Another VTES player, perhaps inspired by my Barbed Wire decks, made his own limited card selection challenge: Atom Weaver’s “Deck Bashing Challenge.” This challenge revolves around making as competitive a deck as possible by combining two starter decks of your choosing. While I like the idea, I do have a few reservations about the idea.

For one, starter decks in VTES are much like Magic: the Gathering and are set specific. If one were to find a great combination of starter decks to make an excellent general purpose deck, the starters you were using might be out of stock two years down the road and simply be of little use to the proposed newbie who needed it. Secondly, the starter decks all revolve around a certain strategy; by combining two of them, all you are really going to be able to do is refine that strategy a bit. The starter decks themselves are not toolboxy enough to really serve as the blank slate that I like as a deck constructor. Of course, one could combine two separate starters, but that runs into it’s own problems. Lastly, VTES is a game that has always favored certain strategies such as sneak and bleed or vote and cap. Starter decks, such as the Malkavian or Venture starters from Keepers of Tradition, will be quite competitive whereas working with the other starters from that set means that you will be building a deck that will simply never be as competitive. That’s just the nature of VTES and CCGs in general.

Ever after a challenge, I chose to work with the Brujah starter in Keepers of Tradition. The deck’s contents can be found here. Clearly this is a combat deck, and, unfortunately, it doesn’t contain many support cards that would allow it to overcome the obvious handicaps that that strategy fosters. For one, there is simply no multi-acting in the deck. I’ve played similar decks based on Gwendolyn (who has Fortitude for multi-acting and damage prevention), the predecessor of Adana de Sforza, and those decks contains either Forced March of Flurry of Action or both.

An example turn might consist of bleeding with Gwendolyn for the base 3 at one stealth from Forced March, and paying 1 to untap (use of 1 card). Then having Hrothulf burn the edge to rush my predator’s largest standing minion (a free action), then having Gwendolyn take another action to call Reigns of Power to simultaneously damage my prey while gaining pool because the largest of my predator’s vamps was taking a dirt nap. Those kinds of turns are powerful and great fun to pull off if you can manage it.

Unfortunately, this deck has no multiacting cards at all: no Flurry of Action, no Forced March, nothing. So the deck is going to be dramatically less powerful with no multi-acting ability than a similar deck that had one. To add insult to injury, this particular deck is promotion a new type of rush mechanic using the card, Enrage. In essence, it looks like the deck designer wanted you to bring up a fighting minion and a smaller minion (such as Garret) to take the Enrage action to allow your fighting minion to rush someone at +1 strength. That mechanic is inherently inferior to just having your fighting minion rush someone using a card (which is inferior still to just having your fighting minion have a built in rush like most dedicated combat decks do).

So the deck is crippled in a number of ways, right out of the box. Furthermore, it has precious little bleed defense (a couple of Major Boons) and the only blood management it has is Entrenching plus Vessel. Paying a pool to get a blood doll as a trifle Master Phase action to drain some blood off of your minion in the hopes that it will be able to regain some of it using Entrenching requires a action from a large minion. Since the deck has no multi-acting, the actions of the largest minion is at a premium, and so this Entrenching strategy is subpar even in the best of situations. In short, the entire deck is simply a horrid lesson in inefficiency.

One could, as The Lasombra suggested, combine this deck with the Torreador deck to try to help it a bit. In theory, that would allow for a decent deck because both clans share two out of three disciplines. Unfortunately, unlike in the Jyhad edition, the Brujah vamps have no Auspex and the Torreador vamps have no Potence. You’d be forced to rely on using the Master Discipline cards to try to correct for some of that, and it could get messy. The deck itself would need to really focus on being a Celerity combat deck with Presence bleeds to make a bleed and bruise deck using Auspex for bounce.

