Attempt to Fix (not ban) Events

Haze wrote:

everyone knows Gehenna string decks don't try to win, they just want to watch the world burn.

You must be playing with unimaginative players that don't try to win with Event decks. Controlling your rage over arbitrary game components and focusing on ousting your prey usually helps.

We had a final like that in LA, Kevin. Your Afifa deck should be burned to the ground. It caused so much trouble for the players that we let a Meddling of Semsith deck win.

(Many of the points you make are pretty sensible, I'm only picking up on ones where I have something to say that isn't "Yeah, cool.")

TryDeflectingThisGrapple wrote:

"They're not interactive!"

Duh. Gehenna came to us, we didn't instigate it and we sure as hell shouldn't be able to stop it with a snap of the fingers.

In Dog Poo: The Eternal Struggle, many players want a good, interesting game with subtleties and power struggles and multiple viable avenues to victory, and they care absolutely zip for "Well, of course it's sensible that My New Card ousts you immediately, it summons Caine for 1 pool, and he eats your face, and that's totally allowed because I've read the third supplement to the Book of Nod where it totally says this thing."

TryDeflectingThisGrapple wrote:

Personally, I think the creating the event class of cards was a stroke of design brilliance, given the intent of introducing something representing an external force. It doesn't collide with the survival tools often present in MPA space, so people can actually include it in decks. It doesn't consume minion actions and can't be blocked or DI'ed, so it will actually work as intended when included. It still consumes a player's in-turn resource (DPA), so there is an opportunity cost beyond card slots.
Mechanically, aren't all of these good decisions given the stated intent?

You're conflating an awful lot of things here under the heading of "interactivity", to do with WoD theme, design goals, precise implementation, player in-game resources etc.

It would be possible to have created events such that they were more interactive, while still allowing them to explore a different or disparate design space. The current implementation is clearly not the only possible implementation.

For example: (Obviously, for everything that follows, you might well have changed current cards to be more or less powerful, or work differently.)

- it would be possible to have Events go off in the Discard phase as normal, but declare them to be to a special type of master card that can only be played in the Discard Phase. Effective net change: Wash, Sudden Reversal etc. can affect them. More interactive, but still not competing with your own MPA space, not consuming minion actions, can't be blocked etc. And Pentex Subversion works as intended when included most of the time, so it's not hard to envisage that Fiery Mouth of Hell Opens Up will work just fine most of the time. And if that weakens them too much (which it might), maybe there's a rule that says "Cancelling events cost 3 extra pool." (Where 3 could be any number. Just something big.) I'm pretty certain that a few players would happily use Sudden and 3 pool to stamp on Anthelios. It also opens up a fun line in decoy masters. If you Sudden my Pentex, will I be able to sneak my Lilith's Baby Shower through unchallenged? Alternatively, you might tweak the rule about playing events once a game - Events can only be played once a game, but cancellation of the event as played does not exhaust this limit. That sort of thing.

- In quite a few instances, protagonists do and/or can know about significant events and delay them, postpone them, push them away. Where events represent - say - the rise of antediluvians (and earlier), is it so impossible to believe that they may be acting through vassals to re-awaken themselves? That doesn't have to be represented by actions (necessarily), but it's possible that a Methuselah might be able to intervene somehow. You say "We didn't instigate it", but in V:TES it is precisely us who instigate it, every time we put a Gehenna card in our decks.

- Interactivity doesn't have to mean 'use an action to put this in play'. Certainly, that's one good way of making a card interactive, but it's far from the only way. There are a variety of really nasty cards in the game that are tempered by burn clauses. For example, Smiling Jack is vicious and can form the cornerstone of some really unpleasant wall-ish decks, but there is an innate way of burning it. Ditto Madness Network, with its potential for horrible abuses. And quite a few others - Antediluvian Awakening, say. And burn clauses don't have to be as straightforward as "Take an action" - they can take time and resources (cards, actions, pool, blood, turns). And it would be possible to make a burn clause reasonably onerous, such that only the most motivated of Methuselah would seriously consider it, more a considered "Aargh, that deck is going to get me off the table so I'm going to do <tricky detrimental thing> to survive it" in a way that isn't "You smell, so I take the action to burn your The Crone Returns, because I'm going to be ousted anyway." (For example, requiring several steps, with the actual anti-event effect only going off at the final trigger.)

