OFFICIAL VEKN GANGREL-ANTITRIBU NEWSLETTER VOLUME 7 NUMBER 10 OCTOBER 2004 ****************** In this Battle of Trafalgar bicentennial edition .... NON-FICTION: Further Experiments With a Live Child MISTAKES AND THEIR KYND: An article about mistakes. DECK: The Guests, another !Gangrelly tournament-topper by Erik Torstensson from the land of saunas, smorgasbord and unfeasibly-beautiful girls. ******************* NON-FICTION: Further Experiments With a Live Child As regular readers will know, i am older than most of you, and the father of a teenage son [Michael, aka Anklebiter]. As others in the community begin the process of raising families i thought it might be useful to describe the role that gaming has played in Michael's upbringing and the effects it has had on him. i'm doing this because i believe gamer culture has had a marked influence for good upon Michael's education, and i strongly recommend that you try its effects on your kids, too. It never occurred to us NOT to play games with Michael. His mother and i are old-time D&Ders, and by old-time i mean that we used the three crappy brown-cardboard cover books and [gulp!] silver-covered ring-bound Chainmail when we started out. However, when Michael was born in 1988 we had pretty much stopped D&D due to lack of congenial players and, of course, CCGs had not yet appeared. The revival of our interest in games took place in 1990 when i moved to Portsmouth and discovered Marshall MacCombie's wonderful shop, Southsea Models. Additionally among my first cohort of students at Portsmouth University were Andrew Sparkes and Garry Scarlett who were/are enthusiasts for skirmish miniatures games, and at that time our favourite was Warhammer 40K. It wasn't long before VERY little Michael was clamouring to take part in a "Massive Game With Daddy", and so he was introduced to WH40K, Epic, and Magic when it eventually came out. At first i think the setting up and moving around of the soldiers was the main attraction, but he did not like to lose at all, at all. In the photo album for 1992-ish there is a great sequence of setting up and playing a gigantic Epic battle, Chaos against Squats IIRC, featuring a VERY happy Michael at the beginning, and a red-faced and teary-eyed Michael at the end, surrounded by the wreckage of his Chaos Legion. He used to get emotional about Magic, too. Shortly after he started school, we were playing a game in which he brought out a Mountain Goat [red, 1/1, mountainwalk] and named him Fluffy the mountain goat. Since i too was playing a red deck i promptly disintegrated Fluffy. Michael burst into tears and fled the room. "You killed my fluffy!" To console him, we had to pretend that fluffy wasn't dead, having nipped into the cover of the discard pile at the last moment. Eventually Michael was enticed back and, stony faced, he passed me a note. The text read; "i no at Daddy lied fluffy is dead and here is his grefestone" [picture of gently-smoking gravestone with the legend "fluffy RIP"]. Our games of Epic and WH40K [later also Warhammer FB, Flintloque and Lord of the Rings] continue to this day. Since i am the cook in our household i frequently have to leave the game to attend to the food, and when Michael was little i often used to have to tell him to take my turns while i did this. A strange phenomenon associated with this pattern of behaviour was that no matter how good my position had been before i left, Michael's forces would have staged a miraculous recovery by the time i returned. Nowadays however he does not have to cheat to beat me, of which more anon. We do not play Magic anymore, and unsurprisingly Jyhad is our favourite CCG. i believe that Michael may still be the youngest ever winner of a Jyhad tournament [constructed, aged 11] and he has also won a booster draft tournament [in London, 2004]. The other game we play a LOT is d20 Call of Cthulhu, edited transcripts of some of our games now forming a staple of this Newsletter's regular fiction section. Our take on Call of Cthulhu is quite D&D-ish, however; my view is that the basic D&D paradigm of Go Down The Dungeon, Kill The Monsters and Steal Their Stuff is the right one for RPGs, but that it is more fun if you have a Webley and you are taking on a Byakhee so as to acquire a copy of Cthaat Aquadingen, than if you are whacking an eye-tyrant with a magic mace of disruption on the Quest for the Holy Tubs of Cash. This means that miniatures play a big part in our games, and Michael is now a highly-skilled and prolific painter of plastic and metal figurines. Michael is also highly-successful at school. This year he is deputy head boy at Springfield Technology College, studying for GCSEs where he is predicted to get A's in everything and A*'s in everything important. He is a balanced, considerate and intelligent child who is greatly liked and respected by all his teachers and most of his fellow pupils; he is particularly good with difficult and vulnerable students. And the point of this article is to suggest that his personal and intellectual successes are linked to gamer culture. Specifically: *He has learned how to analyse and interpret difficult text through CCGs, especially