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I love Gamer Interface I do....

And I most certainly look forward to Words from Wales, sir. It is refreshing to get a non-American perspective on America, which you most certainly offer. And yes, my LORD have Americans gone nuts over swine flu. Does NOBODY remember the "swine flu" that we didn't suffer from during the Ford presidency? Panicmongers, I swear. I still goggle that we're changing the name to save the lives of pigs worldwide.

Anyway, I hope you've been able to participate in the rerelease of Cutthroat Caverns and snare a copy - it'd be a shame if a d4 roll cost you your only opportunity for a game you've been yearning to own.

And hey - have you thought about asking to be included on the eBay shout-out auctions? It'd give me one more host to visit before my reign of eBay tyranny is ended. But even if you only accepted shoutouts from Welshpersons, it'd still be cool.

Welshpeople? Welshians? Walespeople just sounds wrong, but there should be something a bit more inclusive than Welshmen. Welshists? Welshites? (That doesn't look good. I should stop here.)





Waleans?

I submitted the Orky backstabbing, and I usually pronounce Dakka Dakka with the same sound as in whack. However, it's hard to alternate both high pitched and low pitched voices while faking an Orkish accent while remembering at the same time to pronounce Dakka right. My bad.

Chrispy wrote:I submitted the Orky backstabbing, and I usually pronounce Dakka Dakka with the same sound as in whack. However, it's hard to alternate both high pitched and low pitched voices while faking an Orkish accent while remembering at the same time to pronounce Dakka right. My bad.

Oh, was not in ANY way making a complaint about the Dakka/Dokka question. I just know that our esteemed hosts have at times expressed a sense of confusion about how anyone might arrive at the "Dokka" pronunciation, and I was just saying that there IS a legitimate source.

For nothing is so legitimate as the Muppet Show.

In Wales we are known as


Y Cymru "The People" - Welshmen will do though


Would love to do shoutouts, ask Russ ?, I know a few people have asked in the past and I do have an interested Sponser but I dont want to tread on any New Hampshire toes so its their call....

Not got a cutthroat caverns yet but will as soon as the bank lets go of my balls....

Owen, don't do what I did and order it from the states. The import duty costs as much as one as the expansions :(

Try and bag a slot at the Carnage instead and I'll play you there!

Bad show of me I know Fitzah but I wont be at the Carnage this year. I am going to the Pompey Pillage next month but am then saving all my wife's goodwill to go to the Alamo GT In Texas in November.

Does anybody know a good UK seler for CC


Cheers


Owen

Great episode, that was two full days of commute entertainment that was not too horrible.
On Warmachine as someone who is going to try and get into Warmachine should I worry too much about the factions or pick the faction that is the most visually appealing. Currently that is the Mercenary faction and the Mariner & Mule jacks look impressive.
Thanks,
Devore

Hey Guys at D6G!

I just discovered you guys on itunes.... amazing!
your show is so informative and entertaining. i have a job where i work 80+ hours a week with TONS of downtime. needless to say with a wife at home my gaming time is kept to a bare minimum. but since i've discovered your podcast time just passes with ease. almost seems like 3 hours a show isnt enough! jk. HOLLYWOOD yout the man, dont let craig and russ cramp your style! keep up the good work guys, your show makes my time away from my life a breeze! awesome job!

hey i have a shoe idea... bare with me. would it be possible for you guys to do a show on like the top ten non-collectible stand alone card games? are you guys into those? games like Infernal Contraption, Blue Moon, Anima RPG, Collossal Arena, Fluxx, ect... what do you guys think?

Nice ep. I choked on my coffee when craig told raef to "strap it on". People at work just looked at me with coffee in my lap and my mp3 player in my ears.

Dev: Raef briefly gives out some advice on picking WM factions in Ep 31 (it's recorded, and will go live on Monday). All the factions are strong, although Mercs are considered one of the weaker factions unless you play pirates. They have gotten better.

