Library card redesign

666Raziel wrote:

Those icons would allow us to lighten the rules.
With it, there is no need to "know" that every crypt cards has a base strength of 1 and can bleed for 1.

This said, should we stay with icon for cap/life, bleed and strength or should we also include stealth and intercept ?

Icons aren't generally a problem for things that are used heavily - like, say, mana costs in Magic or Hearthstone, or capacity in V:TES.

They can get weird and annoying, though.

1) When certain types of card don't see much play, icon-izing key features of those cards is a barrier to understanding them.

2) If you're trying to icon-ize something that's relatively static (i.e. only varies on minority of cards), that can also get annoying - particularly where the values of two different icons are commonly the same. Base bleed is 1, base strength is 1. I've just flipped out a mid-cap Brujah who has an orange diamond that says 2 and a purple octagon that says 1. So is that 2 bleed and 1 strength, or 1 bleed and 2 strength? All my other cards have an orange diamond saying 1 and a purple octagon saying 1, so that's not so much use for me as a newbie trying to remember which is which.

3) Clutter. If your aim is to stop people having to remember base values, you could be needing quite a few icons to cover things. Potentially a) strength, b) bleed, c) votes, d) inherent +stealth, e) inherent +intercept, as a start. That's potentially quite a lot of space to use on vampire who is just the default for every value.

It also gets annoying when some minions will still have conditional bonuses. So Bobby the Brujah has +1 strength when in combat with a Sabbat vampire and Owen the Osebo has +1 intercept against non-Laibon vampires. Even with the icons, you're still going to need to write out the ability to text in quite a few situations.

self wrote:

the current design aesthetic is trending away from icons. Consensus seems to be that they confuse new players.

Card type icons confuse new players, because they try to communicate complicated concepts by wrong means.

Most other icons are fine.

Test to understand, are the icons appropriate or not - try to switch one icon for other. If the card will still "work" (example - switch for ) then the icons are at their plaice, if not (switch for ) than you have to go different way.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

When certain types of card don't see much play, icon-izing key features of those cards is a barrier to understanding them.

Good point. Icons for burn option, advanced ets. have to go.

elotar wrote:

Test to understand, are the icons appropriate or not - try to switch one icon for other. If the card will still "work" (example - switch for ) then the icons are at their plaice, if not (switch for ) than you have to go different way.

It's very simple; icons that you need to match to other cards are the most important — so that's discipline (including flight and imbued creeds) and clan. The rest are effectively reminders.

elotar wrote:

jamesatzephyr wrote:

When certain types of card don't see much play, icon-izing key features of those cards is a barrier to understanding them.

Good point. Icons for burn option, advanced ets. have to go.

I care somewhat less about Burn Option as it's mostly only found on Bloodlines-y cards or similarly advanced sets, and I'd hope that somewhere between older players giving some guidance and a starter project etc., new players would mostly be heading for the 'mainstream' clans. Of course, it would be quite possible for something like that to turn up if a new player played a game of draft with some people. Also, given people seem to like the design where it says things like "Action Modifier / Reaction" down the left-hand side, eating into the space for icons there, I wouldn't be at all opposed to turning Burn Option into text.

On Advanced, I don't care so much about the icon being there, but I do miss the Advanced text having been dropped from the textbox too, which I thought was helpful. I believe it's a conscious decision to save space - like some of the newer cards say "has +2 votes" rather than "2 additional votes" to save space. My personal preference is that if a text box on a vampire is so bursting with information that you can't fit in the word "Advanced", I'd prefer to slightly tweak the height of the text box up a bit for those very few special vampires. But I understand that other people's aesthetic preferences will not match mine - mine tend towards utilitarianism trumping beauty, if there absolutely has to be a clash.

(I do, however, think that the icon for Advanced is a rubbish icon. That might be just me.)

Lönkka wrote:

I think that the Red Cros sis trademarked.
At least I seem to recall that here in Finland when one band used a similar symbol in their album's cover they had to recall the record and replace the cover.

Oh I'm not talking a total ripoff of the Red Cross logo. But something as simple as making it in Green, Purple, with an outline around it. Because of the large number of cross logos around the world, there should be an easy enough modification to make it clear as something 'medical' but without infringing any specific copyright (i.e. The Red Cross' Red Cross)