VTES Card Ideas That Bleed …

… sort of.

I’ve been thinking about some mechanics due to recent discussion on Discord that came about due to the Nosferatu discipline mix’s lack of payload.

It’s easy to spin flavor to justify mechanics.  But, there is a reason to have different elements within a group have different flavor.  That’s a vague way to put it, but we all know it when we see it.  Centauri and Narn should have different cards.  Magic color pie.  Illian and Tear doing different things.  In VTES, clans doing different things, disciplines doing different things, titles doing different things, etc.

Potence has always been a boring discipline that is mostly about “I hit hard”.  Yet, superstrength is the most useful superhero power and kind of useful in VTM (felt broken when I used to play).  Don’t just want to give it straight up +1 stealth, +1 bleed, +2 votes, +1 intercept, or whatever other disciplines are supposed to be good at.  So, tie it into something the discipline is supposed to do.

Exterior Decorating
Action
C = 0
<pot>: (D) Burn a location.
<POT>: As above, and unlock the acting minion and this minion gets +1 Stealth until end of turn.

PTSD
Action
C = 0
<pot>: (D) Inflict 1 damage on target minion.
<POT>: As above, and put this card on this acting minion. Burn this card to gain +1 Bleed.

Animalism may not be as boring, but it feels limited in what it does that matters.  If want to give it boring effects in less boring way, then here are two ideas:

Bestial Distraction
Action Modifier
C = 1
<ani>: Burn an animal retainer employed by this vampire to gain +1 Stealth.
<ANI>: As above, but this action costs 1 fewer blood.

Release the Pack
Action Modifier
C = 0
<ani>: Burn an animal retainer employed by this vampire to gain +1 Bleed during a bleed action.
<ANI>: As above, but, if the retainer had 3 or more life when it was burned, then this vampire gains +2 Bleed, instead.

I’m not terribly motivated to design a bunch of these as my goal isn’t to create cards.  My goal is to point out the flexibility of design that CCGs have.

Take something that seems like ability bleed [sic] and tie it to some aspect of the game distinction.  Magic has done this for ages.  It’s great to take ideas from other CCGs and figure out what would be an analogous mechanic even in a game that plays very differently.

I posted a card idea on Discord to show how could make a particular clan better by giving an alternative way to use cards.  Here is a way to provide some likely broken flexibility to a particular discipline mix:

Opening Sire’s Gifts
Master
C = 0
Requires = [some clan that sucks = clanX]
Put this card into play and choose one of these three disciplines: [clanX’s first discipline], [clanX’s second discipline], [clanX’s third discipline]. Once per turn, you may return a card that requires the chosen discipline from your ash heap to your hand by discarding 2 cards (total) from the other two disciplines.

Note that this would work in multiclan crypts, assuming you got the sucky clan into play to put this card into play.

Anyway, as with pretty much every CCG I’ve played, there are an infinite number of ways to make cards to use VTES’s mechanics to generate different effects that could address a weakness for a group of vampires, such as a clan, if the interest is in powering up a group of vampires.  There are various reasons to use or not use a particular idea, like I’d be very concerned about the above even for a supposedly suck clan where I’m not going to be that worried if someone can pull off animal retainer combos.

While CCGs have a limited number of effects that matter in games, where don’t want to overcomplicate games to where don’t appeal to a broad amount of new players, can take rather boring effects like +1 bleed and get there in quite a few different ways.  And, sure, maybe the cards above aren’t good enough to matter, but that’s what developers are for – take designers’ terrible ideas and make them actually fit the game.  If blowing up an animal retainer isn’t worth +1 bleed, maybe it can be +2 or +3 but require a blood.  Can mess with whether the bonus is limited or unlimited.  Could put a clan requirement, capacity requirement, or whatever, though neither of those seem like good ideas.

Anyway, maybe I should do more posts like these with game component ideas.  I know I should post more often as I could do a lot of other things than what I do.  So much of it is a matter of being sufficiently inspired.  So, if want something, should let me know.

Oh, and as to the Ultimate Combat! decklists for decks I have, I’m trying to find my decks box; I don’t know where I put it.  I did find a couple decks, but they are very odd.  I’m thinking I was experimenting with Type P style UC! decks as they don’t conform to what any normal constructed deck would be.