Printing own cards

the two players in question would still gladly play in a tournament, without proxies. They just don't want to pay the entry fee. I guess they view it as paying twice for their cards? I don't really understand the logic.

Paying twice? As in they dont want prize support because how many BH boosters does one person need?

It seems like part of the problem is (if thats wjat they mean) as stuff other than overprinted BH becomes more scarce, prize support matters less and less. Personally, I can use disarms and deflections, so the starters are neat, but boosters get less important when what you really need isnt in them.

So, new players will eventually be the only people who appreciate prize support lile BH boosters, and other players would take 1 booster from TR over 12 from BH just to maybe get a convert vs bezt case scenario getting a Path of Evil Revelations and or middle of the road vamps like Ignazio and Henry taylor with limited monetary value (and who most folks have 5+ of).

Getting cards printed is the only thing that makes this better.

If priz support suddenly becomes limited run alternate art varianta of cards like Cog, Preturnatural Strength, Arika, Enkidu, and or Cock Robin, its cool to have that, especially if we get enough following to let princes get a pack of "prizes" each season or fiscal quarter and dole it out accordingly.

As we stand, entry cost could end up covering mid-tourney pizza soon instead of prize support as what exists dwindles.

@Self Biased:
Venue costs what your money goes to? If so, tell them they can hold it at their house if they don't want to pay...

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

@Self Biased:
Venue costs what your money goes to? If so, tell them they can hold it at their house if they don't want to pay...

lol. says the person from Australia to the person in New York.

Brum wrote:

You don't need to change the game.
At least in Portugal (don't know elsewhere) Commander is growing.
People don't mind multi-player long term games.

Hell, it's the very essence of some of the most popular types of games: board games and RPG's.

Long games are not, in themselves, unviable. Clearly, people play Dungeons and Dragons and people play Monopoly. But there are two key differences:

1) People don't completely rework their 'deck' between games in the same way that they do with CCGs.

1a) In most RPGs, you extensively customize your character at creation, and make minor advancements to it during downtime (e.g. levelling up, selecting a prestige class, choosing between kit a and kit b). But you don't generally say "Oh, well, Harriet the Nice Tremere(*) is sick and tired of all this spooky Thaumatury and is now a pink-haired gun-toting biker chick instead."

(*) Real character I have interacted with in a LARP. That was, of course, her OOC name.

1b) A great many board games have minimal preparation investment. (A tabletop wargame ilke Warhammer is different.) You sit down and play Monopoly, and you choose to be a hat or a comb, no difference. You pick between playing Apollo and Laura and Tyrell in a game of Battlestar Galactica.

2) Some long games are very good at keeping people involved throughout the game.

2a) In a two-player game, this is usually reasonably achievable (player A slays player B, game over). Some games may get into a state where player B pretty much can't win, but player A has to go through some laborious nonsense to actually hit the 'win' criteria, or the game theoretically mandates that there are X turns to be played but a player can't possibly catch up with the other. That's probably a design flaw in the game.

2b) Quite a few multi-player games don't require player death as an inevitable consequence of playing the game. In an RPG, for example, players do die, but often it's a fake-death, in the sense that they might sit on their hands for twenty minutes while the other players drag their corpse back to the shrine and pray to Spudulika for their resurrection. Not a huge issue when it only happens every once in a while. In a game like Agricola, a player can get ahead in one of the early phases, but there is scope to catch up with them, especially once you can add additional family members. (Friends typically played with the house rule that a few cards like Family Growth which allowed for massive headstarts if randomly drawn were removed from the game.) In Battlestar Galactica, most players can contribute until the end of the game, unless something unfortunate goes on involving the Brig, though I've mostly played with the basic set. Diplomacy is an obvious counter-example here, but Diplomacy has a number of flaws in its design.



