what if YOU rebooted VTES?

miketheknife wrote:

Agree with 2 and 3, i just would change 1 in the opposite way: make antitribu independent clans and redesign some cards to work on tribus and antitribus (like hunting grounds).

I just would like to remark juggernaut's point 1: KEYWORDS, along with a clear statement of card secuence (combat chain, referendums, action mods vs reactions), not that is not already 99% clear, but declare a basic rule that gives directions to card design.

About antitribu, what if said antitribu change the sect to the opposing one ? From thematic point of view (and balance point of view) it make no sense that !brujah who changed sect cannot play regular brujah cards.

So i would axe antitribu clans and just make sect requirement on some clan cards.

1. Simpler rules. There is to much rules in vtes, many of them are used very seldom and not really needed. Vtes is too complicated for begginers. I would remove Imbued (worst design in vtes ever!), slave, research area, change the red list, reflex, and some other
2.Put more pressure on minion interaction, less on playing masters
3.Make some changes to disciplines (f.e. dominate is all in one and generally stronger than other disciplines, some disciplines' effects are very fuzzy. I feel disciplines should be more specialized.
4. Some other changes in specific cards

No one should get ousted. Wouldn't exactly be easy, would require some serious rework, but it should be a turn/timelimit based game, with some sort of point scoring. One of the less desirable aspects of vtes is it takes nigh on 2 hours to play, and if you're ousted early, you can end up just sitting on your ass for ages bored out of your mind.

salem wrote:

No one should get ousted. Wouldn't exactly be easy, would require some serious rework, but it should be a turn/timelimit based game, with some sort of point scoring. One of the less desirable aspects of vtes is it takes nigh on 2 hours to play, and if you're ousted early, you can end up just sitting on your ass for ages bored out of your mind.

You could do something like that if you ended up going for a more board-game-y feel and lost the circle-of-death mechanic. Having a prey who doesn't die makes it much easier to win if you can constantly score points against them, so you probably need to turn points into things you win by doing 'stuff' rather than killing other players.

So you potentially end up going for something more like Puerto Rico or Agricola, where you can achieve something (staking your territory, assembling your minions, winning your votes).

Others players' choices interact with you - such as by preventing you making a choice, or by inflicting punishments on you if you don't make a choice, or by making it disadvantageous to make a particular choice. German board games like Agricola tend to be very hands-off - I've taken the blood off The Rack location on the board, so you can't, but I can't actually stop you doing it if the blood is there. For a WoD / VTES-y flavour, you'd probably want something more interactive - but maybe me stopping you getting points means giving up some of the resources I've amassed.

Later turns in the game would potentially contribute more to your point score - because better objectives are available, you have more resources, you can draw more cards. So even if a player gets a little behind early on (bad luck, screwed by choices etc.), they can still pull ahead in the later stages. It's not that the early stages are irrelevant, but you don't want someone to get so far behind that there's no point - they might still come a very good second with 52 bites, which counts to getting into the final.


Alternatively, one very early conception for V:TES from - I think - Mark Rein•Hagen was to have a grid of vampires as a kind of board in the table that you fought over. You could do something like that. Winning early weenie vampires as your first step in the Jyhad might help you generate resources, but might cost a lot of cards. Winning medium vampires might be easier if you saved up a little in the early rounds. But maybe some cards you could play, some strategies you could take might rely on lots of vampires. So say there was some sort of competitive bidding mechanism (or something analagous), you might fake out your opponents into thinking you're playing one strategy to get them to waste their resources thwarting you. "Oh, the only reason anyone ever wants to win Smudge the Ignored is if they're planning to play such-and-such a card that requires them to win bids on three vampires. *tries to stop you winning on the next bid*"

Interaction in a more bid-led game could be via playing cards that make you win the bid, cards that make the bid harder for other people, cards that modify the vampire you're bidding on semi-Munchkin style - okay, so you've just spent 23 blood cards on winning round 4 (Zack North), but I played a card that means he generates one less blood card per turn and...


Perhaps you blend the two - every Agricola-like harvest or Puerto Rico-like shipping goods moment is an opportunity to "buy" vampires. Maybe there are 4 players, so at the end of each 'round' (several Agricola-like turns), 5 (4+1) vampires out, and everyone can bid to choose their favourite - using the resources they've built up over the last several turns. The winner gets first pick, but loses most resources.

Perhaps everyone starts with 'their' vampire who can do diddly squat, and they upgrade to having their plans carried out by a better vampire as they go. Paying a lot for a good vampire in round 2 or 3 lets you start doing more things better, but then you can't pay for an even better vampire in round 4 or 5.

Decks might be filled with things to help you do stuff - equivalent to action modifiers, combat cards and reactions - but not the actual stuff themselves. Things on the playing "board" might be closer to actions and master cards. You might have to diversify a little, because you might not end up with a titled vampire and lots of Charm (political) resources because other people might get in the way and take them.

Decks might be quite small - say, 30 cards - with you redrawing the whole deck between bidding rounds. Do you then include good cards for later rounds that will be rubbish early on and vice versa?



Expansions could give you a new clutch of vampires to bid on. So say it was 5 rounds of 5 vampires, each new expansion could have its own set of 25. An LCG style box might give you, say, 40-60 different library cards to include (with several copies of each). Possibly there's a card limit.

Maybe you can mix and match expansions - so you can play with the Jyhad vampires and the Dark Sovereigns libraries, and everyone can pick their own. Maybe they're functionally compatible sets, but you tend to play with the matching vampires and libraries. Maybe expansions don't give you a whole new set of vampires, but perhaps replace one or two rounds. So you go round 1 base set, round 2 base set, round 3 expansion, round 4 base set, round 5 expansion. Or some other combination.




The question would be how VTES-y such games would end up. You could certainly do something WoD-y with Methuselahs and vampires.

salem wrote:

No one should get ousted. Wouldn't exactly be easy, would require some serious rework, but it should be a turn/timelimit based game, with some sort of point scoring. One of the less desirable aspects of vtes is it takes nigh on 2 hours to play, and if you're ousted early, you can end up just sitting on your ass for ages bored out of your mind.

I actually prefer being ousted to hanging around in a lost position for hours. Board games that do that leave me feeling trapped into some shitty dynamic where nothing I do matters, but that I have to play it out.

I've thought about how to reboot V:TES as it is before. I sort of always viewed Sabbat as a model for that as it removed some of the more egregious cards from Jyhad, though, as time has gone on, I've realized how it also removed some essential cards - Deflection, Telepathic Misdirection, Minion Tap, etc. - from the game if you limited to just that set.

However, while it might be easy to never go down the path of minor/narrow mechanics/rules with minimal upside that rarely matter to games and such, there are some critical core elements to the game that should be considered for a true redux. Contestation is a really annoying mechanic, if mostly just for crypt cards, for instance.

A thoughtful post on what I think should be done would require far more thought to address the myriad of problem areas in the game. However, I don't envision a different game. V:TES has strengths. Its multiplayer CCG dynamic is far better than other top multiplayer CCGs.

Then, even if a good starting point can be established by essentially rebuilding Jyhad or Jyhad + Sabbat or whatever, there should be a lot of thought put into how the game should expand. As long as there is unbounded expansion, there's going to be mechanics/rules bloat. May slow it down but will inevitably hit critical mass on overly complicated cards, strategies that don't function well within the core mechanic, and all of the other problems that CCGs that survive get into.