The future of V:TES

Ohlmann wrote:

It's still don't respond to the fact that I don't like seeing a tournament with mutliple True Brujah or Kyaside deck.

Uh, what?
VTES isn't a simulation of 1st Edition WoD/Vampire.
So the numbers of vamps/their clans don't have to correspond to any perceived ratio of WoD canon.

When you've been building decks, have you been taking consideration the relative number of vampires of each clan? "Oh, now I've done a Brujah deck. Can't build another one until I've put together a deck of X, Y,Z, etc etc so that the harmony of WoD doesn't shatter..."

Perhaps we should also institute "official" clan ratios for tournaments.
"Ah, participant number 49. You want to register and your clan of choice is... Ventrue, right? Unfortunately the Ventrues are already full but, tell you what, we still have some Caitiff slots available if you want to participate."


Back to the topic on hand:
-The starters for each clan sound interesting

-I really liked Blood Shadowed Court way of reprinting (=all vampires from one expansion). You could also sell full clan sets -all the vampires of a given clan. And if you want more versatility, you could just chose ones from certain grouping (Group 1 Brujah etc).

-Theme sets: 30 cards (or whatever is suitable) of Potence Combat (or Presence voting etc etc) so you get a solid block of cards. Say, 6 Immortal Grapples, 4 Disarms, 4 Slams, 4 Might Grapples, etc

-How to diffrentiate PoD cards from normal cards. Replace the set symbol with a suitable symbol. Since a printer might not be that classy, perhaps outlines of a classic Remminton typewriter? (Or just stick a PoD text on top o the set symbol. Or color the set symbol differently. It ain't rocket science.)

Great posts Mimir, this coming from a longtime player (as long as any).

I've heard very similar sentiments from nearly every potential new player we've come across for the past several years (where I live we still routinely demo at cons and actively recruit at game shops, etc.)

I really want to stress that the health of any game lies in it's player base and with a game as niche as vtes recruiting new players is essential just to have enough people to play regular games, not to mention holding sanctioned events and the like.

More players = more demand for product. Doesn't this go without saying? I don't think anybody has said that POD will bring in "a lot" of new players but some new players are better than none, can we agree?

Coming from a playgroup on the brink of final death, I'm asking kindly to make cards easily and inexpensively available to new players.

All us old 'Mr Suitcases' aren't interested in buying reprints anyway. Two of the local longtime players were dissappointed by the prospect of buying printed cards again, they were looking forward to the (free) PDF. Probably won't buy the new set (and certainly won't buy reprinted cards). Very few local players buy singles either (though some have begun selling because the market is so inflated).

It seems to me that some of the comments on this thread are driven by longime players who don't want to see the advantage of superior collections diminished and/or those that profiteer from the secondary market.

I'm asking you to look at this from the standpoint that this game is going to die if our player base continues to shrink. Release your new set, myself and the other old timers will buy it (provided it's good and reasonably priced).

I still believe POD lends itself to improving the experience for the playing community, in doing so I believe you stand to move more units than if you try to revive the supremely un-fan-friendly CCG model.

I still say a design-a-deck-for-print function is ideal for players new and old but if is MUST be precons for whatever reason, please at least let Benny design them again...

So you can't cite games which are "complex, take a lot of time to learn as well as play", but large playerbases? Starcraft, DotA, other CCGs (take, for example, L5R), many fighting games (let's say, Guilty Gear or Virtua Fighter), many board games and/or wargames (have you ever heard of "Twilight Imperium"?) etc. If you think being complex and so on are the sole reasons Jyhad doesn't have more market penetration, I can't really convince you otherwise.

This is a really naive post. Are you actually comparing the complexity of VTES with that of some popular video games? I'll help you wake up from that dream - neither DotA not Starcraft is hard to play. The concept is as simple as it gets and anyone can sit down behind their computer and play it without reading a single guide or manual. It's literally download - install and go. Yes, both games are hard to master, but that's something entirely different.

And that's not even going into the fact that those are actually video games and are as such widely more accessible by a lot of people, get a lot of attention on various websites and more importantly, can be played alone. Oh and they're either free or cost, like, $40 at most. The fact that they're arguably more fun with friends is redundant; games like that are WAY easier to pick up than VTES ever was.

