Hey Everyone Let's (airhorn) PODCAAAAAAAAST

Legomancer wrote:

hotseatgames wrote: I'd say that in a perfect world, the people talking about their experience playing a game would be talking about sessions that they actually played TOGETHER. We could easily round up a group to talk about Cthulhu Wars, myself included. But anything I say about CW will be framed around "and then this other guy who you have never heard of, he was running Yellow Sign...."

I disagree. If you're going to talk about Cthulhu Wars, I don't want to hear a session report. I want to hear what people like about it. What they don't. What works for them or doesn't. Why is this even worth talking about? And I don't need a deep dive into it. In fact, I specifically don't want it to be about the game of Cthulhu Wars that these four or five people played because that's a single play. Four or five different plays would be far more interesting.

That's really what I meant... a series of sessions of the same game, same players. That way you get roughly equally experienced players who have built up a meta based on prior plays, allowing the game to really show its strengths and weaknesses. A lot of typical sessions of Cthulhu Wars for people would be "well we had one new guy so he played Cthulhu..."

Shellhead wrote:

Black Barney wrote: yup. Ryan Seacrest does one on EVERY episode of Regis and Kathie Lee. He's no dummy. That stuff is EASY

I'm disappointed that you didn't mention Letterman.

Yeah but Letterman didn’t want to do it. He was contractually obligated to at CBS. He knew it was tired schtick at that point. If you ever have the misfortune of watching Seacrest do it, you know he’s just finding a really lazy way to kill time

It’s awful

Personally I'm not that interested in hearing podcasts about new games. Chances are I haven't played them, and thus I can't really follow what's interesting about them. What I did like, however, was when So Very Wrong About Games dived into Battlelore 2nd edition which I have played and quite like. And another podcast which I can't remember the name of did a feature on Starcraft which is one of my favourite games ever. So both episodes added more value to games I already enjoy, and I would listen to that. Not if it was only a recount of game played, but if it was about the experience of playing it, the thing that makes the game stand out and so on. And if you'd also want to cover new games, doing it in relation to a conversation about and "old" game would, I think, work nicely.

Another thing that is worth considering is to revisit games that hasn't been played for years. I'm doing a podcast where we reread the Dragonlance books, and seeing how stuff you really liked holds up is quite fun. The obvious difference between games and books, however, is that a chapter by chapter rundown of a book with comments makes sense, but a turn by turn playthrough of a board game would most likely be horrible.

All I ask is that any review starts with the sound of dumping the contents of the box onto a surface. Any surface, living included.

New episode of So Very Wrong about....yet another fucking Plastic on a Map thing they can compare to Rising Sun.

This podcast is frustrating because the guys are close to what I want to hear in a podcast, and when they're not talking about the same goddamn game in whatever its current new hat is, it's interesting, albeit brief. It's the closest thing I've found so far to what I'm interested in, but it almost always then swings away sharply.

hotseatgames wrote: I'd say that in a perfect world, the people talking about their experience playing a game would be talking about sessions that they actually played TOGETHER. We could easily round up a group to talk about Cthulhu Wars, myself included. But anything I say about CW will be framed around "and then this other guy who you have never heard of, he was running Yellow Sign...."

I'll drag this back to the front of the queue again. I don't think it's necessary to have played together, nor even preferable. I don't think anyone is interested to hearing me give a narrative of what happened when I sat down to my last game of Warriors of God, and they certainly don't want to listen to me and my opponent do it in stereo. I think it's incumbent on the speakers to understand that. Instead, the conversation should focus on the big concepts and personal takeaways of the play, not the actual action on the board. Three separate plays will by necessity speak to concepts, because there isn't a shared experience of details to discuss.

If three people play three different games of Firefly the commonalities in the three plays are going to coax out the fundamental facets of the game, good and bad. A phrase like "man, everything I tried to do blew up in my face" is likely to draw responses from the other people recording, because that's one of the fundamental facets of Firefly. Shit goes wrong in Firefly. Everyone experiences it. That's the nature of that particular title, and that's what the podcast narrative should focus on. The details don't matter, it's the big concepts that are of interest in a podcast.

If you're covering the big concepts, you're doing your audience a service and they'll come back. If you cover details no one will care. I listen to So Very Wrong with my finger on the 30-second advance button. They have occasional stunning insights, surrounded by a lot of chaff and detail that doesn't matter.

It boggles my mind every time someone does a podcast or vlog on gaming. It's a massively crowded field, and the ability to get listeners/viewers is hampered by the fact that there's a couple of big outlets, and then a virtual ocean of 100-subscriber channels. Unless I could get 3,000 subscribers in a year (and 1,000 views/listens per episode) it simply wouldn't be worth it. Especially with no BGG to help promote yourself.

Sagrilarus wrote:

hotseatgames wrote: I'd say that in a perfect world, the people talking about their experience playing a game would be talking about sessions that they actually played TOGETHER. We could easily round up a group to talk about Cthulhu Wars, myself included. But anything I say about CW will be framed around "and then this other guy who you have never heard of, he was running Yellow Sign...."

I'll drag this back to the front of the queue again. I don't think it's necessary to have played together, nor even preferable. I don't think anyone is interested to hearing me give a narrative of what happened when I sat down to my last game of Warriors of God, and they certainly don't want to listen to me and my opponent do it in stereo. I think it's incumbent on the speakers to understand that. Instead, the conversation should focus on the big concepts and personal takeaways of the play, not the actual action on the board. Three separate plays will by necessity speak to concepts, because there isn't a shared experience of details to discuss.

This is exactly my point. I want one of those three players to be able to say things like "In our game, nobody traded and there was a lot of combat" and another player to say "weird, our game went differently". Or "the Gherkin player was screwed pretty much from the get-go and never recovered" vs "in our game we thought Gherkin was too overpowered". Or, similarly, if all three come back and say "the player who tried farming instead of mining dominated" then that too says something.

The purpose of a play is not to provide a or multiple session reports, but to try and get at what the game is doing, what seems to work and what doesn't, and so forth. Three people playing in three different games and coming together is far more interesting to me than the same three people playing the game together three times.