The Game Without Dice

In 1991, Erick Wujcik published a role-playing game with no dice, no cards, no coins, no randomizers of any kind. The character with the higher relevant attribute wins. Always.

The Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game was built on a proposition most designers considered impossible: that an RPG could sustain long-term play — campaigns spanning months, years — without any element of chance. Every other commercially viable RPG in history used randomization as the engine of uncertainty. Wujcik removed the engine and replaced it with something harder to manufacture: human judgment.

Four attributes — Psyche, Strength, Endurance, Warfare — establish a strict hierarchy among player characters. What creates uncertainty is not probability but information asymmetry (players don’t know each other’s exact point totals), tactical creativity (shifting which attribute governs a conflict through narration), and the phrase that haunts every Amber session: “all other things being equal.” The GM adjudicates how circumstances, powers, clever play, and sheer narrative audacity modify the baseline comparison.

West End Games rejected the concept outright. Wujcik founded Phage Press specifically to self-publish after six years of playtesting. It sold out at Gen Con. AmberCon conventions have run annually across multiple countries for over thirty years, with ongoing campaigns spanning decades.

He proved it could work. Then other designers proved it could propagate.

The Auction

Character creation in Amber begins with a public auction. All players start with 100 points and bid against each other for rank in each of the four attributes. The highest bidder in each attribute is definitively, permanently superior in that domain. First rank in Warfare means you are the best fighter among the player characters, period. No roll will ever change that.

Point-buy systems existed — Champions had them in 1981. But no prior RPG used competitive bidding. The auction was entirely novel. It deliberately fostered competition, rivalry, bluffing, and alliance-building before the first session began, mirroring the family dynamics of Roger Zelazny’s Amber novels: siblings who love each other and will betray each other without hesitation.

Remaining points are spent privately with the GM on powers, artifacts, allies, and personal shadow worlds. Unspent points become “Good Stuff” — a meta-resource representing persistent good luck, favorable NPC reactions, and positive narrative fortune. Overspent points create “Bad Stuff” — persistent bad luck and hostile circumstances. This was a proto-meta-currency: narrative fortune as a mechanical quantity chosen during character creation.

Fred Hicks, co-creator of Fate and co-founder of Evil Hat Productions, ran an Amber campaign using Fudge rules. The friction between Amber’s design philosophy and Fudge’s mechanics led directly to the creation of Fate. Hicks stated: “The Amber Diceless RPG was probably one of the strongest” influences. Rob Donoghue, Fate’s other co-creator, confirmed: “The Amber DRPG was sort of a steady bass line in the background over many years of intermittent play.” The Book of Hanz states plainly: “I really don’t think that it’s inaccurate to say that Fate is, in many ways, Amber but only with some randomization added.”

Amber Diceless is therefore a documented direct ancestor of the entire Fate family — Spirit of the Century, Dresden Files RPG, Fate Core, Fate Accelerated, and dozens of Fate-based games. One of the most successful narrative RPG systems of the 21st century traces its lineage to Wujcik’s auction and his Good Stuff.

The Crunch Before the Silence

Before Wujcik removed the dice, he spent a decade mastering them.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness (1985) was written in approximately five weeks after Kevin Siembieda rejected another freelancer’s work. The core dice mechanics were Siembieda’s Megaversal system. Wujcik’s original contribution was the Bio-E point-buy mutation system — a structured character creation mechanic where players spent points to purchase animal mutations, intelligence, bipedalism, and specialized traits. Over fifty animal types, each with distinct mechanical profiles. In a system that typically used random-roll generation, this was Wujcik’s first visible departure toward player agency over randomness.

TMNT sold approximately 180,000 copies total, peaking at 50,000 per year before the 1987 cartoon shifted the franchise’s audience younger and killed the RPG’s market. It was Palladium’s first major commercial hit.

Ninjas & Superspies (1988) expanded the trajectory. Rick Swan’s Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games called it “the most comprehensive and coherent treatment” of martial arts mechanics “ever presented in an RPG.” Wujcik designed 41+ individually distinct martial arts forms, each with unique bonuses, maneuvers, and special powers, plus a Chi energy system with 48 mystic powers. Every style functioned as a unique mechanical package chosen by the player — making combat identity a product of meaningful selection rather than random rolls.

The martial arts system had balance problems — a first-level martial artist could reportedly defeat a fifth-level supervillain from Heroes Unlimited. But it demonstrated Wujcik’s signature: deep cultural research (weapons history, martial arts traditions, Chinese mythology) systematized into playable, granular mechanical frameworks.

The Diceless Tradition

The adoption evidence for Amber Diceless is the strongest documented design-propagation case in this scoring session.

Beyond the Fate lineage, the diceless tradition traces directly to Wujcik’s proof of concept. Theatrix (1993) and Jonathan Tweet’s Everway (1995) followed. Jenna K. Moran’s Nobilis (1999), described by multiple sources as “basically a cross between Amber Diceless and a World of Darkness game,” won the Diana Jones Award in 2003 and itself spawned further diceless designs. Lords of Gossamer and Shadow (2013) officially licensed “Erick Wujcik’s Diceless Role-Playing system,” using the attribute auction, Good/Bad Stuff, and diceless resolution in an original multiverse setting. Lords of Olympus (2012) adapted the framework to Greek mythology. Dread (2005) replaced dice with a Jenga tower — a different kind of dicelessness, but part of the same intellectual tradition that Amber legitimized.

The dyasdesigns.com diceless RPG listing credits Amber as “The first!!! …Still very solid and its offspring include just about everything on this page.”

