Verge playtest at Dreamation
I attended Dreamation this past weekend. It was awesome.
Friday night of con, a bit after midnight, jeisen (Jon Eisenstein) and dscleaver (Dave Cleaver) and I are hanging out in the Carlysle Room or whatever the fuck it's called -- the place where all the RPGs happen -- and I whip out Verge Reprogrammed and start talking about some of the things I've changed, what works, what doesn't, and so on. Before I know it, the three of us are redesigning the network management part of the game. You know, once you have a giant network and characters and all that shit, there's gotta be a game out of that. We were talking about how the dice should work and how you navigate all the arrows and how you use all the numbers on the network.
Jon and Dave had played in different versions of Verge, from the first version with the character sheet to the penultimate version without situation mechanics, so they had a good feel for the history of the game. Over a couple hours, we ran some thought experiments and I scribbed a page of notes, essentially replacing most of the existing rules with some skeletal ideas.
Saturday night after midnight, Jon and Dave joined nikotesla (Joshua A.C. Newman) and benlehman (Ben Lehman) with me to playtest Verge. I had to beat up Ben a bit to get him to sit and listen, as he was clearly in some kind of foul mood, telling me that he wasn't in the right emotional space for a playtest and he was afraid to tell me that my game was crap. I assured him that I knew my game was crap, and that's why I'd replaced a dozen pages of carefully typed rules with one page of hastily scribbled notes the prior night. I secured a piece of posterboard from someone in the wargames room and layed out colorful sharpies (markers). Once we all settled in, I explained the idea behind the game.
The new network creation (Load) rules work like a charm. I'd done some fake playtesting of those myself before con and found them slightly lacking. They weren't producing a spiderweb network, but more a long string of characters connected to a few root ideas. It wasn't dynamic enough for me, so I had resolved to add a rule that fixed this. Essentially, in each Load step, players got to add one additional connection between any two nodes. It produced the shape I wanted. Excellent. I cut Load short, after the second Character step, since the network was full and we all agreed that we didn't need traits and gear and other crap. I remember wishing that there were more !'s on things, since the network looked a little anemic dicewise. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't.
The network / setting we created was mind-blowing. Everything ended up revolving around "Distributed Identity," which I think was Ben's idea, and the first node written on the network. Basically, there were these beings or personas or people or whatever that were controlled by committees of people on the Internet. I imagined the participants being permanently wired in and having their subconciouses making "decisions" about the various identities they participated in. The largest DI's (as we called them) had millions of people contributing thoughts. In return, the DI's could take over one of their participants at any time as their agent in the real world. Because DI's commanded the mental power of so many people, they are super-intelligent and border on omnicient and omnipresent. They made the perfect candidates for CEOs of powerful corporations and for leaders of government agencies and countries. Our characters included a DI CEO (of Megasoft, of course), a scheming senator, the original programmer of DI technology, and the first DI ever "made." The electoral system had been replaced by a meritocracy based on winning at games (late night con thinking!) and their were PACs taking advantage of game-cheating.
Anyway, I discussed the Most Important Thing rules and Joshua thought those sounded important, so we all marked one relationship with "#1" and described its importance to our character.
Then I launched into a conflict, trying to be the GM. We had to work through the dice and the network-exploration rules. The night before, I'd worked out this stepwise thing. It took a lot of convincing before Dave and Jon would buy into it, but I think it worked well. Essentially, you used to pick a target node on the network and gather dice for everything between you and it. Your opponent did the same, then you rolled dice and figured out what happened. The problem was search time. That is, players spent too much time optimizing paths and not enough time role-playing or even rolling dice. I built a rule that lets a player expand outward from their character one step per turn. Dice are rolled on the spot and signal is allocated to the next node out. You need signal ≥ 1 to move into a node 1 step from your character, signal ≥ 2 to move into a node 2 steps from your character, and so on. Then players race towards their goal and try to cut each other off before goals can be completed. This forces a player to make trade-offs between reaching out to gather dice and taking short paths to reach their goal quicker.
The essence of this idea worked but not the actual dice. As we played, we all got fiddly with the dice. Why not have multiple signals all covering different nodes? Let two people occupy the same node with a signal if they agree on it. You can kick someout out of a node if your signal is higher than theirs. When someone gets ejected from a node, they have to remove the signal there. In fact, they have to remove how many dice they got from that node in the first place (equal to the node's power). So you might hold a node with one die but you got three dice from it, so when you get ejected, you lose that one plus two more of your choosing. Losing dice this way can cause a cascade of failures across the network if you overextended.
The new Verge plays like a twisted board game with role-playing. Each of us had his own cube of dice in a different color. You could quickly glance at the network and see that my blue dice had these nodes and Ben's gold dice had these other nodes. It's a very visual, tactile game. It's very fiddly with the dice but the mechanics are easier than ever. You rolls lots and lots of dice (I think I'll recommend each player have their own cube of 27 small d6es in a unique color. Maybe two cubes each. Alternatively, you can play tricks with token stacks representing signal dice (a "5" on a stack of 3 chips means four 5's).
Though we'd agreed to play till 2 AM, we didn't wrap up till around 4 AM. There was still enthusiasm to play but no energy left in us. Ben threatened to steal my game mechanics if I didn't turn it into a playable text within a reasonable time. That's the highest compliment of all. I'll spend some time in the next few weeks writing up the rules we played and refining them. Then I'll need some brave souls (with lots of dice) to try out the new rules and let me know if they make sense and work. I'll be doing some of my own playtesting, too.
