Birth date of Amber Diceless?

[finarvyn]

I saw this on Dragonsfoot...

Coincidentally, today might be 43 years to the date after when Dave Arneson first ran "The Fantasy Game" with Greg Svenson and Fred Funk. We know what this would become...

... and it got me wondering about the birth date of Amber Diceless.

I know that my "first print" ADRP rulebook lists November, 1991 as its publication date. I guess that makes the printed rules 22 years old.

Ambercon is supposed to trace back to 1989. (I'm guessing April, 1989, since all of the current Ambercons are held in April.)

Erick said that the first ever ADRP auction took place "way back in the Fall of 1985" although I've never seen any date more specific, so I guess that makes ADRP 28 years old as a game system.

[Panjumanju]

I'd also be interested to know when we should be celebrating an Amber-versary.

//Panjumanju

[finarvyn]

Michael Kucharski gave me a pretty decent answer:

The first character auction was on a Sunday evening in December of  1985; my best guess would place it on December 22nd.

Of course, this doesn't give an exact "birth" date for the actual game mechanic, but it would represent the first campaign auction. An interesting factoid is that Michael mentioned that Erick had each player make three dice rolls as part of character creation but later Eric decided that those rolls would be meaningless, so technically the "first auction" wasn't totally diceless. I take this to mean that Erick was probably building his rules model at the same time that he was starting the campaign.

[Jason D]

It's more related to the gestation than the birth date, but Erick told me an anecdote about when he was developing the game for R. Talsorian.

The whole team was playtesting Amber in-house and having a great time. At some point, someone in a position of authority asked Erick to make a chart showing what all of the levels of each Attribute Rank could do... so that a Warfare 75 meant X, 80 meant Y, etc. Basically quantifying and organizing the controversial "what the 1st Rank character can do" lists describing the Attribute abilities.

Erick drew a line in the sand against this. Thus it was decided that R. Talsorian wasn't going to publish the game, and that Erick was leaving to take the game elsewhere. When the announcement was made, the other employees wanted to know if they could continue their in-house Amber playtest campaign.

[finarvyn]

A great story. It would have been fun to be a fly on the wall to see some of those early playtest sessions.

What I find most interesting is that Erick wrote a rules set, then generally ignored it. Seems like he breaks his own rules constantly.

[RPGPundit]

My first game was in late '90 or early '91; a few months before the book was published.  Someone I knew in school had gotten the rules from someone he knew or something like that, though in fact the actual rules we used were not precisely what ended up in the main book (it was I think some earlier version of rules with a lot of house rules piled on).

Anyways, at the time I joined because I was curious about the 'diceless' aspect and was sold on the power-levels and multiversal stuff (I had not actually read the novels yet, though I would almost immediately after), and I knew of Erick Wujcik as the maker of the TMNT rpg, which I'd ran and though was awesome.

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[finarvyn]

in fact the actual rules we used were not precisely what ended up in the main book

I'd be interested in hearing more about this. What did the rules look like pre-pubication? (I know that there were various early drafts of the Sorcery rules but haven't been able to get ahold of any.)

[RPGPundit]

I'd be interested in hearing more about this. What did the rules look like pre-pubication? (I know that there were various early drafts of the Sorcery rules but haven't been able to get ahold of any.)

Well, keep in mind that this was a long time ago, but I recall that a lot of the powers seemed to be different (that is, to work differently), i think sorcery among them.  I also recall that we were working a stupidly large amount of points and we all had our own shadow, but I suspect that was house-ruling (either the GM's, or inherited).

The thing is I was not the one who had the rules, I was just a player in my first outing, and I wasn't even particularly close to the GM (who, if I recall, was a non-student boyfriend of a female player in the group, I remember he dressed like a punk and was a hardcore objectivist, which I found funny even then). That group fizzled out after three or four sessions but it was interesting enough to me that I immediately got the official book when it first came out (still the copy I own now, of course), and the rest, as they say, is history. It woud be two or three years later that I first got in touch with Erick Wujcik.

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