On 4/21/2017 at 1:17 PM, Wintersong said:

Vengeful Oathkeeper (in one preview) is a conflict card personality. I must assume he has conflict card back.

Where are people getting that the Oathkeeper is a personality in the conflict deck? There's not enough of the card shown for me to see how people are concluding that, especially since the preview article seems to indicate that dynasty deck=character and conflict deck=follower.

"Each player commands their forces with two separate decks: A Dynasty Deck fills their provinces with characters and holdings and a Conflict Deck consisting of tactics, maneuvers, followers and attachments that can be used to turn the tide in a struggle for supremacy."

It's the fact that the card is in the handful corresponding to the conflict deck description (on the product description the first handful illustrate the text below it talking about the dynasty deck, the same for the second group of cards and the conflict deck) and the power of the card which is very likely something akin as "If you lose a military conflict, put this card into play from you hand".

2 minutes ago, Vlad3theImpaler said:

Where are people getting that the Oathkeeper is a personality in the conflict deck? There's not enough of the card shown for me to see how people are concluding that, especially since the preview article seems to indicate that dynasty deck=character and conflict deck=follower.

"Each player commands their forces with two separate decks: A Dynasty Deck fills their provinces with characters and holdings and a Conflict Deck consisting of tactics, maneuvers, followers and attachments that can be used to turn the tide in a struggle for supremacy."

Vengeful Oathkeeper's text box states "If you lose a military conflict, put this card into play from your hand."

A Dynasty Card would never be in your hand. Ergo, Vengeful Oathkeeper can't be a Dynasty card.

1 minute ago, Vlad3theImpaler said:

Where are people getting that the Oathkeeper is a personality in the conflict deck? There's not enough of the card shown for me to see how people are concluding that, especially since the preview article seems to indicate that dynasty deck=character and conflict deck=follower.

"Each player commands their forces with two separate decks: A Dynasty Deck fills their provinces with characters and holdings and a Conflict Deck consisting of tactics, maneuvers, followers and attachments that can be used to turn the tide in a struggle for supremacy."

It's a 3-part assumption

• The card fans have all of their cards being part of the same deck, and it's with other conflict cards.
• Its text says "...put this...rom your hand." Dynasty cards are never in your hand.
• There has been an explicit mention of Characters in the Conflict deck (one of the Team Covenant vids, I think).

10 minutes ago, Smobey said:

Vengeful Oathkeeper's text box states "If you lose a military conflict, put this card into play from your hand."

A Dynasty Card would never be in your hand. Ergo, Vengeful Oathkeeper can't be a Dynasty card.

That does not make it a character, though. I don't see why it can't be a follower.
And where did you get the full text? I can't make that much out from the preview.

1 minute ago, Vlad3theImpaler said:

That does not make it a character, though. I don't see why it can't be a follower.
And where did you get the full text? I can't make that much out from the preview.

If it's a follower, it'd likely be an attachment. And attachments have a different layout than than the Vengeful Oathkeeper card has.

And I just guessed most of the text.

18 minutes ago, Vlad3theImpaler said:

That does not make it a character, though. I don't see why it can't be a follower.
And where did you get the full text? I can't make that much out from the preview.

Sure, it could be a follower and that the new rules make followers to not be an attachment. But then, what would be the differences between a character and a follower? Moreover, what we see of the template of the Vengeful Oathkeeper match perfectly with the template of the other characters.

For the power, we can read "... lose a Military conflict - put this ... from your hand." with only the space for 2 ou 3 words between "this" and "from". I can't see what it could be other than our suggestion, but if you have any other idea, I'd like to hear it.

36 minutes ago, KerenRhys said:

Sure, it could be a follower and that the new rules make followers to not be an attachment. But then, what would be the differences between a character and a follower? Moreover, what we see of the template of the Vengeful Oathkeeper match perfectly with the template of the other characters.

For the power, we can read "... lose a Military conflict - put this ... from your hand." with only the space for 2 ou 3 words between "this" and "from". I can't see what it could be other than our suggestion, but if you have any other idea, I'd like to hear it.

Most followers really just represented minor (no-name) characters anyway. I could see them merging the concepts of followers and non-unique characters into these generic characters, with the named characters all being unique.

There may still be a follower type of attachment, but I expect the pool will be much smaller and consist more of units with a tighter tie to a leader, rather than just, "and the rest" of the army. And honestly, sometimes the follower concept didn't really make sense in the game ("I am a ninja! I am the shadows themselves! Just me and my horde of Heavy Infantry!...and the Sons of Gusai....and an Elephant Cavalry...")

Originally followers represented either minor people, as you say, or small groups of people. I would be unsurprised if Followers were things like Light Cavalry, Heavy Infantry, Ashigaru etc in the core box, maybe moving onto the clan-specific ones later.

16 hours ago, Toqtamish said:

This is not true at all. I've playtested several games.

