House Rules

Partial Powers | Artifacts | Attributes | Attribute Auction

Are you going to use the standard attributes? The standard powers? Probably not. One of the beautiful things about the DRPG is how easily it's modified to fit your specific needs. You don't need to worry about how many dice of damage something does, or whether this ability costs fatiuge. A merely descriptive rendering of a power or attribute, plus some point costs, and you're on your way. You should definitely utilize this to its fullest extent by customizing the game system to fit your conception of the game and its setting.

Partial Powers

Let's start with some basic stuff. If you haven't heard of a partial powers system, you need to. Basically, the idea is that having to buy powers in point blocks that range from 15 to 50 or more points is ridiculous, not so much in character creation, but in experience. By subdividing the powers into more bite-sized pieces, players both have more options during character creation and in experience spending. There are myriad partial powers systems out there, and you can find them with a search on most of the major search engines. Take a few moments to acquaint yourself with some of the premises behind them. I created a partial powers system for my A Tale of Blades campaign, which you can find online here. For your conveniance, I've included a series of links to the pages of the major search engines which relate to partial powers...

Okay, so you now at least have an idea about partial powers. Before you use any of those systems (or make up your own), you need to think about what you want out of powers. Is your game going to allow really flashy, powerful abilities for PC use, such as those displayed by Brand, Merlin, Mandor, and Dara? Are you going for more low-key, but still powerful, abilities such as those that Fiona shows in the Corwin series? Or do you want powers to be very background, as they are for Corwin and most of the princes in the Chronicles?

In each case (and none of those cases are intrinsicly better than another, simply suited to different styles of play), you're going to want different things from your power system. If you're going with the pyrotechnics, you'll want advanced powers to be relatively easy to get, with low point costs, and sorcery will probably be easy to get and powerful. If you're going for the more subtle approach, a better tactic would probably be to still make the advanced powers relatively easy to get, but avoid the more flashy ones, and make Sorcery weak. (Sorcery is, by the way, the single biggest culprit for making Amber power-heavy. It bears very strict watching). In the background case, you may want to disallow any advanced powers from purchase during character generation.

Remember that all of this has to relate back to your theological canon. And also remember that, when in doubt, you should focus. Is your story driven by the conflict of the primal forces, and highly polar? If so, you probably want to weaken Trump (possibly even making it a subset of Logrus and Pattern powers) and Sorcery. Are you introducing the concept of Abyss power into the game? If so, you probably don't want to do anything wild and crazy with Logrus.

This isn't to say that you should cripple people who don't happen to align themselves along the power axis that you chose, but remember also that you aren't obliged to live up to player expectations as to what Sorcery, or Trump, or Pattern "should" be able to do. As long as you're consistent with your canon and clearly announce the powers changes you are making before character creation, you'll be fine. For a more thorough example of altering the Powers system to suit your needs, see my partial powers page. Even if you don't use the powers as written, it provides an explanation as to why I made the changes I did, and how they worked in my campaign.

Now that you've ironed out your powers, let's look at the bane of the Amber DRPG, Artifacts.

Artifacts

Point Caps | Donwpowering | Tossing Out the System

The quickest way your game can breakdown is to have some munchkin begin to grasp the artifact rules. Some object lessons in the hideousness involved can be seen in the Problem Characters templates, but let me go over the main points here.

Some of the artifact powers and qualities can duplicate what stats should do, and some of them can give entirely inappropriate "super-hero" like abilities, all for extremely low point costs. In the "stat-like" category, we have mental defense (especially psychic barrier) and healing (especially regeneration). A literal reading of the Psychic Barrier power (4 pt mental defense) gives a defensive rating far beyond even the best psyche anyone could hope to buy. Sure, it doesn't give you the offensive abilities, but at 9 points (for the power plus conferral), who cares? You'll have plenty of points left over just to beat your enemies into submission.

Regeneration allows healing far faster than Corwin could manage. And when I say "a lot faster," we're talking several orders of magnitude. Get this with conferral and people can put your eyes out all day for all you care. Or you can add it to a fighting critter, not bother with the conferral, and (along with a decent armour rating) not have to worry about anyone ever "killing" all your nice points.

The Shapeshifting powers are pretty obnoxious, too, as rings that turn into daggers or the like make you damn near impossible to disarm. But worst of all (in the category of things stats can't get for any price) are Armor and Damage. For the number of "Invulnerable to Conventional Weapons" pieces of armor I've seen, you'd think that Julian's personal blacksmith hadn't got a night's rest in two centuries. And some people don't even have the courtesy of making their armor big and bulky like Julian's – instead, they want Invulernable leotards or just pay for conferral and argue that that means they can take a gunshot to the eye without blinking.