Jyhad. *He has learned social skills including how to argue, negotiate and compromise from CCGs, miniatures and board games. *He has learned narrative skills and also how to act and how to empathise through RPGs. *He has learned mathematical, statistical and spatial awareness skills through miniatures games. *He has gained an advanced understanding of issues surrounding race and politics from miniatures games - an odd claim, but justified by his affection for the despised Orcs in WHFB and Lord of the Rings. *He has learned a lot of history and archaeology through Call of Cthulhu. *He has learned artistic skills and also patience and application through painting miniatures. So much for classic gamer culture, but perhaps it is right also to note that we play a lot of cricket and we like to walk, in summer to look for butterflies, and in autumn to look for mushrooms. Naturally, we also play computer games, which teach one, erm, stuff about computers, i suppose. We even occasionally watch the telly. In short, here is a boy whose leisure has been almost wholly an educational experience, during which he has picked up important and difficult techniques ENTIRELY painlessly. And though i am probably not the best judge, i cannot think of any downside to this approach - perhaps i will have to eat my words when he turns out to be a drunk, wifebeater or thief, but i do not think so. i'm aware that the anecdotes of a proud parent may not give a completely fair picture, and that in any case Michael might have turned out exactly the same had he been brought up in complete ignorance of games. But i really don't think so - it's the active seeking out of generally-useful techniques and ideas with the aim of APPLYING them to a fun activity which convinces me that these are stories worth sharing and an approach worth emulating. If you like, rather than hot-housing him we got him to hot-house himself - all the gain but none of the cost in terms of personal stress. In summary, i suggest that gamer culture is a fine educational tool, and the family that plays together, stays together. So start experimenting on your kids Now! ****************** MISTAKES AND THEIR KYND In this article i wish to discuss mistakes, a subject which SHOULD be of interest to ALL players, even the ones who never make any, for reasons to be discussed below. The inspiration to write this article came from a Wednesday-in-the-pub game which i won 4/1/1 essentially because everyone else made some fatal errors, not unconnected with the fact that it was a six-player game. Mistakes are a feature of all games, but how big a feature depends on the game. In theory it is possible for a game to be so simple that it is impossible to make a mistake at it. In practise i know of no such games, though my friends the Stirlings have a going-to-the-shops-and-buying-things game, bought for their then 4-year-old daughter Charys, which comes close. It is also possible for a game to be so complex that one is certain to make an error; examples of this include Tetris, Space Invaders and Wizfire/Armageddon. In practise most games fall somewhere on a line between these extremes. For me personally, Jyhad/VTES and Chess fall at the top end of the continuum of doable games; Medina, and Zvrt aka the Game At Which LSJ Always Kicks My Ass, are over the top end. Actually, there are also people for whom Jyhad is over the top end. Such a one i believe was Ryan S Dancey, infamous for his opinion that Jyhad is a game where luck and seating order alone determine the outcome [true if all the players are crap, partly true if only one is]. Normal Jyhad between competent players is interesting at least in part because it is complex enough that mistakes *ARE* a factor, but they are not, usually, the main determinant of success. Can we attempt to quantify the degree to which mistakes influence a game of Jyhad? i think it is intuitively obvious that the number of possible mistakes that one can make is related to the number of players in the game. Let the number of players be n; then the number of possible mistakes that can be made is given by the sum [n-1] + [n-2] + .... +1. For practical purposes, if there are three players there are 3 possible mistakes, for 4 there are 6, for 5 there are 10, and for 6 there are 15. Let us call this sum Sn.. The number of possible mistakes that can be made is also related to the length of the game and to the number of incidents that take place in the game. These factors are harder to quantify, because, for example, of permanents, and the different mental stamina of players. However, it is easy to see that if the chance you are going to make an error is P, then for n players it is SnP, so the chance that you will NOT make an error at any given opportunity is 1-SnP, and the chance that you will STILL not have made an error after x opportunities so to do is [1-SnP]x. We note that if the aim is to reduce the number of mistakes then one must reduce P [eg by reading all the card-texts properly, and practising intensively with one's deck], and reduce x [eg by trying to win quickly]; by contrast, if the aim is to INCREASE the number of mistakes, one's tactics are to