I played in a few campaigns of Amber Diceless Role-play in the mid-1990s. The experience was formative. It opened my eyes to the incredible possibilities that role-playing games hold. The many roads of my thinking about role-playing games lead back to Amber.

Amber Diceless Role-playing is based on the Amber Chronicles by Roger Zelazny. The novels are an unusual cross-genre mix of sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction with a philosophical bent. The main characters are the god like, nearly immortal, ruling family of a realm called Amber. The Amberites have, among many incredible powers, an ability to travel to anyplace that could be imagined and find anything that they desire. They call those places Shadows as they are mere shadows of Amber. The Amberites are the children of an enigmatic, mysterious and mostly absent king named Oberon. His absence causes a great number of problems. Fights over status, succession, insults (perceived and real), keeps the scions of Amber scheming against each other. Only when Amber itself is threatened do they turn their daggers from each other and to their enemies.

The novels themselves are excellent and I recommend them.

I recommend picking up the PDF or if you can find a reasonably priced second hand copy. I rarely recommend a role-playing game for the purposes of only reading. This is one of those exceptions.

Amber is not an easy game to play or run but it is rewarding to do so. A serious gamer will learn how tabletop role-playing games work on a deep level by playing this game. That’s one reason why I’m enamored of it. However, there is a great deal to learn from the book itself even if you never play it. The player and game master advice in this book is more robust than any other game book I’ve ever read. If you design or publish game products, Amber Diceless Role-play is a master class in game design and product design.

Very few game books match it’s genius. Here are some lessons I learned from Amber Diceless Role-Play.

Fit your game to the fiction.

The late Erick Wujcik designed one of the best examples of a game customized to fit another creator’s vision.

When adapting a pre-existing fictional world to a pre-existing set of rules, you often run into the problem that the rules don’t fit the setting. The designer either has to change the rules, change the setting, or accept the dissonance between the game and the fiction. The play experience of some games tied to existing story worlds can feel a little different than the original source material. They will be similar but somehow off. Usually its because the publisher has a house system and wants to leave the game intact. Continuity with the fiction and its emotional experience is diminished.

Erick loved the Amber novels and read them dozens of times as he developed and published the game. It was important to him that the game match the fiction and that players felt like they were playing Amber not a shadow of Amber.

He had to figure out a way for players to do what the protagonists in the stories were able to do. In the novels, the Amberites could go anywhere, experience anything, and do whatever they want, almost without limit. At some point in his thinking, he decided that the game had to be a dice-less system.

Erick was a skilled game designer who worked on Palladium Fantasy, Rifts and designed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG. Later in his career, he worked on video games. He knew how dice mechanisms worked and might have applied that tool to the problem. He recognized that approach was not going to work with Amber. The possibilities of what an Amberite can do are effectively infinite and for the most part Amberites just decide what they want to do and they do it. The only time they have a problem is when something unexpected happens. It the one you don’t see coming that gets you.

Despite the lack of dice mechanism, the system isn’t purely narrative. The character creation and advancement system has some math to it. It’s a point buy system. The points you spend determine where you are weak and where you are strong because nobody has enough points to be good enough at everything to feel comfortable as a jack of all trades. Someone will always be better than you at something. This creates many dilemmas for the player right from the first session. They have to make the best of bad choices in many situations. This is completely in line with the fiction. The protagonists of the Amber stories are always working with partial information, false information, supreme advantages in one area and fatal disadvantages in others. The point buy system in the game mirrors those dilemmas from the fiction very effectively.

By shaping the game to fit the fiction Wujcik successfully captured the feel of reading an Amber novel.

Trust the gamers.

It is remarkable to me just how much ego game designers can have. I guess they are human like the rest of us. The designer seems to say, “You are not so bright or creative as I am. It’s OK because I’ve designed this game so you don’t have to think too hard about this, just memorize the rules and write down all the important bits on the sheet. I know what’s best for you and your group, do what I say and you’ll have fun. Don’t, and your game will suck.” Uncle Gary suffered from some of that as have many who came after.

Erick decided to trust the game master, and the players. Without a doubt, a bad GM and lousy players can make this game a disaster to play. Even well meaning groups without everyone having read through the novels and the game book will struggle. He expects you to do your homework. He also expects that you trust each other and will work together to create a good experience.

