Attribute Auctions

[RPGPundit]

To me, they're the absolute foundation of all of what makes Amber work.  They're also great fun to run.

That said, there have been many alternate methods of character gen for Amber over the years.

Other than direct point-buy, which is boring and pointless, what other methods have you encountered? Did they work well, or not so well?

RPGPundit

[James McMurray]

I think a kung fu tournament could be cool. Sparring equipment optional.

[RPGPundit]

I was thinking more like the Tarot card system that had shown up in one RPG magazine once... only thing with that one was that it added an element of randomness, to character creation at that.

I still haven't found a single method of creating an Amber party that was superior to the attribute auction.

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[Otha]

To me, the attribute auction is pretty much worthless, as written.

There's little reward in bidding.  You don't have enough points to really meaningfully compete with the Elders, and against the Youngers you're better off not bidding, and buying up into the ladder afterwards, because then they won't know where you stand, but you know where they do.  If it's pretty clear that NOONE is bidding in an auction, I'll bid five just to take the first slot cheaply.  By doing this, if I have to get into a conflict with a cousin, I usually know which attribute to use to beat him.  Not only that, I usually end up with enough points left over to buy more than just basic pattern.

[RPGPundit]

The monkeywrench in your position, Otha, is that if the game is run as-written, there should be a shitload of stuff that will put you in direct competition with your "cousins".  You won't likely be in that kind of direct open conflict with the Elders, who, as you say, should be able to kick the shit out of you in a head-on fight, at least at first.

It sounds to me like the campaigns you've played in, the GM either didn't end up putting enough emphasis in player-competition, or didn't make 1st place a sufficiently valuable resource, or both.

There's certainly nothing wrong with secret bidding, and being generally competent in various attributes as opposed to excellently competent in one attribute, but 1st place should be made awesome enough to make it worth fighting for.

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[finarvyn]

My game group is more cooperative than competitive, and as such have never been very interested in the auction concept. Because of this, I have tried various ways of getting them to get into a more advesarial mode.

One thing I tried was to assign suits of playing cards to individual attributes (spades=strength, hearts=endurance, diamonds=psyche, clubs=warfare). I had a group of 6 players so I counted out 6 cards of each suit and handed the entire stack to the group. They got to determine who got which card, knowing that higher cards meant better attributes.

My assumption was that they would start to scheme to get the cards they wanted.

Instead, they were careful to balance the numbers so that no one felt cheated. They discussed who wanted which cards and how each fit into their character concept.

Wonderful role-play, but not very auction-like.

[RPGPundit]

That's a pretty awesome idea that could be developed further!

You see, the version I had seen was just each player drawing a certain number of cards and keeping that for himself, which I ultimately discarded for being too random.

But if each player drew a certain number of cards, and then got to pass a certain number of cards to another character, this would be slightly random but also controlled and could certainly generate competition, as players threw undesireable cards at other players or struggled with each other to get the attributes they liked.

I'll have to think more about how that could be done...

RPGPundit

[finarvyn]

One of the additional problems I encountered was how to juggle the numbers for attributes. My concept was that the players would haggle over the cards without having actual numbers associated with them, then they could select their powers and items and stuff and so on.

What I would do at the end would be to take their total points, subtract points for each of the powers and goodies, and then the remaining points would be allocated based on the cards they kept.

The problem was that since each player spent different points on goodies, the points left over for attributes weren't the same -- which meant that the value of a given playing card changed based on who held that card. For example, if player A has 10 points to spend on Psyche that high card might mean that all 10 points would go there to preserve 1st rank. Player B with 40 points to spend on attributes might have a middle-rank card and end up with 15 points in Psyche. Oops.

It would appear that further refining needed to happen to my card system.

[Otha]

The monkeywrench in your position, Otha, is that if the game is run as-written, there should be a shitload of stuff that will put you in direct competition with your "cousins".  You won't likely be in that kind of direct open conflict with the Elders, who, as you say, should be able to kick the shit out of you in a head-on fight, at least at first.

"should"?

