Verge Tune

From Verge

This chapter offers some general advice plus some advanced techniques you can use to improve your game.

Game Mastering

There are some basic strategies that any game master can use to make play better. This section talks about some in detail.

Causing Trouble

The game master's main role is Chief Troublemaker.

A game master starts planning trouble in the load phase. Use the load phase to create a setting that breeds conflict! Conflict is what creates fun play. Figure out what seems to be important to the players (and their fictional characters) and start planning ways to make them hurt.

This means creating bad guys. Cyberpunk stories are full of amazing bad guys. They don't have to be twirly-moustache-evil, though. They can be unfathomable, strange, and alien. Cyberpunk villains are often shades of gray, not black-and-white. For instance, Neuromancer has an AI that causes all kinds of problems for Case and Molly but it is a super-intelligent computer and its motives are difficult to call evil. Bladerunner's replicants cause trouble for Deckard, but they are mostly just trying to survive. As the players load up the network, use your voice and your pen to create memorable bad guys.

During the run phase, use those bad guys to cause more trouble. Spend your tokens to create new bad guys to fill in holes and spend more tokens to pump up their strengths. The players may weaken them, but that just increases their value, and that nets you more dice in conflicts when you use them to defend.

If you can brew a conflict between characters, all the better. These are conflicts that sap player tokens without you spending anything yourself. Use your game master turn to sow discontent. Make deals with characters that pit them against other characters. Create relationship edges that encourage players to fight over important resources (nodes they'll want to activate). Make sure that, in the fiction, these nodes are not friendly to everyone. They can ally with one character but hate another character.

Don't be afraid to let the players win. That means you earn tokens that you can use to cause trouble later. Save up for a couple scenes, then bring out a heavy wallop. Make them fight for that scene.

Pacing

Keep a finger on the pulse of the game. If it feels too fast, slow it down. If it's lagging, spur some action. It's okay to let the pace oscillate a bit, fast for a few scenes then slow for a few then fast again. Use your favorite movies as a guide for how fast you want the story to unfold.

Whose Story?

The story is owned by everyone. As a game master, don't come into the game with a story to tell. You might have ideas, and these can fuel your trouble-making, but be prepared for them to fall apart when the players do something unexpected. This isn't your show. You get a say, but the players need to be the fuel for the fire. You just bring the matches and occasionally throw in some napalm.

Token Economy

The game has a flow of tokens between players. It may be easier to understand the game if you know how the currency flows. It looks sort of like this:

1. Players initially earn tokens in the load phase by creating nodes and edges that other players put their surges on. These come from the bank.
2. Each player earns 3 tokens at the start of his turn. The game master gets 3 tokens on each player's turn, too. These come from the bank.
3. During the run phase, players spend tokens to change nodes and edges they control. These go back to the bank.
4. They also spend tokens to activate nodes in conflicts, and to inflict effects on a target node when they win conflicts. If these weaken or destroy the node or the node's edges, these tokens go to the "loser" (the owner of the target node); otherwise, they go to the bank.
5. There's a special effect, which is a sort of free "default" action, that weakens a target node by 1 drain, and the target's owner earns a token from the bank.

Network Grammar

The network has a grammar to it. Nodes are nouns and edges are verbs. Here are some lessons culled from grammar textbooks to help you write more interesting edges. This section was written by an army of nerds armed with dictionaries. If your eyes start to glaze over, just skip it.

Stative Verbs

The best kind of edge uses a type of verb called a stative verb. Stative verbs represent the current state between two things: either a relation or a mental perception. For example, "employs" is a stative verb that identifies a relation between two things. "Fears" is a stative verb that identifies one thing's (probably a person's) perception of another thing.

Here are some sample stative verbs:

• emotional state: likes, loves, adores, appreciates, hates, loathes, fears, trusts
• desire: wants, needs, desires, prefers, eschews
• ownership: has, owns, employs
• belief: thinks, believes, doubts
• recognition: recognizes, affirms, forgets, ignores
• components: consists of, contains
• perception: perceives, sees, hears, smells

If you're not sure if something is a stative verb, try dropping the -s, add an -ing to the end, and add the verb "is" in front of it. Does it still make sense? If not, it's a stative verb.

