Suggestions to your Commish

Please post any suggestions you may have here. Are the e-mails enough communication for you? Would you like to see more/less? Have I answered your questions? Any suggestions would be appreciated. This is YOUR league, guys.

Well a full team roster would be nice.

Running tallies of wins, losses, and ties would be useful in choosing opponents, as might number of touchdowns and casualties inflicted.

What do you mean by "full team roster"?

I'm working on the updated league results. I think that I will release them with a full week's delay, to discourage bottom feeding and the like. However, you will see a full breakdown of everything you mentioned.

I meant a listing of all the teams in the division. Or both divisions would be good, too.

I thought the whole point of the challenge system was to discourage bottom feeding. Any team which feels picked on can find someone big and nasty to fight in its stead. If I'm trying to figure out where my team stands within the league, I would like up to date information.

I see what you mean.

I'm just waiting for a final few coaches to give me their information. I've been having a problem keeping the lines of communication open, and several coaches have seemed to simply fall off the face of the earth. Once I get everything, I'll get that info out to the Coaches.

As for the up to date information, I'll try to get the info as soon as possible, but for now, I can't make any promises.

I think the I've Got My Eye On You rule is actually a good thing, now that I've survived getting fouled FIVE TIMES in a single game.

The roster idea is a good one. Or at least a matrix that shows who has challenged who in which game. Chrispy, check your e-mail.

Just five times?

He pretty much stopped after one of his players fouled out.

Did you lose anyone?

Nope. Amusingly enough the only casualty sustained during the entire fiasco was on his side, when one my Black Orks pasted his lineman into tiny bits.

As I found out to my chagrin yesterday, the major change to fouling is that you now get caught on doubles for the armor OR the injury roll. One would think this would make fouling less popular, but apparently not.

I think that certain people would foul no matter how many players he's already had sent off. So using him as an indication of the threat of fouling is pretty inaccurate.

I wasn't talking about Scooter, who seems to take inordinate glee in causing permanent harm to other people's teams. Loudly.

I threw one foul and lost a player I sorely needed. Had I known there was now a 1/3 chance of losing my player [I know that's an approximation] I never would have done it.

Suffice to say Scooter is playing the appropriate team.

Is the Glen Burnie BB open on Labor Day? I might be able to make it that time.

As a suggestion for future leagues, I sincerely recommend you make the league day Saturday so people who have work can attend.

fouling is awsome sauce i love it i kick while your down muhaaaaaa

ladys and gentalman i woulld like to take this moment to remind you all this is just a game and as such should be treated like a game. so i foul, and it is so funny i love watching my snoghtlings getting kicked out thats why i have 2 more to back them up. Just like some peoples stratagy of not standing up in the late part of the second half and not taking a hit from my ogers i will foul every chance i get. snoghtlings are cheap and expendable.

My strategy was to kick every snotling you owned off the pitch. I think I did rather well.

In the future, I think I will have it either Friday or Saturdays. The reason I chose monday was because of the huge amount of people who regularly show up for Monday nights already, it wasn't a change for them to continue on a different game.

How to "treat Blood Bowl like a game" is up to each coach. I, for instance, enjoy watching my team grow most of all. If fouling is your favorite part, Scooter, I'll confess to being more than a little confused, but I can't say you're wrong.

I get unhappy when half my team ends up in the dead-and-injured box. Chances are many will have to be replaced, which will cost money I was counting on to expand my team beyond the starting line-up.

This is also, incidentally, why I feel bad when I put half my opponent's team into the dead and injured box. If I've already dominated the game, I think it's unnecessary, unsporting, and insulting to foul his players just because I can.

The debate has been beaten to death, so let me just make some points clearly.

1.) Fouling is legal within the context of the game if not the fluff.
2.) Fouling has a limited chance of success with the new rules about assists.
3.) Fouling has a significant (~30%) chance of losing the fouler a player and causing a turnover.
4.) Fouling is sometimes a very useful tactic.
5.) I probably don't want to play Scooter in a league game.

