John Paleologus' ability

jamesatzephyr wrote:

So I create two cards that both say "At the beginning of the master phase, you may do a thing"[0]. Card A and Card B. Two different cards, not two copies of the same card - say, a reworded Seattle Committee and Temptation .

But then someone comes along and says "But the beginning of the phase only happens once, after all". So you can only use Card A or Card B at the beginning of the phase, because once you've used Card A, you're no longer at the beginning of the phase, so you can't use Card B. But we want you to be able to use Card A and Card B at the beginning of the master phase. So we could put an explanation in the rulebook of what "At the beginning of..." means, which doesn't seem like much of a step forward - card text churn without really simplifying anything.

I think what you've nicely demonstrated is that all wording can be misconstrued under the right circumstances. All we can hope to do is to have wording that is as clear as possible, and I would suggest that VTES falls short of this (admittedly lofty) goal. I also think that the vast majority of card gamers are familiar with Magic, and while I do not like that game, I think mimicking it's wording would be a good idea. That game certainly doesn't have the same volume of strange rules questions that VTES has - part of that is that VTES is a more complicated game, but I also think that part of it is that Magic cards are better written. But maybe that's just my opinion - I'm not on the rules team, after all!

First, a disclaimer: My musings in this thread have significance only if VTES should return to print or if it would be restarted as a new game (something which happened to Netrunner, yet another Richard Garfield game).

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Montano's text is: "Once each action, he can burn one blood to give an acting minion you control +1 stealth." That could equally be written "During an action, he can..." and it would mean the same, because "During X, do Y" means "once during X, do Y". Where X is an action, it means once per action - nothing more, nothing less.

When looking at simple semantics unrelated to VTES, amount of times you can do "during X, do Y" is not clear. It is clear only to those who play VTES and are aware of the wording template, and specifically are aware of VTES 'speciality' that usually you can do a given card ability only once per turn. I understand that this is done for game balance reasons, but it seems to me to be rather specific to VTES. I play some other games (android netrunner and magic and have played a number of other board games) and I haven't noticed such limitation in other games, when relating to cards own abilities. Limiting these abilities for balance reasons is usually handled in a different way in other games, such as using tapping or some resource as a mechanic to limit the amount of uses.

I have played VTES now for about 2 years. Yet I made this thread because I wasn't sure, and the ruling is not intuitive to me. Since it is not intuitive, I am liable to forget the ruling if the situation does not arise often where ruling would be needed, and since all other games seem to do things differently.

What bothers me in this case is that the ability is cards own special ability, not a game mechanic such as bleeding, equipping or rescuing a vampire from torpor. It is also not a keyword for an ability shared by multiple different cards such as those Magic cards often have. And despite it being a cards own, technically unique special ability, it does not directly state on the card how many times you can perform it per turn. This is what bothers me, and I cannot really defend the decision to not include the information in any way.

In my opinion, when making card texts, one should strive to the situation that the players need to refer to the rulebook as little as possible. It is in my opinion rather bad design worth fixing if one needs to refer to the rulebook every time one needs to read a card text box.