle this. For "We Happy Few", a con game I ran a few years back, character generation was all about tying characters into Amber, giving them power and influence over the mundane parts of the society, like the court, the army, the church and so on, so that when play began they were all invested and inter-character relationships had developed out of the contention for those resources. I was pretty proud of it, but it was a lot of work.
One lighter-duty model I've tried is to just assume that the big scribble exists, and try mapping _just_ the individual character's relationships, so that each character begins play with some number of connections which they can assign to named (or invented) NPCs and hash out what the character thinks the relationship is. I even offer trade offs - each thread you draw connecting you to another player gets you an extra thread connecting to an NPC. Bribes are, after all, always in fashion.
One other method I've experimented with in other games that might translate well is to bust out the list (or diagram) of _things_ the character is interested in. This is pretty freeform - it might be NPCs but it also might be agendas, vendettas, opinions, items or really anything else the player has an interest in. This is done pretty openly so players can hook into each others interests. Once that's done, the GM then runs through the NPCs and hooks them into the same issues, so these issues serve as lenses for the various relationships. I really like what this does in terms of suggesting what's important in a game, but I haven't tried it yet.
(Of course, when I'm feeling very lazy, I put everyone's name in a hat and have everyone draw three times as 1. THis guy saved your life, 2. You support this guy (Secretly or openly) 3. you oppose this guy (secretly or openly). If I'm feeling saucy, I mandate everyone have a secret, and make draw #4 "You know this guy's secret).
Not that I spend hours thinking abotu this topic or anything. :)
-Rob D.
Posted by: Rob Donoghue at Sep 5, 2006 12:51:38 PM
