Archeology: Jyhad combat as it can be reconstructed from present time

jamesatzephyr wrote:

which impliedly suggests that large amounts of S:CE was never or rarely playtested

Extremely professional behavior!

And as I've said before - we can see problems in Jyhad as mistakes, even if it looks to me that they have workable combat system and then intentionally fucked it. But they was pressed by time, got no experience in multiplayer ccg, maybe even there was some obscured problem, which can't be solved without SCE...

But then they got a year until VtES "reboot", and what changes do they managed to make when time constraints was removed as well as they've got information from all around the world about the way their game is played?

Concealed Weapon was just dropped -(by the way, LbP here is your answer - it was not a misprint;) ) and Chainsaw was also dropped (they actually spend like 20% of the "from Jyhad to VtES article" on musings about it, when they have like 40 unplayable combat cards in the set).

O, and they changed how aggravated damage works, which was quite reasonable, except Ivory Bow became even more broken.

zip gun + DBR as well as aggravated Pulled Fangs was in the pool also.

So the combat became even more thin, than in Jyhad.

Than they made three more sets, including "combat oriented" Sabbat, upping number of combat cards to 154 (more than doubling initial 69), managing to add by it a total of one combat strategy ().

All this looks like a bad design job, dumbness and "do not give a fuckery" to me. Nobody can prohibit you to call them professionals, thou - I think they was paid just fine.

When a card game is young, its designers rarely have a grasp on the game's overall balance not just due to massive amount of playtest required, but also because designers don't yet know what exactly players are looking for in the game. What makes it fun? What makes it captivating? What makes people want to play more? These things are subjective and difficult to answer. Mistakes always happen in the early years. I do not want to look back into the past too much because of this.

However, its the mentality against change that I see as a problem, particularly on these forums. Players have become too stuck with the past. If there are problems with cards, lets fix them/introduce counters/errata problematic cards etc.

elotar wrote:

jamesatzephyr wrote:

which impliedly suggests that large amounts of S:CE was never or rarely playtested

Extremely professional behavior!

Again, quit with the whiny, whiny idiocy. Mistakes and oversights are not the same as being unprofessional.

elotar wrote:

Concealed Weapon was just dropped -(by the way, LbP here is your answer - it was not a misprint;) ) and Chainsaw was also dropped (they actually spend like 20% of the "from Jyhad to VtES article" on musings about it, when they have like 40 unplayable combat cards in the set).

There's a theme to the cards that are dropped, and those that are added. With the exception of Movement/Shadow, everything that's dropped was disciplineless and everything that was added was disciplineless too. (Working on the principle that CW was a misprint. It makes no sense to print it with Obfuscate, because Disguised Weapon is better in every way, and Obfuscate already had 11 Obfuscate cards without it.) They wanted to give some very wide access to stealth-bleed defence - which is what Elder Intervention, Protected Resources, Justicar Retribution, and Archon Investigation are intended as - so they're all disciplineless. Removing the Paralyse rule gets you the option of removing two cards, although in the end they only removed one (because Stake got reprinted as Wooden Stake). Taking out disciplined combat cards would leave you with an imbalance between the disciplines.

Of the disciplineless combat cards, quite a lot actually saw play - despite being a bit ropey, and having been surpassed these days. After Concealed Weapon, there are 16. A good dozen-ish of them would have been considered playable at the time: Zip Gun, Trap, Taste of Vitae, Dodge, Pulled Fangs, Dragon's Breath Rounds, Fake Out, Boxed In/Dead-End Alley, Lucky Blow, and the one on the borderline for me would be Amaranth. Several wouldn't make the cut today for a variety of reasons, but the card set in Jyhad was different. For Lucky Blow, these days I'd swap Target Head/Vitals as being more interesting. Boxed In/Dead-End Alley wouldn't get put in pretty much any deck today, but in the days of Jyhad/V:TES, people were still regularly trying to make Thaumaturgy combat work well. Presses (either generic presses or presses to continue) are suprisingly hard to access in Jyhad. The obvious places to look - Read Intentions (aus), and Movement of the Mind (tha) - are both presses to end. A number of people tried Mages on Speed (tha/cel - because cel gets you presses fairly easily), which was fun and interesting, but expensive in terms of vampires and susceptible both to combat defence (S:CE) and being trumped by better combat decks. Similar happened with Tha/For, which was also quite painful to play. Which of them you'd prefer would depend on what you were seeing from opponents.