Unfortunately, this reasonably suggestion is hamstrung again by the contents of the Brujah starter; the only celerity combat cards are three Psyche!s, four Stutter-Steps, and five resist Earth’s grasp. The Torreador deck doesn’t help much in this department having only three more Psyche!s and six Pursuits. If we added both decks celerity packages together, we’d have six Psyche!s, six Pursuits, five Resist Earth’s Grasp, and four Stutter-Steps for a total of 23 celerity combat cards. All in all, that doesn’t sound too horrible because we could make the resulting deck a 60 card library to get what we needed, but the four Stutter-Steps simply have very little synergy with the rest of the concept we are going for because it doesn’t combo with the available weapons the deck has access to: Desert Eagles, Tiger Claws, Mark Vs, Sengir Dagger, and Ivory Bow. The Stutter-steps do have some synergy with Bundi, but the Brujah deck only have two and there’s just no way to build a deck around that.

In essence, any attempt to combine or work with these decks in any way will result in a subpar result, and that’s just the nature of these particular starters. Of course, that did not stop me from trying. So I made two decks from combining two of the Brujah and Torreador Starters. The Brujah Starter deck contains five Harrases, which when doubled will allow for gratuitous rushing of other minions. It has a smattering of decent bleed cards in Public Trust, and some decent combat gear with Sengir Dagger, Bundi and Tiger Claws. Unfortunately, that’s really all there is to work with. The Master Cards given allow for limited bleed defense with Major Boon, a single good combat support card in Tension in the Ranks, and… damn little else. I dare say that KRCG News Radio is a waste of pool in a deck with little intercept; sure, if your predator or prey do not have stealth then it would conceivably shut them down, but if they do have stealth then you’ve just wasted two pool. Furthermore, there’s always the temptation to use KRCG News Radio to help a cross table ally gain enough intercept, but, at a pool a whack, that’s pretty pricy.

KRCG represents an attempt at a catch and kill style strategy, but attempting such a thing is fraught with difficulty. For one, it requires an untapped vampire or many On the Qui Vive to be of any use and the way the card pool is thrown together untapped vampires are at a premium. Furthermore, if one were to try to use this strategy in a typical constructed deck, it would require the use of multiple intercept locations rather than two copies of a single unique intercept location. It would also help if the vampires themselves had some level of intercept, and two copies of Phased Motion Detector just isn’t going to cut it.

When it comes to Crypt selection, the I prefer some vampires that have votes because it allows you table talk options and can often give you vote lock at a table without a political angle. That would allow for you to diablerize opposing vampires once they had gone into torpor with impunity or convince a cross table ally to do it for you (which I actually did in one of my games with this deck). Furthermore, a built in bleed represents a powerful option for what is, in essence, a bleed and bruise deck. For all of these reasons, I’m going with the IC member Adana de Sforza.

If one tried to construct a deck without the two large vampires Adana de Sforza or Jana Berger, then you’d be left with Tomaine, Herbert Westin, Reginald Moore, and Garret. Unfortunately, Herbert Westin is a horrible vampire for this deck because of his discipline spread: OBF PRE pot for a five cap vampire is all kinds of horrible. So now we’re down to just three vampires, and there’s no way to design a deck around small and midcap vamps. Once again, with this deck, we are all kinds of screwed.

Here’s the deck I ended up with:

Crypt
Adana dr Sforza(11) x4 CEL POT PRE PRO OBF aus +2 Bleed, IC
Tomaine(6) x4 CEL POT PRE Primogen
Garret(3)x2 pot pre
Reginald Moore(4)x2 PRE

Master Cards 8
Tension in the Ranks x2
Potence x2
Celerity x2
Major Boon x2

Reaction Cards 3
On the Qui Vive x3

Combo Cards 6
Resist Earth’s Graspx6

Political Action Cards 5
Finding the Path x4
Year of Fortune

Actions 14
Public Trust x6
Harass x8

Combat 48
Immortal Grapple x4
Weighted Walking Stick x6
Psyche x6
Taste of Vitae x6
Stutter Step x4
Brute Force x10
Slam x4
Relentless Pursuit x2
Torn Signpost x6

Equipment 6
Sengir Dagger x2
Bundi x4

This deck is a combat deck. I’ve designed a lot of combat decks in my time, but this is one of the most rugged of combat packages. Every time this deck gets in combat with an opposing vampire, they seem to go to torpor empty- which is nice. Unfortunately, that’s the decks only saving grace. It requires the player to attempt to leverage that one dimensionality of the deck to deal with all other elements of a VTES game. A daunting challenge (both times I played the deck I got zero VPs), but one that at least teaches the player the pitfalls of a combat only focused strategy.