It sounds to me like the campaigns you've played in, the GM either didn't end up putting enough emphasis in player-competition, or didn't make 1st place a sufficiently valuable resource, or both.

Like I said, once the players realize that they can have first place cheap by pre-negotiating the auctions, no "emphasis" the GM puts on the competition before play starts will have any impact.  Emphasis placed after play starts is too late.  Making 1st place more valuable only makes the effect worse.

If you have players who are more cooperative than competitive, why do you want to try to convince/coerce/bribe them into being something they're not?

Is Amber a game that only 'makes sense' for competitive play, or is there room for a traditional, cooperative mode of play?

[RPGPundit]

There's room for it, just like there's room for running a D&D or other game that isn't party-based play; its just not the obvious "default" mode.

As for "should", I've seen players manage to take down elders, even relatively early in a campaign; its possible, because there's plenty of elders who are beatable in particular stats by the PCs.  If the PCs can somehow manage to keep a contest being about that/those stats, then they can defeat the Elder.

RPGPundit

[Otha]

Wrong should.  I was looking at the first one, which is a comment about how people "should" run games.

[SunBoy]

Nope. It is a comment on how the game was intended to be by the designer in the first place.


[Man do I hate taking a blow for someone else]

[finarvyn]

But it's probably worth mentioning that the "right" way to play any game tends to change with time. A designer has a "right" way in mind, and that's the way his campaigns are run, but then another consumer buys the product and creates a new way to run a game.

I have this same thing happen at work. As a teacher you'd think I can follow someone else's lesson plan, but I really can't. I interject my own experinces and ideas and craft it into my own thing. Same general lesson, same general topic, often very different results.

If you look at the origins of D&D you will find a game heavy into miniatures combat, and the rules are sculpted to reflect this. As time passes, more and more people rework things and the game grows -- sometimes for the better, sometimes not. The "right" way to do things isn't a static thing.

With ADRP Erick runs a game which is very competitive, and design features such as the attribute auction reflect this intent. I've played in a scenario which Erick ran at Chicago ConClave years ago and he scrapped the auction and let us generate characters using points, which tells me that not even the designer needs to follow his own lead. Another GM may decide to emphasize other aspects of Amber, and for that campaign the "right" way to play may be vastly different from Wujcik-Amber or Zelazny-Amber.

Bottom line: I'm not sure that there is a single way that a person "should" run Amber.

Just my two cents.

[Spike]

I was thinking about the random card draw connundrum presented by Fin in his posts.  It struck me, what he presented anyway, wasn't a particular issue.

The player who only has 10 points in attributes is unlikely to win a bit even against a casual bidder with 40 points.

Consider: number of cards in a players hand equals a value set by his points in 'attributes'.  No player reveals his cards, but they can 'blind swap cards' with other players.  No player can swap with another player more than once, say.

Each suit represents an attribute, each card can either provide a number of points equal to it's face value (dodgy) or a number of points that is fixed, so adding up cards of the same suit is important to win.

The only tweak lies in setting the number of cards in play properly (scaled to attribute points used) and their value so that final totals can be fixed.

So, mr ten attributes would really like to be number one in psyche, while Mr fourty attributes could care less, as long as they are good across the board.  Mr 40 can probably assemble pretty good ranks, or he could specialize during his trading... or attempt to anyway (since he has no idea what cards he's getting, only what he discards), while Mr. 10 has to prey all of his cards are, say... hearts, and even then he's likely to suck. His fault for not savign points for the draw.

Now: Make each card worth 5 points, and for each five points in attributes they have one card and you have balence.


Just a thought

[finarvyn]

Now: Make each card worth 5 points, and for each five points in attributes they have one card and you have balence.

Spike, that's really cool.

So ... the guy with 10 attribute points only gets 2 cards but the guy with 40 gets to draw 8.

Whether they trade blind or let each other see the number might not matter -- we have to assume that the players will be somewhat fair in their trades and as long as the one guy only ends up with 2 and the other gets 8 the system should still balance itself. Player A might trade a higher card in an off-suit in order to gain another card in the suit he wants, for example.

I'll have to ponder this!