Secret Notes

[Otha]

No, they just confined their imagination to the game itself.  Amber won't work without imagination, on everyone's part, as you've pointed out previously.

[jrients]

Now see, and keep in mind that I've never read nor played Amber, I thought the whole point of things like the attribute auction was to put the competition of the game firmly on the meta level.  John beat me out on the Warfare auction and now I want to pimp his guy over, but how do I do it when I put so many points into that attribute?  If you're not going to play meta, the attribute auction loses all its oomph.

At least from this outsider's perspective.

[Arref]

Other way around.

The auction is supposed to immerse you in pseudo back-story rivalry with your family. It's not John that beat you out, its John's PC, Claymore that beat your PC, Adrienne.

When Players treat the game as a personal field of battle, very bad things happen.
YMMV

[Otha]

Exactly.  I always discourage that; hence the total lack of psych-out secret messages.

[RPGPundit]

I disagree. I think the game is a competition both in character and out; and there's nothing wrong with that as long as its kept a "friendly" competition. I mean shit, there's a lot of games that are competitive, there's no reason an RPG can't be.

And in the spirit of that, only a fool would pretend that players don't take meta- stuff into account in their IC play.  Metagaming is looked down on by almost everyone and practiced by absolutely everyone, even if its only subconciously.  So playing some metagaming OOC mindgames on the other players is absolutely fair game in a game like Amber.

RPGPundit

[Otha]

Right, but shouldn't players try to avoid subconscious biases, even if they can never completely get rid of them?

[RPGPundit]

Probably. But in Amber, smart players should also take advantage of the subconscious biases of their competitors.

RPGPundit

[Otha]

So to summarize, Amber player should repress his own subconscious biases, but enhance those of other players, to his advantage?

Does that apply to the GM too?  Should the players attempt to play mindgames with the GM too?

[RPGPundit]

Does that apply to the GM too?  Should the players attempt to play mindgames with the GM too?

The GM isn't their competition in the game, other players are.

That said, they could in theory try to do so, except that the GM is the one who describes the universe to them, so playing mind games with the GM might result in their own character's understanding of the universe ending up warped by the misinformation they fed to the GM.  Its tricky business, and not really recommendable.

RPGPundit

[TonyLB]

That said, they could in theory try to do so, except that the GM is the one who describes the universe to them, so playing mind games with the GM might result in their own character's understanding of the universe ending up warped by the misinformation they fed to the GM.  Its tricky business, and not really recommendable.

I've found that it's possible to sway and inspire the GM in such a way that your own character's warped and wrong-headed view of the world becomes, little by little, accurate and reliable.  The world turns out to be warped and wrong-headed in precisely the ways your character believes in.

Now that's not good for the universe (oh HELL no!) but it's usually pretty good for your character ... and I tend to think that it's pretty well in line with the way I see Amberites behaving in the books.  They seem a lot more interested in bending the world to fit their preconceptions than in bending their minds to fid the world.

[jibbajibba]

I played a series of games back in the days when people could still make face to face games for long periods and we didn't have kids, important jobs and the like.
Using the Daredevil's rules (an FGU game from the old days for you young whippersnappers based on 1930s pulps) we would have 10-15 players and run the game for 15-20 hours straight.
On the first game there was a party who were looking for a lost city in the Amazon. We had our usual huge number of passed notes.
By the third game whoever had survived had been through a gangster session in New York and ended up in Singapore at the start of WW2. Other characters had replaced the deceased. So of the 12 players in the room I would say that no one had met everyone else at least 2 players had deliberately not met anyone else. We ended up with 4 different parties of PCs arriving on the secret island to locate the holy altar. When they did eventually meet the South African Gangster shot the American pilot but was himself, along with the  Journalist,  blown up by the Romanian count, who survived. The New York club Owner and waiters from his bar in Singapore were gunned down by the British Secret Service man and his Indian reservists. The Count blagged his way past the Secret service guy after all this was nearly all done with notes and the secret Service guy has no reason not to believe the Count's seemingly believable story.
So that was a 15 hour game all notes with bits of face to face in the kitchen as it got critical and we had to actually roll some dice.
For Amber they would be even worse so did it all as a play by email game:-)