Card Games: We do play a lot of non-collectible card games. I have Infernal Contraption (and the expansion), and we play Bang! (reviewed), and Cutthroat Caverns. In Ep 31 we'll cover another one. I also enjoy Race (or Raef) for the Galaxy. Hmm, maybe you do have a great topic idea there.

Thanks for listening!

If you're looking for another non-collectable card game filler, I'd suggest Guillotine, produced by Wizards of the Coast. My girlfriend LOVES this game. It has very simple mechanics, and fun gameplay. The art is nice, as well. It's only about $12, so if you see it, you can't afford to not buy it.

WoW GamerInformer I am really beginning to like your posts! Really no joke.

HD

I'm only too happy to give back a little of what you folks at d6G are giving us all to listen to - information, perspective and (hopefully) insight.

Oh, and now the contest is over, I picked up Cutthroat Caverns and the first expansion. I'll probably get a game in with my local group within the next two weeks. Lookin' forward to it, thanks to your show.

I just finished this Ep, and I wanted to say: great show guys (as always).

I always love when you guys do Warmachine stuff because although it ain't the game for me, I love how open and communicative Privateer is with their consumers. So while their flagship game may be going down a semi-familiar road to what GW went through twenty-ish years ago, it is fantastic to hear about the ways in which they are able to make (at least most of) their fans more comfortable through the transition.

The one time I did play Warmachine I immediately knew it wasn't the game for me. I don't like keeping track of stat cards for every model and having power-up tokens applied to units, etc. Its just too much micro-management for me and plus it is infused with just a tad too much Fantasy for my tastes (I like laser guns). So it was kind of refreshing for me to hear that the MKII rules are basically just the same game but streamlined, as that let me know it is still a game I can safely stay away from (and I mean that in a positive way because the last thing I need is an excuse to buy more minis).


As an outsider of the game listening to you run down the WM changes a few things sprung to mind:

Regarding the use of 'icons': If they've removed the rules text from the unit cards hasn't that freed up a lot of space that they could at least use to list the 'title' of the skill as well as the icon for that skill on the card?

I would think listing the name and icon for a skill would be the way to go because that way you wouldn't always have to remember what each and every icon was without looking back in the rules (you'd have a name as well to help jog your memory) but the writers would still be able to use just the icons when they needed to print a unit or weapon's stats in brief (or people in a forum wanted to write out a statline without using all the skill names to save some space).

I can't see how using just icons instead of in conjunction with the names of the skills will make things any easier. Unless there are less than 10 icons total in the game then there is absolutely no way (IMHO) it is ever going to be easy for anyone but veteran WM players to have them all memorized.

Another thing about removing the rules text from the cards: Isn't that half the point of having unit cards in the first place, so you don't have to refer back to the rulebook all the time? As I mentioned above, one thing that instantly bothered me about Warmachine (and I know not everyone feels this way) was having unit cards on the table for every model/unit. But at least those cards contained the rules I needed to help me, as a newbie, remember what the heck my models could do.

By removing the rules text it seems like the whole point of the unit cards are degraded a bit, in that, unless you are veteran who has all the icon skills memorized, you're now going to have to continually refer back to the rulebook to remember what your skills do. That doesn't sound necessarily like progress to me.


I also agree with you Russ that the new points value system ultimately seems like a bad idea. I think it is something they will be able to make work now, as they're currently re-balancing all the units at once. But I think it will bite them in the ass in the long run as it will really make it difficult for them to create new units as they will always have to make themn perfectly balanced with all other existing units in that same point bracket.

So say they come up with a really cool idea for a unit's special rules but including that rule would make the unit more powerful than other comparable units in that point level, but not quite powerful enough to be bumped up to the next point level. Now PP will either have to leave the unit to cheap or too pricey for what it does, or worse, just remove the cool special rule altogether.

Worse still, if they do manage to release a unit that is costed improperly, they will now no longer really have the option to just tweak the point value of the unit through an errata (something that is regrettable but easily digested by gamers as the unit doesn't change, just the relative value of the unit does). Instead, they will be forced to change the rules of the unit via errata to make it fit better into that point level (which is a much more difficult change as players then have to get used to playing differently with that unit).