- Cards don't have to take effect the instant they're played. One problem with a number of event cards is that they just come from nowhere while being extremely broad and/or deep in their effects. Perhaps you design the mechanic exactly as it is now, but events take effect the following turn (by, say, coming into play tapped, or something like that). Or perhaps you add that to some events. So maybe, from a strategy angle, you have some impetus to force through several actions this turn, because you don't want to face The Unmasking. Maybe you call that Public Villification now, because Fall of the Sabbat has just been played.

- Cards can have downsides. Maybe you decide that you don't want players to have warning because of theme. But if other Methuselahs get screwed by an earth-shattering event that comes from nowhere, why do I - as the playing Methuselah - get off with close to zero ill effects? (Because I know that Irad Returns is in my deck, so I build around it to minimize the effects.) If I can, apparently, predict and control this happening, so can other Methuselahs, no? But as the source of the really bad thing happening, perhaps there should be some consequences for me. Perhaps I have to burn pool every turn. Perhaps other players can get a bleed bonus vs me. Perhaps damage votes do more damage to me. Perhaps people can rush me. Perhaps some of those might be once per turn, perhaps they might be once per action, perhaps the action has a cost in life or pool or blood or anything else. The exact implementation would obviously be up for grabs - it could be card text, it could be rules text, maybe a little of both - but most of the responsibility should probably rest with other players. Making 'Vanguard' style cards where I cause havoc on the table but my minions can't play Strike: Combat Ends isn't great for a game as diverse as V:TES, because I design around that. (We already see that sort of 'ignore the problem' deck design with, say, Talbot's Chainsaw.) My predator being able to get additional bleed against me is something that's more tricky for me to deal with.


Nothing about any of the above should be taken as saying "Well, this would just have made Events totally unplayable." It would be more about striking a different balance, whereby a card could still be vicious, in an altered framework. (And if you've made events totally unusable, that framework is wrong.) Indeed, it might be possible for some cards to be more vicious than they are currently, because you can reasonably say that the opponents have a variety of ways they can deal with it (which aren't just "Well, play a Black Hand deck if you hate it so much").

TryDeflectingThisGrapple wrote:

Double Duh. You don't just laugh away the end of times over a cup of coffee. Further, I suggest that if 4 players at a table really need to fix a widespread event problem, it can be orchestrated by removing the offending Methesulah, or in the absolute worst case, creating an unfavorable VP cascade.

This exacerbates a problem that Garfield has talked about as being significant downer in game design. He added the deliberately artificial predator-prey, VP dynamic - rather than, say, the more obvious "last man standing" alternative - to reduce but not eliminate the situations where some multiplayer board games turn into a heated argument of "I'm not the threat, he's the threat!" "No, shut up, she's the threat, she's just trying to manipulate you." "No, God, look, he's got three pieces there and..." (Talk to anyone who's played - for example - Diplomacy a lot and you will quickly run into that sort of tale.)

The fact that each player has distinct goals was supposed to grease that wheel slightly. Yes, there are benefits to me ousting that deck cross-table. Yes, there are times I want to rush my grand-predator. But giving another player a VP is intended to be a strong disincentive to arbitrary "Let's all pile on this player and oust them." That player's grand-predator is almost always going to be thinking "Oh god, I really don't want my prey to have 6 more pool, and he's expended almost zero resources in the process, because all four of us have just cross-table ousted JesseMae when she played Countdown to Oblivion on turn three."

If whole-table alliances are the right way to deal with the deck, there's probably something wrong going on, absent a special set of circumstances like the Nergal storyline. For example, watching the table crumble to a well-played, pre-errata Anarch Revolt deck (replete with all sorts of hideous, hideous vote defence) was soul-destroying.