Radio Free Decipher/Episode 112 transcript

Transcript of an episode of Radio Free Decipher.

Radio Free Decipher Broadcast 112 (25 January 2002) features Scott Gaeta of Game Players Network on the network's support for the new Star Wars CCG Players Committee, and a discussion of the committee's first six members, alongside Star Trek CCG and The Lord of the Rings TCG news. Participants: Kyle Heuer and Evan Lorentz (hosts), Scott Gaeta. Speaker turns are inferred from the captions.

Source: Broadcast 112 - Radio Free Decipher (25 January, 2002): Scott Gaeta on the SWCCG PC, Player's Council, YouTube (uploaded 13 May 2022; originally released 25 January 2002). Preserved copy: Internet Archive.

The text below is from the video's automatic captions, corrected for names and card titles; it has not yet been checked against the audio. Words that could not be made out are marked [unclear].

Transcript

[00:01] Kyle Heuer: Hello everyone, welcome to another installment of Radio Free Decipher. Already we're looking at each other trying to crack each other up, and I'm successful. Well, my name is Kyle Heuer, and with me is Evan Lorentz. How are y'all?

[00:13] Evan Lorentz: Good. [Laughter]

[00:15] Kyle Heuer: That's a nice sweater you've got on today, man.

[00:17] Evan Lorentz: Why, thank you, man.

[00:19] Kyle Heuer: It looks like it's cashmere.

[00:21] Evan Lorentz: Well, it's not. Anyway, not important at all. It's just kind of warm on a kind of cold day.

[00:30] Kyle Heuer: Tell us everything that's going on with Trek.

[00:32] Evan Lorentz: Everything? That would take a while. How about I tell you one thing?

[00:35] Kyle Heuer: Sounds good.

[00:36] Evan Lorentz: All right. We're working on the movie set, of course, The Motion Pictures—that's with an S. Some people have been a little unclear about this: this is all nine movies, from the first to Insurrection. Obviously you're not going to be able to see heavy amounts of any one movie, because it is just a 131-card set. This may actually be the first time I've said that, too.

[01:02] Kyle Heuer: Whoa. You heard it here first on Radio Free Decipher.

[01:05] Evan Lorentz: Yeah. People have been speculating that it might be some super-size set, and certainly it would be nice. I think we could find the material to fill that, but we're choosing to stay with the standard set size for right now, so 131 cards. When we do the movie set two, to include Star Trek 10, and we might—

[01:25] Kyle Heuer: Yeah, I definitely think that, just because this is The Motion Pictures, doesn't mean you're not going to see more of that stuff.

[01:31] Evan Lorentz: In fact, you've seen a lot of First Contact cards after the First Contact [set], and I would think that would be more the case here, because there's just plenty of good stuff.

[01:40] Kyle Heuer: That's a good question. Is there going to be a lot more First Contact stuff?

[01:44] Evan Lorentz: Not a lot more, no, but there are First Contact cards.

[01:47] Kyle Heuer: Excellent. Something from every movie?

[01:50] Evan Lorentz: There is something from every movie.

[01:52] Kyle Heuer: Come on. Star Trek V?

[01:54] Evan Lorentz: Well, Star Trek V has some things that would make good cards, although the movie wasn't all that popular.

[01:58] Kyle Heuer: Come on, man, it had Sybok.

[02:01] Evan Lorentz: It did have Sybok. The set will have Sybok; that's probably no surprise. But actually, one of the things that might be a little more interesting is: tactics are coming back.

[02:14] Kyle Heuer: Ah, very good.

[02:15] Evan Lorentz: I know it's been several expansion sets since we've had tactics, and there's not going to be a ton. It's not going to be a Blaze of Glory number of tactics here, because there's plenty of other things that need to be going into the set, but there are going to be a few tactics, maybe somewhere between three and five new tactics, something like that.

[02:34] Kyle Heuer: Good stuff. Like the hook-the-two-shuttlecraft-together one, from Star Trek—what was it, nine?

[02:41] Evan Lorentz: Oh, right, right. Now, that's not a tactic.

[02:45] Kyle Heuer: "If your opponent's shuttlecraft is at the same location as your shuttlecraft, flip two, download one." Boy, and they're hooked.

[02:55] Evan Lorentz: Well, you should just be in the TCG studios.

[02:58] Kyle Heuer: I should be designing cards, baby.

[02:59] Evan Lorentz: But yeah, we're actually having to make a lot of very tough decisions about things that we are not going to get to include in this set, simply for size, because we're trying to have a lot of kind of theme decks in it, so that you can focus on a couple of the storylines. So in order to give you enough cards to make a theme playable, we have to sacrifice some of those fun, unrelated interrupts, unrelated events—funny lines, funny incidents and those kinds of things are unfortunately not going to get to be in the set.