Ultimately that just seems like the tail wagging the dog to me and I hope they reconsider and scrap this new points system before they get too far into the revamp.


Oh, and on GW's insistence on remaining in the black & white print realm: Russ you're assuming it is because GW is cheap. But the fact is, GW has never really been shy about putting more money into their products and then passing that expense onto their consumer, so I don't personally think for even a micro-second that if they wanted to do full color codices/rulebooks they wouldn't do it immediately and then jack the price of their books up by $10 (or so).

You have to remember that black & white artwork can be an aesthetic choice that (clearly you do not care for Russ) some people do actually care for and enjoy. Yes, color artwork and pages can be glorious, but especially in the case of 40K, those classic black and white Blanche pieces kind of define the universe in a way that doesn't come across quite right in full color (Blanche does work in color sometimes and I think it doesn't capture the feeling of his vision nearly as well).

The same people who have been making GW books 20+ years ago are still at that company and I think the truth of the matter is they just really like black & white artwork and so they keep making books that feature it.

Of course that's just speculation on my part as well, so who knows for sure!


And last, Owen I must cast yet another vote for the return of 'generic American guy'. Oh that was quite the humorous bit! And remember: generic American guy hates soccer (football), finds rugby confusing and pointless, drinks crappy beer, loves Monday Night Football and delights in watching reality TV shows. His favorite games are definitely Poker and maybe playing Madden on his old PS2.


Keep up the good work all!

Hey guys, great show as always. I don't play WArmachine yet, but I've been meaning to pick it up, as the models (particularly the Jack) have always looked cool to me.

I really enjoyed hearing the Mark 2 overview, but I've got a quick question - is there any way of getting hold of the rules now that Privateer have closed the preview site down? I'd been meanign to grab them for a couple of days, and when I finally had the chance to sit downa nd do it, found out that I'd left it too late.

As I understand it, the rules are in PDF format, so I don't know if there's any kind of watermarking applied to them to discourage sharing the files, or if there's simply a caveat on them, asking people not to share them. If so, please accept my apologies, I'm simply trying to get hold of the rules, as I'd like to give the game a try, particularly with the new rules which, to my ears, sound like I would enjoy playing more than the current ones.

Thanks for the comments Yakface...

Icons: There aren't that many icons (about 10), and it would be logical for a 'quick reference card' to be produced in the final product. There are still abilities and their rules printed on the cards for unique abilities for the unit, just not for common abilities. A GW analogy would be the "Commissar" entry on page 32 of the IG codex. Their "Summary Execution" ability is fully described, while "Stubborn" and "Independent Character" are just listed. You'd have to go to the main rule book to look those up. In WM mark 2, a "Commissar" would have icons for Stubborn and IC, and would have Summary Execution listed with full rules text. The nice thing about the icons is that you can glance at your opponents cards from accross the table and easily see the large symbols, and have an idea of at least the core abilities you're up against.

Points: Someone sent me a theory that the point system was just done this way for the play test, so that testers wouldn't get hung up on complaining about the exact points of the model, and that they may very well switch back in the final version. A theory so crazy it just might be true. I've no idea, but I agree with your comments.

GW Books: A lot of folks keep e-mailing me about this very topic, defending GW's black and white books as an 'artistic choice.' Perhaps I should re-phrase my issue with the GW 40k and WHFB Army book/codex line. They do not look artistic in any way to me. They appear to be designed to deliver the most amount of text as effectively as possible. Example: I love the background and fluff of 40k, and as such a person I'll generally acquire cool books on the subject (such as FFG's new works). As a die hard ork player of old, the recent ork codex looked rather blah to me, and I did not pick it up. I DID buy the 40k 5th edition collectors edition of the rules. That book IS beautiful, and artistic, despite being mono-chrome. However I also just purchased the IG codex, because I want to play my IG. While I like the rules and what they've done with the IG in this codex, and think it is a great codex in general. As an artistic work I think it is uninspired. It looks and feels almost like a school text book, with the graphs and charts replaced with token pictures from the archives unless they need to scrounge up some new artwork for a new unit.

