New set of starters ideas

Secondary Merchandise.
Sit down, get Heather Krieter, and all those other lovely art people who are working on VTES art for the PnP sets. Get them to design some simple counters and sleeves type ideas.

So then you would have a Starter Box that might have:
6x Starter Deck
1x Box of Beads/Counters/Chits designed by cool art people
(Remaining space is say a box of card sleeves by said cool art people, or maybe a small number of custom edges again by said cool art people).

You can then 'randomise up' the Beads and the 8th-Space-Item between the Starter Packs.

BenPeal wrote:

drnlmza wrote:

Cam Ed did boxes of 6 different starters (1 for each Camarilla clan), so numbers other than 4 have been done before. That worked fairly nicely as it allowed swapping in a new deck rather than just having different pemutations of the same set of decks.

That ended up being awful for retailers, as certain decks would be purchased in favor of others, leaving some decks behind and causing a serious disincentive for restocking. That's presumably true even for 4-different-starter display boxes, but it's exacerbated with 6 starters. Sure, one can try to design starters that are all equally worth purchasing, but also gets increasingly difficult the more starters you try to design.

Indeed, this seems to be a problem with all the starter sets.
Even to a degree with the most excellently balanced Heirs to the Blood set. But that set sold out rather quickly so the problem wasn't that big. Besides each starter still had the two Villeins everyone and their grandma wanted...

Then again, it seems to be a problem with ALL the games. Some actually way worse than VTES (say, games where you have just two different starters and one is hot and one is utter garbage).

With VTES most often the one that was highest selling one in each set tended to be the one that had two copies of Freak Drive (don't recall any starter ever having more).

I like the idea of having 5 starters in the display (ready to play for optimum player amount), but production-vise might not be the best option...

I don't think I commented about "complexity levels" yet, but its a great idea. MTG did that right in the late 90s and moved it forward. Sets like starter 99 and the portal sets were a cool idea we can use (at least partially with precons, simple new vamps for starters, maybe easier worded versions of staples)
Counters: pokemon started with glass beads and a cardboard coin in starters, now have a sheet of cardboard counters an a plastic coin. Most successful tcg there is. Nobody will knock us for omitting glass beads. Plastic, aluminum, etc would work if we felt it added something.

The "problem" with some starters sitting on shelves forever kept up through KoT. Venture flew off shelves. Eventually, you saw malkavian KoT sitting with BH malk on shelves next to NoR and SoC boosters, and nothing else ever showed up. HttB sold out stupid fast because of content and limited supply. New starters will be more like HttB than, oh, let's say BH, so there's more likely to be a demand for 2villeins, some TV, abbots, dragon bound, tastes, freak drive, and stuff where buying a starter for modern frame beast, a disarm and some tastes was the previous norm. We still pay ~$5 each for freak drives. Starter with 6 freak drives can have a crypt of 12 Faruq and a library of 54 computer hacking and it would get bought for ~$10 like old starters EASILY. Change faruq to 12 Bindusara, switch computer hackings into 3 MotS, a 3 obt skill cards, a cog, some TV, some tastes, 5 deflection, 8 govern, rwtp, hidden strength, wws, eyes of argue, and its worth even more.