CCGs tend to hit the sweet spot where they're not persistent, like many RPGs, but they're not investment-free, like many board games. Often, you finish a game and come away with "Ooh, I wonder if I changed..." thoughts. I'll take out that sideline of blue cards and add some white cards. If I swap in my Romulans, I think the deck is more resilient. If I take out these guns and add in some Potence flung junk... And then you want to try again. And the goal in V:TES really is to knock players out - that's essentially the only way to score VPs. For you to win, some other players will have to be knocked out and, for all practical considerations, spend a significant portion of the game not being able to do anything. Unlike the RPG, that isn't 20 minutes out of an afternoon, that's maybe 30-60 minutes every single game, for multiple players.

This has tended to put V:TES in a slightly unfortunate place for commercial exploitation. Games aren't quick enough that you can rapidly evolve your deck once it turns out that, no, Tzimisce with Quietus is a terrible, terrible idea. It's long enough that demo-ing it in a store or at a convention is quite hard. It's brutal enough that an almost inevitable consequence of being a new player in a competitive environment (e.g. your first local tournament) is that you'll get ousted fairly quickly and perhaps spend a couple of hours not being able to take part. In a 2R+F tournament, being knocked out an hour in on both rounds isn't that improbable for a relative newbie. (I'm not suggesting that people should try to batter the hell out of you in social games when you're learning, but if you try to be overly nice to the newbie in a tournament, you may actually end up violating the spirit of play-to-win.)


And none of that's to say that V:TES is a horrible unplayable bag of poo. It's just that if you want to purchase licenses from fairly big companies and make money off them, you need to think about your market. In, say, an LCG with a relatively small per-player investment (because with one or two boxes, you have all you need of that expansion), you might need a bigger player base than V:TES has to cover those costs than in a CCG model (where individual players can buy a crate of cards, to make use of 20 of that rare).

I feel like how appealing we are breaks down to these factors for anyone throwing money at us:

A.we are niche. We are a cardgame, as stated, which can be profitable, but in a funky niche where existing numbers of people lined up to buy cards has to be part of the equation, but not all of it.

B. How long until existing players buy all of what they have needed? To offest the risk of it being a largely profitable endeavor for 18 months and then gradually lose sales and become a money sink, they need this magical thing called "shit people 'gonna buy" (this is why retail exists).
Still B. So, cranking out new cards to vets will turn that 18 months into a few years if done right. But that initial boom of everyone buying 500 freak drives and 400 deep songs with 700 eyes of argus is where they want buisiness to stay to keep raking in Scrooge McDuck amounts of money (to swin in, of course).
So they need the existance of c.
C. New players. New player acquisition often leads to profit. Why borrow cards when you drop $30 on several deck options? Thats how new players try Vtes on a PoD model. Keeping them requires effort on our part, as a community.(more on that in a moment). To rake in new players, a fun game with badass art and plenty of strategy will hook them if they are vtes-potentials. Then we lose them with the learning curve because they get tired of bleesing ar stealth and being overwhelmed with options for new stuff.

Heres the fix:

Starter set. Jyhad/third/ce style sets, where we design what we NEED (crypt cards that are vanilla as hell) reprint essentials but not more than a good sampler of stuff(no chance in hell we need bastard sword and meat cleaver, or even melee weapons at all in large numbers. But 44 magnum is essential, saturday night special less so, and stuff like kpist is a hell no) and we find niches filled by cimplicated cards and design new ones (deep song jr: bleed at +1, or literally "enter combant with a minion controlled by another methuselah") stuff, and add subtext to make cards easier to read (Taste of vitae: only useable at the end of a round of combat after the presz step but before the next round....)

Anyway, make true beginner level, where you use 4 vampires as a crypt and use basice level disciplines. Then integrate the rest of the package of cards for a starter who has a handle on the games basics. Then one of tbose for stealthbleed chamging to better stealthbleed, combat to better combat, voting to voting with cap n tap, and walling changing to walling with guns.

As a playerbase, we just need to be nice to new players. Instead of ousting the stealthbleed prey, make him put a hurtin on stuff first. Show them the games about the whole table, etc. We have less new players anymore, and if we get printed and make basic sets, that could change quickly.


But, thats how we look like a money maker to companies; grow.