"Quick" Rules for VTES

Kushiel wrote:

Confusing blood and pool is a very common newbie mistake (and a totally understandable one, unless you go to the trouble of using physically different beads for each). I think that the language you use in this guide is only going to exacerbate this; you seem to think that "pool" is a container used to hold the resource of "blood," rather than a resource in itself. It's not, so don't write "blood in their pool" or "drain their pool of blood" or other variations thereof. Just write "pool."

The current rulebook would benefit from your advice. A player's pool is sometimes described as comprising 30 blood counters. See second post from the top here. .

Could you just open the google doc for comments?

- You refer to capacity as if it’s lingo for “power level”. I can’t recall anyone ever calling it power level, and even “age” is just used to tie it into the vampire’s generation. There’s also an unmatched right parentheses in this section.
- Refer to “magical abilities” as (magical) disciplines. Terms are important when cards and rules start referring to them.
- Cards printed prior to Berlin Anthology do not say “Master” in the upper left.
- Your action table implies diablerie and rescuing other methuselah’s vampires from torpor are at +1 stealth.
- The action table skips requirements outside of disciplines (capacity, title, sect, etc).
- Under “Who can block” you list the prey as the blocker twice.
- Your explanation for aggravated damage is way too thin.
- You should state what happens if “leave torpor” is blocked.
- You should state how votes are gained by discarding political actions.
- You should state what happens when a vote is tied.
- Maybe explain the 1,2,3,4 transfers at the start of a game.

Although I have quite a few gripes, it looks good!
Keep up the good work.

Thanks for all the clarifications. I've incorporated a lot, and the document has been opened for comments.

In a few cases I left things as they were. For example, I know that power level is not a game term, but it's a convenient way of explaining what capacity (and its sub-concept, age) represent. Don't forget that I started by describing Methuselah's as "ultramegavampires" - certainly NOT a game term... but it gets the idea across.

Behind magical vampire abilities I did add "disciplines" in parentheses to align it with how capacity is presented.

On actions I changed the requirements cell to "see card" and expanded the description to "may include."

Good catch on the torpor actions. That was a mistake on my part - the table now shows +1/+0/+0 on the stealth modifier. Not perfect, but I feel it's a good compromise vs. adding rows. I also added the no combat / optional diablerie for blocking a leave torpor.

Added explanation of the 1/2/3/4 transfers at the start.

On titles, I'm going to leave them only Sabbat because this is intended to work with Sabbat precons - the amount of titles in the full game is a lot and I want to limit irrelevant information for their first plays. I did add a note that the game has other titles.

I've also added the !Ventrue deck to the appendix, as well as hyperlinked the decklists (on request from my play group, which is apparently thinking about their next game...).

Whew!

Good idea!

I would definitely not use (nonstandard) Amaranth layout for the included examples though - it does not match the layout of any card new players will encounter in real life and will lead to confusion.

Added a bunch of comments to the doc.