Attempt to Fix (not ban) Events

Ankha wrote:

Azel wrote:

self wrote:

Off-the-cuff terrible idea:

what if an event can be cancelled as it is played if all the other methuselahs at the table agree to each pay 1 pool to cancel it? that way if someone tries to play an event that makes the entire table shit its pants, it can be quietly made to go away for a cost.

I had a more detailed explanation but my post didn't take the first time and i can't be bothered to retype it right before bed.

That's actually a pretty nice idea.

That's actually pretty bad, making events a big lottery: successful (or not) if you draw it early (4 or 5 players left), but surely unsuccessful otherwise. Given a chance to deny you an advantage, most players will use it.

And that is without people trying to get a dog-poo-deal and polish into a diamond-deal so you'll agree to your predator burning 1 pool, you burning 3 and your cross table burning 1 pool...

self wrote:

Off-the-cuff terrible idea:

what if an event can be cancelled as it is played if all the other methuselahs at the table agree to each pay 1 pool to cancel it?

I don't even want to start considering how many more Parity Shifts I would see with the ruling in place.

well, i did say it was a terrible idea.

TryDeflectingThisGrapple wrote:

Personally, I think the creating the event class of cards was a stroke of design brilliance, given the intent of introducing something representing an external force. It doesn't collide with the survival tools often present in MPA space, so people can actually include it in decks.

say what? it's never an external force. the only external forces in VTES show up during storyline events. building a deck around them is no more external than playing a govern or KRC. hey you suddenly lost 3 pool, sorry, i guess these things just happen!

and creating the mechanic as a clone of masters isn't elegant design, just convenient. I'm pretty sure the intention was to create "big" master cards like Week of Nightmares, without being so vulnerable to sudden reversal. not getting in the way of existing masters was just a bonus.

"They can't be easily removed!"

Double Duh. You don't just laugh away the end of times over a cup of coffee. Further, I suggest that if 4 players at a table really need to fix a widespread event problem, it can be orchestrated by removing the offending Methesulah, or in the absolute worst case, creating an unfavorable VP cascade.

they can't be easily removed, except when they are? kill the guy who unleashed Wormwood on the world, that'll solve everything. play the Uncoiling, that'll reverse The Unmasking and all memories will be wiped. if you want to defend VTES for thematic consistency, events are the worst offenders of all.

a cardtype that encourages 4 players dogpiling on 1 is acceptable in VTES? weird, I thought that's what the game was trying to avoid.

"They're global, persistent and cramp my style"

Gee whiz. I don't see Gehenna starting on Tuesday and being over at the end of the work week. Nor was it intended to make your life easier - you aren't supposed to loko forward to it like a schoolboy anticipating recess.

the point of Gehenna in the story was not to cramp every vampire's style and be annoying. it was to END VAMPIRES and sometimes also the world (also to end the game product line forever so it could be rebooted). unfortunately, the Gehenna cards don't do a very good job of speeding up the end of the table, they tend to prolong it by making everyone weaker.
funny how the most used event cards DO make someone's life easier, at everyone else's expense. players do look forward to getting them in play because that's when they get their own personal recess.

"They're too powerful!"

Now that's just silly.

Sure, there are plenty of stupid pet tricks you can use to get a VP or two, or blow up a table if people get greedy and careless. There are several things in that list having synergy with a larger deck construct (Hunger Moon with blood deprivation). But is anyone really complaining about Absimiliard's + ally theft + Autaurkis or Absimiliard's + Ancilla Empowerment? Or ANYTHING with Blood Trade? Heck, even the card giving one of the most potentially powerful effects in the game (library search) is in the TWDA a grand total of.....wait for it.....4 times.

odd strawman choices. absimiliard tend to not be a game-winning strategy since it only lasts for 1 VP, so it's not worth jumping through all those hoops. Blood Trade is used to enable other Gehenna events, and is very good at that because there's no penalty. Inconnu Tutelage is one of the weakest library-search cards in the game for various reasons, I'm actually surprised its count is as high as 4. (TWDA statistics are flimsy evidence for discussing relative power level anyway)

the existence of weak/unpopular events means nothing, even Dominate has some stinkers in its card pool. and it's not about the strong individual Events either. the "too powerful" argument here is that Events as a concept are too powerful compared to other concepts, because of the way they're integrated. they're global, they're persistent, they cost 0 pool, and they change the rules of the game. they're MASTER PHASE'S EVIL TWIN BROTHER, with red food coloring! they're immune to suddens, but since we get silver bullets of a different caliber it's supposed to be fair.