Steve Kenson, creator of Mutants & Masterminds, wrote in Hobby Games: The 100 Best that Amber “continues to set a standard by which new” RPG approaches “are measured.” Evan Torner’s academic essay in Analog Game Studies placed Amber alongside D&D as a key epistemological exemplar of RPG design. Shannon Appelcline dedicated a full chapter to Phage Press in Designers & Dragons: The ’90s.

The Honest Assessment

The first draft inflates several claims. It describes Wujcik as a “co-founder” of Palladium Books, but Wujcik himself stated in interviews: “I’ve never drawn a paycheck for any of the work I’ve done in role-playing.” He was always a freelancer — likely helped launch the company alongside Siembieda, but was not an owner or employee. The first draft also claims Amber sold “approximately 30,000 copies in its first year,” a figure the second draft cannot confirm — Amber was a cult success, not a commercial blockbuster.

The first draft inflates the Bio-E system’s originality, calling it “one of the first modular, budget-based character creation systems in a mainstream RPG” while noting Champions had point-buy in 1981. The second draft is more precise: Bio-E was a meaningful departure within Palladium’s random-heavy system, not a broader industry innovation.

Invention lands at 8. This is the highest Invention score in this session. The diceless RPG was genuinely novel — the first commercially published RPG designed from the ground up with zero randomizers, sustained through six years of playtesting and thirty years of organized play. The attribute auction was entirely unprecedented. The adoption evidence through Fate alone justifies the 8 threshold: both Fate co-creators explicitly document Amber as a direct ancestor, and Fate became one of the most successful narrative RPG families of the 21st century. Lords of Gossamer and Shadow licensed the system. Nobilis drew from it. The diceless tradition credits Amber as its origin. This is documented adoption on a scale that no other designer in this session demonstrates.

Architecture lands at 7. The core mechanic — higher rank wins — is brutally consistent. Zero ambiguity about the fundamental resolution principle. AmberCon proves the system supports decades of sustained play. Some propagation exists: Lords of Gossamer and Shadow licensed the architectural framework, Lords of Olympus adapted it, Nobilis drew from the diceless resolution concepts. But the power subsystems (Pattern, Logrus, Trump, Sorcery, Conjuration) are widely criticized as inconsistent, overcomplicated, or poorly defined. Multiple reviewers report that virtually every Amber GM houserules these subsystems. The system places extraordinary burden on the GM. Brilliant core, flawed subsystems, limited propagation — that’s a 7.

Mastery lands at 7. Twenty-eight years of published work with one of the most dramatic craft evolutions in RPG design history: from crunchy Palladium simulationism through deep cultural research to the complete philosophical inversion of Amber Diceless. Identifiable signature throughout — deep research systematized into playable mechanics, player agency over randomness, trust in the GM as storytelling partner. Substantial sole-authored catalog: Amber (a genuine masterwork), TMNT, Ninjas & Superspies, Revised RECON, Shadow Knight, plus 18+ supplements. But the career was cut short at 57. Post-Amber tabletop output was primarily Palladium supplements within Siembieda’s system. Many projects remained unfinished. A strong 7.

The adjustments add +6. Six triggers fire — the most in this session alongside Ernest and Selinker. The Awards trigger fires on the ENnie Lifetime Achievement Award (one of only three ever given, alongside Gygax and Arneson) and the AAGAD Hall of Fame induction. The Design propagation trigger fires on the Fate lineage — the strongest documented propagation case I’ve encountered.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Wujcik spent a decade learning how to simulate reality through rules, then realized the most realistic way to model human drama was to remove the simulation entirely.

The trajectory is visible in retrospect. Bio-E point-buy (1985): player choice replaces random generation within a dice-based system. Forty-one martial arts forms (1988): player selection replaces generic combat within a dice-based system. Amber’s attribute auction (1991): player competition replaces randomization entirely. Each step removed one layer of dice between the player and their character’s identity.

The diceless system wasn’t a rejection of his earlier work. It was its logical conclusion. The man who researched 41 martial arts forms to get the crunch right ultimately concluded that the crunch itself was the obstacle — that the deepest simulation of human conflict was not statistical but psychological. Not “what did the dice say?” but “what would your character do, and why?”

The game he built tells players, in its closing pages, to eventually throw the book away. “The best kind of role-playing is pure role-playing. No rules, no points, and no mechanics.” A game designer whose masterwork instructs you to transcend game design. That’s either the highest aspiration a rulebook can hold or its most radical limitation.

Both things, as always, are true.

What Remains

The Amber Diceless RPG — proof that an RPG can function without randomization, sustained across thirty years of organized play and still producing active campaigns.

The attribute auction — the most innovative character creation system ever designed for competitive party dynamics, still unmatched in its ability to generate inter-player tension before the first scene begins.

The Fate lineage — Amber’s design DNA present in thousands of games played today by people who have never heard Wujcik’s name.

The Good Stuff — a meta-currency concept that anticipated Fate’s Aspects by a decade, now embedded in the structural vocabulary of narrative RPG design.

The TMNT Bio-E system — proof that even within someone else’s dice-heavy framework, a designer committed to player agency can carve out space for meaningful choice.

And the 100+ pages of GM advice in Amber — still described as a masterclass in game mastery, still teaching GMs how to run games that prioritize story over statistics.

He didn’t build the most popular RPG or the most commercially successful one. He built the one that proved the hobby’s most fundamental assumption — that you need dice — was optional. Then the designers who came after him built empires on that proof.

Total: 29 points. Year: 1980.

29 points. 1980. The higher rank wins.

The dice were always optional. Wujcik just proved it first.