I wrote a few weeks back about the Dramatic Question. I claimed that the difference between games is what questions they ask and how they answer those questions. In Amber, one of the questions is “Which player character is best at a given domain of skill?” that is answered by the character creation and advancement system. Players buy attributes and are ranked from highest to lowest. In a pure test of strength, the character with highest strength wins. When other variables come into play, things get tricky.

Sometimes the question is, “Which player best used a combination of their character’s powers, knowledge of the Amber story world, creativity, and general knowledge in this specific situation?” That’s hard no matter what game you are playing.

We all know of weird grey areas in encounters when a player wants to set a donkey on fire with lantern oil so the army camp will be distracted and not notice the fighter trying to break into a guarded siege tower. There are no rules for that and the game master has to break the situation down and make judgement call. A lot of games in contemporary gaming discourage that sort of thing by encouraging you to use a power, a feat, an ability, or skill that you have on your sheet instead. Other games abstract it to meaninglessness. You could have come up with an entirely different plan and the outcome would be the same.

Erick’s answer to this question? Trust the players and game master to apply their understanding of the the rules, setting, their creativity, reason, and desire to have a good time with each other to resolve the question.

Guidance

Even though most actions in an Amber are resolved through game masters adjudication, it doesn’t mean Erick left you hanging. He provides a lot of help.

I have long contended that anyone publishing a tabletop role-playing game should be putting as much effort into coaching customers how to play the game as you do providing materials to play with. This is doubly important for game masters. More skilled game masters running enjoyable games brings more players because the players tell their friends and encourage them to join. More players means more sales. More players means more game masters because some of those players will transition to game mastering. It is a positive feedback loop. You can achieve this by supporting, training and aiding existing game masters as much as possible while encouraging new game masters to give it a try.

Providing guidance to the game master through the core rule book and through supplements and other means is time well spent.

I have never seen another game book provide so much guidance to the game master and players as Amber. I estimate the word count devoted purely to rules is less than half the book. More than half is the guidance he gives on how to play the game.

There are explanations of what characters can do, how they might go about it, how to adjudicate them. He gives relevant quotes from the novels to provide clarity about the NPCs, their allies, where they live, what the do and more.

There are examples of character creation, combat resolution and uses of the various powers possessed by the Amberites and their enemies. In those examples he shows several examples of good uses of the system and a few bad ones so that you know what to watch out for.

Another unique feature are asides written by long time players in his games giving advice to players about how to approach different aspects of the game. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen another game that has commentary from play testers specifically for the players. All the advice throughout the book is good advice. It’s based on years of actual play experience from a group of savvy gamers.

Publishers should pay particular attention to this, especially in the market where there are thousands of games easily available. If you want more people to play your game, make the books as friendly and helpful as you can.

Art, Layout and Information Design

Erick published this himself in 1991. Desktop publishing was still in it’s infancy. He did the writing, the design and the layout. He had to have it printed and bound through a shop with his own money and effort. The graphic design in Amber is better than most RPG products today.

You can tell this was a book designed by someone who ran and played games. You can find what you are looking for when you need it. There is a good table of contents and an excellent index.

The text is in a classic serif typeface with big headings and clear breaks. There are pull quotes with advice from play testers for players of the game. These are usually in the center of the page and very noticeable. They scream, “Pay attention to this! It’s important!”

The interior art is black and white line art but always placed where it will do the most work. Each of the major NPCs in the setting gets a character sketch as do the most important symbols and locations.

There is a serviceable, though boring character sheet and several work sheets for the GM spread through out the book.

The whole thing is neat, clean, efficient. Not too much, just enough.

Conclusion

I could go on and on about how much I enjoy Amber Diceless Role-Play. It is a master work.

It took six years for Erick to get this game from it’s first play test to published. Erick ran the game continuously for his friends throughout that time and after. It seems to have been something of an obsession. There was an expansion that brought in material from the second series of Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles and some short stories. Wujcik also published a zine that saw 15 issues and ran a convention, Ambercon.

The reason Amber is such a robust game and the book such a useful play aid is that it was built through rigorous play by someone who truly loved what he was making and wanted others to experience the enjoyment he got from it.

In the next installment of the analysis, I’ll talk more about the mechanisms, the way they were custom cut and fit to the setting, how and why they work.