Tedious Post

Achtung!

This post is going to be extremely tedious for pretty much everybody who reads this blog, excepting possibly 3 or so people. Everybody else, just quit now.

Seriously, don't complain later if you read this.

Geek Lore

There is a certain type of person, who, for lack of a better term, we will refer to as the Geek. The behaviour and mindset of the Geek is usually rather straightforward. One of the more obvious characteristics of geeks, dividing them cleanly from other people with poorly developed social skills and obsessions about wierd and unpopular things, is the Geek Collecting Instinct.

This is a very important aspect of geek psychology. The exact object of the Collecting Instinct isn't important; the behaviour doesn't change. Among its more noticeable characteristics is the arbitrary character (the object of the Instinct can be just about anything); the lack of moderation; and, most relevant to this blog post, the need to organize. It's not enough to have the greatest collection of X-Men comics evar, you have to have them sorted, organized and laid out systematically. An index or an inventory spreadsheet is optional, but recommended.

The system may not make sense to another living soul, but it makes sense to the geek, and that's what matters.

It's All Null's Fault, Really

So Null, admittedly not directly or of his own volition, has gotten me into this Vampire card game, and I've become more than a little obsessed with it. As my 13-binder Magic card collection will tell you, this is not particularily out of character for me. But even for me, I've amassed a pretty decent collection in not a lot of time.

(This hoarding instinct is, as I've outlined above, an outgrowth of my inner Geek nature. You might think that I'd be amassing cards out of a desire to win more games, but a cursory review of how I build decks would cure you of that mistaken assumption. Someone trying to win doesn't include cards because the artwork is puuuurty.)

As part of the Third Tradition of Geekery, I'm working on deciphering the ideal way to organize these things. With Magic, it was pretty straightforward. Five colours, plus lands, artifacts, multicolour and hybrids; not too complicated. Vampire is a whole other kettle of fish.

(Incidentally, don't forget I warned you up front this was going to be tedious.)

The Problem

The first step of figuring out how to organize a Vampire collection (after deciding, like any right-thinking person, to put them in sleeve sheets in 3" binders, rather than a box) is working out how they break down.

The Vampires are easy to categorize; they're different from all the other cards (even their card backs are a different colour) and they each belong to one and only one clan. Easy peasy.

Master cards go into one big pile, as they're functionally, conceptually and artistically distinct from other library cards. I've separated out disciplines, hunting grounds and clan-dependent masters, but unfortunately all the others are in one big pile. So far that's not too much of a problem because I don't have that many of them, but this may be an issue in the future.

Equipment, Retainers and Allies are all used by vampires and functionally broadly similar to each other. They go nicely as a category of three groups.

Political actions are their own thing, and visually quite distinct. They usually don't have obvious requirements like clan dependencies. On their own, then.

The problem is the rest of the library cards. You have actions, combat actions, action modifiers, and reactions. Many of them require a discipline, but some of them don't, and some of them require 2 or even 3. Some of them are clan dependent. What's even worse, some cards are an action modifier and a reaction, or a combat action and an action modifier, or some other infernal combination.

How do you sort this?

The Solution Thus Far

I've finally broken down and sorted them into a few big categories. This is the best I can work out:

• Dependence-free Actions, Action Modifiers, Combat Actions, and Reactions, in that order (sorted by type).
• Clan-dependent cards of all four types.
• Cards of all four types which have 2 discipline requirements where both are basic clan disciplines, all in one group.
  
• Cards of all four types with only one discipline requirement, or cards with two discipline requirements, one of which is exotic (ie a Bloodlines discipline like Obeah or Temporis). Each discipline is grouped together, but all four card types are gathered in that group. Multi-discipline cards with one exotic and one common discipline are gathered in groups of the exotic discipline, again in one big group of all four types.
  
• Anarch-dependent cards with 3 discipline requirements.
• All cards of any type which are dependent upon Imbued.

Believe it or not, this is the best I've been able to come up with, after quite a bit of thought and a few different attempts.

I went through and re-organized everything to follow this pattern tonight. It actually seems to work pretty well.