what if YOU rebooted VTES?

(Disclaimer: This is a completely hypothetical scenario for fun. But if you want to freak out because you assume I have any power over the future of VTES, that would be funny too.)

Inspired by the Fantasy Flight Games reboot of the Netrunner TCG, I pondered how I would recreate VTES if it were to start over completely from scratch. LCG format aside, the new Netrunner has an updated theme and setting, with seperate factions, and no doubt new cards to work around this. It's also been rumored that some original game mechanics have been removed or at least simplified. It's an interesting approach to revive a dead card game, I wonder how it'll work out.

So, how would you remake VTES if you could? Would you change the theme of the game? How would you mess with the rules and mechanics? Or maybe you'd change the development of the cards themselves (like the MtG "color pie" with its checks and balances) or create new card-types to avoid confusing design (locquipment comes to mind). Let's say you pitch a 400 card base set, with a few concepts for expansion sets to follow.

You can use this as critique of how VTES has evolved over 20 expansions, or just as a creative experiment for something entirely new!


example: One of my main ideas would be to tone down the game's world-spanning battles of Inner Circle members and Princes from multiple continents duking it out with fists and guns. Each game's theme would be more like it's a struggle over one major city, with all the localized politics and violence. Only one prince, no higher ranks directly involved (as minions). The "story" would be less abstract that way, and perhaps more relatable to the Vampire RPG crowd. I'm personally not much a fan of the hundreds of canon vampires that come from some guidebook or novel, they seemed shoehorned in.

1) No Antitribu clans, only vampires with both a clan and a sect. Reduce the number of clan cards and have only a few of them require both a clan and a sect.
2) Give a timing to all effects, including permanent ones and OOT masters, as it has been done for the use of Powers. Use the Reflex timing and maybe introduce a Referendum timing for cards played during votes. Play reflexes after replacing the card to make the game more fluid.
3) Recenter the game on its core: vampires taking actions. 2 changes for that:
-a methuselah can never have more than 2 master phase actions per table turn, no matter where they come from.
-during his untap phase, if a methuselah controls more allies than vampires, he must burn allies in excess.

The rest is just rebalancing individual cards.

1) Keywords, Keywords, Keywords. This game has lacked a specific word use format. There are multiple words used for the same concept and different rulings on cards which use the same words in a similar way.

2) Suck the power out of Dominate. It is too powerful and unbalances the game.

3) Imbued would not be crypt cards.

4) Nerf Voter Captivation.

And these come from the top of my head.

My initial reaction is that I would keep the same game and benefit as much as possible from what 20 years of evolution has provided but remove a few of the dead-ends explored along the way.

I would of course make sure everything got a makeover, consistent wording, symbols, card backs etc.

The Imbued would not be in initially, but maybe released again with the mechanic completely reworked. This could be a mechanic that would also make it possible to add other playable WoD creatures later like werewolf clans.

Individual cards would be reviewed for balancing and gameplay improvement, but not with the purpose of changing the game, only to fix a few problems and maybe reduce the amount of wallpaper. After all whatever you nerf there will always be something else that is now the strongest, so I would not put *too* much focus on that.

Where possible I would try to streamline the mechanics and rules overhead, reduce need for shuffling etc, but again not in a game-changing way and not to the extent that the game is "dumbed down". I would like it to feel like VTES 2.0 and not some different game.

Maybe I am lacking imagination, but I am also trying to consider what would be realistic assuming some kind of commercial interest in the reboot that would have to balance cost (development time) with benefits.

I would possibly also want to do something with the Dark Ages setting, but not sure how or if it should even be part of the same game or just a separate game sharing the same base rule mechanics. Maybe with some new mechanism for controlling land.

Oskar wrote:

The Imbued would not be in initially, but maybe released again with the mechanic completely reworked. This could be a mechanic that would also make it possible to add other playable WoD creatures later like werewolf clans.

It's relatively easy to do that with the existing Imbued mechanics. I've sketched out similar ideas a few times before, but you get something like:

- A bunch of allies of the relevant type, with Virtues that are equivalent to their thing in WoD
- A small number of new Conviction cards, that are only for that new ally type
- Powers that trigger off the relevant Virtues and Convictions

So a Werewolf gets Rage and Gnosis conviction cards. They have Ragabash, Homid and Fianna virtues (or possibly Fianna is a creed). They get Gifts (powers) that trigger off those things. They don't have titles, but might have a few werewolves with status keywords that are relevant for moots, which might be an action or master card or something.

Mages get several types of Quintessence conviction cards. Creeds map to the various different Traditions (Celestial Choristers, Virtual Adepts etc.). Spheres are virtues. Some powers give them Rotes (just a normal power with a "Rote" keyword on it). They can equip Sanctums as loquipment. They have Nodes as master card locations. Perhaps more of their play is focused around having multiple Quintessence cards. They don't typically have a meaningful political structure.


Wraiths, you probably wouldn't want to go down this route - mapping Wraith: The Oblivion into other games is always hard, while retaining any of its actual flavour. (The difficulty of interacting with mortals, use of the Shadow etc.) Still, it does have the best power in the world - Pandamonium.

Tone down the scale, make it happens in 5 cities that are relatively close to each other (one idea is east coast, second is old europe with say zurich, prague, vienna, munich, frankfurt ?).

Make it 60 pool instead of 30 (and minions from 1 to 20 respectively).

Decrease number of phases to Untap, Main, Influence.

Get rid of master cards, instead add new type of cards that are played during main phase.

Change number of levels per discipline to 3.

Give more information on the crypt cards, like city where he belong that will influence how he interact with new cards. Also, make some allies crypt choices and remove this silly keyword (instead give them something akin capacity but different colors says how it interact with damage on him so for example humans burns when they have no blood on them but werevolves burns only if they can't heal).

Make every discipline card two cards on one card so you can use multi-clan decks with better card flow. This is actually huge as every dicipline card will have 3 levels of one discipline and 3 levels on the other discipline.

And more.