Friday night of con, a bit after midnight, jeisen (Jon Eisenstein) and dscleaver (Dave Cleaver) and I are hanging out in the Carlysle Room or whatever the fuck it's called -- the place where all the RPGs happen -- and I whip out Verge Reprogrammed and start talking about some of the things I've changed, what works, what doesn't, and so on. Before I know it, the three of us are redesigning the network management part of the game. You know, once you have a giant network and characters and all that shit, there's gotta be a game out of that. We were talking about how the dice should work and how you navigate all the arrows and how you use all the numbers on the network.
Jon and Dave had played in different versions of Verge, from the first version with the character sheet to the penultimate version without situation mechanics, so they had a good feel for the history of the game. Over a couple hours, we ran some thought experiments and I scribbed a page of notes, essentially replacing most of the existing rules with some skeletal ideas.
Saturday night after midnight, Jon and Dave joined nikotesla (Joshua A.C. Newman) and benlehman (Ben Lehman) with me to playtest Verge. I had to beat up Ben a bit to get him to sit and listen, as he was clearly in some kind of foul mood, telling me that he wasn't in the right emotional space for a playtest and he was afraid to tell me that my game was crap. I assured him that I knew my game was crap, and that's why I'd replaced a dozen pages of carefully typed rules with one page of hastily scribbled notes the prior night. I secured a piece of posterboard from someone in the wargames room and layed out colorful sharpies (markers). Once we all settled in, I explained the idea behind the game.
The new network creation (Load) rules work like a charm. I'd done some fake playtesting of those myself before con and found them slightly lacking. They weren't producing a spiderweb network, but more a long string of characters connected to a few root ideas. It wasn't dynamic enough for me, so I had resolved to add a rule that fixed this. Essentially, in each Load step, players got to add one additional connection between any two nodes. It produced the shape I wanted. Excellent. I cut Load short, after the second Character step, since the network was full and we all agreed that we didn't need traits and gear and other crap. I remember wishing that there were more !'s on things, since the network looked a little anemic dicewise. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't.
The network / setting we created was mind-blowing. Everything ended up revolving around "Distributed Identity," which I think was Ben's idea, and the first node written on the network. Basically, there were these beings or personas or people or whatever that were controlled by committees of people on the Internet. I imagined the participants being permanently wired in and having their subconciouses making "decisions" about the various identities they participated in. The largest DI's (as we called them) had millions of people contributing thoughts. In return, the DI's could take over one of their participants at any time as their agent in the real world. Because DI's commanded the mental power of so many people, they are super-intelligent and border on omnicient and omnipresent. They made the perfect candidates for CEOs of powerful corporations and for leaders of government agencies and countries. Our characters included a DI CEO (of Megasoft, of course), a scheming senator, the original programmer of DI technology, and the first DI ever "made." The electoral system had been replaced by a meritocracy based on winning at games (late night con thinking!) and their were PACs taking advantage of game-cheating.
Anyway, I discussed the Most Important Thing rules and Joshua thought those sounded important, so we all marked one relationship with "#1" and described its importance to our character.
Then I launched into a conflict, trying to be the GM. We had to work through the dice and the network-exploration rules. The night before, I'd worked out this stepwise thing. It took a lot of convincing before Dave and Jon would buy into it, but I think it worked well. Essentially, you used to pick a target node on the network and gather dice for everything between you and it. Your opponent did the same, then you rolled dice and figured out what happened. The problem was search time. That is, players spent too much time optimizing paths and not enough time role-playing or even rolling dice. I built a rule that lets a player expand outward from their character one step per turn. Dice are rolled on the spot and signal is allocated to the next node out. You need signal ≥ 1 to move into a node 1 step from your character, signal ≥ 2 to move into a node 2 steps from your character, and so on. Then players race towards their goal and try to cut each other off before goals can be completed. This forces a player to make trade-offs between reaching out to gather dice and taking short paths to reach their goal quicker.
The essence of this idea worked but not the actual dice. As we played, we all got fiddly with the dice. Why not have multiple signals all covering different nodes? Let two people occupy the same node with a signal if they agree on it. You can kick someout out of a node if your signal is higher than theirs. When someone gets ejected from a node, they have to remove the signal there. In fact, they have to remove how many dice they got from that node in the first place (equal to the node's power). So you might hold a node with one die but you got three dice from it, so when you get ejected, you lose that one plus two more of your choosing. Losing dice this way can cause a cascade of failures across the network if you overextended.
The new Verge plays like a twisted board game with role-playing. Each of us had his own cube of dice in a different color. You could quickly glance at the network and see that my blue dice had these nodes and Ben's gold dice had these other nodes. It's a very visual, tactile game. It's very fiddly with the dice but the mechanics are easier than ever. You rolls lots and lots of dice (I think I'll recommend each player have their own cube of 27 small d6es in a unique color. Maybe two cubes each. Alternatively, you can play tricks with token stacks representing signal dice (a "5" on a stack of 3 chips means four 5's).
Though we'd agreed to play till 2 AM, we didn't wrap up till around 4 AM. There was still enthusiasm to play but no energy left in us. Ben threatened to steal my game mechanics if I didn't turn it into a playable text within a reasonable time. That's the highest compliment of all. I'll spend some time in the next few weeks writing up the rules we played and refining them. Then I'll need some brave souls (with lots of dice) to try out the new rules and let me know if they make sense and work. I'll be doing some of my own playtesting, too.