Creating a Character in Amber

This is a guide specifically for players

What's the first thing you need to do to make a character in Amber? Listen to your GM. Regardless of how familiar you are with the books, regardless of how many times you've played the game before, your GM may well have a bunch of new takes on the system. So, before you even start to come up with character ideas, check out what restrictions and additions your GM is making.

Second? Make sure that you've got a handle on the game. If you don't know what half of the powers are, sit down and read about them. If they're still confusing, ask your GM. If you do this right, you'll be boring your friends with stories about this character for the next twenty years, but if you do it wrong, you'll hate the whole game. It's essential to get a character you want to play, and if you realize halfway through the game that you didn't want to play a Chaosite after all, you're throwing away a golden opportunity. Whenever you're in doubt, ask your GM. I can't emphasize that enough.

After you've done that, you've got a couple of options. Amber is unique in role playing games to date in its competetive character generation, and the attribute auction system gives you both the best and the worst of the random and point-based character generation systems. I think there are two good, solid ways to go. The first, I'll call the pre-planned method, the second, the opportunistic method.

The Pre-Planned Method

Okay, so suppose you've got a really good idea of what you're going to play. You know what you want to be, and you know how you want to get there. Great! In that case, what you pretty much want to do is figure out where you're going to put your character's points. Think about what Powers you'll be needing, and what stats are most important to you, then work out where your points are going. But don't spend all your points.

Save about 15-25% of your points, and don't spend them anywhere. These are your insurance points. Remember, unlike a purely point-based system, there's this whole competetive aspect of the attribute auction. While you could just initial-bid all of your stats to the exact level that you want, you run the risk that, if you do that, those twenty points in Endurance which you thought would buy you a nice middle ranking actually put you dead last. Since, in Amber, your stats are both important in absolute and in relative terms, you don't want to be caught flat-footed by the vagrancies of the attribute auction. If a stat is going for higher than you expected, you can bid some of your cache of "extra" points to keep up. And if you end up where you want without spending some of your cache, well, you can always secret bid or just go into good stuff.

The advantages of this system are that you can play exactly the character you want to play. It's very much like a strictly points based character generation system (say, GURPS or suchlike), where you know that if you want to play a warrior, you'll play a warrior, and if you want to play a sorceror, you'll play a sorceror. Its disadvantage is that you don't really have the full fluidity that you might like in the attribute auction. You'd be suprised just how little 20% of your points really is. They go like that, and you may still be left behind in an important attribute. And there's nothing like assuming you'll be at the top of Psyche, only to realize that you're right near the bottom.

Never the less, I reccomend the pre-planned method for most people. It's a good compromise between flexibility and rigidity, and, while you probably won't end up with a juggernaught of a character, you will end up with the character you want to play.

Of course, you should spend some time thinking about what character you do want to play... More on that after the

Opportunistic Method

So, you've just been burned by the attribute auction one too many times. You're sick of watching your fourty five points in Psyche buying fourth place, and then seeing some gimp get first in Warfare for twenty points that you just don't have. It's time to get vengence.

If you're going to be opportunistic in the attribute auction, don't even bother coming up with a character concept beforehand. You don't need that kind of framework tying you down. Essentially, you're going to go into the attribute auction in all of its chaotic glory, and, with any luck, emerge battered, bloody, but with great deals on attributes clutched in your bruised fist.

How do you do this? Well, first, set yourself an absolute limit on the number of points you're going to spend. It's a heady experience, being in a close auction for that all-important final stat, and it can be very tempting to spend so many points you just don't have anything left. Don't let that happen to you. Tell yourself, 'No matter what happens, I will have 60 points after the auction, so that I can get Pattern and a little more.' Or 50 points, for just Pattern. Or whatever the minimum level of points you think is viable to get your character the Powers he'll absolutely need. And recognize that you probably won't end up with much more than that minimum: this is the stratagem of the stat-heavy.

In the auction itself, make a certain minimum bid in each attribute (could be no bid, or ten, or something, depending on how many points you have), and then wait for the results from the other players. If it's going for a bargain price, jump in and command a strong lead. If you're way behind everyone else, it's probably not worth it to contest the lead: it sounds like you won't get it without dumping all your points right there. If you feel like you'll be crippled without a decent rating in this stat, figure on secret bidding to match a mid-ranked player, and mark those points off as spent, so that you won't use them later.

For opportunistim to work, you absolutely have to be unbiased about what you're going to go for. You have to be willing to accept that your character might be low ranked in Psyche and Warfare, but high ranked in Strength and Endurance. If you can't do this, go back to the preplanned method and just make your character to start with, and content yourself with less freedom in the auction.