increase P and x, a subject to which we will return at the end of this article. We also note that because the graph of the values of the above function against x or P is of sigmoid form, quite small changes in P or x around the critical values can have dramatic outcomes in terms of overall success [outside this range they have virtually no effect]. On this subject it is appropriate to note a possibly-incorrect assumption of the above argument, namely that P is a constant; actually, it is probably itself a function of x, at the very least [meaning that the more stuff is going on, the likelier it is that you will mess up all of it]. Also hard to quantify is the quality of mistakes. Some mistakes that you make will be major game-losing blunders. Others will be minor. A few might even benefit you - failing quite honestly to remember that a minion has only got inferior dominate, for example. This last class of mistake should perhaps be reckoned as a mistake by all the other players in not noticing your error. To win at VTES, the simplest view is that you need to aim for two goals: [1] Not to make any mistakes yourself. [2] Capitalise on the mistakes of others. Arguably, you might also aim for: [3] Maximise the chances that other players, ideally your predator and prey, will make mistakes. Before discussing how one might use these ideas in play, we need to distinguish another two subdivisions of mistakes, namely, mistakes that are in principle retrievable/avoidable during play, versus others that are not. This latter class of mistakes principally comprises errors in deck-building, especially the occasions when you totally fail to read the metagame and [for example] turn up with a presence-bleed deck for an all-combat tourney. While i don't think one can completely avoid these kinds of errors, a possible approach to minimising them is to simulate a game by drawing oneself a pentagon having a five-pointed star with internal pentagon inside it, each of the star's points touching a vertex of the external pentagon. Imagine your deck is at one of the vertices of the external pentagon/points of the star, and think about what will happen when you interact along the lines that contact your vertex with various other decks that could occupy the other vertices. Your thoughts will probably veer quite quickly in the direction of "toolboxing" your deck, but as they do so you will remember that the toolboxier your deck becomes the less simple it is, and therefore the likelier it is that you will make other mistakes of the in-play type. Practically speaking, what policies might one follow in order to minimize the chances that one will make a mistake, and to maximise the chances that the other players will make mistakes? What follows is not an exhaustive list but does i think include the major strategies that one might adopt. [1] Avoid interacting with your grandpredator and grandprey as much as possible. By so doing, you greatly reduce the number of possible mistakes you can make. An extension of this principle but not so easy to implement is to encourage your predator to interact with your prey and grandprey, and your prey to interact with your predator and grandpredator - deflection etc is a way of doing this but here is also the realm of table-talk, and a major reason for being instinctively resistant to it. [2] Wait. In the early part of the game take few and simple actions. Allow/encourage other players to take actions [ruthlessly punishing any that are mistakes]. The longer you can wait, the likelier it is that the other players will make mistakes. [3] Have permanents. The more permanents you have in play, the greater the opportunity for other players to make mistakes because the greater the number of factors they have to think about. Of course it is also true that YOU will make more mistakes, but because they are YOUR permanents your error-load SHOULD be lower in respect of them. An extension of this principle is what Derek Ray has called information overload - give the rest of the table FAR too much to think about. [4] Know the field. In this respect there is one overwhelmingly brilliant card that sees remarkably little play: i refer, of course, to Pulse of the Canaille played at INFERIOR. All of the above looks like an argument for Auspex, and so it is, though i did not realise that it would be when i started to write the article. We note with some complacency that Auspex is the !Gangrel fourth discipline. Going further, i suggest that for the above reasons Auspex is*ALWAYS* the best fourth discipline, whenever there is any choice. Perhaps it is also an argument for lurking and VP-sniping using table rearrangement. Since these are rather depressing conclusions, let us pass on to what to do if you DON'T want to follow one of these strategies. [5] Don't get angry. Angry players make mistakes FAR more readily than calm ones. The corollary of this is obvious but illegal under VEKN rules, and quite right too. And while it is possible to achieve the effect legally in VTES by playing annoying decks it is still unwise to make people angry deliberately, even in countries where hand guns are illegal - an angry person is just