You're also completely ignoring the fact that VTES is, and always has been, fishing in the same pond as Magic. As you may or may not be aware, Magic has long ago changed their business model from requiring Mr Suitcase to even be competitive to being able to literally spend $30 on a fat pack to have a somewhat reasonable deck. Add in a bunch of extra boosters from the corresponding blocks and you have some deck options. Grab a second fat pack and you can build multiple reasonable decks. All for less than $100. Having 5 colors instead of like 25 disciplines makes boosters actually useful, as opposed to VTES where boosters are usually a good source of frustration unless you opened a box or more. Magic is easy (and cheap) to pick up, extremely easy to learn and can be played 1v1, which makes finding games significantly easier for basically everyone.

So yes, at this point in time I don't think betting on new players for VTES to survive a few more years is a good idea. When 3rd and KoT were still readily available, we didn't get a lot of new players. What makes you think a POD scheme or something similar will suddenly attract a significant amount of new players? All it will do is allow vets to round out their collections with a few Enkil Cogs and Summon Histories and flood the secondary market with those cards.

The only time the game actually got a ton of new players was when White Wolf revived the game with Camarilla Edition. The number has been on the decline since and new cards won't change that. It's no longer 1998-2003 where even supermarkets sold CCG cards. People with money to blow on games for entertainment turn to PC/PS/XBox games nowadays.

I don't want to sound naïve, but I hardly think that maintaining the current playerbase is taking you anywhere. But that's the perspective of an outsider; what do I know of this matter?

Well, judging from tournament attendance both locally as well as international, it's fairly obvious that retaining the playerbase has turned out to be pretty rough. I doubt a bunch of new cards will change that much, mostly because it's so freaking hard to get a game going if you don't have a solid, reliable group you can play with.

I mean, I'm not saying that making boosters with shit rares is the way to go, but the game growing because of a fan-set or POD cards is just as likely as CCP starting to print it again. As much as I'd like to have a ton of players available, we 're gonna have to be realistic at some point.

@Izaak
I've got a MtG Judge for a friend (and I know his soul needs saving but he's enjoying his sins too much)... he openly admits to be competitive in MtG you need a deck built on rares. It might take him a little to put it so openly, but that aspect of MtG has not changed and will not while MtG's design model places greater raw power on cards with increased rarity.
VTES has not really been like that. Increased rarity usually means increased specialist roles or greater opportunity costs. So stop tossing around that little straw-man.

As far as being in print helping playerbases. I've got at least 2, but probably 5 players who would love to be able to expand their collections. They got limited material a while ago (or in the case of one guy, lost a 5000pc box to the territorial markings of a feline) and can't gain any more and don't want to be spending lots of cash on speculative eBay Bulk Lots or trying to buy 4 copies of Enkil Cog at $100 ea.

I have been steadily recruiting players for years. Our group got serious growth post Cam-Ed and I've been doing what I can to keep and maintain those numbers. Having new cards available makes that job SO much easier. It's even easier if I can hand them basically a small business card with a website and tell them that it will cost $20-$30 to get their first deck, which would be playable, delivered to their door. If they want more, they can get more there and all the cards that the 'old guys' have are available. Sounds golden. (It may also push cards like Sensory Deprivation to be neutered... because everyone can have a Sense Dep deck then!).

Having something to keep the old players in (the PDF set) is the start. Once you can keep the groups alive, then we can go about expanding them.

OK, I got over seven pages in before I said screw it and decided to post my thoughts. I got into this game as it went out of print and have had some great success at putting together a collection myself but regardless, there are some cards that are simply impossible to get.

I like the idea of Re-releasing previous sets a lot for that reason but I also do not need another blood doll. In order to properly preserve the history of the game you will need to reprint the suck cards as well as the good ones. Here's a solution for what it's worth. Experienced players all know that commons in the current iteration of the game are as powerful as the rares which has always been a key factor that allows new players to kick ass as well as the longtime players, unlike MTG.

