So I've run Amber ... heh ... many times. Enough that I'd be embarrassed to count up, and that it might be a futile exercise anyway. The individual games have disintegrated into a sort of rough hummus of accumulated experience.

Then I took a break from it, and coming back I notice things. The very first thing I notice is that the game system says "You have the freedom to create any character, from anywhere, ever! Make the world from which he comes, and all of his supporting NPCs. The power is finally in your hands."

God, I find that unhelpful. And, from the evidence of people I've played with, they find it unhelpful too. They immediately latch on to the few things that are rigidly defined in the setting, and build from there. Who is your character's parent? Which of the elder Amberites do they know, and what are their relationships with them? Where do they stand relative to Amber, the Pattern, the Courts of Chaos, and so on?

Now ... potentially ... the freedom to create anything includes the freedom to create rigid anchor points that the other players can latch on to, as starting points for their own characters. But in practice, I find that people look to the GM to do that, no matter how much the GM asks them to do it themselves.

Is there any way to sell this? Could you, for instance, limit people's right to define those anchors, so that they value the opportunity and therefore sieze it? If you say "Each of you may define one setting element that will be important to everyone ... anything else that you define from there on in will only be as important to other people as they choose to make it in play," will that be a spur to creativity, or will it just add performance pressure to the blank page syndrome?

How do I become one contributor among many, rather than a herder of cats?

Yeah, I've seen the same thing happen in, interestingly enough, a lot of small press games. Everything from Dogs int he Vineyard to Unknown Armis to anything with a freeform component. I bring out a game, say Dogs, and say "Hey, take any ability you want!" And the players will sort of look at me with a blank stare. Eventually, just like I see happen at Con games and the like, the GM will say, "Yeah, you can take anything you want. Here's some examples" (and they'll rattle off a number of examples from characters from the book, characters they've seen, etc). Eventually the players have an idea of the boundaries or just a feel for what else has come before, and start to play within those boundaries.

A game that really gets this right is Spirit of the Century for Aspects: There's a page with a laundry-list of nothing but dozens of Aspects: Not for the players to pick from (though some will), but to show the range and depth of what can be used. Many players use aspects found on that list as an inspiration to create their own.

So, that's all rules-based "Tyranny of Freedom". What it looks like in Amber we have the same thing, but for Setting. Saying "You can come from anywhere you want and have any kind of NPC followers you desire" is like SOTC's Aspects, but without examples. Creating them takes a long time, often accompanied by doubt and some stress.

The best thing that could have been done to remedy that would to have provided three extra pages of examples, one actual play example per page, of an example player creating their world and NPCs (each of the three players creating a very different kind of shadow), to show how it's done and provide some inspiration to the reader. Perhaps another page which shows about a dozen one-sentence examples of Shaodws, a dozen relationships, a dozen different NPCs, a dozen different flavor elements.

Basically, yeah, I've experienced the same thing all the time with my players. I've been in that position as well, where I'm not sure what I should be thinking of. The solution to this is always, Always, ALWAYS more examples, more sample text. Many designers don't use examples because they figure 1) Their players are smart enough to come up with X on their own, and 2) They don't want to "put limits" on the creativity of the players.

...after that, you can try making up fun stuff like "Tools to use to create a Shadow", or "roll or choose from this chart of NPCs and relationships", or something like the World Burner from Burning Empires, but the first, easiest, and most often ignored step is examples, lots of examples.

-Andy

Paul: Well, yeah, I could do that, but then it's me defining all the anchors and limitations. What I'm hoping is that people have some advice on how I can encourage/empower the players to define some of those anchors and limitations.

Also, kill puppies for satan style, you can have default relationships if you can't thing of anything. "Okay, so you guys both met when you were out in porno shadows getting your pimply asses laid as teenagers."

yrs--
--Ben

Posted By: neelkMake a Lexicon for your setting. There is no way to avoid building off of each other's ideas. :-)

That's a good one. I've seen wikis help an Amber game a great deal.

Posted By: TonyLBPaul: Well, yeah, I could do that, but then it'smedefining all the anchors and limitations. What I'm hoping is that people have some advice on how I can encourage/empower theplayersto define some of those anchors and limitations.

Have the players brainstorm the limits as a group, then get into details as individuals. For example, in a superhero RPG I played in 8 months or so ago, I suggested, as a player, that we all make heroes that were children of supervillains as a unifying them. The group hashed it out until they had something to work with, then went off and made characters separately.

Also, as jhkim suggested, this can evolve naturally if you brainstorm the setting in general. It doesn't really matter where the limit comes from, so long as you don't have absolute freedom and crippling pressure on your creativity.

DannyK: This is me blinking in confusion. Amber is too limited (in terms of its setting) to allow players to create important elements? How is that?

I do think you can create Places that matter to Relationships.
You can get kicked out of the same university that Random did, and thereby piss off your mother.
You can get accredited at the same hospital where Brand did his studies of mental illness, and thereby have things to say to one of your redhead cousins who never knew Brand.

These things are Very Helpful for sticking to other characters.

Thanks.

It's also canon as understood by the Amber community through Zelazny. More time spent in shadow places makes them more Real, more interesting.
This binds back to your idea about shared anchors (or 'gravity wells' as it is usually considered on the AML.)

