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We have been working on getting more batreps ready, recently we have been talking about doing some of the longer "banter style" reports. I tend to lean towards the summary style, but i wanted to get a better feel for what others like.

I tend to prefer player turn but game turn is better if you're trying to keep it short like 5-10 minutes.

Summary after each player turn is more interesting, it gives you a better overall feel for what's going on in the game. Banter style is better if you want to get into the meat and potatoes of how an army plays.

I like narrative personally with lots of cool pictures. I've never been a fan of videos and just find being able to scroll through and read a batrep much more intriguing

I can not stand banter reports. For 2 normal guys playing 40k over the course of 2 hours, they're not going to say anything interesting that wouldn't have been said in a summary report.


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And if something interesting does happen at an odd time, then the guy with the camera can turn it on to record that on its own, saving us all 2 hours of our time. Say someone interesting shows up to say something, or an amazing roll is made. You can record that without having to record everything else.

Anything as long as it's not a video report. I don't understand the prevalence of those lately, it's a comprehensively worse way of presenting the information, and also takes much more effort to produce. It's madness.

As others have mentioned, video reports are the suck.

I enjoy watching and making video battle reports.

 Crablezworth wrote:
I enjoy watching and making video battle reports.

I too enjoy video battle reports (But not the drawn out banter variety) and appreciate the effort you and others put into making them.

The problem with banter batreps is they are generally only funny to the people who play them. Very often inside jokes or things in them really ruin it for everyone else watching.

The only ones I can watch are Miniwargaming's Banter Batreps but it's hard to have a 'Dave' type person for most people without coming across as purely unwatchable.

Stick to summary unless you're supremely confident what you have to show is funny for all audiences and relevant all the time.

I'll only watch banter reports. I want to see each die cast, why it's been rolled, what the goal is and how some of the more nuanced rules work in action. I'm watching a report to see armies play. If I wanted fluff, I'd just read a book. Chances are I'm not going to play against every army out there enough to recognize what they're doing as they do it, so I want to watch a report to learn what I don't recognize and develop tactics against their rules if possible.

Relearning Warhammer after a 9 year hiatus was easier with that style as well. I watched the game play out and every time I couldn't say exactly why the die was cast and what number was needed, I looked it up until I was fluent once again in the rules.

But when you say banter, I see someone mentioned Dave from miniwargaming. I can't stand him. I don't want to watch humor or trying to make jokes for the camera. Just play it natural. Xeno Vids is one of my consistent favorites because the only flavor chat is complaints about dice rolls. But nearly every dice roll is filmed, albeit not perfectly. If there's a rule that they had to look up, they mention it and why they got it wrong. Honestly, just show me the game and the way people play it so I can think outside of my little gaming club and see other ideas.

But I will say, even if the videos aren't suited to what I want, I like seeing so many people putting in the time to making them and having the options out there.

 Joyous_Oblivion wrote:
The problem with banter batreps is they are generally only funny to the people who play them. Very often inside jokes or things in them really ruin it for everyone else watching.

The only ones I can watch are Miniwargaming's Banter Batreps but it's hard to have a 'Dave' type person for most people without coming across as purely unwatchable.

Stick to summary unless you're supremely confident what you have to show is funny for all audiences and relevant all the time.

I can't really watch Dave. I mean I can start out ok, but eventually my mind starts to wander as the small talk starts to build up. And then I come back to the video thinking "what am I watching?" and stop. Matt's even worse because there's just something about the way he talks and acts that I can not stand.

The only long battle reports that I can watch are StrikingScorpion82's battle reports. That's because the models are great, the table is great, and he actually makes it summary even though not really. I guess it's the inspiration. That's why I watch.

I think there's room for a longer form of summary style. Some of the batreps me and my usual opponents have done are like 35-45 minutes long. I tend to think of it like a podcast, if we're boring you just fast forward. Don't care about what's in the armies or how we're playing terrain or what scenario we're doing? That's cool, just skip ahead to the summary of turn one. We tend to go a bit overboard on detail and there's unavoidably going to be some commentary and editorializing but hey, people will have opinions regardless. Can't censor opponent's perspectives and expect them to wanna do another battle report with ya. Same for salty language, I'm not gonna take the time to edit it out every expletive to please a wider audience. It's also too lengthy to re-shoot a whole summary cuz someone dropped an f bomb or something. Some of the batreps we've done took upwards of like 10 hours to shoot/play. And that's not always super high point levels. The one thing all our batreps have in common is we try our hardest to make sure to only use fully painted models and terrain. The hope being that even if you find any or all of us obnoxious there's at least enough eye candy on display and the summary is at least informative enough to ensure you get a good idea of what transpired turn by turn.

Thanks for all the feedback guys!

We may try to do a couple of longer banter style ones. I personally will be sticking to the Player turn summary style.

We are also planning a "narrative" campaign, i think for that we may do a longer banter style.

Again thanks for voting =)