I played Magic the Gathering when it came out and promptly quit when I made the deck to end all decks. Four copies of the power nine, three channels and a fireball. Playing Magic was a game about who had the most money. If you had these 39 rares and one common you had a one turn kill and could pretty much guarantee the new player wasn't too keen on playing after a few duels against it.

Anyways, the solution. Reverse the rarity of all sets. Make Blood Doll a rare and Mind Rape a common. New players will be able to get their "rares" from old players and vice versa. The reprints ought to be distinguishable from the originals, much like Sabbat and Sabbat War,

One thing I would also like to see is some of the original artwork come back. Anson Maddocks artwork for Madness Network is the bomb. (It might also be nice to replace all of Gary Chatterton's artwork with artwork but that would not preserve history I suppose. I guess I will just have to puke in my mouth a little every time Depravity hits the table. Has anyone come up with a Chatterton themed deck yet? I imagine it would generate some serious table hate!)

Another thing is the music quotes on the original Jyhad cards... I am assuming that was a legal issue when it was changed, if it wasn't bring it back.

Suppose that the game were printed like it was under WW/CCP. What did people like or dislike about the model while the game was still in print?

Because, if the old system wasn't all that great for building the playerbase, then that can be eliminated as a desired alternative.

Examples of some criticisms:
1.
I recall a time when people complained about sets coming out too fast, whereas I was of the opinion at the time that sets didn't come out often enough as they came out far less frequently than other niche CCGs. Now, I don't care so much about new cards. Unless you reboot a game, it suffers horribly from mechanics bloat. While it's questionable the extent of the burden of new mechanics, the difficulty not only of learning the game but keeping up with the game is such that every new mechanic strikes me as making the game less appealing rather than more. While some of that exists for anything new, even if the new is easy to process, like vampires with different discipline mixes, I'm not bothered in the same way about expansion without complexity creep.
2.
There were a small number of cases of odd rarity choices. I don't mean making something rare that everyone would like to have - that's a hardly surprising decision with a CCG. I actually mean cases where commons should have been rarer, like Reins of Power and any other once per game vote being a rare, Ravager being rare (depressing rare to crack, but it does make sense), The Oath not being common.
3.
The history of bizarre precons. While they moved towards getting better over time, the card choices were just insane. How about the amazing x5 Templars in the !Toreador precon? How about the reluctance to print .44 Magnums? No Spiritual Intervention in LotN Giovanni (while having absurd cards like Forger's Hammer). Extreme imbalances in the playability of precons within the same set as seen with CE or more recently with LotN.
4.
Not just precons, but a number of reprint decisions have been problematic for new players. I started a document of underprinted cards. Some of these are well known. Some, I think are surprising since I don't see people mention them. We can complain bitterly about how Bang Nakh should never have seen reprint, but it's amazing that .44 Magnum couldn't make it as a common since Sabbat, that Movement of the Mind hasn't been printed since V:TES, Parity Shift since CE, Spiritual Intervention only reprinted in 10th, Earth Meld not since Anarchs, no Deflection between BH and HttB, Sensory Deprivation not since FN, etc. I understand that artwork has been an issue for some cards, but then, go get some new artwork - it's not like art changes are all that rare for CCGs. Why hasn't Carlton seen reprint? Liquidation?
5.
Missed opportunities. It definitely seems like I care more about the Laibon being shafted on crypt choices and other cards than others, but how about a Camarilla set that actually expands library cards for Camarilla decks to a significant degree? For those who read my blog, they might remember my noting just how few Camarilla allies there are in the game. Also, Primogen cards, Camarilla sect requiring cards that have nothing to do with titles or clans, etc. The argument that the Camarilla has always been plenty powerful just doesn't wash. Expansion isn't about power, it's about more options. For the most part, the Camarilla has gotten new vampires to play with, which is something (group 4/5 Brujah were huge for getting away from EuroBrujah), but why not make Cam decks without Princes, Justicars, or Inner Circle more viable/interesting?

One more, the 60 card sets, with the exception of Twilight Rebellion were awful. Too narrow, rarity problems were exacerbated, didn't address needs well enough.