ReVamping VTES?

BenPeal wrote:

I'm not saying we should ditch counters from V:TES, but if I were to go back in time and re-design V:TES knowing what we know now about V:TES and games in general, I'd seriously consider ditching the counters.

[...]

So when you design a V:TES product to meet modern expectations of a game, you need to make an all-you-need-in-one-box product. And that means at least 150 counters. And yes, of course I know that the counters could be made out of cardboard or plastic instead of glass. We had plans for a Kickstarter campaign with stretch goals that included improving the quality of the components. Regardless of the component quality, 150 counters is a lot of freaking counters and it gets you wondering what, materially, you're really selling to the customer. Not wondering in a "do we not include counters" way, but in a "this looks pretty odd when you see all the counters in the box at once but that's V:TES so we gotta go with it" way.

The solution I came up with was to modify the card-backs slightly, but this is probably undoable. If we could go back in time and incorporate this slight change, it might be a good substitute for counters.



Magic: The Gathering cards have these four little dots in the corner because the card-back was designed to resemble an old book (hence, the 'library' of spells flavor). A similar design could be used for pool. This would let players use their spare (unsleeved) cards as blood / pool. IDK, just what came to mind.



Arranged for easy readability. IDK how cumbersome or convenient this would be.

BenPeal wrote:

self wrote:

The context Ben likely intended about the counters was more "How Do I Design A Complete Product?" thing, with the intention being to give a prospective group of players everything they need to play the game in one package. I have no idea how people picked up the notion that he thought counters were bad.

Yeah, that's basically it. I'm not saying we should ditch counters from V:TES, but if I were to go back in time and re-design V:TES knowing what we know now about V:TES and games in general, I'd seriously consider ditching the counters.

I think it would be impossible to rid the game of counters unless there is a major redesign. If not wishing to do a redesign, I do think a two-player format solves not only the issue with the counters (only need 80 [30 for each player and 20 for the blood bank]), but lots of other issues too (only one other player needed, takes less time to play, streamlines the mechanics, etc). I'd buy a VTES product that contains two preconstructed decks of existing cards, 80 counters, an edge counter, a rule book, a play mat, and a sheet of any necessary alternate rules/card text to make a 2-player format more playable. But that's just me. I realize the game was designed for 5 players who show up to the game with constructed decks. But I strongly believe 2 player VTES is tragically underrated, even when playing with 2 preconstructed decks where the cards are known to the players.

At risk of this becoming a personal blog of sorts, I (updated?) made some more icons. Yes, I know no one asked, but I'm doing it for fun.

Auspex
Potence -> Ferocity
Thaumaturgy
Mortify !NEW!
Animalism
Celerity

So, Potence would be renamed Ferocity, as that gives us what is known as homoioteleuton - the endings of the words being the same. So we get Ferocity, Celerity, and Tenacity (Fortitude) as our physical disciplines, which are all pretty accurate words for what they do (strength, speed, and toughness.)

The word 'Ferocity' also has a better flavor in conveying what it does, IMO. The discipline is not strictly "super strength" but tremendous wrath, aggression, savagery, frenzy, and violent action in general.

This small change in word choice makes the discipline more intuitive (for English speakers) than "Potence" and fixes something of a problem that was present in the original VTM:

"Being 'super strong' is a kinda weird power. We get that there are characters who are super strong and there are characters that are super strong. Dracula had the strength of twenty men, which is pretty impressive, but the Hekatonkheires picked up fucking mountains and beat Cronus with them, and that's a different scale of strength altogether. Unsurprisingly, we get our most easily accessible depictions of super strength from our current media: TV shows, movies, and comic books. [...] Potence didn't do one of the things that super strength does in every piece of source material you've ever seen or heard about: it didn't make you supertough. There are characters who are invulnerable without being super strong of course, but there is not now and never has been a character with super strength who wasn't also tougher than normal. However, in Vampire: the Masquerade, super toughness was 100% mediated by Fortitude, which wasn't normally even available to the same vampires. Even with maxxed out super strength, you would still go down when some completely normal person hit you in the face with a shovel."
--- Frank Trollman, Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire: The Masquerade

The whole post is a very interesting read, and as someone who had learned about VTM, VTR, and VTES from YouTube videos, the WhiteWolfWiki, and forum posts, it points out and criticizes a lot of things I found puzzling about the WoD myself.

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There is also the new discipline of Mortify that I would add to a VTES 2.0 (while removing some of the other obscure or ultra-specific bloodline disciplines like Abombwe.) Mortify means 'to embarass, humiliate, or shame' someone, but I think it could also be used to mean 'to horrify or terrify.' An analog would be the Nightmare discipline of the Nosferatu from VTR. Mechanically I imagine it fitting into the 'Euro Stealth' style decks, forcefully tapping down younger minions and / or preventing them from blocking altogether.

For the purposes of a "starter package", instead of including an impractical amount of counters, it would make way more sense to just include a couple dozen or so of those rotating cardboard wheels that you spin to display numbers which can be placed on minions, plus a bigger one with two rings of numbers to use for the Pool. Cheap to produce and servicable, IMO. You could even have numbers on them show the blood/pool symbols to make it visually simple.

There's always that, but I'd like to repeat the point someone already made about moving blood.

Everything from Blood Dolls to Villeins, Governs and Steal Blood effects moves, transfers counters instead of (if not in rules terms, effect) decreasing and increasing them. Kinda. You get the point - you all now how to use Vessel. The point was that this happens all the time, frequently, in multiple phases, each turn, off-turn, in between turns.

Moving a single counter from somewhere (from on top of it) to something else is really easy and comfortable. Compare to sliding wheels first from the vamp, then to pool, then to... And wheels are a bit harder to read from across the table as well.

Then compare to the wee card tokens of blood/pool mentioned above. You'll have to do all of that shuffling (in that example) from underneath the card proper. Of course you can keep them somewhere else as well, but that takes space. VtES already takes quite a bit of room to play.

For practical reasons I'd argue that, while wheels and using card backs as tokens are both rather reasonable ideas, counters on top of cards that move around quite a bit during a game is probably the easiest way to do this without giving a major headache to players. As I said, those things could work, but I'm really not sure if they're better than counters while actually playing the game.

I get Ben's conundrum with packaging and selling the game. The alternate methods of tracking blood could be serviceable for packaging purposes, but I'd argue they're not better than counters per se for gaming.

Again, not talking specifically about glass beads. They're just the fanciest way of presenting them. But whatever the counters are, clarity in presentation and countability from across the table should be issues to consider as well.

Real tricky, so this is...

Krausedit\\ If we assume that there'd be, say, 160 double-sided, little cardboard counters in the starter box (other looking like blood, other like pool [or life?]), or even 160 worth of counters (with fivers and onsies), could the box include a wee plastic storage container? I mean something that kitchen players could place in the middle of the table and just pour all the counters in there? Of course peeps have those at home, but that could make the game a bit more approachable. The starter box might have to be a bit bigger but some board game boxes are pretty big for what they have in them.

Make it just small enough for roughly 200 counters, might have an overflow issue and wouldn't even be a problem, and produce from the cheapest, thinnest plastic possible. Even with that, imagine all the 'unboxing' youtube videos where they're, like, "it even comes with this cool bowl for your counters!".

Fancy is fancy, and people love fancy.

To be clear, I'm refering to the type of thing shown , only smaller:



You don't need hundreds, maybe 50 small ones, and 5 large ones for the Pool. It's worse than counters, which I enjoy, but like I said, for a starter package, it's far more practical and cheaper to produce.