It's much like the Imbued, there's some crappy Imbued cards nobody uses, and the standard set everybody uses. they're powerful not because they can bleed for 6 or call parity shifts, they're powerful because of the way they interact with many existing cards. cards that assume the game is about vampires and not allies. on top of that they get special protection from most existing ally weaknesses. it's yet another part of the meta guessing game you have to prepare for.

it's interesting how the post-Gehenna events were much more reasonable in design and power level. they might as well be inoffensive master cards... which is kind of stupid, it makes it all inconsistent. are they supposed to be huge gamechangers or red-flavored masters? anyway, it's like a hostage situation, as the other events certainly don't deserve to be hosed just because Gehenna causes trouble.

"Events are a pain in the ass to bookkeep!"

Yeah, there is truth here. I have enough trouble keeping track of mechanical bits like Fame/Anarch Revolt ticks, Perfectionist blood gain, empty minions must hunt first and whatever else. Overlay all that with getting a strategically correct order of actions in my turn. Chaos ensues.

But it's a part of the game we already cooperatively deal with - the whole table has to join in to police the effects and deal with the mental fatigue that results. Inconvenience doesn't seem like a justifiable reason to nerf a large class of cards.

keeping track of blood gains/losses is one thing. many players unconsciously keep mental tallies of where the blood counters are on the table. if someone made an error with blood counters, it's trivial to correct in 90% of cases.

this is a very different ballpark from those Gehenna cards that require memorizing someone's entire turn. is this the first discipline card played by that vampire this turn? did you remember not to replace? did you illegally hunt? which vampires didn't hunt this turn? did you commit diablerie before or after the last gehenna card was played? but this only applies to certain vampire ages! did you calculate your vampire's new capacity after wormwood? WELCOME TO VAMPIRE: THE ETERNAL SPREADSHEET, NO FUN ALLOWED.

"inconvenience" might not be a valid reason to deal with these cards, but it certainly is a reason to not want to play VTES and go setup some other game instead. mass bookkeeping events may be grudgingly tolerated in tournaments, but it's almost always a faux pas in casual games. it certainly doesn't motivate me to improve my game, more like I'll just avoid that person.

actually I take that back, inconvenience was half the reason Madness of the Bard was banned.


If it were up to me, I'd just ban all Gehenna events and let the game sort itself out. a few cards and vampires will become unplayable, but whatever. maybe we can keep Dragonbound, the rest aren't too important.

Haze,
Gehenna Events are 'an external force' in the sense that:
1) Other vampires aren't behind it.
2) It was meant to be the 'end of the Vampiric and Supernatural World' in VtM (which conveniently allowed designers to end one edition before starting another much like they do in D&D but with more theme than just... we want to sell you 45 more books for $50 each)

3) They are meant to screw the supernaturals and the vampires most in the RPG, so they did in the game. They do a rather good job of ending the vampires when there are other things in play other than vampires (Hence why I was trying to work Wormwood and Spell of Life together in a deck)


Four players dogpiling on one is acceptable VTES strategy Haze. If you deck will take out the rest, then the solution to survival is to dogpile the one, and then fight it out amongst the rest.

The choice of events isn't a strawman, it's to point out that of the 37 events people are claiming to want to ban... roughly 4 regularly see play. So to confirm your claim that ALL events should be banned, kindly prove how these events (i.e. Absimiliard's and the other 33 infrequently used Events) can be 'broken' in the game to result in the need for them to be banned. You need to wreck the game as badly as PTO or the Seat Switchers to get to that goal.

Events are global, they are persistent. Only some are Gehenna cards.
They last as long as the Methuselah does. Most of them hamstring the player playing them... the majority have DNR clauses such as "Until a vampire commits diablerie" or "Until a vampire successfully hunts". A large majority have a requirement for other Gehenna cards to be in play, most of the seriously style-cramping ones require two Gehenna cards to be in play. The irritating ones are usually one Gehenna card in play... the screw you all ones a 3 Gehenna requirement.

Heck if you're trying to play a Wormwood Deck at full speed you will probably have a 3 card handsize without some kind of other tech to bump it up. Been there, done that, got the tshirt and the ousted-by-my-predator for it.


