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Ha! Wait till you have rules in hand and see the word Mecha a million times. I think this is a necessary evil for PB to justify using the RPG license to make a minis game so some things will have to be used from the RPG books.

Give it to me straight, Mike. Do they overuse "mecha" as obnoxiously as that one draft did?

That one became akin to nails on a chalkboard before long.

The actual rules....I don't think you can find a paragraph without the word Mecha in it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
So much so that when I did the re-write and took out the pics I told them I took out the word mecha and replaced it with Units or Figures. There should only be like 3-4 times the word mecha appears in the re-write. Hopefully soon they will decide one way or the other.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B0VSNzmthd1vYVRNcVFiT0hJSUU&usp=sharing

Moved Star Wars stuff to its own folder on Google Drive

>.<

Damnit Palladium.

Do they pluralize it between "mecha" and "mechas"? Because that might drive me a bit crazy, but I can see situations in my head where ambiguity would cause a bit of a nightmare.

Of course, with the right wording that wouldn't be a case, but I'm already at a point doubting them, so let's table that possibility for now...

No, mecha is both singular and plural

What?!

"So when your mecha fires at target mecha, that mecha may roll defense, then spend command points to attempt to dodge, roll with the impact, or have other mecha take some of the damage."

"Err, is that when one fires at one, or a bunch fire at one, or one fires at many, or many fire at many?"

"Yes."

>.<

THAT is a cluster-feth waiting to happen. A word that important simply cannot use the same for both singular and plural and avoid confusion (willful or otherwise).

Well, they can, but it'd involve a lot more clear and precise language than I'd expect of a company doing the above. :-(

It's Palladium. They're worse than GW at writing rules.

But the rules are 98% done.

Ahem.

Finally 98% done, thank you very much.

http://palladium-megaverse.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=97

To be fair, Mecha was the term used in all the novels as well and was both the singular and plural. It's not that hard to understand, though hopefully they tone down the amount of times it appears in the revision

 Forar wrote:
What?!

"So when your mecha fires at target mecha, that mecha may roll defense, then spend command points to attempt to dodge, roll with the impact, or have other mecha take some of the damage."

"Err, is that when one fires at one, or a bunch fire at one, or one fires at many, or many fire at many?"

"It's great. Everyone in the office loves the rule!."

>.<

THAT is a cluster-feth waiting to happen. A word that important simply cannot use the same for both singular and plural and avoid confusion (willful or otherwise).

Well, they can, but it'd involve a lot more clear and precise language than I'd expect of a company doing the above. :-(

I changed the above for you as you had the very unrealistic expectation of Palladium providing a faux clarification to a rule. Judging from the RPG side of the business, they don't bring themselves down to that level to answer rules questions (even in an unclear manner). The best we have to hope for is Mike answering a rules question post wave 1, Redduke chiding people for asking one, and Wayne saying that only a tiny portion of the fanbase cares about why the square peg doesn't fit into the round hole.

Likely an NDA in place, but it is funny to have WRRD swinging through the thread just to repost something I'd already mentioned, and not bothering to even lay down some rules on us.

That'd have been a much better way to curry some favour than whatever the hell that was supposed to be.

I mean, unless his assessment of Mike doing a good job was meant to indicate that we SHOULD take Mike's word as gospel.

In which case, lead on, Brother Mike! To the promised land!!

To be fair I don't think Thom / WRRD has any more ruleswise than I do. But his NDA probably does not allow him wiggle room for sharing like mine does.

Since he is the playtest coordinator for dozens of people according to his blog post pre-KS, I'd hope that they're making updated rules with the tweaks and adjustments to the rules based on feedback available for actual testing to those under NDA and not just taking Kevin's helpful hints in the manner than the Kim's of North Korea have happen. I don't want rules changes that go straight from Kevin's mouth (or other sunshine filled orifices) to the printer like with the RPG.

Wyrd had a few figures that had rules go to print without the usual rigorous playtesting done in their first edition of Malifaux.

Guess which figures also had to be 'fixed', tweaked, nerfed or adjusted for a couple of years following that?

Or at least, so the story goes.

Well, the RPG is the only thing we have so far to go by and they don't bother fixing that stuff. The books published around 1998-2002 that were the most broken examples of power creep still are unchanged.

Well Kevin didn't wast any time throwing out the nurgle excuse for con crud at the beginning of the latest update.



It’s a dreary day and I’m feeling droopy. It has been a struggle to stay focused and the day has just flown by.

I’m wondering if its fallout from the hard push to get Rifts® Northern Gun Two finished and to the printer. Gosh, what a monster that book was. My fault for making the NG-2 so darn big. There were just so many ideas and great concept art -- combine with my feelings of obligation to make Rifts® Northern Gun 2 special because everyone has waited so long for it -- and . . . I don’t know, I just could not stop. It is an outstanding book, so I’m glad for that, but still. After Julius had finished proofreading the finished book, I asked him what he thought. “I think the fans are going to be delighted.” he said.

