Amber combat

Step 1. Compare the Attribute Ranks of the participants in any Combat.
Step 2. The character with the larger Attribute Rank wins (page 80 in Amber DRPG).

Sounds simple and straightforward. Then the game goes on to undermine that basic 2-step process. As Wujcik says in the section on “Campaign Advancement”:

Points, desirable as they may be, do not an Amberite make. After all, it’s not a character’s Attributes, Powers, and items that determine superiority. It is how they are used. Pit a skilled and experienced Amber player, with a 100 point character, against a raw beginner with 200 points, and the outcome is certain. To paraphrase an old adage, quite appropriate for Amber, ‘age and treachery beat youth and power every time’ (139).

By the basic rules of the game, a 200 point character played by anyone should beat a 100 point character played by anyone else because the “character with the larger Attribute Rank wins.” But that is of course not the case, so there is another resource available to the players that determine their success other than their points.

In a diceless RPG, the players depend on resources of some sort to affect any encounter’s or challenge’s outcome, otherwise there’d be no mystery in how the game unfolds. At a casual glance, the resource in Amber are the 100 points that each player begins the game with to make their characters. You allocate those points to decide where your character will succeed and where they will struggle. But there must be another resource if the above statement is to be believed.

The combat section of the text is really good. There are a lot of play examples and the text gives the players a lot of language to talk about a sword fight, even if you don’t know a thing about sword fighting except for what you’ve seen in movies. The text breaks your stances as a fighter into 1) attacking furiously, 2) taking an opportunistic stance, and 3) going defensive. Then each of those stances if broken down into more detail, and the text indicates how each stance will affect the battle depending on whether you are much better, a little better, the same, a little worse, or much worse than your opponent. But of course, you never know how you compare to your opponent because the GM is never up front about that point, so your success in the battle will depend on which stances you take to suss out your opponent and then what stances you adopt by what you learn early in the combat. When I first read this section, I made a note about how useful the language was. When I finished the book, I realized how critical that language is to the game because the language becomes coded within the context of the game. The GM is prompted to interpret the language used by the players in judging the success or failure of their actions. How well a player masters that language has a direct impact on how well their character does within the game, according to the whole of the rulebook. That language, that is the hidden resource available to the player. The other way to look at it is that the GM is the hidden resource, and the experienced player knows how to tap into the GM’s unspoken expectations.