Dice or Card-based resolution systems for Amber

[RPGPundit]

So, have any of you created or used any alternate resolutions systems, that made use of dice and/or cards of some kind?
Tell us about them.

RPGPundit

[finarvyn]

I took a page from Tunnels & Trolls. If you've played T&T you know how the MR (Monster Rating) works, and what I did was to create a MR-type stat for each of Psyche, Strength, and Warfare.

I used Endurance as an adjustment for all three of the other ratings. I also had to adjust for the negative values of Shadow and Chaos rank.

This gives a number of dice to roll against an opponent's dice.

It's a good system if you like T&T, since it's pretty simple and easy to run, plus it gives the players the chance to roll handfulls of dice.

[weilide]

For a while I tried to resolve all conflicts with three-hour games of Monopoly but it seemed to slow down play a bit...

[RPGPundit]

Lol.. seems like not that much experimental stuff here.

I suppose most people here wouldn't really feel that including any such experimental stuff would be really important in a new product?

RPGpundit

[Warder]

Well, beeing in posession of the core book for quite some time I got a few modifications down, but they mostly seemed unnecessary to the gameplay.

I once hoped to use Endurance as an expendable stat that could boost the other three, giving the starting pc's a chance at competing with the elders without scheming(but that kinda missed the point of the game entierly). It was supposed to work something like this; you kept track of your current Endurance pool, used it according to your needs and boosted one of the other three stats up to half of its number. When your Endurance would drop to one third your stats went down to one third too and the same when they went to half. This forced you to know your limits, and while empowering the plyers also brought them down a peg. You could restore it with resting naturally, but even if the idea is simple, the constant number crunching never struck me as an Amber thing. Also one of the reasons why I never liked Dnd gameplay(but loved the fluff).

[Nihilistic Mind]

I adapted a mashup of Houses of the Blooded system (based on the demo PDF) to run Amber and I experienced great success using it to run an Amber game.

[Evermasterx]

Lol.. seems like not that much experimental stuff here.

I suppose most people here wouldn't really feel that including any such experimental stuff would be really important in a new product?

RPGpundit

personally I don't like house rules and in this case I think that ADRPG was so experimental that didn't need more of that. Most of my interest is in the interpretation of the rules when they are vague (often, being adrpg a game of possibilities...)

[downeymb]

I came across a blog post about less dice being more awesome.  The last paragraph really struck my interest:

There's another trick from fudge as well which can be useful here, called min-mid-max. When you roll 3 dice, depending on circumstances, you can take the lowest, middle or highest value. By itself, this allows a simple skill system (Untrained, trained and expert) which can be used with any of the resolutions you can use with a single d6, including that chart. Alternately, you can do a 7 step system that goes something like this:

Lowest die (average 2)
Middle die (average 3.5)
Highest die (average 4.9)
Lowest die + Middle Die (average 5.5)
Lowest Die + Highest Die (average 7)
Middle Die + Highest Die (average 8.4)
Sum of all 3 dice (average 10.5)

This is a fun one because while the averages progress in a reasonable fashion, the maximums have curious jumps. Being level 7 is the only way to get a result higher than 12, just a being level 4 is the only way to get a result higher than 6. This creates an interesting 2 tier model, where the best of one tier (level 3 and 6 respectively) are almost as good as the worst of the next tier (4 and 7) over the long run, but there are some things that they just can't do. I find there are a lot of things this models very well, especially in a game with a lot of competition, such as Amber.  One nice bonus there is that it makes "faking down" your level of ability entirely doable even with open die rolls. You simply take a lower set.

You could do all sorts of additional things to this, like adding or subtracting 1 or 2 for ranks 1 and 1.5, throwing in a fourth die, etc.