Verge Run
From Verge
In the Run phase, you get to pull the trigger and see the bullet of your character blast into the network, wreaking havoc with the world. You've built the world, populated it with fascinating people and ideas, and created characters you all care about. Now you get to make stuff happen.
Turns
Play continues in circles around the table, starting with the player who drew the last relationship in the Link phase. Each player gets one structured scene during his turn. That scene involves role-playing, focusing the camera, figuring out what the player wants and what is in the way, earning and spending tokens, rolling dice and moving dice around, and adding and changing nodes and edges.
When it is your turn, you are called the focus player. The spotlight is on your character. Other players might have characters who are involved in the scene, or they might be asked to play characters for the GM, but the action focuses on your character's story. Your turn is a "scene," like in a movie. You might cut away to another character's scene before resolving this one, or you might play it out to its conclusion. When to end a scene is up to the game master.
Turns are usually quick! A few minutes should be enough to role-play a bit, figure out what the scene is about, roll dice, and change the network. Everyone should keep play moving quickly and the GM should hurry people along when they're slow.
Get Paid
At the beginning of your turn, you earn three tokens.
Stage
The focus player and GM start by discussing where in the setting to stage the scene. You might say, "I'm going to go to the dojo and confront my sensei about his affair." That establishes a bit about what you want your character to do and where you want the action to occur (a dojo). The dojo is like a sound stage for a movie production.
Be creative when choosing a stage. Evoke the right mood for the scene. Think like a director here. Have your character encounter his nemesis in a dark, dirty alley. Have her learn that thugs are after her when three black sedans try to run her motorcycle off the road on the highway bypass that runs through the city.
The Camera
Do not get so focused on the dice and tokens that you forget the fiction and the role-playing. The game contains a simple gimmick to remind you: the camera.
At the start of every scene, the focus player and the GM need to establish where the character is and what he's doing. Imagine that you're shooting a movie and you're the director. What does the set look like? Where is the camera relative to the action?
Through play, use the techniques you've seen on tv and at the theater. When you want to draw attention to your character's reaction to something his enemy just said, say, "Close-up of my face" and glare at the GM or add, "I am glaring menacingly." Use camera angle, blocking direction, fades and cuts, zoom, and anything else you can think of to make your game more visual.
Getting visual means calling attention to details. More importantly, it forces you to get into the setting. If you are talking about what happens in the game but no one can picture it, you're probably just pushing dice and tokens around and not role-playing. That's like going to a movie where the director tells you about the movie he made, but you don't get to see it. Show me the film already.
You'll probably want to use "camera" loosely, too. Be creative. You can talk about the sound effects, tastes or smells, the air temperature, the chill that crawls up a character's spine, and so on. You can get into character's heads and hear their thoughts. You can cut back and forth between two or more different "sets" or characters. Use anything you have at your disposal to describe what is going on in a way that excites you and your friends. You might want to describe the framing of a scene using descriptions of how it'd look in a graphic novel, for example.
Role-Play
This word is a catch-all for the real meat of play. This is why you're here: to get into the fiction, explore a cyberpunk setting and get into your character, and tell a story with some friends. Always role-play before reaching for the dice and before engaging the resolution mechanics.
Role-playing doesn't necessarily mean character acting or talking in funny voices. Each play group should figure out what they expect, but it's generally something everyone can work out during play. Some people like to get deep into their characters and do the my-character-says-what-I-say thing ("I talk to the drug dealer down the street. [In a nasal voice] 'Hola. My name is Knight. What can you tell me about that one?' I point to the girl in the nylon skirt."). Some talk about their characters in the first person but describe what they're doing and saying without exactly acting it ("I talk to the drug dealer down the street, explaining how I need information on the girl in the nylon skirt."). Other players prefer to treat characters like an author might, talking about them in the third person ("Knight goes to the drug dealer and gets him to tell her about the girl in the nylon skirt."). As long as everyone is having fun, it shouldn't matter how each player role-plays, but some groups might want to set standards on how they approach role-playing.
Declare a Scene Goal
During the role-playing on your turn, you will get to a point where you have a clear idea about how what you're role-playing affects the world. This is your scene goal.
You'll state your scene goal in terms of the setting, not the network and the rules. The GM will translate that to effects to the network. If the GM cannot figure out how it affects the network, then your scene goal is too small. Make it bigger. For example, you might say, "Mara wants to run over the goon with her motorbike." The GM looks at the network and can't tell how that changes the network, so she asks you to make the goal bigger. "What do you really want?" she asks. You think. Really, you want to escape from the goons. "Bigger," the GM says. You think more. The goons are just a tool that the Puppet Master is using to capture you. You want to kill the Puppet Master. The game master likes that: "Now that's a great goal!" Killing the Puppet Master requires that you weaken his node to 0 power. That's a network change.