as likely to mess you up as the target you want them to mess up [likelier, in fact]. So play nice, avoid being annoying, smile often, and win more. [6] Be realistic about your own relative abilities. Usually, this will mean you will want to play simple decks with whose mechanics you are solidly familiar whenever you go off to play with good players. This even applies if you yourself are a good player, since there is an excellent chance that the other good players will be showboating with weird decks, and will fail because they make extra mistakes. And if a new card fits well into your simple deck, play with it, on the grounds that at least some of your opponents won't have come across it, thereby increasing their potential to make mistakes. [7] Have a good breakfast, and drink lots of water. These measures will help you to concentrate. [8] Pack a few Strong Denial cards - Suddens, Pentex Subversion, Direct Intervention. Play these, i beg you, with EXTREME circumspection; while there are other reasons for including these cards in your deck, if you accept the thesis of this article your aim here is to use them to cause sensible plays to turn into disastrous mistakes. For example, DI should virtually always target an action modifier, or a deflection that is coming your way [recall that a vampire cannot play two action modifiers or reactions of the same type on any action]. [9] Make a few deliberate mistakes. This will encourage the other players to drop their guard, and make more mistakes in their turn. Into this class of tactics falls what Ben Peal has called the "curve ball", meaning the deliberate inclusion into your deck of cards that don't seem to fit it. i found this out once when we were chatting about deck-building, and we discovered that we both had independently developed this tactic; we agreed that its psychological effect can be devastating, and is manifested in large part by increased errors amongst the other players. i wish to conclude this article by considering a completely different approach to mistakes in Jyhad/VTES. i suggest that there COULD be occasions when your aim is NOT to minimise mistakes, but to maximise them. i have in mind games in which you personally are completely outclassed, intellectually and/or through metagaming failure. In these circumstances, your ONLY chance is to turn the beautiful game of Jyhad into a ghastly lottery, whose outcome is determined by chance alone. This gives you a 20% chance of winning the game, but that is better than zero. One's thoughts turn instinctively to Malkavian Games and Malkavian Pranks. Many readers will know that there is a right and rational way to play both cards [for those who don't, it is to always bid odd for the former, and always give your grandprey and grandpredator pool with the latter]. My concluding point here is that there are also perfectly rational reasons for bidding like a fool when you are on the ropes, with the aim of maximising table error load and hence your own [slim] chance of winning. ************** DECK: The Guests, another !Gangrelly tournament-topper by Erik Torstensson from the land of saunas, smorgasbord and unfeasibly-beautiful girls. It's a pleasure once again to feature a tournament-winning deck with a strong !Gangrel component, and without further ado here is Sten During's account of the: Gothenburg in the Heat of the Night Tourney: Winning deck. Participants: 10 Date: 2004-07-10 Winning player: Erik Torstensson Winning deck: Name: The Guests Description: Inspired by the Leonard Cohen song "the Guests"... A neo-stealth/bleed with a nice twist of gehenna. Get one or two VP's and then play Absimilard's Army and wait for a while. If anyone who isn't you takes a ghoul, steal it with your merged Sebastian. Since the numbers of masters are quite low, the Veil of Darkness hits everyone else harder than you. Author: ERik Crypt (12 cards total): 3x Sebastian Goulet 3x Sebastian Goulet Adv. 1x Suzanne Kadim 1x Catherine du Bois 1x Badr al-Budur 1x Reverend Blackwood 1x Juggler 1x Count Ormonde Library (89 cards total): Masters (10 cards): 4x Visit from the Capuchin 2x Fortschritt Library 2x Blood Doll 2x Gambit Accepted Actions (15 cards): 10x Govern the Unaligned 1x Dominate Kine 4x Flurry of Action Allies (1 card): 1x Mylan Horseed (Goblin) Events (10 cards): 3x Absimiliard's Army 1x The Unmasking 1x Recalled to the Founder 1x Fueled by Heart's Blood 1x Nightmares upon Nightmares [questionable in this deck, as pointed out by Derek Ray] 1x Conquest of Humanity 1x Thirst 1x Veil of Darkness Action Modifiers (28 cards): 4x Cloak the Gathering 4x Seduction 2x Elder Impersonation 3x Faceless Night 5x Lost in Crowds 3x Spying Mission 7x Conditioning Combat Cards (10 cards): 1x Fast Hands 2x Bone Spur 3x Weighted Walking Stick 4x Flash Reactions (12 cards): 6x Deflection 6x Wake with Evening's Freshness Combo (3 cards): 3x Swallowed by the Night **************** And that's it for the October issue! November will be late and jet-lagged but FULL of transatlantic wisdom, not to mention beer, cos i am off to visit some of my American chums. See you then! Address for correspondence: james"dot"mcclellan"at"port"dot"ac"dot"uk