Old design choices that proved to be non-optimal

Mewcat wrote: The concept of different levels of success was something I have kicked around with on political actions.

I think the scope for this on political actions is much better than on a lot of other cards, because there's only one level on political actions. When you have at least two levels, possibly three with a fallback level, handling partial success and full success (or whatever else) eats into a lot of space for card text. This gets particularly acute where different levels can be almost entirely unrelated. e.g. just picking the first random card I can find with three unrelated levels:

Defining partial and full success for each level would be painful in terms of requiring a magnifying glass, or mean that you have to alter cards to do fewer things in the first place, which is also annoying.

As I see there are three types of posts in the forum:
1. Tournament reports. Usually containing just decklist because nobody really cares what have happened at the table.
2. Rules questions - even after 25 years there are countless rule holes.
3. Suggestions to change design of the game somehow.

Why is it so? Lol

LivesByProxy wrote: I like the idea of having 'partial success' or greater rewards for succeeding with more stealth. It doesn't even have to be 2+ stealth for full success, or just 1 for partial, it can be done on a card-by-card basis. For example, one card could reward succeeding by 4+ stealth, and even let you contribute stealth-modifiers (even if not needed) to reach that 'full success'.

I also think the game and deck-building should be based on using a variety of Disciplines. Unfortunately, the current card designs suffer from 1) the grouping rule limiting crypt options; 2) partly because of the grouping rule, every new group needs a core bunch of vampires with the same Discipline spreads - inferior out-of-clan disciplines are generally not very useful, and creative and interesting Discipline spreads are rare; 3) the Library cards requiring Disciplines don't ask for particular spreads - most are mono-Discipline, and the few that are dual-discipline follow the "[inferior][inferior] OR [superior][superior]" model. There are no Library cards requiring three Disciplines, or others following the Elemental Stoicism model.

About the phases: I was thinking about how the game could be redone in a way that necessitated less beads, and the solution I came up with was changing the phases and separating age from capacity. Basically, have two phases: Master & Minion. You can take them in either order. During your Master Phase, you get Influence Points to spend. You spend these playing cards, activating effects, and untapping them.

_________
But none of this or that matters, because the game won't change. It won't get a reboot or update or patches or sweeping errata.

1. Sure, some cards would have binary success model, some cards would require more stealth to get full success and it should be on per card basis.

2. This one is unfortunate, but still salvageable. I'd like to see more cards with inf/sup/sup inf or inf/ inf inf/sup inf spread. Sadly, it's mostly inf inf/ sup sup for no real reason. Perhaps even inf/ sup inf/ sup other inf.

3. Sadly it's not really feasible in current card pool due to various reasons.

4. It won't. However pointing out flaws is good to do.

Looks like the suggestions would heavily complicate the game.

The only thing that sort of appealed to me with 1st reading was merging of master and minion phases so you could play master cards bit less narrowly. However the master cards are already so strong that on second thinking I do not think they should be made even stronger.

It should be obvious for everyone that none of those design choices can be used at the moment ( and can only be used in some form on new cards that have it in mind, for example on masters that have playable also in minion phase text). The only thing that could be perhaps done is making master and minion phase interchangeable (full master then full minion or full minion then full master), and even then we have things like millicent smith that by design intend should affect your turn too.

Masters are strong, but they are strongest in decks that get full mileage out of master cards each turn anyway.

@James:
It's perfectly feasible and reasonable to have cards with 1 effect like Army of Rats, 2 effects like Govern, 3 different effects like Undue Influence, or the inf/inf/sup model of the Temporis and Melpominee cards. Frankly, I don't understand why we don't have cards like:

Card 1
[effect 1]
[effect 2]

Card 2
[effect 1]
[effect 2]

Card 3
[effect 1]

And your point about the space for card-text is mostly fixed by using keywords for commonly used game-phrases like:
--"Put this card into play."
--"A methuselah can only have 1 of [card name]."
--"Put this card on the acting vampire."
--"A minion can only have 1 of [card name]."

For example, just off the top of my head:
--Permanent.
--Singular.
--Attachment.
--Restricted.

That condenses 22 words on Frozen Object into just three words...