The future of V:TES

Squidalot wrote:

Yes bu anti ventrue different discpline mix is also and error (though a wod error)

ooh? care to elaborate? so the intent was to for venture and !ventrue to have DOM FOR PRE?

where did it go wrong?

(sorry if i digress)

As an unrelated side note, I find the World of darkness more interesting lore wise with AUS FOR DOM !ventrue, because it fit so much better with the whole knight and lord thing.

Historically, I have been told this was so that bloodline have a matching clan, like every other functional bloodline

Didnt the anti ventrue derive from the Knights of Blood, who emphasized more on Combat and perceiveing the truth oposed to the normal Ventrue who use Presence and Domiate to manipulate kine and kindred.

As far as I'm concerned what's done is done with the antitribu. Besides the confusion (and there would be plenty) those clans crypts would be huge (relative to Setites, Lasombra, Assamites, etc.) if you 'merged' the cam with their sabbat counterparts into a single clan. I understand the sentiment but IMO it's too late, too many cards have been printed for the separate clans.


This is from Drive Thru Cards, "Card Game Designers - Card game creators will be able to offer their card games as digital downloads (for print-and-play) and as premium-quality cards printed on demand and shipped to customers as they order."

Granted it's not up and running yet but I would very much like to know if anybody has any real insight into the process they intend to use? I'm assuming it's digital print onto card stock as opposed to full-plate offset 4-color press process based on the above. That would avoid large (speculative) print runs and the need to stock product. "On demand."

The downside to the consumer is higher cost per unit printed due to smaller print volume and a more expensive process. The upside to the consumer should be the 'on demand' part; the buyer selects the cards they purchase.

At that point you're talking pricing models. X cost per single and per-unit discounts for larger orders ostensibly. Which is why I keep going back to 102 cards (one legal deck). I think it would be very fan friendly to allow players to build their collections deck by deck. Hell I'd make that the minimum order (depending on base unit cost I suppose).

For limited play you could have somebody (i.e. Benny) design VEKN sanctioned draft kits that could be mixed and matched for sanctioned drafts. Those would be fairly large and should incur some discount ideally. But it should all be production cost driven.


Of course if we are talking plates and offset print then I agree with clan and/or discipline specific packages. I'd really like to see HttB quality precons designed for every clan for the newbs to get started. At least one per clan but that could be fleshed out quite a bit.

It would be really helpful if we could send new players to a sight where they could come away with 2 or 3 playable decks for less than $100.

jtroyve wrote:

i'm still skeptical on full print on demand being economically feasible. That's a huge number of cards/plates to maintain with no sure orders for 90% of the cards.

It would need to be printed digitally, which isn't much of an issue in terms of quality and the system would also need to be automated in a similar fashion to what the guys and Lotus Noir do for proxy PDFs — but better quality.

A quick scan of the consumer sites suggest feasibility. For example 108 individual custom cards costs $9.24 from here www.superiorpod.com/product/poker-size-custom-card-decks — costs would be much lower if you have a direct relationship, high volume or similar.

I'd definitely pay upwards of $15 for a deck of what ever cards I choose.

As a bonus, those of us who play optimised decks would save 30% — 60 cards vs 90! sweet...

Ke

Ke. wrote:

(...)

It indeed appears to be viable. A five-minute search took me to a BGG thread: "Print-on-demand card games?" ; the first link there is this , which has a lot of info on various topics:

Manufacturers of Games Parts, Cards and Boxes
Game Makers for Your Whole Game
Distributors
Art and Graphics Resources
Other Useful Sources of Information

And there are some others that this site doesn't even cover, but that have been mentioned in the BGG thread, such as Guild of Blades .

"Base pricing is $.075 per card", which is excellent; but "We have a minimum order of 25 card sets [set = 9 cards] for the first run of any project. By having this minimum, we avoid the need for any set up costs for a project. Once a project has been printed at least once with us, if you have no file changes, any future print runs only have a minimum run requirement of just 10 decks" [Source: gobretail.com/podcards-pricing.php]

It doesn't do exactly what I mentioned in earlier posts, but suggests that POD models can be reasonably successful.