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Yeah, the Red Sign was so dull I remember basically nothing about it except the mortal House Tremere hedge order that fled the fall of the House proper and became rosicrucians and freemasons.
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May 13, 2020 08:54
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Rand Brittain posted:Although The Red Sign is in competition with Transylvania Chronicles I for being the most boring World of Darkness book ever published, which is impressive given that it's about a mage-vampire conspiracy to cure undeath, and Transylvania Chronicles is about your grandpa insisting you spend a century manning a toll booth. My group was into the idea of being given our fiefs until we remembered that the game wanted one per city and there weren't any other vampires to really interact with and none of us were super down with 'with scheming against each other so the ST kinda threw that part out and just worked in the Gehenna stuff as it became relevant.
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May 13, 2020 13:01
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gtrmp posted:The fun thing about Blood Treachery saying "you can't use any kind of magic to cure vampirism so don't even think about trying" is that three years later they published The Red Sign, a sourcebook all about a mage-vampire conspiracy that was trying to do just that. White Wolf in that era was really keen on these scolding rants from the authors about how you were a dumb powergamer who was Playing Wrong if you did X, followed in short order by chapters or whole books of doing X. The Aberrant Player's Guide was probably the most notorious, with a rant about how Aberrant was not a four color superhero game and you were a stupid idiot for playing that way, followed immediately by a chapter on "how to play Aberrant as a four color superhero game". But it seemed to pervade all the lines to some degree or another, and dumped gasoline over a lot of the divisions about the direction of the settings in the revised era.
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May 13, 2020 13:53
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Is today still the release date for Dark Eras 2?
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May 13, 2020 15:37
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Desiden posted:White Wolf in that era was really keen on these scolding rants from the authors about how you were a dumb powergamer who was Playing Wrong if you did X, followed in short order by chapters or whole books of doing X. The Aberrant Player's Guide was probably the most notorious, with a rant about how Aberrant was not a four color superhero game and you were a stupid idiot for playing that way, followed immediately by a chapter on "how to play Aberrant as a four color superhero game". But it seemed to pervade all the lines to some degree or another, and dumped gasoline over a lot of the divisions about the direction of the settings in the revised era. The People Who Were Playing It Wrong and the correct ways to Punish those people really haunted the nightmares of writers and players in the late 90s/early oughts, it's weird.
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May 13, 2020 19:28
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Jonas Albrecht posted:Is today still the release date for Dark Eras 2? It's this, right? Ferrinus posted:The People Who Were Playing It Wrong and the correct ways to Punish those people really haunted the nightmares of writers and players in the late 90s/early oughts, it's weird. Which is weird, since you can't have played with all of them.
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May 13, 2020 19:30
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Attorney at Funk posted:It's this, right? Hell yeah.
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May 13, 2020 20:15
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Attorney at Funk posted:It's this, right? When you saw only one set of 1/1/4 social stats in the coterie, it was then that I carried you in the team-based PvP sense.
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May 13, 2020 20:37
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Ferrinus posted:When you saw only one set of 1/1/4 social stats in the coterie, it was then that I carried you in the team-based PvP sense. 
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May 13, 2020 20:39
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Ferrinus posted:The People Who Were Playing It Wrong and the correct ways to Punish those people really haunted the nightmares of writers and players in the late 90s/early oughts, it's weird. It's funny that Abominations didn't get nearly the hand-wringing this did, although I guess they did force people to waste page space on 'but can THIS were-thing be Embraced?' with varying degrees of humor. They probably still would have nixed Pariah if they thought about it more in hindsight.
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May 14, 2020 01:07
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Desiden posted:White Wolf in that era was really keen on these scolding rants from the authors about how you were a dumb powergamer who was Playing Wrong if you did X, followed in short order by chapters or whole books of doing X. The Aberrant Player's Guide was probably the most notorious, with a rant about how Aberrant was not a four color superhero game and you were a stupid idiot for playing that way, followed immediately by a chapter on "how to play Aberrant as a four color superhero game". But it seemed to pervade all the lines to some degree or another, and dumped gasoline over a lot of the divisions about the direction of the settings in the revised era. I'll submit that the worst is actually in With Fang and Claw, their strategy guide to the Rage CCG. There's a three page diatribe about not making your deck TOO good, and instead more flavorful. Call me crazy but I'm not sure a good strategy guide for a competetive game would tell me to play worse. Adding to the absurdity is that inserted between pages 1 and 2 of the essay is a "10 Commandments of Rage" graphic which has rules of thumb for optimal play. Free Gratis fucked around with this message at 01:30 on May 14, 2020 |
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May 14, 2020 01:19
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Free Gratis posted:I'll submit that the worst is actually in With Fang and Claw, their strategy guide to the Rage CCG. There's a three page diatribe about not making your deck TOO good, and instead more flavorful. Call me crazy but I'm not sure a good strategy guide for a competetive game would tell me to play worse. Didn't Rage not actually have rules for who went first?
