I have noted several times that Amber is all about data hiding. You never know how skilled, strong, or powerful someone else is until you test them, and that's part of the key to Amber's feel, as well as to its success as a game (rather than just a story setting).
SA is built on transparency, but I've been thinking that I haven't gone far enough in that direction to make things interesting. Let's try this on for size:
- Anyone with Enhanced Nano can tell what someone else's Capabilities are. They can note the stronger bones and enhanced breathing for Bio, the power supply for String, the presence and activity in a Cognitech mesh, the swiss army tools of Nano, and can cross-reference the many tiny alterations of someone whose Meta is enhanced.
- You can get this information as a general, numerical "threat level" that you can compare to your own capabilities. Someone's threat level would be their highest Capability and their total number of escalation tokens from Attributes.
- You can only read Expertise levels when they are in use. However, since you can spot
- You can only read Core Values after observing some interaction - an hour for Enhanced Meta, ten minutes for Cutting Edge.
- You can "dumb down" your Capabilities, but you cannot conceal them. You can have nifty cloaking around your implants all you want, but that String power plant's energy has to go somewhere. You can't both conceal the more efficient breathing you have from Bio and also take advantage of it. Furthermore, you cannot "dumb down" and then use those capabilities in a conflict to surprise people.
What are the consequences of this?
- You know whether you can take someone.
- You know how bad things will need to get in order for you to take them out.
- If you can't take someone, you have a good idea as to how much you can wear them down.
- They know this too.
Now things are in a very different situation. Instead of Amber's essential questions of, "Am I cocky enough to fight him?" and, "Do I need this bad enough to fight her?" we have different questions: "Can I wear her down enough to make a difference?", "How much collateral can I afford?" and, "Now that we both know what will happen, what do I gain by beating him?"
It seems to me like this could really help keep the body count down. When everyone knows that you could beat someone if you were willing to demolish a city block and infect all the survivors both mentally and physically, conflicts probably don't happen as much.
Anyway, food for thought.
