Reprinting Old Sets

I can't condone infringing copyright. If the biggest problem is that I highly suspect Hasbro and CCP would hae enough in-house lawyers and enough willingness to sue the people who spearhead that drive.

Honestly, the problem with getting them printed is that the necessary IP is split. If it had a single set of IP (like I assume there is with TrekCCG), then a company like CCP who had little interest in printing them itself would probably be more inclined to license it to a 3rd party, because they get zero-risk income from the licensing.

Regarding speculation over what WotC / White Wolf would do about a virtual expansion :

See the example of a Netrunner expansion that's been out for a good while with no legal action from WotC so far. It's at least an encouraging precedent.

Anyway, in my opinion, it's clear that the number one option is to keep the game going, organizing events and so on.

Beyond that, the other thing that the community could do is to put together a virtual expansion. And as I stated, there are some risks and difficulties with doing that.

Speculating about what might work to motivate the companies involved, or what kind of licensing deal might be possible, is IMHO a waste of time unless you're closely connected to or on the inside of those companies.

Decipher allowed the printingof virtual cards for Star Wars and Star Trek. They were unable to renew teh Star Wars License prior to episode II due to Hasbro aquiring WotC, and Hasbro's relationship with Lucas. I am unsure as to why Star Trek was discontinued. In order to allow their games to live on Decipher allowed the production of virtual sets which are produced in an interesting way. The virtual sets are not new cards, but actually errata to old cards. Either version is legal for play should you desire it. The virtual sets have printable versions that you place in a sleeve with the original card and look pretty good. The sets tend to be small, a common theme, plus some number of magic bullets meant to adjust powerlevels of common decks. Starwars is a good comparison because they have a similar card library to VteS without a format where only new cards are allowed.

Since Decipher did this to avoid WotC patents I imagine it would work here.

In order for this to work you need a few things. Permission from CCP/WW caused by the use of digital images. A sanctioned body or individual to create the new 'sets'.

This begs a few questions, which I will chime in on:

What do we still need/want? Finished group 5/6 comes to mind.

Does this game need new cards in large quantities to live? I love new vampires, but I think we were approaching the end of some of the design space. How many more bleed actions do we need? There seems to be plenty of unexplored design space surrounding Masters, events, and Rare diciplinces.

With some many opinions in this group, if LSJ was not the one or part of the design team, do others creating cards do more harm than good? For me, this is a potential problem. I don't know many people that have played this game for over ten years that do not have strong opinions about it, those opinions tend to vary greatly.

Fun to thing about.

prunesquallor wrote:

Cons :

• The community can't even come to any consensus on whether Villein needs to be fixed, or how it should be fixed. Is it really feasible for enough of us to agree that all the cards in a new virtual expansion make sense and should be allowed in regular and competitive play?

I think if LSJ could come up with a team to design the cards the community would be alright with it (more or less ). If some others would do it I'm not sure though.

I also think that speculating that two very well financed companies with entire departments of in-house lawyers would not issue legal action against people setting up a virtual game which will require infringing two different sets of IP.

The main reason why VTES isn't being printed isn't because WW or WotC didn't want to print. CCP & Hasbro couldn't reach a licensing agreement for the IP that would satisfy both sides there was enough profit. The problem is 'content' IP belongs to CCP and 'mechanics' IP belongs to WotC-Hasbro.

So I don't think we should encourage anyone to create a virtual expansion or version of VTES without first seeking at least some kind of approval from either CCP (for the 'content' IP) or Hasbro (for the 'mechanic' IP) UNLESS some people want to turn around and rewrite the core rules to remove the IP needed from Hasbro.

Joscha wrote:

I think if LSJ could come up with a team to design the cards the community would be alright with it (more or less ). If some others would do it I'm not sure though.

Not all of them. B)