You do want to be careful not to slide into "any cool place has already been explored." As that reinforces the "Elders are more awesome than you will ever be" slippery slope. But the technique definitely helps relationship mapping.

I think this points to the importance of the questionnaire in character creation. If you put locations in the questionnaire (Where do you like to hang out when you're not in Amber? Where did you get your education?) then you can start with a set of important locations.

To boil down what Tony is saying, he's asking "How do I get the players to create things to which their characters can be connected? All they seem to want to do is connect to things that already exist."

And the answer I'm giving is, well... ask them to, in the questionnaire.

I ran Amber a lot in college. One of the disconnects we had was between the novels and the game: In the novels, Shadows are scary, unknown and kind of important. Avalon is a big deal, so is whatever place the Fount of Power is, our own Earth matters a lot, and so on. In the game ... not so much. When we sat down to plan our 3rd season (Senior year) of gaming one of the common goals was to give Shadow more respect.

We did this by basically acknowledging what Jonathan Tweet later called the rule of Drama -- that Shadows would have stability, weight and power in play in direct proportion to how much we the players knew about them. I don't think that at the time we boiled it down to quite so clear a formulation, but that was basically how we addressed the problem.

All of which brings me to say: I think part of the "blank canvas/too limited" discussion above exists in the context that, yes, you can define all these cool shadows and widgets and so on but in a lot of Amber games the stuff you make has all the resilience of tissue paper. So people tend to focus on Amber, Chaos, devious relatives and objects of power because those are the only things deemed "real" enough to have any staying power, and therefore the only things worth putting creative energy into developing.

I guess my biggest advice would be to talk with players about how "real"/"important" you want Shadow to be. Then I would allow each player to propose one Shadow which is going to be important to the game. Brainstorm the shadows and flesh them out a bit. I'd do this even before doing chargen. You could even take a leaf out of Shock: and assign a different player to be the "content boss" for each Shadow.

Just coming up with N shadows before play starts seems like it will go a long way towards colouring your game for you. Suddenly you don't have infinite tepid worlds to play in. You have (N + 2) (the +2 being Amber and the Courts, natch) worlds, each of which has a distinct character and flavour to it. PCs can then definte themselves in relation to these "core" worlds, either as residents or as outsiders who've never been near any of them. Even the outsiders will actually have something to be outside of -- which is helpful in and of itself.

Anyway. That's how I'd do it.

If you're stuck for inspiration, bring along a deck of Everway cards, or a compendium of fantasy art or something like that and have people flip through looking for images they like and then spin stuff out from those images.

Cheers,

R.

I doesn't have to be Shadows, of course. I picked Shadows in my post above because they tied in to my personal history with Amber, and they are a natural "bundling" of setting content which is pretty easily understood.

Other "bundles" that players could create could include:

A major political faction -- in Amber, Shadow, the Courts or all three
A single major NPC
A threat to All That Is that will be dominant during at least part of the campaign

I also would use a methodology of

Everybody brainstorm
Each player settle on one element they are creating
Everybody give their input to each element
Each player pick an element to be their thing to manage and make some editorial decisions about it
Begin regular chargen

I find that in practice it only takes a little bit of structure to get people creating. But having something to push against, or some sense of "what are we doing now?" really does help get people moving.

Cheers,

R.

Posted By: Robert Ahrens
All of which brings me to say: I think part of the "blank canvas/too limited" discussion above exists in the context that, yes, you can define all these cool shadows and widgets and so onbut in a lot of Amber games the stuff you make has all the resilience of tissue paper. So people tend to focus on Amber, Chaos, devious relatives and objects of power because those are the only things deemed "real" enough to have any staying power, and therefore the only things worth putting creative energy into developing.

Robert said what I was trying to express. Thank you Robert. Good post.

Speaking to your example, Tony, there's no handy way to distinguish between "Binky the pet dragon" (i.e., color) and "the Draconic Empire" (thematic, plot-driving stuff) with the tools the Amber DRPG gives you. You either need to have a separate mechanism worked out, like questionnaires, or, as I was saying, you need a well-trained group of storygamers who will cleverly take each other's creations and build on them to create meaning. Either way, there's some kind of underlying structure that helps us make distinctions.

Reward them for doing so.

Social: "Hey! Wow, you totally rolled Troy's Draconic Empire into that bit with Binky the Wonder Dragon. That was COOL."

Mechanical: "And here's an extra character point for you for that great bit with Binky the Wonder Dragon and the dragon-skin cloak."

Directly: "I think the game would be cooler if you folks can pay attention to the things other people contribute and see what you can do to orient on them."

Hrm ... just using the styles of text? That's a thought.

I'd like to point out that, in the specific context of that game, you provided me with a loverly example of what I was aiming for: Doug said "I think that pieces of the shadows around Amber should be rebelling against what they were before." We boiled that down to mostly being around Arden, and mostly being that the shadows are radically changing. And, once that was on the table, I immediately got more interested in figuring out my particular take on Julian, the NPC most specifically associated with Arden. I haven't figured out where he stands relative to these changes, but every single idea I have for him is more interesting than any idea I had before the constraint was given to me.