Amber Diceless Role Playing...Say What Now?! Diceless?

Strange Licensed Role Playing Games Selection #2

In the first entry in my series on “Strange Licensed Role Playing Games,” I argued that one of the reasons companies choose to publish licensed games is that it gives them the opportunity to expand their player base. This was certainly the case for the early licensed games like Heritage’s Star Trek and even more recent introductory games like the Pokémon Jr. game I wrote about in that first entry.

Making a licensed game based on an intellectual property with a huge audience that wasn’t currently a large part of Wizards of the Coast’s role playing game customer base was not what made that particular game strange. In the case of Pokémon Jr. what made it strange was the combination of mainstream marketing, price, and what MBA’s call “cannibalization of brand.” Pokémon Jr. was too expensive initially and it was too similar in appearance while simultaneously too different conceptually to the product it was linked to. Pokémon packs, when not allocated due to small print runs, are relatively inexpensive and a major part of the consumer base buys merely for the collecting value. Pokémon Jr. was designed TO PLAY and without any planned collector value. The $11 spent on Pokémon Jr. was $11 that couldn’t be spent on Pokémon so the game was “pre-cannibalized” by the IP it was leveraging.

As I mentioned in that commentary though, Pokémon Jr. is a great game and

Stan!

and Bill Slavicsek deserve praise for the game they designed.

What is Amber Diceless Roleplaying and What Makes it Strange?

Amber Diceless Roleplaying was written by Erick Wujcik and published in 1991 through his own game company, Phage Press. Erick was a talented game designer with experience working on one of the most successful licensed role playing games ever published, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness from Palladium Books. He worked on a number of other interesting products for Palladium including, Ninjas & Superspies, Mystic China, and Revised Recon, and did freelance work for West End Games on their Paranoia line with products like Clones in Space and contributions to the original Acute Paranoia. Erick was also lead game designer on the video game Return to Krondor. Sadly, Erick died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 56 in 2007. His death was sudden and was a major loss for the gaming industry.

Illustration on Page 54 Depicting Someone Walking Through Various Realities

Roger Zelazny’s Amber books have long been popular in the Science Fiction and Fantasy community and were very popular in the table top gaming community in the 1990s and early 2000s. Their combination of wit, style, and high concept mashup of Fantasy and other genres was a natural fit for a role playing game. West End Games recognized this fact and licensed the rights to the game from Roger Zelazny and Erick Wujcik convinced them to let him submit a design for the game.

During his playtesting of the game, Erick Wujcik decided that the game played best as a diceless system, and by diceless I mean entirely without any element of random success determination. Given that this game was being proposed to West End Games, whose cornerstone Star Wars d6 game system can use BUCKETS of dice when simulating very powerful characters, his proposed design was rejected by West End. In response to this rejection, Erick acquired the rights to publish an Amber game and tried to get it published elsewhere. His first attempt was with R. Talsorian Games, the publishers of Cyberpunk, Mekton, Castle Falkenstein, and Teenagers from Outer Space. With the Castle Falkenstein game, R. Talsorian demonstrated an willingness to experiment with traditional mechanics, but Wujcik eventually moved on to create his own company, Phage Press, to publish the game.

It should be pretty clear by now that the thing that made Amber “strange” as a licensed game wasn’t the intellectual property, rather it was the diceless aspect and how that connected with the gaming scene at the time. This wasn’t an IP being marketed to an audience outside the current gaming community, it was a game being marketed to the gaming community. And when Wujcik say’s diceless, he means without random chance.

Let’s take a step back and imagine what the average gamer in the early 1990s would picture when they contemplated their favorite role playing game. Any such game would probably include all of the following:

1. A rule book

2. Some form of map, but not necessarily a tactical battlemap.

3. Some miniatures or other counters. Before you disagree here, let me remind you that even Runequest which included material by “RPGs are the next great performance art” advocate Greg Stafford said of minis in its 1980 Reston Publishing edition “These are optional, but give the play some focus and help settle arguments over who was were.”

4. Dice, or at least some form of randomizer.

These ideas would have been deeply ingrained in the mind of a gamer in the late 80s and early 90s. You have to keep in mind that while the modern cutting edge in game design are rules-lite games like Shadowdark and Powered by the Apocalypse, the late 80s and early 90s non-D&D space was dominated by very mechanically complex games like the Hero System with its Champions super hero game and GURPS. As much as Steve Jackson Games relies on Munchkin money to pay the bills today, it was GURPS that paid the way in the late 80s. Even more narrative games like Vampire the Masquerade, also published in 1991 in its first edition, had die pool mechanics. Yes, there were automatic successes possible in Vampire, but they were tied to the size of die pools and the statistical probability of rolling a success with that pool size.

At that time task resolution in role playing games meant rolling dice, with rare exception. Dice were such a central part of the role player’s world that there have been books written about the obsession. Show me a gamer and I’ll show you someone with a dice collection. That’s right…”collection.” Strange multi-sided dice are almost synonymous with the hobby.

That’s what makes Erick Wujcik’s Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game a perfect candidate for this series of articles. Who would have thought that anyone could design a diceless role-playing game?

What is most striking to me is that the game’s basic resolution system assumes that “whoever has the higher stat wins…always wins.” How can you make a workable game based on this premise? Wouldn’t this lead to the game being just a series of frustrations. Even if there are means for the Game Master to override that base mechanic, doesn’t that just exchange Game Master whim for fair randomization? Who could design such a system and have it play like an actual game and not just as an outline for improv sessions? Not me, that’s for sure.

If asked before reading Amber if designing such a game was possible at all, I’d have said that it was impossible. I would have argued that any such design wouldn’t be a game at all and would be nothing more that guided storytelling. I would have been wrong.

The fact is that Amber is a fantastic game. Erick Wujcik’s basic system of “highest is best” provides a foundation for role playing, but he provides a detailed Game Master section that discusses how circumstances and player innovation should be used and interpreted to allow them to overcome otherwise insurmountable obstacles. The advice is so specific and particular that it removes a lot of whim or subjectivity from the process and provides fantastic advice for game masters in any game. I still think that Amber doesn’t quite have enough mechanics for my tastes. I think that it can fall into merely being improv sessions, but Wujcik’s writing convinced me that it doesn’t have to do so.

Even though I might disagree on the edges with Wujcik regarding the game being better without dice, I can say that Amber’s Game Master section should be read by everyone who wants to be a GM regardless of the game they play. In the section on combat resolution, Wujcik provides advice on Game Mastering that demonstrates how one can become a fair and engaging arbitrator of rules and interactive storyteller. The book is a must own for any Game Master. You may never run Amber, but reading it and learning from it will make every game you run better.