Parents?

[RPGPundit]

What methods do you usually use as a GM to pick your PCs' parents?

RPGPundit

[Arref]

For short games, like conventions, I let the Player suggest their PC's parent, as this is a shorthand to getting 'family dynamic' in the game.

For long games, like campaigns, I much prefer having the GM assign parents because that decision will be more woven into the back story fabric from the GM's overall perspective. And it helps to maintain the 'bloodline' tendencies that Zelazny's own canon emphasizes.

Players sometimes choose a parent to "play against type" with and this isn't always a successful theme.

[JongWK]

What about you, Pundit?

[Sosthenes]

They were all killed by marauding orcs. Each and every one of them. Even in sci-fi campaigns.

[RPGPundit]

For my part, its an absolute rule that the one thing I NEVER give PCs input on is who their parent is going to be.

I choose that.

RPGPundit

P.S. Sosthenes, do you even know what we're talking about? Are you high right now?

[Sosthenes]

...deleted because of immense stupidity, coupled with a slight fever...

[RPGPundit]

Dude, this is a thread about AMBER.

Are you familiar with Amber?

You know, the game where you all play members of a huge dysfunctional extended family?

RPGPundit

[Sosthenes]

Ooopsie, too many threads at the same time. Me very, very bad. Maybe I _should_ check my temperature.

Still, I'd much rather have them pick their parents themselves. If they're not familiar enough with the subject matter, it's time for a big discussion.
That being said, quite some time ago forcing them into a too close family structure was one of the main objections against starting an Amber campaign. So we decided that not everyone was a family member and we'd have lots of grooms and Moorcock-like companions.  Sadly, that group disbanded before we could put it into place.

Playing Amber is different enough, unless this particular campaign would have some very tight core concepts, I'd let them choose their parents. This goes as far as actually creating them, maybe with an auction all of their own. Build the genealogy before you actually play. It would ease the players who probably won't ever read the novels. It got some severe procrastinators and at least one dyslexic in my current group

[Otha]

Some PC's shouldn't know who their parents are.  For that reason, players shouldn't pick their own PC's parents.

That doesn't mean that the GM has to do it, though.

[JongWK]

For my part, its an absolute rule that the one thing I NEVER give PCs input on is who their parent is going to be.

I choose that.

RPGPundit

And yet there is potential in letting them choose their own poison, don't you think?

[RPGPundit]

And yet there is potential in letting them choose their own poison, don't you think?

Yes, I don't deny that its the GM's perogative if he wishes to allow players to pick their own Parent, and that it can certainly be a case, in almost any possible scenario, of giving them the rope by which they will hang themselves.

RPGPundit

[Otha]

And then of course, there are players who will willingly put their heads in the noose, smiling the whole time.

[Arref]

Some PC's shouldn't know who their parents are.  For that reason, players shouldn't pick their own PC's parents.

I ran a game where one PC had a story arc that ran quite a while, basically proving again and again that her parent was not who had been proven to be already. I think it ran through three different choices before ending.

Naturally, this is not a common trope but it was pretty noir and made a nice bit about layers and revealing truths, another Zelazny canon bit.

[Sargon]

heh.  In my first game a a player, my GM and I worked out that my character had ben raised by fiona ( which makes perfect sense.. he was a high psyche pattern mage).  Half way through the campaign my character began using a mixture of pattern powers and dna analysis to work otu an ACCURATE family tree, partly for power, but mostly because eh was a genuine scholar.   Well that's when he found out that merlin ( who was pretty much a womanizing pawn and a fool in this particular amber) was his father.

Needless to say that experience has caused me to always pick parents for my players, to nto always tell them( and then not alway shonestly), and even to somwtimes be a little cruel in my choices. ;>

[Uncle Twitchy]

For the campaign I'm getting ready to run, I'm going to have everyone draw from the Trump deck and I'll tell them that's the person that raised them. Whether or not that's their actual parent will be my discretion. I think it'll be fun. In the past, I've always chosen, and often regretted at least one choice as play proceeded -- for instance, in my first campaign I had one character that I'd decided that she was the daughter of Moire and Corwin and raised in Amber as Dierdre's daughter during Eric's reign -- but given how she played and the personality she developed very quickly, I realized I'd made a big mistake in not making her Gérard's daughter.

She wasn't the only one who had the onion layers peeled back -- One player was told that his father was Caine. As Caine was unavailable during the beginning of the campaign, a Loki-esque NPC posed as Caine and sent the poor guy on wild goose chases for the better half of a year before he finally was exposed when the real Caine showed up and told the player, "Sorry, kid. Never saw you before in my life."

From this point on, the player's entire focus -- which was continually interrupted by the other players' agendas -- was to find out who his father was. He didn't learn it was Oberon until the very last session, when Oberon went off to fight a massive battle against someone who came in from outside of the Amber universe to destroy it (while Oberon and Dworkin and the surviving members of the Courts of Chaos went to fight this guy, Fiona gathered the PCs, a few other minor individuals, and a Pattern-artifact key that one of the PCs had found in Tir-Na Nog'th -- which had an empty setting in it that the Jewel of Judgment would've fit perfectly into had anyone bothered to pay attention -- to salvage what she could of Substance and Shadow).