Have you ever tried this?
What if the GM (or someone who isn't part of the group) takes part in the bidding? Say, a character that will appear later, or a placeholder for a future PC?
It works pretty well.
IMC, we had two players start, and I listed four other NPCs to round out the bidding. But I also had personalities assigned to those NPCs so I knew how they might bid and react to other bids.
While I generally see other methods than the auction to get such results now.
Funny, I was just thinking about that today.
It might be something to try in my next Amber campaign.
RPGPundit
I think that the best "attribute ladders" are those where there are a lot of steps. I tried once where each player bid for two characters (and I would determine later which one he got to run) and that made the bidding more interesting.
Another one of my tricks is to save old auction results and combine numbers from more than one campaign. I keep the numbers seperate during the auction, but combine them later on for players who want to add late. That adds an extra level of uncertainty.
My current thought is to create a "Minimum winning bid", which, if no one bids over, is the 1st rank (which would then belong to an NPC): If someone did bid over that number, then that number remains one rank on the ladder.
So, for example, I could set the MWB for Warfare at 20. If the highest bid for Warfare was 18, then 20 would be 1st rank, and 18 would be 2nd rank. If the highest bid was 25, then 25 would be 1st rank, and 20 would remain a rank on the ladder, even if no one had actually bid that number in the auction.
The only thing I'm still debating is whether the MWB should be revealed before the auction begins, at the moment that someone bids over it, or not at all until the auction is over.
RPGPundit
Pundit, your MWB concept sounds a lot like a "Reserve" auction on e-bay. When the high bid is posted, it's possible that there is a disclaimer that says "Reserve Not Yet Met" and no one wins the auction.
For ADRP you could pre-determine a MWB (perhaps by starting with a given number then adding a dice roll (gasp!) to make it a bit less predictable) and when bids occur you could announce that the Reserve has not yet been met, which would mean that NO ONE would be the highest of their generation. This might inspire additional bids to top that number. I like having some sort of random element as part of the process simply because I would hate for players to say "oh, so the MWB is 15, eh?" because for the next attribute it might not be. :D
Yeah, my thinking would be that this sort of thing would make sense in a campaign where you wanted to have an NPC who was of the PC's generation and in direct competition with them. You simply set up his stats, point-wise, at the offset, and those become the MWBs for each attribute. So clearly, in each case they'd be different for each attribute.
RPGPundit
I'm beginning to think that handling elders and youngers on different ladders is an entirely bad idea.
I think in my next game, I'm going to make the PC's the entirety of the family, except for a recently-removed Oberon.
Quote from: OthaI'm beginning to think that handling elders and youngers on different ladders is an entirely bad idea.
I always put everyone on the same ladder, but I give elders more points to give them an edge. It does NOT mean that elders are always better for everything, but with more points they tend to be.
I give PCs 100 points and give elders points similar to the middle level examples in the ADRP rulebook, so (if I recall correctly) Corwin is around 250, Llewella around 150, and so on.
Gerard tends to have loads of points in Strength so that it's not impossible but unlikely that a PC would ever pass him. Same with Benedict and Warfare.