Preston,

Stop muttering about that role-playing stuff and check this out:

http://robertreich.org/post/894152905/why-we-really-shouldnt-keep-the-bush-tax-cut-for-the

I would LOVE to see you take the time to deconstruct this article, one line at a time. It’d be a real eye-opener for all the commie pinko VTES players out there.

-Kevin

Well, as long as we’re going after commie pinko VTES players, count me in! Well I read Dr. Reich’s blog entry, and, sure enough, it’s dreadful beyond belief. Not it that typically way a politicians ideas are all hot air kind of dreadful, but in that much more pernicious way thinking that only macroeconomists seems to think.

In essence, Dr. Reich’s argument is this:

• I’d be nice if we could reduce our national debt (an idea with which I can whole heartedly agree).
• A tax increase can help us reduce our national debt (also logical, but I’m never a fan of higher taxes).
• We need to increase taxes in such a way as to maximize our consumer spending.
• Therefore we should soak the rich, because they already spend all the money the could ever hope for and any taxes increases won’t decrease their consumer spending one little bit.
• Also, the rich are to blame for this economic crisis we’re in, so it’s only fitting that they pay the way out.

Ah, Macroeconomics. It’s the only place I know of that uses bizarre mathematical models to argue against common sense while at the same time reducing people to simply cogs in the greater wheel of the national economy. I remember distinctly sitting in Intermediate Macroeconomics while the professor explained to me the benefits of inflation being that it got people back to work faster in economic downturns because unionized workers would never agree to a pay cut but these same workers would easily be fooled to return to work for the same nominal wage. Therefore, he argued, these workers would have taken a defacto pay cut because inflation would have fooled them into mistaking real and nominal wages. I then pointed out to the professor that all he was saying was that inflation was a wonderful tool of cheating the common man out of his hard earned wages- which left him without a rejoinder.

Dr. Reich’s argument is clearly one that John Maynard Keynes himself would be proud, for it combines some of Keynes’s favorite activities. Firstly, it argues against intuition or good old common sense to instead make a case for complete balderdash that any person who is not a Macroeconomist could tell you is complete and utter bullshit. For instance, if you stop most anyone on the street and ask them if people will spend less if they have less money, they would state rather empathically that this is the case. It crosses the line from illogical to simply fantastical to think that the amount of money a person spends is not a function of how much income that person has. But that’s just the kind of poppycock that Macroeconomists deal in on a day to day basis. They typically argue against common sense by either a mathematical model or a bizarre and revisionist version of history. Since it’s a toss up which subject the average person is more ignorant of, mathematics or history, either is bound to get the glassy eyes stare that the Macroeconomist was looking for that will allow him to continue to argue his preposterous notion more or less unchallenged.

Dr. Reich decided to go with a selective interpretation of history rather than a mathematical model to support his argument. It’s probably the right choice for him, because it does boggle the mind to think of how one could even write on the chalkboard:

• Consumer Spending = f(consumer income)
• f(consumer income) = f(consumer income- 10%)

Or, to translate out of mathematics, consumer spending is a function of consumer income and will be exactly the same at consumer income less 10%.

So the selective interpretation of history that Dr. Reich chose to grace us with is that higher taxes have accompanied economic expansions in the 1950s, 1980s, and 1990s. I couldn’t help but notice the absence of the economic time period almost everyone has some cursory knowledge of, the Depression Era 1930s. Over that decade, we saw that tax increases seem to have exacerbated the conditions of the Great Depression and instead prolonged it. Instead he chose to look at the 1950s, a time when we had the only means of production because the rest of the world lay in ruins, and the 1980s and 1990s, a time when the Federal Reserve started it’s long campaign of reducing interest rates from their highest point ever in 1982 all the way to zero today. The Federal Reserve does this buy pumping more money into the system, so over that time period, people lost income when measured in real terms after taxes but were able to make up for it by expanding the use of credit which got so loose that college students with no jobs were given credit cards.