That's good information. I assume the NDAs are pretty robust!

Most of the time, the NDA holds until the game is released. Once it is, there's nothing preventing you from saying you've been a playtester.

24 minutes ago, Ryoshun Higoka said:

That's good information. I assume the NDAs are pretty robust!

12 minutes ago, Ser Nakata said:

Most of the time, the NDA holds until the game is released. Once it is, there's nothing preventing you from saying you've been a playtester.

Correct, since the names are printed in the rulebook after all.

2 hours ago, Ser Nakata said:

Most of the time, the NDA holds until the game is released. Once it is, there's nothing preventing you from saying you've been a playtester.

Is anyone saying that there is? I've never seen an NDA that applied to public information after the product was released - what would be the point of that?

4 minutes ago, Ryoshun Higoka said:

Is anyone saying that there is? I've never seen an NDA that applied after the product was released - what would be the point of that?

As far as I know, I am still under NDA of a video game I helped (pre)alpha testing and that was released years ago.

Just now, Wintersong said:

As far as I know, I am still under NDA of a video game I helped (pre)alpha testing and that was released years ago.

Huh. Different strokes for different legal departments, I guess.

Just now, Ryoshun Higoka said:

Huh. Different strokes for different legal departments, I guess.

I could see a company possibly testing something about a game, deciding against using it, but still wanting to hold onto it for future games (or expansions/DLC/etc.). Maybe some companies have longer NDAs just in case something like that happens?

Just now, JJ48 said:

I could see a company possibly testing something about a game, deciding against using it, but still wanting to hold onto it for future games (or expansions/DLC/etc.). Maybe some companies have longer NDAs just in case something like that happens?

That would make sense.

I know that other games I've playtested for have had NDAs that stated that I couldn't reveal anything that wasn't made public via official release of the publisher via media announcement, post on their site, printed on cards or rules that in the public or already publicly divulged by employees.

There are still some things for a few games that haven't been released form years ago that I can't talk about.

12 minutes ago, Wintersong said:

As far as I know, I am still under NDA of a video game I helped (pre)alpha testing and that was released years ago.

Yeah, I was a historical researcher for the Paradox game Sengoku and I don't remember any language in the NDA saying when it lost effect. Of course, an NDA having an unnecessarily long duration (such as an indefinite one) will get it thrown out of court, so it doesn't really matter.

29 minutes ago, Ryoshun Higoka said:

Is anyone saying that there is? I've never seen an NDA that applied after the product was released - what would be the point of that?

I'm still under an NDA for D&D 4th Edition in that I can't discuss how playtesting was conducted.

Just now, rzlittle said:

I'm still under an NDA for D&D 4th Edition in that I can't discuss how playtesting was conducted.

That makes perfect sense. I was very unclear in my previous statement - it should have included the phrase "public information". In terms of what a game company (or any company that requires and NDA) will allow you to disclose to the public, there are going to be limitations on private information (game concepts, etc.) but not on public information (who the playtesters were, etc).

26 minutes ago, SlackerHacker said:

I know that other games I've playtested for have had NDAs that stated that I couldn't reveal anything that wasn't made public via official release of the publisher via media announcement, post on their site, printed on cards or rules that in the public or already publicly divulged by employees.

There are still some things for a few games that haven't been released form years ago that I can't talk about.

I'm just curious about the bolded line: does that include only information that is officially divulged, or if something is leaked can you talk about it because the cat's already out of the bag?

52 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

I'm just curious about the bolded line: does that include only information that is officially divulged, or if something is leaked can you talk about it because the cat's already out of the bag?

It is generally only if officially released. There was a playtest I was in where a few things were leaked. Some of them were fairly quickly followed up with an official release that confirmed them (and freed us up to talk about), but the remainder of the items we were reminded not to talk about (in the case of one thing, it ended up not being in the final game, so it made sense not to talk about it).

1 hour ago, JJ48 said:

I'm just curious about the bolded line: does that include only information that is officially divulged, or if something is leaked can you talk about it because the cat's already out of the bag?

Only if it was legitimately released or acknowledged by the publisher.

So if something was leaked and the publisher acknowledges that the info is legit, I could talk about it.

23 hours ago, KerenRhys said:

Sure, it could be a follower and that the new rules make followers to not be an attachment. But then, what would be the differences between a character and a follower? Moreover, what we see of the template of the Vengeful Oathkeeper match perfectly with the template of the other characters.

For the power, we can read "... lose a Military conflict - put this ... from your hand." with only the space for 2 ou 3 words between "this" and "from". I can't see what it could be other than our suggestion, but if you have any other idea, I'd like to hear it.

I'm sure that's mostly accurate, but I was trying to figure out if there was an image I hadn't seen that had the full text revealed. It could start with "if," "when," "after," or possibly some other phrasing that hasn't occurred to me yet.