The nature of combat in Amber makes damage nearly as bad. If you want to nick someone's hand with the tip of your sword, you can almost invariably manage it (especially if you're willing to let them score a more solid hit on your, ahem, Invulnerable to Conventional Weapons self), and with Deadly Damage, those nicks become incredibly serious, incredibly quickly.

I could go on all night about the potential abuses of Artifacts (shudder when you think of the concept of Horde quantity Rack and Cast Named and Numbered Spells), but I'm hoping you get the point. So the question becomes what you can do about it. Well, there are a couple of techniques.

Attributes

"I'll catch his eye as he raises his sword and mentally freeze him."

"I don't care if you're faster and more accurate than I am, I'm better at martial arts. It says so in the book."

"Even if my Warfare is only Chaos level, I'm still better at chess than Kasparov. It says I'm human maximum."

There are some potential issues with the stats. Some people find that the attributes as written in the DRPG really bug them, others don't mind too much. I, personally, tend to want to weaken Psyche, but I'm pretty fine with most everything else, but let's take a look at the most common problems people have.

The Ranking of Attributes

What it says in the book notwithstanding, Psyche and Warfare are the most important attributes. If you don't want to play around with the stats, just accept that Endurance is 2nd class, and Strength a distant third. If, on the other hand, you want to try to equalize the attributes a bit, read on.

Psyche is actually pretty easy to tone down. The reason it gets so sickening is because it's pretty unreasonably easy to get into mental contact according to the rules in the book. Apparantly from the sole example of Corwin's interchange with Stryggaldwir, it was decided that looking into someone's eyes was sufficient for mental contact. Now I, at least, am rather less certain that Stryggaldwir's knowledge of Corwin's name is evidence of anything of the sort. In any case, it seems that the authors of the DRPG generalized from that that skin-to-skin contact could also suffice for mental communication or attack. I've found that Psyche is a remarkably less-dominant stat if one makes a simple ruling: No hostile Psyche contact can be performed unless 1. Trump or other powers allow it, or 2. The victim is completely physically helpless. How much further you choose to take this ruling is up to you (I usually don't allow much friendly psyche contact either), but that basic ruling is generally enough to prevent completely one-sided characters from dominating the game.

Warfare is somewhat more problematic. Perhaps the best way I've seen to redo the physical attributes is to make speed and reaction time a subset of the Strength attribute, not Warfare. This simultaneously increases the importance of Strength and reduces the role of Warfare, which, altogether, makes all three physical attributes much better paired. Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to justify this scheme in a canonical game – let's face it, Gérard is simply not the fastest of the Elder Amberites.

In a canonical game, then, the only way to reduce the power of Warfare is to break up its purview into distinct parts (for example, you could make the attributes of "Tactical Prowess" and "Dexterity"). However, this, too, has its problems. If there are five (or more) physical attributes, it becomes more and more tempting to simply play a Powers/Psyche based character, for you can afford to purchase more Powers for the same number of points the physically based characters spend on all of their stats. Thus, it behooves the careful GM to retain a parity of 1 purely mental stat (Psyche), 1 crossover stat (Endurance) for every 2 purely physical stats (Strength and Warfare). Thus, one often ends up splitting Psyche into pieces, and before long, there are eight attributes or more. I'm not convinced that Amber needs more attributes than AD&D. However, some consider it worthwhile.

The Purview of the Stats

It can seem quite odd to many people that dexterity and tactical prowess are lumped together under one stat, or strength and martial arts knowledge, or psychic sensitivity and psychic power. Of course, the DRPG makes some assumptions in the name of simplicity, hence the "wide coverage" of the stats.

Perhaps the strangest case is grouping martial arts under Strength. Many feel that it is more logically a subset of the Warfare abilities, and, indeed, the primary reason for the DRPG's decision in this area seems to have been a desire to make Strength a more "powerful" stat. I, personally, suggest moving the skill parts of Martial Arts under Warfare, but have found that games work out just fine under either system.

I recommend that you avoid breaking down each stat into a whole ton of subsideary values and bidding on each one of these (eg, Psychich Sensitivity, Martial Arts, Weapons Prowess, Strategy, Healing Ability, Stamina, Dexterity, etc.), because one of the DRPG's strengths is its simplicity. The four stats are generally a pretty good way of dealing with things, and present, if not an incredibly balanced stat set, then at least a play-tested one.