Can GW produce good looking books? They sure as heck can. The LoTR line is ENTIRELY in color and all those books look great. Their 40k/WHFB RPG lines are also in color (even prior to selling it to FFG). The art books and the 5th Ed collectors edition are also EXCEPTIONAL.

So why not put that kind of effort in the 40k and WHFB expansion books? I think the answer is, they don't have too. LoTR needs it because it is not as popular, RPG's need it because ALL PRODUCTS in that space are full color. But 40k and WHFB sell almost whatever they put out, as long as the rules are reasonable.

Again, just my 2 cents. But I'd LOVE to see a GW IG book or ork book that looked like Dark Heresy: Creatures Anathema.

So why not put that kind of effort in the 40k and WHFB expansion books? I think the answer is, they don't have too. LoTR needs it because it is not as popular, RPG's need it because ALL PRODUCTS in that space are full color. But 40k and WHFB sell almost whatever they put out, as long as the rules are reasonable.

I gotta disagree here Russ. I don't know the reasoning for GWs book production choices, but I can't believe that people are going to be more inclined to buy LoTR because the books are in colour (until your plans for world domination are complete and we are all Wakelin clones ). 40K and WHFB are living proof that you don't need colour books to make massively popular miniature games.

I agree it's an anomaly that LoTR is produced largely in colour, and one that I can't explain. My only thought on the subject is that one of the characteristics of the WHFB and 40K books is that they reference a bunch of old art work each time, which I think is really cool, and I'm not sure that colour and black and white art prints mix that well in books.

Holy crap! I just decided to wander by the D6G page for a moment and what greets me but a brand-spankin'-new illustration for the show.

Looks very slick! Who's the artist? (or will that be an ep. 31 topic?)

What podcast doesn't need a devilish-looking cherub as their mascot?

RussWakelin wrote:

Icons: There aren't that many icons (about 10), and it would be logical for a 'quick reference card' to be produced in the final product. There are still abilities and their rules printed on the cards for unique abilities for the unit, just not for common abilities. A GW analogy would be the "Commissar" entry on page 32 of the IG codex. Their "Summary Execution" ability is fully described, while "Stubborn" and "Independent Character" are just listed. You'd have to go to the main rule book to look those up. In WM mark 2, a "Commissar" would have icons for Stubborn and IC, and would have Summary Execution listed with full rules text. The nice thing about the icons is that you can glance at your opponents cards from accross the table and easily see the large symbols, and have an idea of at least the core abilities you're up against.

It's good that there aren't that many icons, and I do get that they are just like universal special rules in 40K, I was just saying it seems like a good idea if they kept the NAME of the skill ALONG WITH the icon wherever they have the space to do so. Because I think, especially for new players, remembering the name of a skill is easier than remembering an icon.

The other benefit of doing it that way is that it is also a constant reminder to players about what each icon is (because the name is frequently there as a reminder), so that the times when there isn't the space for the skill name and just room for the icon now newer players are more likely to remember what icon means what.

GW Books: A lot of folks keep e-mailing me about this very topic, defending GW's black and white books as an 'artistic choice.' Perhaps I should re-phrase my issue with the GW 40k and WHFB Army book/codex line. They do not look artistic in any way to me. They appear to be designed to deliver the most amount of text as effectively as possible. Example: I love the background and fluff of 40k, and as such a person I'll generally acquire cool books on the subject (such as FFG's new works). As a die hard ork player of old, the recent ork codex looked rather blah to me, and I did not pick it up. I DID buy the 40k 5th edition collectors edition of the rules. That book IS beautiful, and artistic, despite being mono-chrome. However I also just purchased the IG codex, because I want to play my IG. While I like the rules and what they've done with the IG in this codex, and think it is a great codex in general. As an artistic work I think it is uninspired. It looks and feels almost like a school text book, with the graphs and charts replaced with token pictures from the archives unless they need to scrounge up some new artwork for a new unit.