Pros and cons of the opportunism method? Pro: You will almost certainly end up with a 'powerful' character. Unless you get yourself into a really dumb bidding war in an early attribute, you'll have the points to sneak into the top of whatever goes for the least points. Remember, there's no shame in second ranking, especially if the bidding is spiralling out of control. Con: You probably won't get a character who's powerful in a conventional sense. Let's face it, a lot of people plot to be first ranked in Psyche and Warfare. Sometimes they don't, and you'll be able to snatch a good ranking in one of those stats for very little, but more often, you'll end up with a solid first ranking in the stat that nobody else wanted. You've got to be able to make a character out of stats that you wouldn't necessarily have wanted. Also, you probably won't be power heavy.

The Important Stuff

The stats and powers of your character are only the loosest of frameworks to hang your character around. Let's talk about the real meat of your character: his background.

First of all, remember that this is a cooperative process. Don't spell out your character's entire life story to six decimal places over the course of ten pages. You probably shouldn't even write one page on you character to start out with. Get a general idea of what you want to see in this background, and then send over a basic sketch to the GM. He'll probably want to add a whole bunch of events of his own, in order to tie you to the plot. You may, or may not, know who your parent is. Etcetera. Get the GM's input early and often.

After you've got a good idea of the sticking points of your character's life that you and the GM want, it's time to tie them all together. Get a general idea of the entire span of your character's life, from day one to the present. Probably, for a typical 25 to 100 year old Amberite, you want to have about two or three pages of typewritten notes on your background.

Some purists out there are staring at me in open-mouthed shock. Why, they write a minimum of ten pages just for their fifteen year old throw-away characters, much less an eighty year old Amberite! The horror!.

All I can say is, more is not always better. Give your character room to grow. Give yourself the room to reverse engineer your life events as you realize what direction your character is going in. It's not important to know exactly what your character had for dinner on the night of April the 16th. It is important to know where he's been for the last two years. If you must write a novel, you must, but avoid pigeon-holing yourself into a direction you'll be dissatisfied with later.

On the other hand, if you're an old, die-hard AD&D gamer, you might be puzzled as to this whole concept of writing a background. I mean, yeah, you do backgrounds. They go like this: "Fred was a street urchin in Palanthas until he was 16, and he learned to be a thief there. Eventually, he got tired of petty theft, and decided to become an adventurer. The end."

Trust me, that's all well and good when you're out there killing monsters and enjoying the easy comraderie of an adventuring party, but it's not what you want when you're trying to decide whether you can tolerate the impudence of another player character's modern affectations, and pondering whether a duel or poison in the night would be more appropriate. Amber is a game of wide-open possibilities, and if you don't have a framework with which to root your character, you'll be lost.

Finally, a few tips for the whole process:

Miscellaneous Tips

Twinking, Munchkinism, powergaming, call it what you will, it sucks, and it's easy to do in Amber. Restrain thyself. "Confer invulnerability to conventional weapons" earrings are singularly inappropriate in most Amber games. This isn't a game you can win. Trying to win by taking advantage of the loose rules is pitiful.

Shadow is infinite, but only in-genre things can be found in its reaches. Ask yourself if your character from the 'Toon world is appropriate for your game. For that matter, ask yourself if any purely humor value character is appropriate for an Amber game. Don't get me wrong: in some campaigns, it may well be. But don't take that promise of "infinite possibilities" the wrong way: it's not an invitation to destroy the mood of the game. When in doubt, remember that the magic phrase is "ask your GM."

Similarly, degenerate characters are prickly things. Before you play your character who's selling his Psyche, Strength, and Endurance down to Chaos, not getting any powers, and buying a 130 Warfare, ask the GM! It's not that that character is incredibly powerful, it's that it could potentially throw a major loop in the GM's plans. The further you get from a "standard" character, the more you should talk to your GM to make sure that you aren't going to be the proverbial monkey wrench. Certainly, you should talk to the GM before you play any character who has no means of travelling through Shadow, or who's from the opposite pole in a single pole game.

Use your common sense. I can't think of every situation that's going to arise, and your campaign may be so wildly different from my own that none of my examples make any sense at all. Just remember, the idea is for everyone to have fun, and resist the temptation to view the game as something that you have to get more out of at the expense of everyone else.

Have fun, and good luck!

This document © 1998 by Epoch (http://wso.williams.edu/~msulliva/). License is granted to print, copy, and distribute this document to anyone interested, but this copyright and license statement must remain attached and you may not charge for it. The Amber books are owned by the Zelazny Estate and the Amber DRPG is owned by Phage Press. Used without permission under fair use.