Say you have "Knight loves Aliana." Is "loves" a stative verb? Replace "loves" with "is loving": "Knight is loving Aliana" doesn't make a lot of sense (it certainly doesn't have the same meaning as "Knight loves Aliana") so it's a stative verb. What about "manufactures"? Say you have "Megasoft" "manufactures" "Brainframe 2000." Replace "manufactures" with "is manufacturing." "Megasoft is manufacturing Brainframe 2000." That seems to make sense and have the same general meaning as the earlier sentence, so it's a dynamic verb, not a static verb.

Dynamic Verbs

You don't have to use stative verbs. Dynamic verbs describe actions that have a start and an end. You can use dynamic verbs like "writes" or "manufactures." These can give the network a little punch, especially if the verb represents some ongoing process or activity.

Here are some sample dynamic verbs that might be fun to use on a network:

• destroys, kills
• designs, invents, creates
• operates, leads, manages
• uses, exploits

Verb Tense

Note that all the sample verbs are in the present tense. Present tense verbs are actions that are happening right now -- not in the past or the future. You can use other tenses, but be careful.

Use care with the past tenses including the perfect and past perfect tenses (e.g. "loved," "has loved," "had loved") because they represent facts that are not theoretically changeable. Edges using stative verbs make for a much more interesting game, because they represent the state of things that can be changed in the world. You can change the fact that "Aliana loves Knight," but you cannot change the fact that "Bob killed Janet." A past tense edge is something that happened in the past and continues to affect the relationship of those two nodes. If Bob killed Janet, you can exploit that past event for present needs.

Avoid the future tense (e.g., "will kill") and future perfect (e.g., "will have killed") unless you're trying to create some kind of strange prophecy; the node will be difficult to understand and use.

Custom Load Phase

You can customize the steps in your load phase to get different kinds of games! This is more of an art than a science, but here are some ideas. You'll have to test them and fiddle with them until they reliably give you the setting you want.

First of all, don't add too much. Mind how many nodes and edges your custom loader generates. It's easy to go overboard, and then your network will be too busy, too crowded, and too hard to understand. Also, the "cash out" step at the end of the load phase generates starting tokens for players. The more stuff that goes on the network, the more tokens each player will have.

On the flip side, don't restrict the network too much either. You need a good number of nodes and edges to spur creativity and give players something to do. How big a network is the right size? The author thinks the existing rules are about right, so you probably can't go wrong by cloning the load phase as written, and changing a couple things.

Focus the types of nodes and edges players create to elicit the setting you want. Verge elicits a sort of Philip K. Dick cyberpunk feel by asking players to connect organizations, technologies, and ideas in strange ways. If you wanted to create a Tudor court political drama, you might ask the players to connect noble people, human rights, and court positions. Two or three types of nodes is about right. You don't have to limit edges at all, but you might set down some rules about what kind of verbs you can write.

The first "names" step in the load phase is there for a reason. It gets actual people onto the network early so that they are well-connected by the end of the load phase. Beware of removing this step or moving it to a later position in the load phase.

Relinking

If you let your character die, or if you want a new character for whatever reason, you can "relink." This means initializing a new character and jumping back into play.

First, pick a new character. Pay its power in tokens. If you are voluntarily picking a new character (i.e., there's nothing wrong with your current one; you just don't like it), then you must be able to afford the cost of the new one. If you can't afford it, you can't switch. If you are involuntarily picking a new character (i.e., your last character is no longer available for play), then you get a bye if you can't afford the power cost (pay all of your tokens to the bank though).

Second, circle your character. It's yours.

Third, give up your old character. Gently scribble out the circle around the node. It's not yours any more. The game master owns it now.

Fourth, complicate your character, as stated in the Link chapter. That is, add a new node and connect it to your character, then let the players to your left and right each add a new relationship to your character.

You are ready to jump back into play.

If more than one player wants to relink at the same time, and more than one player wants a character, it goes on auction, as explained in the Link chapter. Whoever offers more tokens for the character gets to have it at that price.