Amber: style over rules

“Amber, in the years of play-testing, has been as much a matter of style as any set of specific rules” (page 225 in Amber DRPG)

This is one of the key sentences in the book, I believe. There are plenty of rules to the game, and while the text gives you all those rules, it is especially concerned with communicating the “style” of play that the book proposes. Wujcik’s main tool for showing that style in action are all the examples of play throughout the book. All the procedural rules are followed by script-styled examples of those procedures in play. So what do those examples show us?

First, the game plays out it great fictional detail. The GM is constantly asking the players, “what are you doing?” The GM acts as the characters’ five senses and tells them what they detect with their senses and then prompts the players to react. This by itself is very cool thing. A lot of RPGs today strive to ground their game in as much talk about the fiction as possible during the conversation of the game, and it is clearly part of the “style” of Amber to have the game play out this way. So why is it set up that way? What does the game accomplish by adopting this style?

I think it is a direct result of being diceless and set in the world of Amber. As Wujcik continually makes clear, the characters are super powerful and can accomplish just about anything with their near-godly powers. Moreover, with defined ranks determining victory, every player could see at a glance who will win any contest just by looking at the numbers. The answer is to obscure those numbers and those facts. Only by keeping the players in a constant state of uncertainty can the GM provide them with suspense, excitement, and mystery. So controlling the flow of information does double duty by first keeping the players in a constant state of uncertainty and by second making the players doubt their ability to do all the things they could easily do otherwise. The control of information is itself a check on the powerfulness of the characters.

The uncertainty in the game depends on the players not talking to each other also. Those secrets are kept by pitting the characters against each other. There is a whole section in “How to Play a Character in Amber” called “Keeping Secrets,” in which the players are given half a dozen reasons not to give anything away about their characters. This is part of the reason for the auctioning of attributes. As Wujcik says, “Your job, as auctioneer, is to get those same kind of bitter rivalries going” (225). The GM is told to stoke rivalries during the auction so that the players will put that rivalry into their characters. I think most of us can agree that that is a messed up way to run a game, but messed up or not, that is the way the game is structured to operate.

Hell, secrets go so far that even players are kept in the dark about their characters during advancements. GMs are told not to tell players how many points they earn for advancement. The players have to make wish lists in prioritized orders and let the GM assign the points according to that wish list. ​