Of the remaining six, one is a clan hoser (Nosferatu Putrescence), and either you remove all of them or none of them, most likely. And they'd clearly made the choice to keep them around. The remaining five are Glaser Rounds, Manstopper Rounds, Open Grate, Ritual of the Bitter Rose. Open Grate is poor, but actually turns up in one TWD (with 4 copies), and given that press-based combat was still trying to work, was probably seen as something that needed to be kept. Manstopper and Glaser Rounds probably weren't considered bad, if you wanted to use them with proper guns - it's just that Zip Gun+DBR was by far the most efficient alternative. RotBR, I personally have little to no time for, but it turns up in several TWDs, including one from last year.

elotar wrote:

O, and they changed how aggravated damage works, which was quite reasonable, except Ivory Bow became even more broken.

zip gun + DBR as well as aggravated Pulled Fangs was in the pool also.

So the combat became even more thin, than in Jyhad.

Now, obviously you're desperate to concoct a scenario in which one of the team on V:TES at that time needed to overturn the rules to make his or her pet deck work better.

In the real world, look at all the changes that were made in V:TES in the round. Include in that the optional rules (long since dropped) that were added to the game, and they're trying to make the game quicker - a trend that continues into DS/AH, with Tomb and Return to Innocence. The execution is, obviously, flawed, but the intent is very understandable.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Taking out [the non-]disciplined combat cards would leave you with an imbalance between the disciplines.

Aren't the disciplines already imbalanced?

I get that a certain amount of 'neutral' cards would be good for the game, equipment being one such example, but I also think that the game would benefit from having disciplines be more prominent, both visually and mechanically.

1. I think it would add greatly to the visual appeal of passerbys and new players.
2. New players instantly grasp 'vampire powers' but explaining the Sects is more work (I basically dismiss the Sects as being 'like political parties' when explaining the game.)
3. Subjectively, I think building a deck around the various vampire powers is much more exciting than building around a Clan or Sect (the discipline icons were what got me into the game, and when new players realize that they can mix and match vampires as long as they have the needed disciplines, their eyes light up.)
4. It would add consistency. I find it bizarre that a card like Haymaker, where the image is a guy throwing a punch, doesn't require Potence and very strange that a card like Vermin Channel doesn't require Animalism despite depicting rats.

I personally think it would be really neat if most / all cards required disciplines and then gave Clan / Sect bonuses like Aire of Elation and Fiendish Tongue. I also think it would be cool if the Political Actions required disciplines. But that requires viewing the disciplines as abstract attributes or traits that vampires have, rather than specific powers, which goes back to my point about VTES being too subservient to VTM lore and mechanics. VTM has a lot of problems conceptually and mechanically, and I think VTES was afflicted by them.

/rant

LivesByProxy wrote:

I personally think it would be really neat if most / all cards required disciplines and then gave Clan / Sect bonuses like Aire of Elation and Fiendish Tongue.

But then we would have to give the same basic functions to nearly every discipline, which would create a lot of overlap and boring copypaste. I don't see how that would make things better.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

...blatant fanboism, which is as pointless to discus as an second round decks in the world with IG...

Now, obviously you're desperate to concoct a scenario in which one of the team on V:TES at that time needed to overturn the rules to make his or her pet deck work better.

O, actually! As an example of stupid crap, happening during jyhad playtest, Garfield in an interview mentioned some dorks, who tried at 2:00 at night to try to add together two "2 hand damage" cards, so they can gave "4 hand damage". He, as I understand, for one hundredth time told them, that such thing do not stack.

And what do they do at the move to VtES, when Garfield was not in control? They made this crap stack!

PS: no presses to was intentional and quite clever - you got cool second round abilities, so you will be tempted just to go there dodging or something at first. As you got no presses, than you have to work at the firs one (staying at long against and going to close against ), having second round threat as just an insurance.