Can GW produce good looking books? They sure as heck can. The LoTR line is ENTIRELY in color and all those books look great. Their 40k/WHFB RPG lines are also in color (even prior to selling it to FFG). The art books and the 5th Ed collectors edition are also EXCEPTIONAL.

So why not put that kind of effort in the 40k and WHFB expansion books? I think the answer is, they don't have too. LoTR needs it because it is not as popular, RPG's need it because ALL PRODUCTS in that space are full color. But 40k and WHFB sell almost whatever they put out, as long as the rules are reasonable.

Again, just my 2 cents. But I'd LOVE to see a GW IG book or ork book that looked like Dark Heresy: Creatures Anathema.

But again, I'd say you're naturally assuming that GW is doing something from a negative point of view (because they don't HAVE to). While that may absolutely be true, there is at least an equal chance that they are specifically choosing to do so because:

A) They think B&W artwork suits the 40K/WHFB universes well.
B) They have a long history of B&W images to pull from and they don't want to just give up that history and move onto entirely new artwork.

Theoretically they could include B&W artwork on full-color pages, but I do think that would look pretty strange.


In the end it is all just guessing, but my point always is: Why necessarily assume that the reason is something negative (like they just don't care or because they feel like they don't have to) when the answer could just as easily be something positively simple: They choose that style (which you don't happen to like) because they think B&W suits those particular books better?

I'd never listened to the show before, and I must say, I don't really think it's for me. Rapidfire verbiage, silly voices, what I suspect are hilarious in-jokes and so on remind me of nothing so much as the abominable 40k Radio.

Jack of all games wrote:Holy crap! I just decided to wander by the D6G page for a moment and what greets me but a brand-spankin'-new illustration for the show.

We chat about this a bit in Ep 31. And wouldn't that logo look so much cooler if it was artistically black and white??? Nah, I didn't think so either. ;-)

(See how I did that? Wove two topics togeather.)

For long time listeners that is, of course, Charlie.

yakface wrote:In the end it is all just guessing, but my point always is: Why necessarily assume that the reason is something negative (like they just don't care or because they feel like they don't have to) when the answer could just as easily be something positively simple: They choose that style (which you don't happen to like) because they think B&W suits those particular books better?

Fair enough. My disappointment in the 40k codex appearance isn't really because I think there is an evil plot afoot. My disappointment is that of all the games I now play, GW has the most drab, uninspired looking texts, IMHO. So when someone asks "what would you improve?" my answer is clear: make 'em look cooler.

Of course, I'm sure there are many folks out there that think they look plenty cool already. But my bet is these folks haven't ventured far from the GW line.

Agamemnon2 wrote:I'd never listened to the show before, and I must say, I don't really think it's for me. Rapidfire verbiage, silly voices, what I suspect are hilarious in-jokes and so on remind me of nothing so much as the abominable 40k Radio.

Our show is quite a bit different from other podcasts, in that each segment is a mini-show in and of itself. And our starting segment, Rapid Fire, is something of an aquired taste according to some.

If you'd like to check out the WM section in Ep 30, just fast forward to around the 2 hour mark.

In any case, thanks for giving our show a try!

RussWakelin wrote:

Agamemnon2 wrote:I'd never listened to the show before, and I must say, I don't really think it's for me. Rapidfire verbiage, silly voices, what I suspect are hilarious in-jokes and so on remind me of nothing so much as the abominable 40k Radio.

Our show is quite a bit different from other podcasts, in that each segment is a mini-show in and of itself. And our starting segment, Rapid Fire, is something of an aquired taste according to some.

If you'd like to check out the WM section in Ep 30, just fast forward to around the 2 hour mark.

Yes, I think that's it, really. It's very jarring.

EDIT: The WM2 coverage was very nice, I really enjoyed the analysis.

"It's very jarring."

I think of Rapid Fire as a sort of initiation into the show, like a hazing or other rite-of-brotherhood style ritual. If you can survive Rapid Fire, the glorious benefits of the show will unfold. Besides, now I know that it sets up the issues in the show, I really like it as an off-the-wall intro. It's so much better than, "On today's show..."