I found out the hard way on fouling. I decided why not, it was the last move of the first half, so I went for it. To bad I rolled snake eyes, I don't know what my wight tried to do to the Chaos Dwarf, maybe the dinner fork and salt shaker clued the ref in on something.

To be honest what other use do gnoblers have besides fouling? Isn't like a gnobler can even be made a decent zombie when I kill them.

I don't stand all my guys up first because I like to keep my options open for freeing them up for movement or even a blitz. I will say it kinda sucks when you screw up and still have three guys down on the pitch.

Problems with the weekend is that there are other events normally going on, so I am not sure about table space.

Well, gnoblars are the only way the ogres have to play the ball at all. Thankfully, they are also incredibly easy to break.

I think that fouling gets a bad rep from the previous editions. It used to be that fouling killed a player on an injury roll of 12, and the Dirty Player skill gave you a +2 to that roll. Now that the rules have changed, the stigma still associated with it is unwarranted in my opinion.

With that, I think that it's in a coach's best interest to use his fouls carefully. Saying that you refuse to foul is like saying you refuse to blitz or hand-off. It's an option, so use it! Just remember to foul like a surgeon, not like a berserker.

This is the coolest conversation ever I love it. My guys are getting better and I'm learning what I have to do to win the games but in the mean time I love to cause havoc and roll the dice I mite get thrown out but that’s a small price to pay for my little beautiful to kill something. Blood bowl is not football it's war the civilized way. And I'm bringing my gunz

Just remember that casualties caused by fouling don't gain SPP.

There's a podcast called Three Die Block. In their first podcast they mentioned the house rules that their respective leagues use. There were a few that I found interesting...

1) No more than 4 players may purchase a specific skill. In other words once four players earn the block skill nobody else on the team can get it. Players who start with that skill (ie Ork Blitzers) don't count towards that number. I'm not sure how I feel about this, although it does sound rather interesting.

2) MVP is not randomly chosen amongst all the players. Instead each coach nominates 3 players to win MVP, and then one of those three randomly earns it. Personally I like this one a lot.

3) Certain skills (Loner, Really Stupid, Always Hungry, Bonehead, Wild Animal, Bloodlust) can be 'bought off' with a double roll. I'm not sure if I like this one. I wouldn't mind buying off Loner, but those other skills are important for balance.

What do you guys think?

I've played with the buying off negative traits rule and like it. Remember, that those doubles are also an opportunity to get the big guy block or dodge or any number of useful skills. It makes for a good decision.

Personally, I'm much more likely to get a troll block and dodge than buy off really stupid.

The idea of only getting four of a given skill seems rather silly to me. Eventually, you will end up with several players with some pretty random and largely ineffective skill sets, once you run out of blocks and tackles and guards.

i like the 2nd point you made

Quote :

2) MVP is not randomly chosen amongst all the players. Instead each coach nominates 3 players to win MVP, and then one of those three randomly earns it. Personally I like this one a lot.

On Houserule #2: Although the standard league rules include simply picking an MVP as an option, I think this provides an effective balance between the two. You can target your bonus SPPs where you want them rather than risk taking those points from players who really need them and giving them to ones who really don't. (For instance, if I roll a 3rd 4 on my next game, I'm going to be annoyed).

On Houserule #3: This seems largely pointless. Even if you scored enough points to average 1 touchdown per player per game (3 points/game, 15 points in the preseason) you wouldn't even have enough points to get a second skill. So I say, if someone wants to give every last one of their line-'men' the BLOCK skill, let them. They probably won't have a chance to get any others anyway.

On fouling: Chances of ejection on a successful armor penetration check: ~30%, chances of ejection on an unsuccessful armor pen. check: ~17%, chances of causing a casualty on a foul (assuming AV 8 and 1 assist): < 13%. I think the stats speak pretty well for themselves. Also, when deciding whether or not to foul, please bear in mind that causing permanent injuries will not benefit you directly in the preseason. Other than that: go to it!

Jack wrote:

Personally, I'm much more likely to get a troll block and dodge than buy off really stupid.

