Verge Versions
From Verge
All the versions of Verge -- even the more traditional early versions -- share two characteristics:
- Verge is focused on creating post-cyberpunk stories, but can be used for all kinds of settings with a little tweaking.
- Verge uses piles of 6-sided dice in an uncommon way, rolling pools of them and grouping them into matching sets.
Here's a rundown of the game's revision history. All the games are actually titled Verge but I added subtitles after the colon to differentiate the playtest editions. The first revision to be born with a subtitle was Verge: Recharged; the rest acquired their subtitles posthumously.
Contents |
Verge: Draft
The first version was published in my blog on March 31, 2005. By April 30, I had a mostly complete game. Drive had solidified as a concept.
Verge: Rewritten
It had a GM. It had loose character roles (like classes, but not that restrictive), and pretty cool flagging mechanics. Play focused on a character Drive, which the GM could use to force you to do bad things to yourself. You decided how many dice you would roll in conflicts against yourself, and the rewards would be proportionate to the risk you took. You could "burn" your friends to get rerolls and they'd take burn damage and could turn into enemies. Really, there was a lot of awesome stuff in this game.
The first PDF was published on May 1, 2005.
Verge: Restructured
On May 11, 2005, I reorganized the rules based on player feedback and my own sense of sanity. I added a character sheet for the first time. I overhauled a couple chapters.
The only artifact I have from this time is a PDF-to-text conversion that was done hastily and not well. The character sheet (at the end) didn't convert well at all.
I playtested this revision at FiranCon 2005 for Woody, Sam, Jessica, Carrie Ann, Connie, and (I think) Jon E. I thought the playtest showed a rockin' game. The players had a lot of fun.
Verge: Redline
On June 30, 2005, I released a new version. It boasted a new color cover featuring my Verge-TV logo. I improved Drive rules and added some stuff for Gear and Boosts. Since the cover had a horizontal red line through the Verge title, I call it the Redline version.
Andy Kitkowski ran this version for some friends at his house con, YukiCon, and it played well. He posted a beaming review of it. Then I changed the rules entirely and he stopped being interested, which is only fair.
I ran my own playtest on a MUSH server on November 5, 2005. I had started to find problems with the rules and needed to figure out how to fix them.
In early September 2005, I started getting black and white art from my two artists: Nathan Bolt and Lee Cerolis. I wish I had money to pay them, but I offered them free ads. I feel awful that I haven't delivered a published game yet, if only because of my promises to them. I will pay up eventually!
In November 2005, I attended MACE and playtested Verge with a few people.
Verge: Reprogrammed
Not long after that, I created my network concept and added it onto the traditional game rules. I playtested that version at IKEAcon on March 13, 2006 with Tony Lower-Basch and Sean de Arment. Tony single-handedly destroyed the dice rules in his wonderful way and pointed to the network map we'd drawn and said, "This is your game. Make the game about this." I did. There was lots of talk about getting rid of the GM, but I hadn't yet.
This was the first "modern" revision of Verge, based entirely on the network map. The character sheet was gone. I worked with Jake Richmond to illustrate a color cover (the one I use now). I playtested it at FiranCon 2006 and an improved version of the same rules at AdamCon 2006 (with Dave Cleaver, Brandon, Jon R., and Jon E. -- and Dan R. contributed ideas). These playtests produced lackluster play. The network creation was a blast but the play wasn't there.
Verge: Overhauled
Though the title on the web page remained "Verge: Reprogrammed," this was a fairly significant change in many ways. I made the fixes in-place on the wiki page on August 8, 2006.
I played this version with a few folks (Ross Winn, Matt Gandy, Clyde Rhoer, and Tim Koppang played; Piers Brown watched and contributed) in the Games On Demand room at GenCon later in August 2006. I introduced the multi-colored sharpie thing so we didn't have to initial all our contributions. Again, network creation rocked (despite con-weary players) but role-play was meh.
Nonetheless, Verge was being mentioned -- by John Harper in Attacks of Opportunity and by Ross Winn in Close to the Edit. That was cool!
I kept updating. On September 14, 2006, Ron Edwards called me to chat about what was broken. I summed up the problems later:
- I don't really know what the game is about.
- The game really doesn't reward the players for anything.
- The game puts the players in a bird's eye view of the fiction rather than in it.
I thought a lot about #1 and came up with a few answers or themes, including 'human without borders' and 'human rights and dignity.' I never really solved #2. I solved #3 with the "video camera" rules, to some extent, plus some play procedure.
In early October, JD Corley emailed me a report of a disastrous playtest. It felt awful to have sent out a game that produced a lousy time for a handful of fellow gamers and it spurred me to work harder on the rules. The essence of the complaint: "Now what?" The game did not produce a clear path for players. Once they built the network / setting, they had no idea what to do. The game lacked clear "situation."
I'd gotten a handful of other independent playtest reports, mostly all complaining about the same thing. I spent a lot of time not working on Verge after that. I was frustrated and a lot was going on in my life.
Verge: Recharged
I took my game to Dreamation in late January 2007, and more or less refused to run it because it was so broken. I did, however, have a great redesign discussion with Jon E. and Dave Cleaver. The next night, I whipped out my two pages of notes and ran an impromptu playtest/design hybrid session with Jon, Dave, Ben Lehman, and Joshua A.C. Newman. I presented what I thought would work and we bounced ideas around. The four gave me tons of awesome advice.
I brought that advice home and rolled it around in my brain for a while. At AdamCon in July 2007, without any new changes written down, I ran Verge out of my head for Jon E., Jon R., Fred Hicks, Anik, and Janet. The players loved the network creation rules, which were pretty finely tuned. Play was interesting but missing something. Everyone agreed that there wasn't a clear path to play -- a perennial complaint. But I'd been able to playtest a simpler variant of the network-control rules that came out of the Dreamation playtest, and these were definitely working. They needed some tweaks.
The Verge wiki page got an overhaul in August 2007. I archived the Reprogrammed pages for reference and started a new Recharged page with links to various chapters. These featured even better-tuned network creation rules that bring out the cyberpunk, the separation of the character-generation step from the setting-generation step, and the new network-control rules (written down for the first time).
Revised again
In January and February 2008, I revised the game for playtesting at Dreamation. The RISK dice stuff is gone. Control is clarified. Play is much looser and more freeform until a conflict comes to a head, and then the dice get in and out quickly. Negotiation of stakes is done post-conflict "with a stick," a la the system in In a Wicked Age.
I also talked on the phone with Jason Corley for about 2.5 hours. He had lots of suggestions and corrections that I incorporated into the February 17 edit.
This is the current version. Please playtest it!
