Poll: Merge Antitribbu into base Clans?

@james:
Key for my proposed adjustments. Cards would get errata and reprint.

We've remembered more than this, and Frankly many cards aren't very good as is.
The simplest thing would be broad strokes, if every card could just be both all members of the clan, that would be best. If a few cards got a new restriction, still fine, as the first few sets of the game have cards that changed, and most players know how much to pay for Gangrel Revel, Caitlin, or Misdirection, and know not to put Fame on your own vamp.
Obviously change is rough, but this particular change (unlike more outlandish and counterintuitive things suggested by new players in the past) has been brought up for at least 10 years that I remember.
Would LSJ have made Antitribbu separate if he had been at the reins before AE? Who knows, but players have been of both opinions for awhile.

And NOW is the time, or never, before we get into reprints.
@Rowdy:
V5 changed too much all at once, and while I can stand back and accept that from a VTES viewpoint, I'm still salty that fir the first time ever the core rulebook doesn't feel like a whole core rulebook. I agree that changing the metaplot, mechanics, and social structure was too much, but I coulda dealt with that; they force you to play gen 8-16 , restrict travel, and omit like half the core clans.

But.

Vtes tying in with as little mechanical impact as possible means focusing on Cam & Anarch politics. We aren't removing Sabbat, but this seems like a good reason to stop dividing clans by antitribbu or base when both get independent and anarch members.
It was never logical, and its even less so now. It's a more intuitive feeling thing than what we have.
I'm generally opposed to change unless its needed to hurt non-interactive decks, but this one makes sense.

Some thoughts on this.

1) First, I think this is a great idea. Relatively streamlined (as far as the alternatives go), makes sense, opens up design space a little.

2) If VTES is truly looking to expand beyond its small but loyal player base, I think it needs to move to represent the game world it’s based on. Brand-new fans are not going to be particularly keen on picking up a TCG that’s based on an earlier iteration of the world they’re learning to play in. VTES’ heyday was during an era where hundreds of concepts were being lifted straight from the books into new sets: there was a real thrill in seeing how those worlds crossed over. We would miss an opportunity to not give that to players.

3) there is some contention around whether V5 is ‘real’ Vampire: the Masquerade (I know a lot of loyalists to ‘old White Wolf’ and Onyx Path), but like it or not, there are IP owners and they’re the ones shaping the direction of the game from here on out. That includes what gets printed and what doesn’t; their ideas about the WoD will shape future design decisions. It doesn’t impact all the cards we have printed already, but we need to be conscious of it and lean into the change rather than pretend it may not happen.

4) We may get to a stage eventually where only Black Chantry-printed cards are tourney legal (and I’m fine with that) due to the amount of text changes, so better to fix these things ASAP.

5) I would look at this like, what’s the choice between a number of potential changes open to VTES, rather than do we change or not? For example, another option could be another keyword. Pop ‘antitribu’ down into the card text and maybe you could open up new design spaces. But, it creates just as many rewrites of cards and doesn’t make it as elegant as simply referencing sect. Plus, you’ve got Lasombra antitribu in the Camarilla etc, so it’d get confusing.

Cheers

Disco Stu

A "solution" is to only add new vampires, disciplines to new sets. If Sabbat vampires are dwindled & different in the new V.5, then let that reflect in set 6,7,8...with a few Serpentis/Obtenebration/Necromancy still made but reflecting the new direction with new "combo"cards for the new way disciplines are done in V.5. Same can be said with Theo & friends, by making new vampires of them in set 7 or such, with contesting still.

Going back & doing too many changes other then clarifying rules/wording on cards, destroys what we have & spent. Magic the Gathering makes you buy new cards to play in the years tournaments, while old cards collect dust unless you play with friends. There needs to be a way to play old decks/cards as well as new V.5 versions that are to come without making cards/stories from the past irrelevant. VTES never did anything with Requiem (thank god), so lets wait and see what all happens with V.5 as it comes into being.

VtM Requiem failed. D&D 4E failed. For the most part they did. There are hopes for V.5, but it too might fail, where as VTES is still going, albeit in only loyal fans/players. Discussing all this is what these forums are for & trying to make VTES great again with new blood is the right direction.
So, just throwing out my 2 cents worth of thoughts on it.

Rowdy

Vtes failed, also. Twice, actually. If steps were taken by the designers back in Sabbat War to course correct, we'd probably not be having this exact conversation. The Vtes community has, in general, been extremely and notoriously resistant to change, which has resulted in a lot of mechanics being added to the game over the years instead of a few big changes. Mechanics that weren't really well supported until VEKN took over.

If Black Chantry's plan is to continue to support a very niche game in a limited fashion, then it really only needs to keep doing what it's doing: release a handful of new cards every year and provide reprints when needed, so it can tread water financially and maybe put a few buckazoids in the pockets of the people who are putting very real work into doing so.