Which, of course, brings me to the real cause of our current financial crisis: credit expansions. People can only replace lost income with credit for so long. Eventually a point is approached by which their current income can no longer service their debt load and defaults start to look likely. Of course, Macroeconomists hate it when that happens, because the collapses of credit expansions are horribly messy things that then to result in societal upheaval and social unrest in the resulting severe economic contraction. Oftentimes, an opportunistic politician will propose a war to put people to work, and then people are dying. So to avoid that, the credit defaults are avoided as long as possible, and that is only possible by the expansion of more credit. Which is how we go to where we are today.

In summary, reducing our national debt would be a good thing, but that will never happen, regardless of our national income, until we can reign in our government spending. Of course, Macroeconomists would never allow such a thing because it would reduce GDP (a figure that they themselves invented which doesn’t seem to have much bearing on anything of importance). Not to mention, when the government is running deficits to the tune of a trillion dollars a year, you’d have to be insane to think that a tax increase on the wealthy will reduce the deficit enough for anyone to notice. Insane, or a Macroeconomist.

]]> http://www.prestonpoulter.com/2010/08/a-special-request-for-kevin/feed/ 0 http://www.prestonpoulter.com/2010/08/the-problem-with-use-magic-device-in-pathfinder/ http://www.prestonpoulter.com/2010/08/the-problem-with-use-magic-device-in-pathfinder/#comments Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:42:11 +0000 Preston Poulter http://www.prestonpoulter.com/?p=1386 aka Another Reason for a Unified Magic System

I’ve never liked the Arcane/Divine divide in magic in what is now Pathfinder. It worked OK in first first and second edition D&D because there were really only two spell-casting classes, but as third edition D&D attempted to take the classes and make them into certain metrics such as Base Attack Bonus and Reflex Save bonus that are additive, the divide became increasingly wonky. For one, now that we had a skill system that was the same across classes, you had skills for sneaking around. If you multiclassed between different classes, your ability to sneak was related to how many skill points you continued to put into your stealth skills. Thus skills of the traditional Thief class from prior editions of D&D were now nicely delineated and could be treated as discrete parts of a greater whole.

The skill system attempted to do that with magic by giving one Spellcraft skill that related to your ability to determine magic regardless of it’s source, but in so doing they created a wonky element to their magic system because the skill itself was not, in any way, related to the actual working of magic. One could be a completely proficient high level wizard or cleric and not have a single rank in Spellcraft. So it was really just a knowledge skill, but why have one knowledge skill that represents two very different forms of magic when you have other knowledge skills that represent the different between knowledge of local events and knowledge of which crest belongs to the local noble?

Monte Cooke addressed this in his book of Eldrich Might by suggesting that DMs assign a -5 to Spellcraft checks when you were trying to determine magic that was of the kind different that your class gave you. He further addressed it in his own system, Arcana Unearthed when he unified the magic system. Holy casters simply had feats that made their magic more “holy” and Psionicists had similar feats. This allowed for all magic using classes to have the same, unified types of spells, but for some to have a different flavor to them or to be better as casting certain subsets of the greater spell list- which is really nice.

Crafty Games Fantasycraft takes it a step further by having Spellcasting be an actual skill which one must succeed at every time you are attempting to cast a spell- as one would expect. Pathfinder, unfortunately, kept the divide when they updated the 3.5 system and it came up in our game last night when the Bard attempted to save a recently deceased party member by using the “Breath of Life” scroll.

Well “Breath of Life” is not on the Bard’s spell list. No problem, she had a reasonably high Use Magic Device skill. So my fiance, playing the Bard, who is known for her poor rolls, rolls a 14. She has +14 UMD, so her total is 28, which is enough to treat “Breath of Life” as if it were on her spell list. Great… except she also needs to make another roll to qualify as having a high enough Wisdom to cast the spell. Since she’d need a Wisdom of 15 to cast a 5th level spell and since the resulting score you can emulate equals your UMD -15, she’d need to roll a separate 16 to qualify.
I didn’t make her roll it, and here’s why:

First off, Charisma based casters are an innovation new to Third Edition. In prior editions of D&D, Wizards needed Intelligence and Clerics needed Wisdom. In Second Edition, Thieves gained a percentile chance to activate magic items, etc. Now comes along Third Edition which introduces the idea that you need a high enough relevant score to cast a scroll which was, I believe, a new feature. It’s one that makes a certain amount of sense in regards to Wizards scrolls because you can imagine needing a great deal of intelligence in order to correctly interpret and invoke the necessary arcane formula as presented in what is now termed a “Spell Completion Item.”