[03:30] Kyle Heuer: Not the punk on the bus?

[03:31] Evan Lorentz: Right now he is a dilemma, and awesome, and a personal favorite of mine, so he's probably going to make the set. But just a few other lines here and there just aren't in there. But the trade-off for that is you get to have a functional Son'a theme deck, you get to have a functional Khan theme deck, you get to have a functional [unclear]—

[03:55] Kyle Heuer: Odo the Klingon? Oh, when he's the assassin?

[03:58] Evan Lorentz: No, actually there's no Odo the Klingon card in the set. He was kind of another one of the hard cuts.

[04:05] Kyle Heuer: Well, Odo was never really the Klingon. It was René Auberjonois.

[04:12] Evan Lorentz: Very good. Actually, the main reason that we didn't do Colonel West—right, his character's name—is because his footage is not in the original theatrical release of the film. It was added on later video and DVD releases, so his only appearance in the actual theatrical film is in Klingon makeup, and you don't know it's him, and it's kind of bizarre. So we're not doing Colonel West, because the copy of the film that we got is the original theatrical.

[04:43] Kyle Heuer: Oh, it doesn't have the Scooby-Doo ending.

[04:45] Evan Lorentz: That's right. So until we get the little Scooby-Doo ending where they pull his hat off and it's Colonel West, we don't have a clear shot of Colonel West. And he also had kind of redundant skills. I mean, we've had to cut a number of people that we really wanted to do just because there are other people in the set that already have those skills. We were a big fan of Scotty's nephew, Peter Preston, from Star Trek II, and he's hit the cut file. So, like I said, tough choices, but that just means that what stays behind should be that much better.

[05:24] Kyle Heuer: That's right, that's right. Well, that's a lot of Trek—more than you thought you were going to get, huh?

[05:30] Evan Lorentz: Definitely. Well, we've got lots of other stuff. An update from the last two Radio Free Deciphers: we finally got around to scheduling some time and playing the Lord of the Rings Adventure Game. Now, I understand that Kendrick was your game master?

[05:45] Kyle Heuer: He was the MC. And we randomly chose—there were only four of us playing other than Kendrick, and there are nine people, so one person got to play three and everybody else got to play two different characters.

[05:57] Evan Lorentz: Did you choose?

[05:58] Kyle Heuer: No, it was totally random, and I think I came out at the head of that, because I wound up with Aragorn and Frodo.

[06:05] Evan Lorentz: Well, gee, that's nice.

[06:06] Kyle Heuer: So I was the Ring-bearer and the booty kicker.

[06:10] Evan Lorentz: So how was it?

[06:11] Kyle Heuer: It was pretty good. It was our first time playing, so we had a little bit of a process getting into the new rules and stuff, but it was very fun. And man, these [unclear] things—we didn't understand what was going on, and they were whooping us, and [unclear] lit them on fire with Gandalf. And actually Gandalf should have been killed, but since it was our first time going through it, we made it so that Gandalf didn't die. But Gandalf should have died. We all realized it, and it was all like, whoa, that was cool, I can't believe it. But we wanted to keep going through the adventure with everybody.

[06:50] Evan Lorentz: So it kind of whetted your appetite for the full-fledged roleplaying?

[06:53] Kyle Heuer: Definitely. It was a very easy system to learn, and man, I'm ready to kick some more [unclear] booty.

[07:02] Evan Lorentz: Well, that's coming out in stores, I believe, next Wednesday, the 30th.

[07:07] Kyle Heuer: Wow, that's not very long. Everybody can start looking for that really soon. Fun stuff.

[07:13] Evan Lorentz: Very good stuff. And you spent about the rest of your week reading decklists?

[07:18] Kyle Heuer: Pretty much. Oh my Lord, let me tell you. Okay, well, first—this is for the Designers' Challenge 2, where people were asked to submit deck designs and strategy to accompany those decks, and then we here at Decipher—there were 10 of us—judged all of the decks, and it went through basically a process of elimination and voting and things like that. For the first Designers' Challenge last year, there were exactly 100 deck designs entered into the contest. For this one there were 756 decks. So when you see the story—it went up today—there is a picture on there of the stack of decklists, and it's incredible. There were so many, I think we killed three trees printing out those decklists, so sorry. [Laughter]

[08:16] Evan Lorentz: On the other hand, if ever I want to design a deck, I know where to get it.

[08:20] Kyle Heuer: Yeah, just come on over. So it's really cool, and we're excited. We decided that since we got so many decklist submissions, we're increasing the number of participants in the finals from 8 to 16. So we are actually bringing in players from the local community to come in and play, since we don't have 16 of us available between the TCG studio and the marketing guys, because some people are on vacation or whatever. So we're bringing in some local players and volunteers, and they're going to spend an afternoon at Decipher whooping on each other. So we're going to have a lot of fun. That event is one week from today, and there's going to be a live message board, same as the first time, a simultaneous broadcast, and it's going to be a lot of fun. So, Evan, we're looking for somebody to be the guy typing on the message board. Since you're not playing in the tournament, man, what do you think? Want to help us out and give the play-by-play?

