The Full Bleed project - back on my bullshit [03.20]

Some thoughts:

These cards aren't true "full-bleed", which is when the art extends all the way to the edges of the card. There's still a black border around the edges - which is good in my opinion. If the game were to go back in print, true full-bleed would cause two problems. Gameplay-wise, you would have to sleeve them in tournaments, as the edges of the cards would be distinctive. Production-wise, true full-bleed costs more. Keeping the black border around the edges would eliminate those issues, and the cards would still look great - the mock-ups you've seen so far have that border.

The mock-ups self-biased has done have square edges, whereas actual VTES cards have rounded edges. Compare the mockups with the DM and TU cards. Minor point, but I mention it for the sake of completeness.

The clan symbol should be a bit larger, and ultimately should be the dominant icon on the card.

The text box appears to have some transparency issues, such that the clan background is kinda bleeding through. It might be a layering thing, where the bleed-through is coming from the clan background instead of the art background. I'd prefer the latter.

There's also what to do with the expansion symbol. Some options:

- Not have one at all, but I'm guessing most players want an expansion indicator of some kind. I gotta say, though, self-biased's original mockups with the Van Fleet art look fantastic without an expansion symbol. Compare those with the DM/TU mockups he did. The expansion symbol is a giant distraction. (side note: I have no idea why WW made the expansion symbol so large and its placement so odd in the present layout, but it drives me nuts.)
- Make the expansion symbol a lot smaller, and tuck it all the way into the top-right corner.
- Make it a lot smaller and put on the top right corner of the text box, overlapping it like the capacity symbol does (maybe having a fixed-size "badge" for it).
- Make it a lot smaller and tuck it into the bottom-left-hand corner, below the first discipline icon, where it can be covered up by the hologram of a card sleeve.
- Ditch having an expansion symbol, but instead have an abbreviation (like SOC, LON, JYH, 3ED, etc.) in between the artist and copyright notices.

There is a LOT I like about this layout concept. It's fresh. It's clean. It's uncluttered. It looks new - which could be especially important if the game comes back. It might very well be better for gameplay, identification, and user experience. It looks sharp. It looks great. On top of it all, it still looks and feels like V:TES. Bravo!

Pascal wrote:

Rulewise, I see no reason why these wouldn't be usable, except, pehraps, some loss in clarity (cards of the same clan have ths same background and are easily spotted).

Players generally seem to handle the fairly radical changes in crypt card layout and clan backgrounds between Bloodlines and Cam Ed fine, so I personally would be very surprised if this turned out to be a major problem.

drnlmza wrote:

Pascal wrote:

Rulewise, I see no reason why these wouldn't be usable, except, pehraps, some loss in clarity (cards of the same clan have ths same background and are easily spotted).

Players generally seem to handle the fairly radical changes in crypt card layout and clan backgrounds between Bloodlines and Cam Ed fine, so I personally would be very surprised if this turned out to be a major problem.

Oh no...I remember a fair amount of outrage over the Cam Edition layouts. Those layouts were changed in the very next set (Anarchs) as a result. They had two big problems:

1) The left-side stripe went all the way up to the top, such that when you fanned out your hand, you couldn't immediately tell what the cards were 'cause you couldn't read the first few letters of the title.

2) The disciplines and pool costs were fully into the bottom left corner, where they could be covered up by holograms common to card sleeves.

Other problems included a smaller text box for crypt cards (adjusted later on - I forget which set but definitely in HttB), the expansion symbol was substantially bigger than clan symbols on crypt cards (still not corrected and the Design Team should get on that), and the positioning of expansion symbols was odd (still not corrected).

Here are the Cam Ed and Anarchs versions of Pug Jackson for comparison:

For future reference, the best vampire IMO to illustrate layout differences is -- of all vampires -- Judah.
He appeared in Ancient Hearts, Cam Edition, and the Anarchs-era Demo Decks:

the HUGE expansion symbol is especially annoying. Old, smaller symbols looked much better.
Why is wasn't modified for Danse Macabre and The Unaligned?

alek wrote:

the HUGE expansion symbol is especially annoying. Old, smaller symbols looked much better.
Why is wasn't modified for Danse Macabre and The Unaligned?

Consistency with existing cards and unwillingness to make yet another layout change. If self-biased only said, "Hey, what if we changed the crypt layout to a full-bleed style?" I would have said something like "Die in a fire". Thankfully, he just up and did it and showed us, and I stand corrected.