If Black Chantry's plan is to grow the amount of people who play the game, then that's a whole different kettle of fish. Personally, I'd advocate what is essentially a soft-ish reset to the rules and the card pool. Give everything a big look over and streamline the rules to bring things into line with what is expected of a modern product. Sand down all of the rough edges on cards that have been covered by rulings. Make a huge, splashy re-release of about a third of the current card set and have that be the new 'core set.' Most of the cards should in the initial release be virtually unchanged in how they work. Now here's the kicker: Ban from tournaments any card not currently 'in print.' Then re-introduce these banned cards in future sets to re-expand the card pool, thus making them legal in tournaments (and ensuring that they're not wallpaper). As a concession to ancient players with extensive card collections, I'd allow the use of proxy cards with the new text, provided it was backed with an old version of the same card. This would cover the very common complaint that the old cards are still around and available and thus a barrier to making changes.

Rowdy wrote:

Going back & doing too many changes other then clarifying rules/wording on cards, destroys what we have & spent. Magic the Gathering makes you buy new cards to play in the years tournaments, while old cards collect dust unless you play with friends.

@rowdy: I don't see how buying the game to support the company that makes it is a bad thing: it's a business model to sell cards. The notion of being able to 'play with all of my cards,' while not unique to the V:tes community, seems to come up frequently. The Grouping Rule for vampires was contentiously received, but preserved a space for older vampires and making room for new ones, allowing the designers to curate these groups effectively. If we still want to preserve these old cards, the grouping rule could be expanded to library cards. nobody's collection would become invalidated, but there'd still be room to curate what cards can be used together.

As ReverendRevolver says, we're at the point where there exists an opportunity to make the game more marketable to people who don't already play it.

ReverendRevolver wrote:

And NOW is the time, or never, before we get into reprints.

ReverendRevolver wrote:

@james:
Key for my proposed adjustments. Cards would get errata and reprint.

Gosh, how silly of me to not realize that errata to cards would be *checks notes* errata to cards.

Creating a metric ton of errata for every card interacting with a clan is not small. The old cards won't go away. Changing them in a systematic way has enormous benefits when people are trying to remember whether Nikolaus Vermeulen works for Camarilla Nosferatu, Anarch Nosferatu, Sabbat Nosferatu, Laibon Nosferatu, Independent Nosferatu, or any other sect that might be implemented or created by White Wolf, or whether Sword of Judgment can be played by Camarilla Brujah, Sabbat Brujah, Laibon Brujah...

Grouping was in a very similar position. Yes, pretty much every relevant card was errata-ed and later re-printed to deal with grouping. No, that doesn't mean that arbitrarily lumping vampires into different groups in a way that follows no discernible pattern would have been a good idea.

ReverendRevolver wrote:

We've remembered more than this,

And now you're adding errata to dozens upon dozens of cards to remember on top, at a time when people are trying to revive the card game.

Every time you errata a card in a whimsical manner, you increase the learning curve for newbies. Existing players may well have had to remember more than this, but they're existing players who have done so over a period of years. New players get to cope with that and literally dozens upon dozens of library cards and vampires that may or may not work the way they think.

SelfBiased wrote:

If Black Chantry's plan is to grow the amount of people who play the game, then that's a whole different kettle of fish. [...] As ReverendRevolver says, we're at the point where there exists an opportunity to make the game more marketable to people who don't already play it.

@Rowdy: SelfBiased mentions a few things here:

1) VTES is currently very niche. Vampires and card games are niche enough to begin with alone, but together they're even more niche. The WoD setting does not help. I can't prove it, but I've got this hypothesis that the longer an IP exists (and evolves) the less appealing it is to people who aren't already invested in said IP. Look at WH40K, Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Dr. Who, Star Wars, etc. Each of these began with a very generalized not-so-specific setting. As each IP grew, the lore got deeper and deeper, and inevitably, the stories got more and more convoluted and sometimes contradictory. The same thing happened to the WoD. The setting became more and more specific and White Wolf focused on appealing to people who were already fans of the setting. That's essentially what they're doing with V5. I get that old fans are their foundation, but if they want to capture a new generation I think they've basically got to do a soft-reboot of their setting. VTES kinda needs the same thing. The more general and cohesive it appears - the lower the barrier to entry - the easier it will be to get new people on board.

2) I understand that old players have huge card-pools to draw from, and have spent a bunch of money on said cards, and that errata'ing or making a 'revised' card-pool that banned half of their collection sucks. I get it. But from a new player's perspective, they're left high-and-dry with limited card selection, have to compete with old players with huge card-pools, and the implicit understanding that they're going to have to pour a bunch of money into this game to get the cards and quantities they need to play. Magic has several different formats. The whole point of the Standard format - the format where cards rotate out every 2 years or so, losing a lot of their monetary value - is that it makes it easier for new players to compete in tournaments. The only cards they really have access to are the newest cards, ergo WotC created a format specifically for the newest cards. A VTES tournament is the equivalent of the Magic Vintage format - the format where all the cards since the beginning are played. This, of course, hugely favors players who've been playing since the beginning and have amassed massive card-pools and powerful rare cards. VTES could easily have different formats for different players - implementing some kind of grouping rule for library cards would be a neat way to do this.