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May 14, 2020 02:12
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Dawgstar posted:Didn't Rage not actually have rules for who went first? Correct! Most phases were played simultaneously, with people just playing whatever and whenever. By the way, the game had Unique cards where only one copy is allowed in play at a time, so it may just be a contest of who slaps it on the board first! Only the combat phase had any kind of turn structure. Each player selected an Alpha for the phase to take an Alpha Action, and the order to take those actions was based on the Renown value of the character. I don't recall their being any official rules for tie breaking equal Renown characters.
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May 14, 2020 02:29
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I assume you fought it out in real life.
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May 14, 2020 04:36
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Early TCG's were kinda crazy.
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May 14, 2020 07:52
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Angry Lobster posted:Early TCG's were kinda crazy. Design-wise, Richard Garfield was really the only one that had a clue what they were doing. There were two White Wolf branded CCGs in those early days (VTES/Rage) and it's incredibly obvious which one Garfield designed. Rage had a couple of things going for it. I enjoyed being able to pick and choose the characters in your pack and have them available for use from the get go. It's one of the earliest forms of a deck having an "identity", like the Netrunner LCG. VTES was somewhat similar, in that you built a Crypt deck, but it was still random which characters were available to you. Also neat was the dedicated Combat deck, which always allowed you to participate in combat without having to worry about dead draws that left you unable to interact. VTES and Rage both had dedicated combat cards, but in VTES those cards were mixed in with the rest of your non-Character cards, so the chance of entering combat without any gas was real. Caveat though, VTES is a much more robust game than Rage and allows for strategies that don't want/need combat, so it's very much OK for one of those players to be out of gas when they do get engaged in combat. Rage is also, as far as I know, the first CCG to have ultra-rare foil chase cards.
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May 14, 2020 17:12
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Rage, to my knowledge, also pioneered the kind of "this kind of card fundamentally changes the game and if you don't have cards relevant to it in your deck, you can't interact with the other player meaningfully" that normally you see in deck-building games where you just buy the entire set outright and play from a common pool of cards. Which come to think of it would be probably the best way to play Rage.
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May 14, 2020 17:28
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Vampite: TES is still the best multi-player* CCG I've found. *With the caveat you need four players, no more and no less. More than that and the game takes too long, less than that and it's just a standard card game or 'kill the guy with the ball.'
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May 14, 2020 17:48
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I don't know much about Rage but if the game favors combat then it's thematic and fits with the rpg. I really like what Vtes does with its basic rules. It has a really deep and diverse metagame and deck building is great. What I don't enjoy so much is how much people favour talking and making deals from turn 1, at least in most european communities. Also I hate how every now and then you have games where you can't literally play due to bad luck/matchups/contesting and you can't even concede in competitive games. I hope that they rework the rulesbook into something more comprehensive for the upcoming 5th edition and not the current unholy abomination we have now with bad formatting and a billion rulings and exceptions. Finally, speaking about changes to Vtes, Black Chantry has released this week a rule change for the community to test in non-competitive game and give feedback: https://www.blackchantry.com/2020/05/09/new-rule-test-contesting-crypt-cards/ A lot of veteran players are up in arms about this, although is not that suprising because they are a bunch of entitled nerds. Angry Lobster fucked around with this message at 18:12 on May 14, 2020 |
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May 14, 2020 18:04
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Angry Lobster posted:I don't know much about Rage but if the game favors combat then it's thematic and fits with the rpg. You know how boardgame discourse has the whole Euro/Ameritrash dichotomy? Rage is about as Ameritrashy as it gets for ccgs as they constantly emphasize theme in the design with little regard for anything else. The basic theme of the game is that you are a Garou pack out to gain glory, and this is represented through victory points, which are gained from killing neutral Enemy Cards, or Character/Ally Cards belonging to another player. Enemy cards are played by the players into the Hunting Grounds and can be attacked by any player during the combat phase as an Alpha Action by the character that a player declared their Alpha for that turn. An Alpha action can be used to attack other Alphas, or issue a challenge to Non-Alpha characters which can be