Yeah, but would you give him block or dodge instead of getting rid of loner?

Quote :

The idea of only getting four of a given skill seems rather silly to me. Eventually, you will end up with several players with some pretty random and largely ineffective skill sets, once you run out of blocks and tackles and guards.

I agree. It makes teams that are skill heavy even better, since so many of them already have block. For teams like Orcs it's not horrible since you would give your BO block anyway. But for teams that don't have a lot of skills it would really screw them over.

Also what's going to happen at the end of the season? Will the league continue next year with the same teams, or will there be a total restart? Personally I'd like to see teams continue on.

i like continueing teams that sound silly and everyone knows I'm silly

Chrispy, as another suggestion maybe we should start up a mailing list that includes all of the coaches? Google Groups might be a viable way of doing it.

Blowupologist wrote:

Yeah, but would you give him block or dodge instead of getting rid of loner?

I certainly would. There are very few things I trust the troll to do. If I always know he could screw up, I'm never that disappointed when he does.

11 games still sounds very short to me. Many of us won't even have 16 players by the end. I would suggest the option of continuing on, at least for one more season, perhaps starting over every year. This will make it a bit difficult to get new teams into the league, but perhaps inducements really do work now.

I like the idea of having the option to continue on. I think some people will want to start new teams (especially if their old team has been heavily abused). I also think that if the more experienced teams continue to play primarily against each other, there will be a limit to how far ahead they'll be able to get. Finally, if that doesn't provide enough balance we can always consider giving new teams free SPP. (Perhaps one or two less than the total of the lowest player distributed at random).
Inducements would probably be more useful (in the sense of new players) if Special Play cards and/or Wizards were allowed.

My plan is to have matched games next season with teams continuing on. I'm not sure when the exact start date will be, but we'll jump that hurdle when we get there.

Sounds good to me. Now post who hasn't played this week so I can know who to crush!

Sorry for the delay this week. One more day until I can get those figures out, as I'm still stuck in DE, the place where technology goes to die.

Jack wrote:

How to "treat Blood Bowl like a game" is up to each coach. I, for instance, enjoy watching my team grow most of all.
I get unhappy when half my team ends up in the dead-and-injured box. Chances are many will have to be replaced, which will cost money I was counting on to expand my team beyond the starting line-up.
This is also, incidentally, why I feel bad when I put half my opponent's team into the dead and injured box. If I've already dominated the game, I think it's unnecessary, unsporting, and insulting to foul his players just because I can.

I agree with all of this. It's not that fun when you lose many models. Especially in Blood Bowl as you only have a small amount of models. Also Chris I think you should definitely move the meets to Saturday, because of jobs, school (and jury duty) Monday isn’t an ideal day to meet.

Maybe we should add a Heroes of Law type rule which, if both players agree to it, would lessen the chances of players dying to fouling. Something like: the two teams have agreed to a fair game of Blood Bowl and the coaches instruct their team to pull punches or not to use excessive force. Something like on the injury roll for fouling 8-11 knocks out, and only a 12 will kill/injure. Then the player is kicked out (double 6's) by his own coach for not following orders. Just a thought I had, what do you guys think?

The problem is that both players won't agree to an optional rule like that. If one player is going to go out of his way to foul the other team he certainly wouldn't agree to something that makes his job harder.

I think I'm just going to accept that fouling is a given part of the game and pray that Nuffle will send the fouling gits to the sidelines.

fouling is a part of the game if you take that out then you mite aswell take miss casting out of fantasy. Or rending out of 40k just cause you don't like it dosn't mean you can take it away. i wish i could tell Kaleb he can't play deamons but that isn't anything i can do. sorry guys but my 20k snoghtlings are going to foul i don't do it every time........ somtimes i forget to

Hey Chris, did you get my e-mail about setting up an ICK Bowl mailing list? If we set up a Google Groups thing then you wouldn't have to worry about letting us who know hasn't played yet.

Good idea. Let me go ahead and set one up tonight.