Scene goals break down to one or more of the following effects:
- You want to gain control of a node.
- You want to strengthen a node or edge that you control.
- You want to weaken a node or edge that you control.
- You want to create a new node and connect it to a node you control.
- You want to create a new connection between two existing nodes that you control.
- You want to destroy a node that is at zero power.
You can accomplish any number of those scene goals in a scene. The difficulty rises according to how many of those things you attempt all at once. It might be easier to do one piece at a time. It is entirely up to the GM to decide what pieces can be done. She may rule that you have to do one piece at a time, or that these three things have to be done together, or whatever. The rules in the Resolution section explain how you determine the difficulty of a goal.
The GM should keep an eye on game pace and watch the role-playing for signs of a scene goal. Once it becomes obvious that the role-play is about to step over something that needs to be resolved by the game system, the GM should suggest a scene goal (e.g., "Are you trying to weaken the Megasoft node then?" or "You'll need control over the Megasoft node to make them lose this public relations battle with your pirate VR news team"). Once the focus player and GM agree on the goal, role-play can proceed for a little longer, to establish how the player wants to achieve the scene goal. But the GM gets control over pacing here. The GM can say, "Okay, bring in some dice and let's see what happens" or whatever and force the system into play.
You buy dice and rerolls, roll dice, move dice from node to node, or make approved changes to the network with your pen. Role-play a little for each thing you do so everyone understands what that little use of game system represents. For example, when you move two dice from your character up to a node you're trying to control, but it's not enough to gain control yet, role-play through trying and failing -- you might still win later, maybe even on this turn.
Finally, the dice will have spoken and you will know if you succeed or fail. Play out enough of the scene to see how it resolves.
Resolution
This section covers the rules for using dice to resolve scene goals. This is the most complicated part of the rules and you might need to read it a few times and even play it a bit before it all sinks in.
Signal and Noise
The essence of the resolution rules are rolling giant handfuls of dice and looking for a number with the most matches. The more matches, the better. If you roll eight dice and get 11222346, you have three 2's, so that's the only part of your roll you care about. The part you care about (222) is called the signal. The part you don't care about (11346) is called the noise.
The number of dice in the signal is called the strength. Remember, higher signal strength means a better chance to succeed at scene goals. The face value of the matching dice in the signal is called the frequency. Frequency is used to determine who gets to describe what happens after a roll. If you rolled 11222346, then the signal has strength 3 and frequency 2.
Confused by all these weird terms? Think about having six radio transmitters. If you can get them all on the same frequency, the signal will be really strong.
You don't always have to choose the highest strength frequency for your signal. You might opt to choose a higher frequency with a lower strength so that you get to say what happens, even if it means you fail at your goal. In this case, you want the power to narrate how you fail.
Earning Dice as a Player
You get to roll giant handfuls of dice. How many dice? It depends on your character's power plus the help you get.
First of all, you get a number of dice equal to your character's power. That's the number of !'s minus the number of ?'s.
Second, you can try to get an ally to help or you can use a tool. Your character is connected to all kinds of other people and things on the network. These are potentially allies or tools. You can use a person as a tool; they don't get a choice in the matter, but they won't like it.
You can generally tell how another person feels about your character by reading the relationship. If it's "hates" or "blackmails," they obviously won't be a willing ally. You'll have to force them somehow. If it's "loves" or "protects," they'll probably help you even if it means a great risk to themselves.
If you use a person node, and that person is a willing ally, you get a number of dice equal to the power of the node plus the power of the relationship to the node. If you use a non-person node, or you use an unwilling person node, you get a number of dice equal to the node's power. To use a node as a tool or ally, you must control the node or have permission of the node's controller. Controlled nodes are marked with tokens. "Uncontrolled" nodes are not marked with tokens, and the game master is their controller.
Earning Dice as a GM
The game master earns dice in a different way. She determines how the elements of the setting react to the character's actions and any elements (nodes and links) that are involved in a change contribute their power (sometimes their value) to the GM's dice pool. That is, anything that the player wants to change gives the GM dice and that makes it harder to succeed.
| Player Action | GM Dice |
|---|---|
| They want to gain control of a node | |
| They want to strengthen a node or edge that you control. | |
| They want to weaken a node or edge that you control. | |
| They want to create a new node and connect it to a node you control. | |
| They want to create a new connection between two existing nodes that you control. | |
| They want to destroy a node that is at zero power. |