I'd be suggesting that Madness of the Bard got banned because "rhyming" doesn't work in all languages easily, on top of its primary effect being to cause irritation. I know a game where Madness of the Bard would be IDEAL... It's often called Bartok or its nastier version called Chairman Mao. Happy to talk about both in another thread.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

Haze,
Gehenna Events are 'an external force' in the sense that:
1) Other vampires aren't behind it.

methuselahs are vampires. in VTES, methuselahs play the events and control them. there's nothing external about the way they're handled. do you consider Smiling Jack or Pentex Subversion to be some uncontrollable external force?

2) It was meant to be the 'end of the Vampiric and Supernatural World' in VtM (which conveniently allowed designers to end one edition before starting another much like they do in D&D but with more theme than just... we want to sell you 45 more books for $50 each)

isn't that what i said?

3) They are meant to screw the supernaturals and the vampires most in the RPG, so they did in the game. They do a rather good job of ending the vampires when there are other things in play other than vampires (Hence why I was trying to work Wormwood and Spell of Life together in a deck)

more like the game goes on forever because minions are constantly screwed and can't effectively go on the offensive (annoying event deck). either that or the events enable turtling and master recursion (top tier event decks)
Dragonbound seems to be the only one designed for direct ousting power. Dragonbound's cool.

Four players dogpiling on one is acceptable VTES strategy Haze. If you deck will take out the rest, then the solution to survival is to dogpile the one, and then fight it out amongst the rest.

yes thank yuo I am new 2 game, plz explain why party shift is good?
the entire game was designed to discourage 4v1s except in extreme dire circumstances. everyone talks big about table threats but in practice they are very fucking rare. Only once have I seen the 4v1 legitimately happen, everyone instantly agreed they were in trouble, and even still one player backstabbed the alliance to get his 1 VP.

but when someone plays mass Gehenna events? every single time, I've seen it turn into the dogpile. that's how much impact those little cards have, they drive everyone crazy in a way that even tier-1 tablesweep decks rarely do.

(coincidentally, the one time I saw the 4v1 happen, it was also a mass Gehenna event deck. but that wasn't the real reason everyone was scared)

The choice of events isn't a strawman, it's to point out that of the 37 events people are claiming to want to ban... roughly 4 regularly see play. So to confirm your claim that ALL events should be banned, kindly prove how these events (i.e. Absimiliard's and the other 33 infrequently used Events) can be 'broken' in the game to result in the need for them to be banned. You need to wreck the game as badly as PTO or the Seat Switchers to get to that goal.

do you know what a strawman is? maybe I missed the post where people complained about absimiliard's army appearing, ever.
people aren't suggesting to hose events because 100% of events are broken, it's because they want a way to fix the problem events. because they can't fix them in-game because the entire concept is a broken non-interactive mechanic. but I don't really like the rules suggestions as they'd unfairly hose the balanced (non-Gehenna) events too.

I don't want to ban all events, just the 23 Gehenna cards, minus Dragonbound. the game would lose nothing important if they disappeared, except for Dragonbound. burn them all.
there's 4 individually powerful events that could go to trial for individual bans, all of which are Gehenna type. the other "problem card" is actually a string of Gehenna events that causes headaches for everyone because of the cumulative effects and rules-refereeing. it's not one card, it's a collective. the disruptive power of these events are amplified by the fact they are master phase's evil twin brother and can't be interacted with normally. you need specialized silver bullets wait I already explained all this in the previous post goddamnit

Anthelios is definitely broken on its own, and I would argue the Gehenna string is game breaking in its own way. it breaks the fun with its constant rules-upkeep. not all of the banned list is RtoI powerful, in my opinion most of those cards belong there because they interfere too much with the dynamics of VTES. hell, I could argue that none of them are overly powerful, and that players should just learn to adapt against them. with silver bullets! use more deflection, delaying tactics, sudden reversal, and arson! there, now we can unban the entire current list, right?

maybe it's a stretch to get all of them banned, but I figure it'd nicely clean up all the event problems with minimal collateral damage. it started as hyperbole but now I'm seriously thinking it'll work out.

Heck if you're trying to play a Wormwood Deck at full speed you will probably have a 3 card handsize without some kind of other tech to bump it up. Been there, done that, got the tshirt and the ousted-by-my-predator for it.

yeah boo hoo. lots of sympathy for Wormwood.
everyone knows Gehenna string decks don't try to win, they just want to watch the world burn.

I'd be suggesting that Madness of the Bard got banned because "rhyming" doesn't work in all languages easily, on top of its primary effect being to cause irritation.

that's why I said half. it discourages and disrupts communication. even if you could make a consistent judgment on rhyming, I'm pretty sure it would still be banned.