Julius enjoyed it quite a bit and he’s not even a tech-guy, so I know we were spinning pure gold. I hope so, because everyone gave it their all to make NG-2 something special. I expect the printer will have digital proofs for my review and approval in another day or two.

Saturday was a strange day. I was feeling pumped up and hot to write the next book. There is always an adrenaline rush and sense of accomplishment when you finish a book. Especially a big one that you’re proud of like Rifts® Northern Gun 2. I was going strong when we lost power at the office. We were pretty much out all afternoon. Lights were back on by the evening, but I was done for the day. I took all of Sunday off. Lazed around the house spending time with Kathy. It was nice.

Today the weather and I are both blah. Not down, just blah. Wayne and I have been trying to catching up with other things today (it’s always a juggling act). Then its finishing up The Rifter® #66. I want to see it go to the printer by Friday. I’m hoping to wrap up my work up on The Rifter® in a couple days and dive headlong into Megaverse® in Flames. Another epic book, but then we have so many cool books we want to get into your hands. Including a number of surprises.

This coming weekend will be taken up by Penguicon. A local convention where I’ll be one of the featured guests.

I can’t believe it’s 7:00 PM already. I need to head home. That’s if for now. More tomorrow or the next day. I want to get back into the groove of posting several times a week.

Kevin Siembieda
Publisher, Writer and Game Designer

© Copyright April 28, 2014 Palladium Books Inc. All rights reserved.

Rifts®, The Rifter®, RECON®, Splicers®, Palladium Books®, The Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game®, Phase World®, Nightbane®, Megaverse®, The Mechanoids®, The Mechanoid Invasion®, Coalition Wars® and After the Bomb® are Registered Trademarks of Palladium Books Inc. RPG Tactics™, Beyond the Supernatural, Chaos Earth, Coalition States, Dead Reign, Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas & Superspies, Minion War, Mysteries of Magic, SAMAS, Thundercloud Galaxy, Three Galaxies, Vampire Kingdoms, and other published book titles, names, slogans and likenesses are trademarks of Palladium Books Inc., and Kevin Siembieda.

I find it amusing that he thinks people even care about that day to day stuff. We are clients not buddies.

Mike1975 wrote:
I find it amusing that he thinks people even care about that day to day stuff. We are clients not buddies.

Not so Mike. Kevin mentions that super fans worry about him and PB. I love my GW minis but I don't stay up at night worried about them.lol

Yes.... advertise the convention appearance. No chance that somebody will be waiting patiently outside in a running car gently revving a high powered V8 engine... no chance at all

 Kalamadea wrote:
To be fair, Mecha was the term used in all the novels as well and was both the singular and plural. It's not that hard to understand, though hopefully they tone down the amount of times it appears in the revision

Does the use of 'mechs' cause potential issues if the game includes non-mecha at a later time? Robotech has a number of conventional tanks, planes, etc. in canon as I remember,e ben if they tend to be squishy compared to the mecha.

(And, to my understand, technically 'mecha' can refer to any mechanical designs when used in the context of anime.)

At this point, I'm looking for great miniatures and that's about it. The rules... should have been the first thing done. There has been so much garbage back and forth between Palladium and Ninja Division that it's just sad. It would have been nice if the RPG company that makes RPG's would have listened to the company that makes models for table top games. Maybe we would have had a game by now.

I'm happy that Palladium didn't just take my money and run, though the KS is so late, they might as well have.

Are we actually going to have a game at Gencon this year? I know last year that the game was, IMHO, bad. Really, really bad with clunky rules, an inexplicable melee system, and obvious broken combo's (missiles+anything!). I had a hard time trying to understand why a kick or punch could do more damage then my GU-11 55mm tri-barreled gun pod.

Reading over this thread and seeing the rules re-written (again!) makes me sad.

I hope to see the Invid Invasion some day, but I doubt it's going to happen if Palladium keeps the license and continues to screw this up.

 Tamwulf wrote:
Are we actually going to have a game at Gencon this year?

It is possible that they'll have something to sell at Gencon but less likely as each day passes. Forar did some napkin math a while ago but in a nutshell they'd have to make over a half million sprues, package them in China, ship by slow boat to the US, clear through customs, and then possibly repackage them into the correct retail boxes (assuming that isn't done in China) for shipment to pledges in the next 100 days. This all assumes that *nothing* needs additional tweaking like the valkyrie that they've been waiting for one or two weeks but never was sent according to the last update. They can obviously shave a few weeks off by air shipping some boxes to either demo at gencon or even sell there while the pledgers just languish. Personally, I suspect they'll have a few boxes to do official demo games with and to show off and/or raffle off but pledgers won't get anything by the con.

I may have been unclear, I was estimating around half a million figures, probably closer to 100k-150k sprues.

But yeah, depending on how many machines they're running/molds they make per figure (I sincerely doubt more than one) and production time, they really, really cannot miss this supposed mid May start up.

