intro to vtes needs a rewrite....

www.vekn.net/index.php/what-is-vtes

Wow is that ever lackluster, witness the following examples;

What is magic?

What is shadowfist?

Welcome to l5r

I may be motivated enough to write something, but implore the more dedicated and rabid among us to do the same, with plenty of relevant and gobsmacking images please!

example off the top of my head (might have delved too far into mechanics here);

Vampire: The Eternal Struggle was Richard Garfields second ccg design after the first ccg that started it all, Magic. It was specefically designed to promote multiplayer play and was voted by Scrye magazine as the best multiplayer ccg ever. Drawing on White Wolf's also groundbreaking Vampire the Masqeurade rpg, there was a deep well of background to draw from for the game.

In it you are a methuselah, an ancient and powerful vampire. You will use your influcence to bring other vampires and minions under your control, and have them act for you in the eternal struggle against other methuselahs, until there is a final victor.

This is no free for all however. The predator/prey relationship focus your attentions offensively to your left (prey) and defensively to your right (predator). Play is clockwise and with up to 5 players, there are typically players crosstble that are thus neither your prey nor predator, and therefore potential allies...for a time.

Your goal is to accumulate victory points by eliminating your prey. When this happens their prey becomes your new prey, and so on until (ideally) only you remain. The edge mechanic and pool reward facilitates this.

To do this there are 3 main strategies, with numerious offshoots and hybrids; bleed, politics and combat. Every vampire can bleed as an action to reduce your preys pool by one. There are many cards to up this amount as an action or action modifier. Vampires can also utilize political action cards to hit players pool or more interestingly, play with the metagame by moving locations, banishing minions, etc. Each referendum called by a political action however requires a successful vote, so having titled vampires or vote pushing cards to get the result you want is a must. Finally combat can be a means to an end by itself, simply violently remove all oppositon!

To get actions performed successfully they will need to go unblocked, and this introduces the stealth/intercept mechanic. Any 0 stealth action can be blocked by a minion with 0 or greater intercept. A small bidding war can therefore be created by upping an acting minions stealth when someone tries to block, who can up their intercept in response until the acting minion is blocked or the blocker fails.

talonz wrote:

Wow is that ever lackluster, witness the following examples

Well, it is short and sweet.
I mean people probably don't really want read an article long intrduction.
Perhaps another paragraph or two?

Besides, the other ones are not that much more through/longer.

talonz wrote:

with plenty of relevant and gobsmacking images please!

Very good idea, but I'd dare guess that we don't have rights to use those pictures...

talonz wrote:

example off the top of my head (might have delved too far into mechanics here)

Yup, good stuff, but indeed I think that mechanics shouldn't be mentioned in the into at all. Too technical, boring and all that

Also I seem to recall that the magazine where VTES was voted was Inquest. I could be wrong on this though...