declined. Each Enemy/Character has a Renown value which is how many victory points they're worth. There are some other roundabout ways to get victory points, like Quest and Moot Cards. Speaking of Moots, these are the political cards of the game, as each player uses their characters to cast votes for their resolution. The effects of Moots can be pretty drastic, such as completely removing a character from play for the remainder of the game, though the controller of that character gains victory points equal to the characters Renown. Chernobyl Peace Prize touched upon cards that fundamentally changed the game, and while I don’t know exactly what they were referring to, the game’s first expansion did exactly that. It added the spirit realm of the Umbra as a completely new and separate play area that could be accessed via certain cards. It was entirely possible to build a deck around this and, unless your opponent(s) planned for it, you could isolate yourself entirely and attack Enemies that only you could interact with. The second major expansion did it again, by adding the new playable Wyrm factions, with their own thematic card types. Instead of Enemies they had Victims, that the Garou factions could not gain victory points for defeating. (Wyrm could not get VP for Enemies either). Instead of Moots they had Board Meetings, and neither faction could vote in the others, leading to uncontested use of these powerful effects. I will forever cherish Rage as the game that introduced me to tabletop hobby in general, but boy is it an abomination of design. Free Gratis fucked around with this message at 19:24 on May 14, 2020 |
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May 14, 2020 19:13
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Free Gratis posted:Chernobyl Peace Prize touched upon cards that fundamentally changed the game, and while I don’t know exactly what they were referring to, the game’s first expansion did exactly that. It added the spirit realm of the Umbra as a completely new and separate play area that could be accessed via certain cards. It was entirely possible to build a deck around this and, unless your opponent(s) planned for it, you could isolate yourself entirely and attack Enemies that only you could interact with.
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May 14, 2020 19:31
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Angry Lobster posted:I really like what Vtes does with its basic rules. It has a really deep and diverse metagame and deck building is great. What I don't enjoy so much is how much people favour talking and making deals from turn 1, at least in most european communities. The VtES players I've known have all routinely cited that as the big thing they like about it.
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May 14, 2020 20:58
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Free Gratis posted:The second major expansion did it again, by adding the new playable Wyrm factions, with their own thematic card types. Instead of Enemies they had Victims, that the Garou factions could not gain victory points for defeating. (Wyrm could not get VP for Enemies either). Instead of Moots they had Board Meetings, and neither faction could vote in the others, leading to uncontested use of these powerful effects. The premise sounds fun but the board dynamics you are describing sounds like terrible design indeed. Pope Guilty posted:The VtES players I've known have all routinely cited that as the big thing they like about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with talking to the other players and making deals, but there's a fine distinction between doing that and having to argue about everything with 3+ people for 2 hours straight just because someone feels like a smartass, and typically then someone does a stupid random play that ends screwing up someone and then everyone gets angry about that. I swear to God, there's too much big nerd ego going around on this tournaments.
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May 14, 2020 21:29
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Free Gratis posted:I will forever cherish Rage as the game that introduced me to tabletop hobby in general, but boy is it an abomination of design. Re: Moots - couldn't both players vote on them but as unless one of the player's Garou died they probably had the same amount of Renown so it was always a tie?
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May 14, 2020 22:56
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Dawgstar posted:Re: Moots - couldn't both players vote on them but as unless one of the player's Garou died they probably had the same amount of Renown so it was always a tie? Yes, unless it was a multiplayer game or a pack mate had a bonus to Moot votes.
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May 14, 2020 23:12
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Gonna +1 Rage as a fun game that I'd like to see again, and also posit how rad a CofD CCG would be.
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May 15, 2020 00:08
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Dawgstar posted:Re: Moots - couldn't both players vote on them but as unless one of the player's Garou died they probably had the same amount of Renown so it was always a tie?
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May 15, 2020 00:20
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There was also a weird Changeling game called Arcadia I always thought was neat. It was less a competitive game and more of a hybrid CCG/Boardgame. Didn’t last very long but it was a cool concept.
