file Polishing VtES - refining crypts and removing grouping

02 Jan 2018 00:19 #84685 by jamesatzephyr

Can you explain the can of worms and why grouping was needed? I am a VTES noob, and even after reading about why grouping was needed on VTES Newbie (sites.google.com/site/vtesnewbie/common-questions) I do not understand the problem grouping fixed.


Building a crypt is supposed to be part of the craft of deck-building. Players aren't supposed to be able to create what LSJ (the lead designer at the time) referred to as a "custom crypt" or "dial a crypt". You're supposed to ram up against the fact that if you want lots of Princes in that crypt, you may have to double or triple up and so maybe get a tricky uncontrolled region some games. The fundamental original design of V:TES - drawing 4 vampires from a crypt of 12 - was supposed to represent that Methuselahs are incredibly powerful but still subject to outside forces, so some games you just won't be able to control Sir Walter Nash as both copies of him are on the bottom of your crypt.

Then there are some very practical issues:

1) Weenies. What do you do? If you keep printing more of them, you end up in a world where you have more and more of them coming out, and people can put together hyper-refined weenie crypts. (In some cases with some disciplines, they can already get pretty close, because the discipline is common across multiple clans, even within a group pair.) Making weenies hyper efficient isn't generally a good thing. The alternative is to stop printing new weenies, which would have been annoying for new players buying boosters of new sets. (This is symptomatic of a wider problem with not printing new vampires to solve the problem another way, it's just it becomes particularly acute with weenies pretty quickly.)

2) New clans. If you have the Brujah with 72 different crypt cards and you want to introduce a new, fairly normal clan - say, the Guruhi - and you only have 12-15 crypt cards in the new set for them, that leaves them at an incredible disadvantage. Perhaps Paradox/new White Wolf would want to bring back Cappadocians in a new WoD rework, perhaps Old Clan Tzimisce emerge, perhaps whatever. As you keep creating new vampires, you have 70, 80, 90... vampires in an existing Camarilla clan, vs how many new vampires for a new clan? A dozen new vampires vs roughly 20-25 in a group pair isn't anywhere near as terrible as 12 vs 72.

3) Continually escalating power if you have all the cards. There are 19 different Ventrue Princes or Justicars, across all sets (including Victor Pelletier). You can create a crypt of 12 different Princes or Justicars with zero duplicates, in a world without grouping. In a world with grouping, the maximum is 7 or 8, and you wouldn't necessarily want to play some of them because they're over-costed / under-powered / slightly weird (e.g. Suhailah is a bit odd with her no Dom and no Pre, but you still see her a little in Group 2 Ventrue decks because she has Obf/For and a title). To compete, a new player rapidly needs the vampires from all the sets - they can't just buy some of the latest base set, and a couple of recent expansions, they need to go off buying single vampires from every set ever. Further, old players have to keep buying blocks of new vampires just to keep up, whereas with grouping a group 2/3 Sabbat deck's crypt should be hopefully roughly as powerful as that 4/5 Camarilla deck, even if the player hasn't bought many new vampires since group 3 (or whatever), making it easier for older players to stay involved with the game.



The very common response to this, when grouping was first announced, was "Well, print fewer new vampires." But lots of players like having new toys, and companies like selling people new stuff. The weenie problem can be solved by just never printing new weenies - but by extension, you end up having to stop printing new vampires altogether. Once you have so many Lasombra archbishops, that's it, no more, ever. By creating a new group, you can try that funky group 6/7 Lasombra antitribu Camarilla variant, without inflating the power of Lasombra overall. You can create that group 6/7 Malkavian deck with a side of demented Animalism, without inflating the power of every Malkavian deck ever. You can have that new group 6/7 Ramanga clan, without feeling the need to print 50+ vampires for it so that it can compete with the existing powerful clans. And so on.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Lönkka, D-dennis, Ankha, ruiza97, self biased, Ezra, ScoundrelAtHeart, kschaefer, LivesByProxy

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