Can we drop the fouling discussion at this point? It's been pretty well established that we're sticking with the current rules at least for the duration of the season.

I'm not sure I can cope with any more of Scooter's unseemly glee.

One suggestion I would like to make is to slightly change the preseason format. Instead of five weeks of one game each, have the players play a total of X games (say 8?) and give them the entire preseason to do it. Players would be free to play whomever they wanted so long as they didn't play the same opponent twice.

The problem with the system as it is now is that a lot of the players get their game on Monday, and those of us who can't play that day usually have trouble finding other opponents. I'm still waiting on an opponent to play for my second week for just that reason.

A caveat to that should probably be something along the lines of 'But you can only challenge teams who have played at least as many games as you.' so that a coach can't play the aforementioned 8-1=7 games in the first week and then challenge a player who's only played 1 (or less). Of course, if the coach is really that suicidal they'd be allowed to submit their 0 game team in challenge against the 7 gamer.

I would also appreciate the greater flexibility in this. 8 games may be a bit much, but that is an arbitrary number. I know we were originally supposed to have six preseason games, though.

The new inducements are supposed too be extremely effective at evening out differences in team rating, but I can't speak to that from personal experience.

However, in looking at the results thus far, there are several coaches who are behind on games. They can still easily catch up in a more flexible system by coming to the bunker on a Saturday and playing two or even three games in a row.

If you were only allowed to challenge players who had played at least as many games as you (and never more than once) you really could make the number of games arbitrary (ie: not set it). Once a player exceeded the current highest game count they would be effectively barred from continuing by the limited pool of players to challenge. Additionally, any other coaches reach this level would have a high probability of already having played the other players if there were a significant diversity between the highest game count and the mode. This would allow players able/willing to dedicate more time to improve (or lose) more of their team during the preseason with little fear of severe stratification.

This is true, but that probably shouldn't be the only limit.

Some coaches naturally have more time on their hands than others. The idea isn't just to keep people from getting too far ahead, it's to make sure that everyone who wants to has a chance to catch up. This is why I favor an arbitrary cap on the number of games played in the preseason.

I'm also in favor of that arbitrary number being greater than five; my team's winnings thus far have been less than satisfactory.

I agree on the need for an arbitrary cap. The fact of the matter is that some of us (ie myself) have full time jobs and are simply unable to play any time other than the weekend. Honestly I'm getting somewhat worried that I may not be able to find a 2nd week opponent.

Something else that might be worth doing is to encourage coach participation through league points. Say give them a league point if they make a single post each week in this forum.

Okay, the point I was trying to make was that if we have an extended preseason (5 weeks or more), those players with more time would reach a natural limit until those players with less time caught up with them. Either way, we definitely need more than 5 games.

On another note, perhaps we should consider dividing the bowl along less geographical regions. Perhaps an Ick Bowl Speed League and an Ick Bowl Brawl League, with slightly varied rules. For instance, the brawlers' league could have more lenient rules on fouling.

Especially in the early game the disparity between the two types of teams can be problematic when playing against each other. For instance, the brawler teams tend to score less touchdowns while the speed teams tend toward losing a significant number of players for the current game, and possibly into the next. (To be clear, I'm not arguing that coaching isn't important in determining these factors; just presenting a trend.)

About the pre-season/regular season switch...

I was wondering how people would feel about a rest period between weeks five and six, and again before the final tournament, i.e., all players who are out with injuries have time to recover before a new phase of the league starts.

Maybe not between the preseason and league play, but I think a recovery period in between league play and the final tournament would be a good idea.

Also I'm interested in hearing about the final tournament. The rule that inducements can't be used to buy mercenaries or star players is pretty cool. Bloodweiser Babes for everyone!

Also what the hell is Peter doing to his opponents?

Well, he lulled me into a false sense of security with his 7 armor, then beat me up.

I'd also like to see a revised team sheet for us to fill out. The current one is based on 3rd ed, where you factored SPPs into the team rating.

The totals are getting increasingly inaccurate. Martin's rats, for instance, should have a rating of 126, not 139.