What is a compelling game need?

Here are some questions that help me determine if a card or effect serves a compelling game need. Food for thought.

1. How does this card reinforce a strength of the clan/discipline?

2. How does this card reinforce the clan's/discipline's theme?

3. How does this card reinforce a weakness of the clan/discipline?

4. How does this card mitigate a weakness of the clan/discipline?

5. Should all clans and disciplines have access to all the same effects? A subset of effects (e.g. hunting grounds, stealth, etc.)?

6. Does the card mimic an existing card? If so, what are the differences and how do they affect the way the card interacts with the game?

7. Did you play test the card? I mean in an actual game. Was it fun for you? Was it fun for the other players? (Hint: Baltimore Purge for Harbingers would not be.)

8. What kind of effect do you think it will have on the META game? Is the result desirable? Ask your play testers.

You forgot:

"Is it as good or better than Conditioning?"

and

"Is it as good or better than Deflection"

But, other than that, great post, attention whore.

Thanks Dorrinal,

These are good evaluation points for suggested minion and Master cards - do you have additional/specific questions for crypt cards? (E.g. questions 7-8 are applicable; I don't think the others are).

chrisn101 wrote:

Thanks Dorrinal,

These are good evaluation points for suggested minion and Master cards - do you have additional/specific questions for crypt cards? (E.g. questions 7-8 are applicable; I don't think the others are).

Yes.

For discipline to capacity weight, you can loosley use create-a-clan point system, and look at other cards.

Lets say I want to make a card for Ratface from CN:Gangrel. I decide hes a 3 cap, and he never got statted out in a book. Do I give him ANI alone? I check beetleman as reference and decide its not game breaking. Then I look at Zoe, and ask "what if he has ANI and fortitude and celerity? Zoe is a great vamp, small drawback, and gangrel could use a good support vamp" well, a Gangrel isnt likely to break the game, but I just made a 3 cap who can rush, draw out beast, crows, bats, press, bats, etc, and possibly forced march and do it all again. And hed be Cam, so Xavier, Slava, etc could benefit......

You base it in existing cards. 11 caps have alot of room for specials, 9 caps without titles do too. Anyone who really evaluate cards while thinking up new ones gets a feel, and playtesting tells you if that small ability isnt worth printing or breaks everything.

What gets you is what disciplines help and what abilities are needed.

Gargoyles: nonslaves,

Make one with DOM and no special or make one with only inclans and a strong special?

Would you rather one vamp bloat, bleed, and bounce, or none but ome can pump bleeds/reduce allies?

ReverendRevolver wrote:

What gets you is what disciplines help and what abilities are needed.

Gargoyles: nonslaves,

Make one with DOM and no special or make one with only inclans and a strong special?

Would you rather one vamp bloat, bleed, and bounce, or none but ome can pump bleeds/reduce allies?

Urgh.

Improving Gargoyles (or, indeed, most clans) shouldn't be accomplished by merely giving them Dom and a couple of vampires with tricky specials. Homogenising the game with yet more Dominate isn't good design, and pushing things only into vampire specials means that whole group pairs are excluded from having access to items which address a "compelling game need". Vampires can and should let you open up new and interesting combinations and strategies, and try out new things, whether with interesting discipline combinations, or titles, or special abilities, or whatever else. But using them to wallpaper over basic holes in a clan is really, really icky.

It would be vastly less annoying to do things like:

- make cards that exploit Flight well, in solid but interesting ways

- similarly, for Visceratika

- cards that riff on the slave mechanic, perhaps a clan card that works one way for Slaves and one-way for non-Slaves, so you get some versatility

So perhaps vampires with Flight and Visceratika get some interesting bleed defence. Perhaps a Slave can do something unique and interesting, that partially offsets the cost of the Slave mechanic.

with gargoyles it's very tricky because with every card that makes them better you need to remember about tupdog. And anything that makes tupdogs better should be rethinked at least few times. With Samedies and HoS it's much easier as there are no clearly broken vampires or decks in existence right now.
And I agree that just dominate as an out-of-clan is not really a good design.