[09:30] Evan Lorentz: You can't put me on the spot like that. That's mean.

[09:33] Kyle Heuer: I'm sorry. We'll discuss it later.

[09:37] Evan Lorentz: Excellent. Let's see what else is going on. Well, we had kind of a fun little announcement with the InQuest awards that came this week.

[09:50] Kyle Heuer: That's right. Lord of the Rings is nominated for Game of the Year 2001. Very happy about that. Coruscant, for the Star Wars game, is nominated for Best Expansion of the Year, and I think we should also get Holodeck Adventures in there. I think that was a great expansion. Well done, Star Trek design team. So that's definitely a write-in. So for those of you that are interested in going and voting for your favorite games of the year 2001, there is an article on our website that will direct you to where the online voting is. The deadline, I believe, is January 31st, so get out there and vote. Vote early, vote often.

[10:37] Evan Lorentz: Cool. Not the slogan.

[10:39] Kyle Heuer: Yeah, something like that. All right, so that wraps up most of the news. We are fortunate enough to have with us Mr. Scott Gaeta, who is, as you know, from the Game Players Network website. How are you doing today, Scott?

[10:51] Scott Gaeta: Oh, just fine.

[10:52] Kyle Heuer: Welcome.

[10:53] Scott Gaeta: Yeah, it's a long road getting from Denver to here.

[10:58] Kyle Heuer: Yeah, it was a much longer flight than—four-hour delay, five-hour delay, something like that?

[11:02] Scott Gaeta: Yeah. I got to see Drew Carey's house, because I was in Cleveland for a few hours.

[11:08] Kyle Heuer: Ouch. Well, Cleveland rocks anyway. You are out here talking to us about some Star Wars Players Committee stuff.

[11:18] Scott Gaeta: Yeah, that's right. We saw the announcement about the Players Committee and saw that you guys were accepting volunteers, and decided that we would volunteer and see if we could offer some support to the Players Committee.

[11:35] Kyle Heuer: Now, you say "we". Tell us exactly who "we" are.

[11:38] Scott Gaeta: Well, Game Players Network is right now myself and, I think we're getting close to about 40 or 50 volunteers, including writers and news people and programmers and that sort of thing.

[11:52] Kyle Heuer: I have seen the site, though. It really has become pretty successful pretty quick.

[11:57] Scott Gaeta: Yeah, so far we've been really happy with the feedback that we've gotten from the members and everything, and there's a lot more to do, definitely. It went up kind of quick. We wanted to get out there and get going with Lord of the Rings soon after the release.

[12:14] Kyle Heuer: Yes, yes, definitely.

[12:15] Scott Gaeta: But yeah, we want to get this Players Committee thing going and see if we can keep playing some Star Wars.

[12:20] Kyle Heuer: Great. Now, exactly what happened was, when we put out the announcement for the Players Committee, Scott and the Game Players Network basically stepped up and said, hey, we're willing to help out however we can. Explain a little bit what you're going to be doing to help out the Players Committee.

[12:38] Scott Gaeta: Sure. Well, we're going to give them web space, give them an area, you know, space to kind of do their thing, get their message out, support the tournament formats that they're going to come up with, interview players—pretty much give them whatever we can, whatever they need. Just kind of become the home of the Players Committee, hopefully, and do what we can for them.

[13:02] Kyle Heuer: Good deal. Great. And so if people have questions for the Players Committee, they'll be able to go to gameplayersnetwork.com, get in touch with them, give feedback, things like that. As well, Game Players Network will be handling a lot of the web support for the new virtual cards. When the Players Committee comes out with new game text, you guys are going to be doing a lot of the web programming to get all of the new game text ready for posting up on decipher.com.

[13:34] Scott Gaeta: Right. Hopefully we're going to handle most of the technical stuff for them, so they don't have to worry about that. They can just spend their time designing new text for the cards, coming out with new tournament formats, pretty much keeping it alive, keeping it interesting and fun. We're looking into putting up a separate new board, basically just for information, for discussion, suggestions to the committee. So that way it truly is turned over to players, and they have an open forum where they can express their opinions, and the members running the Players Committee can look at that and take it all in and decide to use it or not.

[14:13] Kyle Heuer: Well, that's great. We announced which of the initial core members of the Players Committee are going to be—who those people are. Now, from there, those six members are allowed to bring on whoever else they want. I mean, it's going to be their game; whatever they want to do, it's their rules. How familiar are you with the initial core six guys?