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May 15, 2020 00:21
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Edmund Lava posted:Yes, unless it was a multiplayer game or a pack mate had a bonus to Moot votes. Yeah, there were a few cards that altered votes, and if it was two player game then it was typically a forgone conclusion. Moots were an attempt to piggy back on VTES Political Actions, but are no where near as elegant mechanically or even thematically. In VTES calling a referendum is an Action in itself that can be Blocked so that it never even comes to a vote. So if the Brujah Methuselah catches wind that the conniving Ventrue is gonna call a referendum to redistribute hunting grounds, he can send one of his bat wielding punks to intercept the Ventrue on his way to elysium. If the Ventrue manages to sneak past or Dominate the Brujah, the vote gets cast and any READY Vampires that have votes can cast them. (Ready is basically Untapped in MTG terms) Minions with Votes are typically vampires that have titles in their stat block, such as Prince of D.C., or Bishop of Los Angeles. So if a player wants to go heavy on a political strategy, they're actually investing in recruiting those high cost titled Vampires, or playing cards that can make their lower costed ones titled. On top of that, they can't use those Vampires for other actions during the turn they want them to vote, and other players can take actions to attempt to tie up and unready those vampires. And even then, they'll still have to avoid that lone Brujah waiting to ash them before they can speak. It's a much more interesting dynamic than Rage's largely uninteractable Moots where each player start the game with 20 votes. Free Gratis fucked around with this message at 00:58 on May 15, 2020 |
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May 15, 2020 00:56
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LOL, what game is this?
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May 15, 2020 01:37
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Jonas Albrecht posted:Gonna +1 Rage as a fun game that I'd like to see again, and also posit how rad a CofD CCG would be. I know Alderac (well, Five Rings Publishing to be technical) re-did the game at some point, but I don't know if the rules were better. I do know it was part of that terrible, awful, no-good 'Rolling Thunder' distribution system which having worked in a game store I'm still sore at Ryan Dancey about. Edmund Lava posted:There was also a weird Changeling game called Arcadia I always thought was neat. It was less a competitive game and more of a hybrid CCG/Boardgame. Didn’t last very long but it was a cool concept. One heard good things, but I think what hurt Arcadia was the non-standard card size in an already glutted market.
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May 15, 2020 02:05
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Arcadia is so obscure that, while you can easily find scans of all the Rage and VtES/Jyhad cards, finding them for Arcadia is - or was, when I last checked - very difficult.
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May 15, 2020 03:41
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Dawgstar posted:I know Alderac (well, Five Rings Publishing to be technical) re-did the game at some point, but I don't know if the rules were better. I do know it was part of that terrible, awful, no-good 'Rolling Thunder' distribution system which having worked in a game store I'm still sore at Ryan Dancey about. I own one of the precon decks from the Rage Across Las Vegas edition of the game, but never actually got to play single a game and I don't remember the first thing about the rules. One thing I DO know is the cards themselves are better laid out with more defined terms instead of the messy natural language of the original version.
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May 15, 2020 04:07
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ZearothK posted:LOL, what game is this? I believe that was originally in reference to Valorant.
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May 15, 2020 06:16
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Loomer posted:Arcadia is so obscure that, while you can easily find scans of all the Rage and VtES/Jyhad cards, finding them for Arcadia is - or was, when I last checked - very difficult. Also the character cards were designed as pop ups and provided their own base. The increased cost of printing those probably contributed to the games demise, but hell it was a really neat idea and I enjoyed it for what I got to play it.
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May 15, 2020 06:40
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Politics is probably the best original mechanic in Vtes, however is very time consuming if you don't have vote lock (aka you can dictate all the terms yourself because you have majority/all the votes) and tables with 3+ political decks drag endlessly.
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May 15, 2020 08:32
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Angry Lobster posted:Politics is probably the best original mechanic in Vtes, however is very time consuming if you don't have vote lock (aka you can dictate all the terms yourself because you have majority/all the votes) and tables with 3+ political decks drag endlessly. That's why the best counter to a vote deck is a wall deck. When my Tzimisce wall deck got going, no vote was getting past me without taking aggravated damage.
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May 15, 2020 08:39
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MonsieurChoc posted:That's why the best counter to a vote deck is a wall deck. I get what you mean, wall decks are pretty decent at loving around with political decks as long as they are either your prey or predator, however the true counter to a political deck is an even meaner, more powerful political deck abusing certain mechanics to lockdown the votes on the table (looking at you, broken baali political cards).
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May 15, 2020 11:49
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VtES is such a fantastic game, and it's probably worth pointing out that the new starter boxed game is on its way:
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May 15, 2020 16:27
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If any of you VtES superfans want to make an info post, that section of the OP is still blank.
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