What print-on-demand COULD mean

direwolf wrote:

You are imagining too much work. There is no need to filter and collate. Players can openly talk about it on the forums. The Playtest coordinator should read some or all of the discussion, and report anything of interest to the design team.

I actually see videogame betatest, so it's not like I never have seen this happen. What you propose is how to create endless topics to animate the forum, but it will add next to no useful feedback. Also, you forget that filtering through a forum is a lot of hard work, especially when trying to find whether one arrogant prick is onto something or is only obnoxious as usual.

In fact, public feedback thread tend to uniformize people feedback, simply because people prefer to agree with people they appreciate than form their own opinions. This happen with each and every human group, and that's why I am more than skeptical that it actually add any useful feedback.

Johannes already said we'd discuss the idea. We do respect all of your opinions, and we've revisited the idea of more openness in playtest over the course of the development of Danse Macabre.

My gut reaction is "You want us to post full spoilers? Where's the fun in that?" but we'll see what the crew says.

direwolf wrote:

But I think there is room for change on step 1. We are already heading in that direction. With these forums here, players can discuss card ideas, and talk about the balance of cards in existence. That alone is a huge change over the vacuum of previous game design.

You do realise that people have been discussing card designs since the dawn of Jyhad, right? Existing card designs, the way they'd tweak existing cards, what they'd do if they could go back in time and tweak the way that [mechanic X] works, new clans they want to see, new disciplines they want to see (replete with a full complement of abilities), new types of crypt cards they want to see (mages and werewolves turn up a fair bit, other things too), new cards they want to see of any type you can imagine, new ways of hosing every strategy you can imagine, new ways of overpowering every strategy you can imagine, and everything in between. This has been going on on Internet forums since forever, with many players having suggestions, heckling, bitching, squabbling etc. in exactly the same way they do now.

V:TES responded to Jyhad with a number of cards that were obviously intended to address problems the game faced at that time. (You can argue about how effective they were, obviously.) Protected Resources, Elder Intervention, Archon Investigation and Justicar Retribution were pretty clearly all intended to assist with the rampant power of stealth-bleed. AI tended to be the most popular, but there are issues that a focused bleed deck can bleed for 2-3 each action, whereas, say, a Bruise-Bleed deck might want to lunge for 5 with one action, so the cards weren't perfect by any means - but they were pretty clearly a direct engagement with the problems being faced by the nascent metagame.

It's certainly arguable that the designers creating DS and AH were less well connected with the game. Specifically, you get a clan like the Assamites, whose theme is combat heavy being lumped with:

- an apparently key mechanic (Contracts) that was implemented in a manner that is more or less just worse than Haven Uncovered. Although HU can be burned, you generally want to dunk the vampire right away anyhow.

- that mechanic is based on master cards, and the various combat decks that were popular at the time got through minion cards at a rate of knots, meaning master jam was a significant problem. (See the weenie Obf/Pot and Cel/Pot decks that were popular among people like Peter Bakija and James Hamblin at the time.) So if you're expecting me to do fewer combats and/or with fewer cards, then you need to provide me with better consequences (they didn't) or you need to let me weenify my deck without master jam (bad crypt selection for that)

- the main offensive combat discipline they were given, Quietus, was very ropey, and had relatively few powerful cards and... It was pretty quickly established that their real disciplines were Obf/Cel/Gun, and that could have been an awesome way of taking Quietus (gun enhancers, that sort of thing), but it didn't happen.

- ...they had no good way of responding to S:CE. Yes, they had Psyche!, but most of their combat involved transients, and it was significantly worse than Immortal Grapple for the vast majority of uses. Even Protean could wait until its opponent had played Majesty before playing (and paying for) Wolf Claws. And S:CE was a massive problem in Jyhad, one of the very biggest flaws they missed was that people would play 30 copies of Majesty or Earth Meld.


Similarly, Setites got given a Corruption mechanic that would take vast numbers of actions compared to, say, Graverobbing, and politics that was just obviously worse than the Camarilla. Ravnos got massively expensive cards. None of these three clans got any access to bleed bounce, which was manifestly the best bleed defence in the game. The Giovanni obviously did. Necromancy was a bit wishy-washy, but Dominate was good, Giovanni tap and bleed wasn't awful.

Library card wise, Return to Innocence was hugely misguided. Yes, the game probably needed to be pushed in a more aggressive direction, but RtoI wasn't that. (It was also weird that if that was their intention, Tomb of Rameses was the most efficient pool machine the game had ever known.) It's never quite clear to me what the intention of Thoughts Betrayed was - was it supposed to shut down offensive combat, defensive combat, or both? But it was very over the top regardless. Protect Thine Own wasn't top of anyone's problem list early on, but became so later.

Sabbat actually did pretty decently. Some of the vampires are a bit over the top, but Vicissitude and Obtenebration are far from awful in Sabbat. Legacy of Pander was, of course, a bit of a nightmare. Personally, with hindsight, I'd probably have preferred fewer, more distinctive clans with better crypt selection, but it's not awful. (Okay, the Gangrel Antitribu were pretty awful.)



But come White Wolf, and you have LSJ and occasional additional designers who have been steeped in the V:TES community for years. They've been making their own suggestions. (LSJ's group had many house rules at various points to deal with deficiencies in rulings and errata, as they saw them.) The Golden Tenets and Sensible Players Tournament Rules had come out of the community. 6/23 and 7/7 and the problems they ended up addressing had been discussed endlessly in hundreds upon hundreds of posts. (They were not, of course, to everyone's taste.) While V:TES was in torpor, various people came up with their own cards and played them on systems like JOL.


"These forums here" are a different venue. They have not enabled some magical new discussions that was absent from the world beforehand. Not even close.

direwolf wrote:

You are imagining too much work. There is no need to filter and collate. Players can openly talk about it on the forums. The Playtest coordinator should read some or all of the discussion, and report anything of interest to the design team.

You've basically just written: "There is no need to filter and collate. However, the playtest coordinator should filter and collate the discussion."

The work that you think is too much work? You're still asking for it to happen!

BenPeal wrote:

Johannes already said we'd discuss the idea. We do respect all of your opinions, and we've revisited the idea of more openness in playtest over the course of the development of Danse Macabre.

My gut reaction is "You want us to post full spoilers? Where's the fun in that?" but we'll see what the crew says.

Honestly, I think that is a lot more fun that releasing "teasers" or "previews."

With an open play-test, you aren't necessarily using the final product... but you have have an idea of where things are going. At that stage, there will be very little changes if any.

Also, maybe not every card is in the public play-test. Hold back maybe half the cards, that don't need further testing, or simply keep some in closed testing.

That builds anticipation for the new set, and lets players work on deck ideas and strategies before the set is released. In the case of print-on-demand, it helps players plan ahead with their purchases.