Short games, long games, and Amber Diceless
I’m having a lot of competing feelings this week. First, I’m pretty sure that I pushed my setting thinking last week too far into “bleak and unfun” territory, so that is probably going to need some new thinking to bring it back to something I’d want to play. Second, I’m feeling a lot of nostalgia about long-running roleplaying games that I used to play and how that intersects poorly with my current “play all the different games” tendencies.
Some of the best games I’ve played (gm-ed, really) have been multi-year series. When we were living in Ithaca, NY, the game I have the most fond memories of was an Amber Diceless Role Playing Game that I ran for three years. It’s not just that game, though, I ran Amber games for almost the entire ten years that we were in Ithaca with many of the same players over that time and they were all at least a year in the playing. I have a lot of good memories with the game.
When I first got into roleplaying in college (with actual people, that is, because my grandparents got me a D&D box for my tenth birthday but I couldn’t find anyone to play with) it was a D&D game. Not particularly surprising; even then D&D was THE roleplaying game. Which was cool, fun, and about what I expected.
The following year, my roommate and I found Amber Diceless in our friendly local game store and split the cost of the book. I had read Roger Zelazny’s Amber books in high school and we were both curious about a roleplaying game with no dice.
I don’t think it is an understatement to say that Amber Diceless was a revelation to me. Where D&D was about going on adventures and fighting monsters, Amber was about dysfunctional family relationships and visiting strange worlds. I mean, at the time we were still in our early twenties so a lot of Amber games were still weird adventures and monster fighting but the possibilities for different play ideas were in there. It just took a few years, and some new friends, before the full potential of the game pulled me in.
So, we had played Amber and I saw some potential there but we were still playing other games: Vampire: the Masquerade, Mage: the Ascension, Earthdawn, Over the Edge, etc, etc. We were all over the place. Amber didn’t fully get me until I was invited to play in a game with my friend Ahmad.
I had met Ahmad playing D&D but we didn’t, at the time, have a lot of overlap in our friend groups, so we only saw each other occasionally at various games or at our local gaming convention, Gamicon.
Anyway, Ahmad invited me to his Amber game. This was a game that had ten players and had been running, already, for over a year. We got together around noon on a Sunday and we would play until 8pm or later. Sometimes, much later. It was bonkers. And not just because we played for 8+ hours. every. week.
Ahmad ran the game like it was novel or a prestige TV drama (before that was a thing, or at least, I was aware of such a thing). With ten players, we had interweaving character plots and recurring NPCs that would interact with different characters in different ways. There was intrigue, moral dilemmas and hard choices.
It was not what I had come to expect from a roleplaying game but, damn, I was hooked. The potential I had seen in Amber Diceless, Ahmad had finally shown me. I took it and ran.
I think I played in Ahmad’s Amber game for a couple years. After it ended, I ran Amber. A lot. Thinking back on it now, I think a lot of how I ran Amber I learned from Ahmad, both in how to run a game and in how not to.
It’s been a few years now since I’ve run an Amber game. It’s harder to do now, when the game is thirty years old and the novel series it’s based on is almost fifty years old.
Hey friend, I want you to read this fifty year old books series so we can play this thirty year old game. I have to warn you, though, the protagonist is a misogynist womanizer and a big jerk.
It’s a tough ask.
When I ran my recent Amber game here in Beloit, no one read the books. Which is fine. I made up a little pdf of the NPCs with pictures and descriptions but, even then, some of the players couldn’t keep them straight. Which, again, I get. After running Amber games for 20 years these characters are a part of me now and I’m just not sure I how to introduce them to someone new.
This turned into something different than I was expecting. I’ve been feeling nostalgic for running games over a longer number of sessions but, I guess, I’ve also been missing running Amber.
For the last few years, we’ve been playing shorter games. A series will last a couple months, maybe, and then we’re on to the next game.
I miss settling in and getting to know our cast of characters, PCs and NPCs. I’m worried that I’ll never have that again.
The Chronicles of Amber - Wikipedia