Even if they start mid May and finish by the end of the month (which in itself could be cutting it close), that gives a whole 2 months to load things onto the ship, have the ship ready to go (unless it's the last container loaded, who knows how many days or weeks it might be sitting around), plus the trek across the ocean, hopefully not getting held up in customs, and however long it takes to unload their container and get their stuff trucked to the warehouse before they can even begin to assemble BC packages and fire them off into the mail, something that may also take them weeks, depending on how much help they can get, and knowing that every day closer to August is another day potentially lost to the black hole that is Gencon (weeks leading up to and coming down from).

Now, some time may be saved in that EU stuff will be compiled and fired over the ocean again (as in, they aren't fulfilling all 5k+ backer boxes on their own from one location), but assuming North America covers a significant portion of their work (1/2? 2/3?) it's still going to count in the thousands and be very time consuming/manpower intensive (doubly so that any screw up and the need to box and mail out replacement parts hurts so very much more now that shipping is an increased cost).

Thanks for the clarification. You were likely clear but I was just not remembering what you wrote correctly. And because it hasn't been posted in a few days:

http://countingdownto.com/countdown/palladium-s-gencon-robotech-mutually-assured-destruction-pact-countdown-clock

106 days and counting!

 warboss wrote:
Thanks for the clarification. You were likely clear but I was just not remembering what you wrote correctly. And because it hasn't been posted in a few days:

http://countingdownto.com/countdown/palladium-s-gencon-robotech-mutually-assured-destruction-pact-countdown-clock

106 days and counting!

That's too funny!

Could you or someone here make a meme from this pic? It should say jazz hands.


http://i1037.photobucket.com/albums/a457/cypherxv/d2e0f13726d086a2dcbd202e7c7039e4_zps7fae4441.jpg

Mecha being both singular and plural is due to the term being from Japanese origin where they don't change the word for context of numbers, samurai and ninja for example each remain the same word regardless of if you are speaking about 1 or 20. In English we are so used to plural verbage that we bastardize Japanese words without thinking about it. Typical somebody will say 20 ninjas or a group of ninjas when the correct wording is 20 ninja or a group of ninja.

That's why I stick to Mecha as both singular and plural in my setting and game rules. However in the rules I try and stick to unit or units whenever possible, in part because it helps avoid confusion but also because there is a mechanical difference between mecha and non-mecha units. Mecha I treat as a keyword so it's only used in specific criteria where unit is the universal standard.

No idea how PB is running things, just wanted to offer up background on the traditional usage of the Mecha word.

 paulson games wrote:
Typical somebody will say 20 ninjas or a group of ninjas when the correct wording is 20 ninja or a group of ninja.

Only if you're speaking Japanese. Which you aren't. In English, either is valid.

 Forar wrote:
I may have been unclear, I was estimating around half a million figures, probably closer to 100k-150k sprues.

Well, that's also assuming the first print run is "made to order". From a purely business expense, they'd likely want a substantial amount in excess to cover GenCon, website preorders, and retail distribution, at least in the short term. Because the costs to book a slot, and set up the machines, could run into 25% of a print run of that size. Because there's switching out the molds, cleaning out the machines, and general maintenance and bureaucracy.

So say it costs 100K to run the backers merchandise. Running twice that amount would save them significant amounts of outlay, and depending on volume, significant amounts on shipping. Half a container costs more than half the cost of a full container. Yes, that would extend the time taken to produce the models, and there's a suicide pact in place, but if there's big bucks to be made, I expect the backers to get thrown under the bus.

EDIT: That's not to say they can't do a full print run of backers + retail, and ship the backers stuff as soon as it's done, and the rest shortly after. But that'd still hit two lots of shipping, and likely incur mold change fees, as they'd have to run through the backer's run of each (unless they're planning on running a seperate machine for each sprue, which isn't economical, as some sprues will be done in comparatively bugger all time, if Destroids are done as pairs, for example).

Very true. Even if they just popped out an extra 5-10% to help cover miscasts/short shots/breakage/errors, that'd add some time. Adding a few hundred boxes for Gencon becomes more time, and going to a wave of retail would be a hefty chunk of time. If they ignored the latter initially and just went backers/gencon/personal site sales (since retail is supposed to follow a month afterwards anyway), that could shave off some time, but you're right on the costs. Once a print or whatever is set up, knocking out extras is just a matter of time, barely one of cost.

I have a friend that had a calendar made for her business, and as the story goes, she could get 300 prints done for a sum of money, or she could get 1000 prints for that same amount plus 3 (yes, three) dollars. So she snagged the extra 700, knowing that even if she barely moved the first set, the remainder were essentially 'free'.

Obviously this wouldn't necessarily hold true to the same scale, but yeah, I see your point. If they're punching out 50,000 battlepod sprues, why not make it 60k or 75k? Adds 25 or 50% more time, but especially if it looks like they're going to miss Gencon anyway, what's the rush? (other than cranky backers, but y'know, frak 'em)