Increased Bleed/Damage

Hello VEKN!

I played quite of a lot of Jyhad/VTES back when it was released up through the first Sabbat expansion. I'm now the Event Coordinator for a local game store in Portland, OR, and Black Chantry's pre-constructed starter decks caught my attention. Our store is ordering in several sets as a group of 5-6 players want to give it a try. I'll start running demo games via our Discord server in a few weeks.

Here's my question:

Back when I played, we always used a variant from Scrye Magazine #8 where vampires bled for 1/2 of their blood capacity (rounded up). For example, a 7-cap vampire would bleed for 4. A vampire's base hand damage was calculated the same way.

This variant definitely made high-cost vampires a bit more palatable to bring out, and sped up our games. I'm curious if anyone still uses this variant? If not, is it no longer recommended and why?

I highly recommend that you do not play this way!
Reasons why you should not play this way:

1. If the vampire has a capacity of 11, that means his bleed is 6 and his strength is 6. Big vampires usually already have some modifications to the basics. Example: Enkidu has the strength +2. In your case it would be 8 (6+2) which would send to torpor any average vampire.

2. Imagine a bleed with an 11-capacity Inner Circle vampire that has advanced dominate, and who uses discipline:
Base bleed 6, card special text +2, Govern the Unaligned +2, Conditioning +3 = 13
Taking a bleed for 6 is very painful, and for 13 usually means you are dead.

3. How do you deal with strikes that are not based on strength? In your case, they would be more or less useless.

4. Even if you play with a 5-capacity vampires with, with 3 vampires you can bleed for 9, which is too much compared to the default 3.

5. There are a lot of library cards, the point is to combine them with the disciplines that vampires have. 5-cap vampire (or even smaller) can do a bleed for 6 or hand strike for 6 just with 2 library cards.


Ok, you want to speed up the game, but this is not the way. Let's say every vampire with a capacity over 5 has by default bleed +1, this would speed up the game enough. No need to modify a strength at all. You can also limit the time to 1.5h instead of the standard 2h.


Advice: Play by the rules, every vampire by default has bleed 1 and strength 1. The game is very nicely balanced and there is no need to modify it. Especially not with BCP starters.

@Anhka: I started playing Jyhad in '94 so it was a long time ago, back when the card pool wasn't as big (pre-vampire groupings). Sometimes I feel like a Methuselah myself.

@Palamedes: Thank you for the in-depth and detailed response, it is much appreciated! As both you and Ankha recommend playing the current iteration of VTES without this variant, I'm going to follow your advice and stick with the standard rules.

I would add just one more thing to all the above. Playing like that makes bleed bounces so much more powerfull - being able to bounce 13 point bleed at your own prey - and all decks would include about 10 archon investigations, that would instantly burn any 5+ cap vapire whenever he would try to bleed.