There’s an excellent post over on Doyce Testerman’s Random Encounters where he talks about the idea of running an Amber campaign using the rules from Trollbabe, a game by Ron Edwards (of Sorcerer and The Forge fame).
It’s my personal opinion that one of the main reasons that the players who play Amber do so because they desire more control over the story — by playing in the Amber setting, you have a tremendous amount of say over what’s happening to your character and the world around them — it’s that kind of setting. (Maybe not that kind of game (vanilla ADRPG), but that kind of setting.)
Trollbabe gives the player more of that kind of control through a built-in mechanic that lets the player have a HUGE amount of influence over the story.
Let me repeat that: not just over the character; over the story.
It’s a really interesting idea. I can definitely see the value in using Amber as the setting for a more Narrativist sort of game, and I agree with Doyce’s point, repeated in one of the comments attached to the main post, that some people who enjoy Amber and the ADRPG might find a more Narrativist style of play very much to their liking.
You can count me among those who find a lot more to like in Roger Zelazny’s Amber than I do in the ADRPG system, though I’ll admit a certain fondness for the game that first introduced me to diceless roleplaying (and for many of the people I’ve met because of that game). If there’s another take on Amber that can help move things out of the rut it sometimes falls into, I’m all for it, though I’m not actually sure that Trollbabe (or some other Narrativist-oriented system) is the way to go. It does sound like something worth trying though, even if it doesn’t end up being everyone’s cup of tea.
[via a post to 20×20 Room]