But that really doesn’t make much sense for Clerics. What are divine scrolls really but prays to a specific god. It makes little real sense that they such scrolls are then divorced from the patron deity as soon as they are written. It defies logic that a Cleric of Iomedae should invoke his god to gain Iomedae’s blessing that at some future time life will be restored to a recently fallen comrade only to have that prayer fall into an enemy cleric of Asmodeus hands and used to bring back an Antipaladin. It defies logic, but I’m willing to go with it for game convention.

However, now we’d have to believe that a Bard, which does have access to a fair amount of healing magic, might fail to invoke the prayer properly because they lack the necessary Wisdom? Wisdom to do what, invoke Iomedae properly? If Iomedae is a necessary part of the spells completion, then she would surely not grant life giving privileges to an evil doer who just happened to find an old prayer lying around. And if Iomedae is not really involved in the casting of the spell, then why is a Wisdom score required at all? If there’s a certain “divine formula” which must be followed to use the divine energies, then it should go back to Intelligence and not Wisdom.

In the Pathfinder system, each class understands magic in its own way. A Cleric, a Wizard and a Sorcerer all cast Charm Person as the exact same spell but each is interacting with magic in his own way using his own prime requisite. This only makes sense if we say that each individual class is able to access magical powers on his own terms and understandings. Otherwise, why would a Sorcerer be able to cast a Fireball off of a Wizard’s scroll just because it’s “Arcane”? It just doesn’t make sense.

So, for magic casting classes, I’ve decided to allow Use Magic Device to add the spell to a individuals spell list on a successful check, and have that particular class’s prime requisite for magic be the necessary check. This not only allows substandard classes such as the Bard and Sorcerer to become slightly more powerful, but it also avoids the future book keeping headache of having to note for each scroll whether it is a Divine v. Arcane as well as Intelligence v. Wisdom v. Charisma. Wizards of the Coast introduced a Charisma based divine caster in its Miniatures Handbook and if such a class were to ever come into Pathfinder then you could conceivably have: Wisdom Divine Scrolls, Charisma Divine Scrolls, Intelligence Arcane Scrolls, and Charisma Arcane Scrolls. As it is I’ve never sense a module list a given Arcane scroll as being Charisma based despite the fact that there’s no reason to think otherwise.

The result becomes as unwieldy as it was when weapons became too specific based on size back in 3.5 when suddenly a small size character’s medium weapon was no longer equivalent to a medium size’s character’s medium weapon. The whole think becomes a book keeping mess and it only serves to detract from the believability of the game as a whole.

]]> http://www.prestonpoulter.com/2010/08/the-problem-with-use-magic-device-in-pathfinder/feed/ 0 http://www.prestonpoulter.com/2010/07/opponent-makes-an-unbelievable-laydown/ http://www.prestonpoulter.com/2010/07/opponent-makes-an-unbelievable-laydown/#comments Sat, 31 Jul 2010 16:53:30 +0000 Preston Poulter http://www.prestonpoulter.com/?p=1384 An interesting series of hands happened today that culminated in one of my opponents making a laydown I just couldn’t believe. The opponent in this question is another house player named Mary Sue. She doesn’t seem to have a lot of No Limit experience and, in my estimation, she tends to make a lot of bet sizing errors by making her average bet too large.

Here are a few hands we played together to give you some context for our big hand. All hands were played with a big blind of $5 and a small blind of $2. Hand 1: She started with about $150 and I had her covered. I raised it to $12 with AK off suit and she called out of the big blind. Flop comes KQ7 rainbow. She bets $30 into me and I call. Turn comes another spade to give two spades on the board and she goes all in for $100 more with JT of spades. I call and she misses her draw.

