[Rant] Anarchs layout changes, and lack of such

To start with, some good things. Moving the discipline symbols up a bit on crypt cards. This is, overall, a good subtle change. I am a big fan of subtle changes for the better. Although, on the downside, for a while i'll be looking at my vampires, seeing the silver dot, and briefly thinking 'what's the extra discipline under there?', but that's just my own stupidity. Fading out the green bar on library cards, and moving the card name to the edge of the card. Another good subtle change. makes looking at a fanned hand much clearer. Making Master cards more identifiable. This is where i start my ranting. The concept was good. Listen to the players. They want their master cards to stand out. The execution: they get an all-green background. This is where things failed. The background is irrelevant in a fanned hand. I am pretty sure 90% of the Cam Ed. master card complaints were of them not standing out in a fanned hand. Changing the colour of the bar on the side of the card might have been a better option. But looking at a fanned hand with Anarch master cards in it, you don't go 'ooh, master'. It looks almost the same as in Cam Ed. Particularly, if the rest of your cards in hand are cam ed cards where the green bar goes all the way to the top, the master card blends in very very well. Now, back to crypt cards. The large discipline symbols introduced in Cam Ed have stayed. Good. But since Cam Ed, the backgrounds have become less 'visible'. It's harder to identify a given background, due to so little of it being shown, especially across table. Also, a lot of the backgrounds look quite similar to each other, or similar to backgrounds from previous editions for different clans, especially across table. Why do we need to know the backgrounds? To see what clans the vampires are. The backgrounds are not very useful for this. So instead, we'll need to rely on the clan symbols. The clan symbols are a joke. They are tiny! The disciplines stand out more than they do, which may or may not be a bad thing. But, for crying out loud, the EXPANSION SYMBOL stands out more than the clan symbol. This is just plain stupid. The expansion symbol is totally irrelevant during in game play. The times that it is relevant it could be as tiny as it could be, because you can have a nice close gawk at the card (trading, collecting, checking deck lists, etc). But the clan symbol? That's definately something i'd like to be able to quietly examine from across the table before i launched a cunning assult. Can the art director please just highlight the clan symbol, right click and choose 'magnify 150%', or something? i don't care if it 'overflows' off the green bar. i want to be able to see the damn thing. thanks for having the patience to read this far, salem domain:canberra http://www.geocities.com/salem_christ.geo/vtes.htm

salem <salem_ch...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<pd4mcv01vojmv4d06...@4ax.com>... [ quoted text not captured ] Hi. Yea.. the backgrounds introduced in the CE do kind of suck... not only do they look similiar to each otehr, they are just colors most of the time.. they don愒 mean anything. (like the skin of rock for the gargoyles, the Changeling glass for the Kiasyd, Italian marble for the Giovanni and such and such..) I haven愒 seen the new backgrounds yet (caitiff and the 4 independents). Are they jumbles of meaningless, similar colors? Hope not... The other changes were all good from what I can tell by the cards on the preview. I still like the old look better, but now it愀 just a matter of taste really. So my only complaint would be if the new backgrounds have as little creativity spent on them as the ones introduced in the CE (with the VERY notable exception of the !Gangrel background, that was very cool). I愒s nice to see that Mr. Shy is being used to paint library cards now. More power to him!! We were all kind of getting bored of his vampires by now whether we liked them or (more often) not. And fron what I saw of his work on the Victorian Age Vampire corebook and the Mummy 3rd edition corebook, he can show us far more when people (or, in this case, vampires) are included in his art with actual backgrounds of places and things. Also nice to sse that more and more of the characters and stuff from the RPG are being introduced. This is a key factor in gaining new players above all else. Still could get better though.. but maybe that愀 just my encyclopedic knowledge of the RPG making my expectaions a bit too high... I do think that this expansion has succeeded much better in giving the cards the feel of the anarchs in the game. Much more than the Sabbat has been represented so far at least.. I悲 give more room and power to the Lasombra and Tzimisce instead of leveling them with the other antitribu, who aren愒 real clans, just fractions (keyword: fractions) of their camarilla (or independent) counterparts. After all, in the jyhad, only the 13 clans have an antideluvian manipulating us, who in turn manipulate the vampires in the game! :)I have high hopes for the Black Hand expansion. To them a Toreador is a Toreador, no matter how much blood goes into his art, and so on for the other antitribu. i od understand this is NOT the RPG, but an effort to balance the 13 clans with their antitribu, and balance each other so that none of them stands out is futile, near impossible. Just balancing the 13 clans issomething much more plausible, and even tat does not have to be very much accurate due to the multiplayer aspect of the game.

salem <salem_ch...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<pd4mcv01vojmv4d06...@4ax.com>... > The clan symbols are a joke. They are tiny! The disciplines stand out > more than they do, which may or may not be a bad thing. But, for > crying out loud, the EXPANSION SYMBOL stands out more than the clan > symbol. This is just plain stupid. The expansion symbol is totally > irrelevant during in game play. The times that it is relevant it could > be as tiny as it could be, because you can have a nice close gawk at > the card (trading, collecting, checking deck lists, etc). But the clan > symbol? That's definately something i'd like to be able to quietly > examine from across the table before i launched a cunning assult. > salem > domain:canberra http://www.geocities.com/salem_christ.geo/vtes.htm Hehehe, that reminds me. When I first saw Camarilla Edition vampires, I was wondering why all the vampires were caitiff :D Albert

> The other changes were all good from what I can tell by the cards >on the preview. I still like the old look better, but now it愀 just a >matter of taste really. So my only complaint would be if the new >backgrounds have as little creativity spent on them as the ones >introduced in the CE I still like the old crypt cards (pre-CE) better as well. The backgrounds were distinct and you could actually tell the difference between different clans. The only thing that pissed me off about the old crypt cards was that there was apparently no logic to the ordering of the disciplines (at least with the new cards, you have an alphabetical ordering. with the old cards it was completely arbitrary! Grrrr...). Halcyan 2

Halcyan 2 wrote: > The only thing that pissed me off about the old crypt cards was that there was > apparently no logic to the ordering of the disciplines (at least with the new > cards, you have an alphabetical ordering. with the old cards it was completely > arbitrary! Grrrr...). The "old" layout cards produced by White Wolf ordered the disciplines in exactly the same order as the new layout cards do. The ordering "change" came between Sabbat and Sabbat War - it wasn't introduced in CE. -- LSJ (vte...@white-wolf.com) V:TES Net.Rep for White Wolf, Inc. Links to V:TES news, rules, cards, utilities, and tournament calendar: http://www.white-wolf.com/vtes/