Amber Diceless Role-Playing

by Erick Wujcik and Roger Zelazny

Amber was the greatest city which had ever existed or ever would exist. Amber had always been and always would be, and every other city, everywhere, every other city that existed was but a reflection of a shadow of some phase of Amber.

-Corwin, in Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny

Role-playing games have come a long way in the last twenty years, from the comparatively simple rules of the original Dungeons and Dragons to the complexities and minutiae found in Rolemaster. Some games require only a few dice and a couple of reference tables to get up and running; others, entire books of rules and GM notes, as well as quite a collection of polyhedral dice. And then there’s Amber Diceless Role-playing, which uses no dice, has no tables to speak of, and has a very open-ended system of play.

Based on The Chronicles of Amber, a series of ten books written by celebrated sci-fi author Roger Zelazny, the players get to try their hands at becoming the sons and daughters of some of the most powerful beings in the Universe, the ruling family of Amber and the Courts of Chaos. Confused? Simply stated, Amber is the one true world, its people the only "real" people. And Amber casts "shadows" which radiate out from it: all worlds, all cities, all people that are or were or possibly could be, indeed all imaginable worlds, exist somewhere out in "Shadow", as reflections, warped by distance as they may be, of Amber. And striding the streets of Amber are the children and grandchildren of king Oberon, almost god-like beings who gain great power to walk between and influence these Shadows by walking the Pattern, the source of all their powers. Warning: the politics and mentality of the ruling family of Amber tends to make Niccolo Macchiavelli’s ideas look positively pedestrian by comparison!

And at the other end of Shadow lies the Courts of Chaos, a source of mystery and... well, chaos. Populated by shape shifters, poisoners, and sorcerers, the Lords of Chaos plot and plan against each other and against Amber, using their own power source, the Logrus, to spread entropy across Shadow and even to the gates of Amber...

As children of Amber or Chaos, player characters can be based upon virtually any concept; after all, you can find anything out in infinite Shadow. Want to be a Jedi Knight? A doddering sorcerer? A Certified Public Accountant? Ruler of entire worlds? All this can be done; raised out in Shadow, your character can just about be anything you want him or her to be! And the powers available to characters during the character creation process can allow them to quite literally do anything in Shadow!

The diceless system introduced in Amber Diceless Role-playing is clever yet relatively simple. Each player who will create a character gets one hundred points. These points may be used for several purposes: buying attributes, obtaining powers, constructing artifacts or creatures of power which are in the character’s possession, constructing Shadow worlds under the character’s control, and determining the karmic fate of the character through the use of "Stuff". Character construction occurs at the first gaming session, where the game master conducts an "attribute auction" in which players bid to see how they are ranked in the various attributes: Psyche (mental power), Strength (physical strength and toughness), Endurance (stamina as well as healing ability), and Warfare (combat ability, be it personal combat or commanding troops). After the attribute rankings are determined, players use their remaining points to buy powers, creatures and artifacts of power, entire worlds of their own, and their karmic destiny (called "Stuff").

Conflicts between characters are determined dicelessly, using three ways for resolution. The first is simply comparing attributes; in whatever conflict is going on, all other things being equal, the higher ranked person wins. The second is by looking at the characters’ "stuff"; if a character has "good stuff" (investing points in this attribute), he generally has the breaks go his way, while if he has "bad stuff" (basically, if the character engaged in deficit spending while creating his character), odds are usually against him. And the third, and perhaps most important method to resolve conflict, is in the very descriptions of the player characters’ actions; oftentimes, with sufficient forethought and ingenuity, a player can offset his weaknesses through planning his way through a conflict.

The major advantage of Amber Diceless Role-playing is the fact that its system allows for just about anything to happen. Written in the rulebook itself is the principle that if any of the game’s published rules don’t work for you, you should pitch them in favor of your own. "Winging it" as a game master and as a player is taken to an art form in this game; furthermore, the "rules lawyers" of other systems would throw up their hands in despair over this system... the game master has final say in just about everything, and there are no charts or tables to wave in the game master’s face.

This same "advantage", however, can sometimes become a disadvantage. Amber Diceless Role-playing is a system which can very easily be abused by power-gamers... an Amber campaign could quickly become a contest between players as to who can make the "more powerful" characters, and player in-fighting is practically built into the system. The entire concept of the player character "party" is almost unworkable in Amber, especially since the characters often have the ability to travel far out into infinite Shadow to attend to their own, quasi-godlike affairs. So player interaction can be difficult at times, and it is not unusual for players to get very little actual playing time into a given session, as the game master goes from one PC to another, dealing with their plans and concerns.

Amber Diceless Role-playing can be a good system, in the right hands. If a game master is imaginative and, above all, can think on his feet and go with the many changes all-powerful player characters throw at him, it can be a rewarding experience. And you can base almost any campaign concept in Amber, since its game world is quite literally infinite. However, this is not a good game for an aspiring game master to begin with; and if you like your dice and your tables, strict rules and principles to base your game world on, Amber Diceless Role-playing is not for you. Reading Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, while not necessary to play, is very useful to get a feel for the type of world in which Amber characters live in; and if you read Zelazny’s works and liked them, then you’ll probably find this game to be just as fun and exciting as the books.

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