Hand #2: She and a couple of other players limp in. I’m on the button and limp with K4 of hearts. Flop comes Jh 10c 6h. Checks to her and she bets $60 into a $20 pot. I fold my hand, but she does get one caller. She puts him all in on the turn for another $100 and wins with a set of sixes.

Hand #3: She has about $600 in front of her and I have her covered. It folds down to her on the button and she raises it to $15. The small blind calls and I raise it to $45 with Ad Ks. Both players call. Flop comes: As 7s 5h. I check to her because I feel she tends to bet too large and will freely commit more chips to the pot than I would in the same round of betting and I want her to continue to make that error. Surprisingly, she bets a rather rational amount of $70 into a pot of $135. The small blind folds and I call.

The turn comes the 10h to make two separate flush draws on the board. I check and she tanks for a good minute. I’m trying to put her on a hand and her general uncertainty tells me she doesn’t have a monster. She bets $100 into a pot of $275, since that will leave her only with a pot sized bet of $350 or so, and since I feel I have the best hand, I put her all in. She thinks and thinks about this for a couple of minutes and then folds, face up, pocket 7s! She said she was sure I had a set of Aces or I wouldn’t have checked the flop with a flush draw out. All I had to say was, “Wow.”

]]> http://www.prestonpoulter.com/2010/07/opponent-makes-an-unbelievable-laydown/feed/ 0 http://www.prestonpoulter.com/2010/07/letter-from-a-magic-the-gathering-fan/ http://www.prestonpoulter.com/2010/07/letter-from-a-magic-the-gathering-fan/#comments Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:33:59 +0000 Preston Poulter http://www.prestonpoulter.com/?p=1379 I received this letter today from a 24 year old man in Brazil who is, apparently, a fan of mine. I don’t often get fan mail, so I thought I’d reproduce it here. Note that it is hand written in cursive, and I can’t quite decipher a few words. I also think that English may not be Pedro’s native language, so there are a few grammatical errors, but what the hey. How many fan letters to do you get?

Hello Mr. Preston Poulter,

My name is Pedro. I’m 24 and a big fan of the Magic: the Gathering card game. I enjoy this game so much as I enjoy legendary players like you, man. I don’t know if it’s your correct address. I’ve been trying to find duelist’s addresses I admire to write to them (like you) but it’s so hard to find. The only 1 I found (I guess) is yours.

All of you contributed to build my love for this game and have a happier life playing it with friends and family. I used to build my own personal decks, but I used to copy the strongest duelists decks to make me feel more powerful. With movies and rock-n-roll, Magic is the one thing that’s part of my life and people like you make us, our fans, see you as idols and people that transform the game in serious ways. So I’d like to congratulate you, first because I love your 1996 deck, and, second, because I write to everyone that takes part and contributes for the expansion of this lifestyle everyday, since my brother, the players that are more close to me, until Mr. Richard Garfield, that answered to me twice (always kindly).

And, as a great appreciator of this funny game, I’d wanna ask you something: could you please sign these 06 cards and give them back to me?? I’ve included $3 for it. Because of the work (I’m a safety technician) and the family (I got married in Oct. 2009) I don’t have much time to play now, but when I can, I do it. So, because of it I review my Magic collection of signed cards, a practice that makes me happy to get exclusive cards and, more than this, bring to you, artists of this game, my admiration and attention to thank you for all you do for your fans.

When you can/ have time/ want to answer, my address is: REDACTED

Thanks again, now for opening my letter and reading it. Now my goal is almost finished, only waiting for your answer when you wish.

All the best from your Brazilian fan,
Pedro

It’s always weird getting these letters from the past. They’re addressed to me, but really, the person they’re written to doesn’t exist any more. He was a 22 year old Graduate Student in Chemistry who’s only real love seemed to be hanging out with his friends (none of whom I talk to anymore) and playing Magic: the Gathering. Still, it always makes me smile to get them and to think back on that time. My life is a lot happier now. Fame is a strange thing and I’ve always considered myself lucky to have found that out by having it in so limited a capacity.

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