Old Link notes
From Verge
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Ally
Your ally is someone who cares about you or will at least help you. It can be a person or an organization, but not an ideology or something equally abstract. This is someone or something with free will and the means to offer you aid.
Here are some examples of allies (and possible relationships):
- your coworker (shares a common goal)
- a corporation or club (supports or funds you)
- a significant other (loves or lusts after you)
- a family member (loves or protects you)
- a reporter (informs you)
- the head of your department at work (pays you)
- your priest or pastor (worries about you)
- the cute girl in the apartment across the hall (likes you)
- a political party (endorses you)
Your relationship with them should explain (in a couple words, tops) why they want to help you.
In game terms, you can use your ally for extra dice on your character node
as long as their node is uncontrolled or controlled by you. If someone else controls your ally, then
you can't use them for extra dice without the controller's permission.
An uncontrolled ally adds dice normally. A controlled ally -- regardless of
who the controller is -- can be tapped for dice in a conflict, but doing so
adds an X to their relationship edge. If an ally relationship ever has more X's
than !'s, it is treated as an enemy instead.
Clever players will naturally jump to create ally links to powerful nodes in the setting, but this doesn't matter. Other players are thinking the same thing, and the same powerful nodes may be tempting to them, too.
Enemy
Your enemy is someone who wants to cause you some kind of harm (physical, emotional, political, or otherwise). It can be a person or organization node.
Here are some sample enemies (and possible relationships):
- your coworker (envies you)
- a corporation or club (thinks you know too much)
- a significant other (secretly hates you)
- a family member (undermines you "lovingly")
- a reporter (exposes you)
- the head of your department at work (wants to fire you)
- your priest or pastor (guilts you)
- the cute girl in the apartment across the hall (spies on you)
- a political party (denigrates you)
Note that the list of people and organizations in the enemy examples are the same as the ally list. It's the nature of the relationship that matters.
In game terms, whoever controls your enemy can sap you of dice during a conflict -- against any node other than the enemy node (you're never penalized when fighting for control of your enemy.) These sapped dice are removed from your pool before you roll.
Tool or Job
Your tool is something you can use to get ahead. It's something of mostly utilitarian value to you. You can choose anything as your tool (it's a matter of perspective). If you want to pick your boyfriend and call him your tool, that's your call. It means that you use him and think of him as more of an object than a person. It might not be nice, but it sure the hell is cyberpunk.
Here are some example tools:
- your boyfriend (take advantage of him)
- democracy (write about it)
- Megasoft Corp (hack its brainframe for leads)
- Father Cayne (learn about synners from him)
- plasma rifles (kill political targets)
In game terms, if you control your tool, you can use it for extra dice in any conflict, regardless of where the tool node connects.
Need
Your need is something that controls you. It's something that can push you over the edge, make you do things you don't want to do, or make you not like yourself.
In game terms, whoever controls your need controls you.
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Notes from my LJ:
The goal task is totally new. You're going to pick a node on the net and draw a dotted line between it and your character. It's a relationship that you want to have but don't have yet. Write it up like an edge, with a name and an arrow and stuff, but it doesn't start with a ! (it's power 0). Put as many of your tokens on it as you like. This is your bet. Your goal is to manipulate the network and control a path of nodes from you to that target node so that you can create that relationship before too much time passes. If you succeed, you get a payout (you double your bet).
You also get some free tokens added to your bet. Count the number of nodes on the shortest path between your character and your goal node. Add that many tokens from the bank to your bet. This encourages you to choose goals that are far away from you. The number of tokens on a goal node cannot exceed the total of the nodes on the shortest path to that goal, not including the character. So if there's two nodes (power 1 and 5) between you and your goal node (power 5), then you can have a maximum of 11 tokens on the goal. Since one of those is a free token, that means you can personally bet up to 10.
Whenever a player achieves his goal, he redraws the goal edge as a solid line and adds one free ! to it (should be power 1 now). He also removes one token from every other bet on the network and returns them to the bank. In this way, bets are diminished over time. He then draws a new dotted-line goal and bets more tokens, as before.
If your bet is diminished to 0 tokens before you achieve your goal, then you must put a single token from your stack onto it to keep it at 1.
It pays to achieve your goals early. It pays to slow other players down. This encourages competition and keeps the game lively. I predict there are short-run and long-run strategies, small-bet and big-bet strategies. I haven't thought through all the combinations and I'm pretty sure some of them are sub-optimal, which means that I need to tweak these rules (perhaps with different maximums, like 2 per distance or something) to make them all viable.