Amber Ranking

The book takes a fairly liberal view of the competence of Amberites. Amber rank, the supposed "base" for character attributes, is said to be superhuman. How true to the stories this is is a matter for academic debate, but let's look at some of the unspoken assumptions of the game.

Glance over the example PC's, and you'll quickly see that most of them have sold down one or two Attributes to Chaos level. Let's face it, 100 points is not a whole lot, espcially if you're spending 50 to 80 on Pattern or Logrus and Shapeshifting, and most players will be quite tempted by ten extra points. This is especially true if the players are unwilling to devote the time necessary for a good set of contributions.

So, given that we're expecting the characters to sell down an attribute, why limit them to the granularity of Chaos or Human, especially considering how discouraged the Human rank is? A more "honest" means of playing the game might be to call the Amber (zero point) rank the "upper end of human ability," (thus making it equivalent to the old Chaos rank in power), and give all characters 140 points. That way, anyone who wants to can spend at least 10 points in each attribute, and be back where they started, while those who would have sold down an attribute under the old system can tailor their points more exactly to their liking than the old catch-alls of "Chaos" or "Human."

Alternately, you may wish to dispose of the concept of specific plateaus to which players can sell down, and simply allow them to take any number of negative points, to a maximum of 25 in each attribute (thus, a character might have a Psyche of 13, a Strength of 5, and Endurance of -7, and a Warfare of -3). Of course, this option will dramatically increase the temptation not to bid in the Attribute Auction, the better to sell down an attribute one or two necessary points.

Finally, you may decide that the book exagerates the abilities of the Amberites, and choose to "recenter" the zero point level down to the level of the old Chaos stats (or lower!), and not give the PC's any extra points for it at all. Equally, you may decide that the book is conservative in its assessment, and recenter the zero point level upwards. Only one thing seems completely certain – in a canonical game, Amberites are somewhere above human average in all ways.

Okay, now let's move on to the...

Attribute Auction

Running the attribute auction proper is fairly well covered in the DRPG book, and I don't have all that much to add to it. Basically, most of the time, the attribute auction will work well, but you have to keep an eye out for abuses of it.

The first potential problem is people making high initial bids. That is, if somebody turns in a 70 starting bid, then it's likely that nobody else will be inclined to bid 71, and everyone will be frozen at their opening levels. While this shouldn't be a terrible thing, it is annoying, particularly if you have the goal of getting people to buy lots of points in attributes, which is generally furthered by highly contested auctions. If this is a problem that seems likely to crop up in your auction, you may wish to consider making a cap for starting bids at some reasonable level, say 30-40. That way, you won't get the following unfortunate circumstance:

GM: Okay, let's see here. Opening bids for Psyche are, um, Jeff, 25, Mark, 25, Nancy, 27, Red, 29, Arnold, 0, and Mary, 75.

Mary: Hee, hee.

Arnold: What? Oh, great, now everyone can crush my mind, and I can't bid up unless I go to 76.

Jeff: Hey, you should talk, Arnold. At least you can secret bid to match us. I wanted to get second or third, but now, even if I secret bid up to Red's level, I'll be pretty damn near the same as everyone else except Mary.

Mark: Yeah, it's like there are only three power levels here. And maybe even not that if Arnold secret bids.

See the problem? Despite there being six players, there's hardly any range of Psyche bids. That would be okay if it was because everyone was hotly contesting the first place spot, but, as it stands, you've essentially got a situation where first place is miles ahead of second, but then second through fifth are almost identical, which doesn't really lend itself to an interesting power dynamic.

Of course, there are problems with a simple initial bid cap. Ironically, they're the problems that the secret initial bid was designed to counter. The point of the initial bids is that players who want to be ranked, but don't really want to spend 50+ points and grab the lead, can get their bids in safely before some loudmouth yells "Ninety!" However, if there is a cap, then if you get a situation where three people have bid the cap, and one of them immediately yells out "Ninety" afterwards, you're back with the same problems. Thus, if you use an initial cap, you might also want to not allow anyone to outbid the current top by more than five points. This should slow down the bidding enough that players can get in their middle rankings without either the uncertainty of the secret bid or the 'twitch' potential of normal bidding. Note that I don't usually take this approach. It's more complex and isn't, I think, usually needed. Only if you think your players are likely to abuse the secret bidding system is it worth it.

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