Magic and Powers

In past Amber games I've had some serious trouble coming to an agreement with players on how draining magic and the advanced powers (Logrus, Shapeshift, Advanced Pattern, etc.) turn out to be. You know how it is... I argue that walking the Pattern of the mind is a challenging and dramatic thing, but the player wants to use it to teleport like a superhero, bamf!, bamf!, bamf!

So I will be explicit: Dramatic uses of Power (even of just plain old normal Pattern) will require... yes, you guessed it, drama points.

In general the criterion I'm going to be using is this: Would I be happy with you doing this all the time without thinking about it? Remember that I am trying to make dramatic moments (like tearing a shadow to pieces) dramatic by keeping them rare. You can still do them, just not all the time.

These criterion do make some of the powers untenable. Power Words would be stupidly overpriced if you needed to pay both character points and drama points for them so everyone can be assumed to have picked them up if they want to pay the DP cost (see below). Conjuration has always been a questionable power, and I'm dumping it. Broken Pattern isn't a separate power, it's Basic Pattern and a really keen Restriction. Otherwise, if it's not listed it's because I forgot about it, not because it's forbidden.

Here are my first-draft estimates of what the costs of various efforts will be:

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