Contested City Title

I would argue that the number of different city is too high to have this rule work often enough. I believe it's the reason why the rule was removed.

If they were only, say, 5 cities, and all with both prince and archibishop, it would be much more likely to actually matter. For example, a special event could assign Paris to the first prince / archbishop, London to the second, Berlin to the third one, Bruxel to the fourth, Stockholm to the fifth, and after that they would be forced to contest or crusade an already-existing title.

Ohlmann wrote:

I would argue that the number of different city is too high to have this rule work often enough. I believe it's the reason why the rule was removed.

I think your assumption is wrong. At the time Sabbat was printed, some princes where widely played -gilbert duane, rake, sir walter nash etc and they had sabbat archbishop counterparts (some who don't see play anymore like lachlan), which made the rule perfectly viable. Plus, having a lasombra and a ventrue fight over a city was kinda cool. You could even build your deck so annoying key vampires would be rushable.
The only thing we needed was an archbishop for seattle so anson could have its's share of punches. The rule was removed when the sabbat expansion was reprinted as Sabbat Wars Iirc, maybe explanations were given at that time but i'm too lazy to search the newsgroup right now.

Reyda wrote:

I think your assumption is wrong. At the time Sabbat was printed, some princes where widely played -gilbert duane, rake, sir walter nash etc and they had sabbat archbishop counterparts (some who don't see play anymore like lachlan), which made the rule perfectly viable. Plus, having a lasombra and a ventrue fight over a city was kinda cool. You could even build your deck so annoying key vampires would be rushable.

Having each city title mirrored is not enough ; even now, a lot of title have both sabbat and camarilla counterpart, and city title contesting is relatively rare.

The problem is that you actually need to have matching vampires to contest. Even if one is extremely often played (say, Constanza Vinti), the other end tend to be less popular (in this case, the less than stellar Sela and the above average Malabranca, both of which are not all that popular). So there will almost alway be one end uncommon, and consequently contest become pretty rare, which the match of a popular deck (but that won't be played by half the players) and an uncommon one.

They can be exceptions of course, like, say, Donal O'Connor vs Una, which both are in known and popular archetype. But that's an exceptional case, and even with this I can't say I have often seen both on a game.

Now, I am not against the idea of contesting vampire veing able to rush each other ; I just want to point out that there are too many city for this to happen consistently.

Having vampires contesting their title being able to enter combat with each other?


Would Leandro rush Lutz?

Pascal wrote:

Having vampires contesting their title being able to enter combat with each other?

Would Leandro rush Lutz?

I would love that, especially since Justicar is the most often contested title in my experience. It would still be relatively rare, and I suspect it would happen more often between camarilla vampires than between camarilla and sabbat.

I believe it's consistent with the fact that vampires are not exactly peace-loving, law-abiding peoples, and discrete 'assassination' is not exactly unheard of.

(of course, Leandro is much more prone to hire some Brujah to do the deed, not unlike Prince are supposed to dispatch cronies than intercept something themselves, but that's another debate)

Pascal wrote:

Having vampires contesting their title being able to enter combat with each other?

Would Leandro rush Lutz?

I have been in favor of such a rule ever since the first city contest/rush rule was eliminated.

A small side effect is that combat actually gains a slight premium in the metagame. This is a good thing IMO.