[14:34] Scott Gaeta: I know Mike Girard does some stuff for Game Players Network.

[14:39] Kyle Heuer: Yeah, Mike Girard.

[14:40] Scott Gaeta: So far he has been one of our roving reporters, hitting the road and covering some big tournaments for us. I know some of the guys. John Arendt is a big guy, very well respected player, and probably one of the most underrated players in the world. Just, if I remember right, in 1999 he finished first at the wild card Day One of the Star Wars World Championships, out of like the 170-some people.

[15:11] Kyle Heuer: Very much, yeah.

[15:12] Scott Gaeta: He's a fellow Coloradan, and in Colorado people have coined the term "Arendt tech". He will come up with something that's just totally out of the blue, and totally unique to John's play style, and it's usually something quite revolutionary. So I think he's a big asset to the committee.

[15:35] Kyle Heuer: And he'll be handling mostly, I believe, the tournaments aspect of the game, correct? So coming up with the new tournament programs, making sure the tournaments are running smoothly.

[15:43] Scott Gaeta: Right. Joe Helfrich, I saw, was named to the committee, and most people know him. He's a huge rules guy.

[15:51] Kyle Heuer: Yep. A lot of people are familiar. He's had a very, very strong presence on the discussion lists, the BBSes, for a while. Widely known as one of the guys that knows more about the game than even our designers, I think.

[16:02] Scott Gaeta: Yeah. Joe pretty much lives and breathes Star Wars rules, so I think the rules are very safe in his hands.

[16:09] Kyle Heuer: Okay. As well as Greg Anderson.

[16:11] Scott Gaeta: Right, yeah. Greg, I personally haven't had any interaction with him, but I know him just by name and reputation. I think he was an excellent choice.

[16:21] Kyle Heuer: Okay. And let's see, Eric Olson. Do you know Eric?

[16:27] Scott Gaeta: No. I've never worked with Eric, but I think that it will be fun to get this going.

[16:34] Kyle Heuer: He helped Joe out a lot when Joe was designing some of the later Episode One Star Wars sets. Joe and Eric are good friends. Eric was Joe Alread's basically sort of right-hand man on the design of those sets, and so he has a very good familiarity with designing cards and what the processes are and what to look for and what not to look for. So I think he's going to be a very valuable asset to the Players Committee in the design area.

[17:07] Scott Gaeta: Yes, I think so. I mean, I think you guys picked a really good group of guys. They all seem to be very psyched about what they're doing, and I think the game is in very good hands, and we're just going to kind of be there for them and do whatever we can to support them.

[17:23] Kyle Heuer: Great. One last person I didn't want to leave out, number six. Number six was Doug Taylor. Are you familiar with Doug at all?

[17:33] Scott Gaeta: Nope.

[17:34] Kyle Heuer: Doug lives up in Seattle. He has been a playtester, I believe, for quite some time. I think he's going to be also doing the design with Eric, and I think the synergy between Eric Olson and Doug Taylor is going to be fantastic, because they both have differing styles when designing cards. I think Doug wants storyline: make sure that storyline is incorporated, and make sure that there's an element of fun incorporated. And Eric is a gamer's designer. He wants to crunch numbers, and he wants to give the hardcore gamer what they want. And so I think there's going to be a really good balance, to make sure that both ends of the spectrum are really accounted for.

[18:26] Scott Gaeta: Right. Sounds like a good line as well. I mean, hearing some of the ideas that they're tossing around, it definitely seems like they're going to go in the right direction.

[18:34] Kyle Heuer: Absolutely. I feel like it's going to be a lot of fun.

[18:37] Scott Gaeta: Good.

[18:38] Kyle Heuer: And there you have it. Well, thanks a lot, Scott, for stopping in here today. I know that this wasn't part of the worldwide tour, but it's always fun to have a guest in here.

[18:47] Scott Gaeta: That was a lot of fun, in the little room.

[18:49] Kyle Heuer: In the little room, yes, with the broken door. Quite interesting. So do be sure to check out all the developments for the Players Committee and visit the rest of the Game Players Network site.

[19:00] Evan Lorentz: That's right. Thanks, Scott.

[19:01] Scott Gaeta: You're welcome.

[19:02] Kyle Heuer: Okay, so there you have it: all the news that's fit to digest.

[19:05] Evan Lorentz: And it's so good. Tastes like chicken.

See also

• Radio Free Decipher · Scott Gaeta · Game Players Network · Kyle Heuer · Evan Lorentz
• Players Committee advocates: Michael Girard, John Arendt, Joe Helfrich, Greg Anderson, Eric Olson, Doug Taylor
• Radio Free Decipher/Special Broadcast (28 December 2001) transcript · Radio Free Decipher/Episode 110 transcript · History of the Players Committee