D_Arquebus
Joined: Aug 02, 2003
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 Posted:
May 16, 2020 - 15:31 |
 
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The momentum of the game is overwhelmingly with the offense. The more common events (5 & 9) boosts give a solid advantage to the Offense
High Kick to overcome Kick/ Unexpected placement of the kick, or just bad scatter
Quick Snap - speed to score, additional movement to catch unprepared Defenders out, and you have to consider that your entire team was set up after the Defense already.
The less common events (4 & 10) allow the Defense to change the momentum in their favour. This keeps the Offense honest, as you get burned most by these results when you disregard them. It forces some caution into the Offense and also allows for surprise results so that Bash 2-1 grind snooze fests have a small chance to be upset.
FAME favours the consistently winning sides (mostly). But FF also boosts one's TV and costs you inducements, or in TV matching, Skills on the other teams perhaps.
Re losing "Key Players", my advice is simply to build redundancy into your team. Min-Maxing a few key Stars and the rest cheap fodder is always prone to upsets imo.
Kick Off table is solid. Accept that it is much less severe than it used to be. Accept that it is well designed and adds significantly to the game design, sometimes in subtle ways. And learn to maximise the advantages it can bring and minimise the disadvantages. You'll enjoy the games much more  |
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koadah
Joined: Mar 30, 2005
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May 16, 2020 - 16:25 |
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JanMattys
Joined: Feb 29, 2004
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May 16, 2020 - 17:06 |
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My take is that the kickoff table introduces a degree of unpredictability to every game that is much needed. When pushed to very competitive play, every race and every matchup pretty much boils down to very few attack plans.
If you attack you must secure the ball and run down the clock.
When you defend, you either a) rush the ball and prevent the cage from forming, b) leave a side open and suggest/force an early score, or c) step 1 square back every turn, slow the cage and prevent scoring by passive resistance.
While dice contribute to make every game exciting and different, there's actually little strategic variability.
Kickoff results force the coaches to change plans abruptly: if you deploy too deep on defence, Blitz! is wasted. Perfect defence lets you reconsider once you see the opposing player setup and kick location, and prevents the opposing coach from exploiting your weak spots. Pitch invasion and Throw a Rock can open unexpected routes. Riot shuffle the "clock resource" for both coaches and, in its most important effect, turns nice and slow 2-1 grinds into unexpected high risk / high reward 2 turns plays.
Every game has 2-4 kickoff rolls on average, and they add another layer to the overall strategy by adding just about the right mix of randomness. No kickoff table would be extremely detrimental to the overall game.
ps: as for Fame favoring the better coach:
a) in no progression tournaments play you pay for your FF with gold so a bonus to fame becomes a strategic choice like any other.
b) in progression leagues, I don't see why favouring the better coach is a bad thing. Higher FF is not a gift; they got it by winning more games, on average. They earned it, just like they earned more spps than you by playing better, scoring more, and throwing more blocks. Would you ask for the same number of spps on every team? No. The same goes for FF. And FF adds to the TV of the team, so you get a compensation in terms of inducements, eventually.
Thinking about it, a possible "fix" could be making the FF weight more. Like 20k for each FF point instead of 10k. That could be tested. |
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Last edited by JanMattys on %b %16, %2020 - %22:%May; edited 1 time in total |
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MattDakka
Joined: Oct 09, 2007
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May 16, 2020 - 17:19 |
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| D_Arquebus wrote: |
Re losing "Key Players", my advice is simply to build redundancy into your team. Min-Maxing a few key Stars and the rest cheap fodder is always prone to upsets imo.
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Consider this scenario: mirror match TV 1000 Tomb Kings , or Necro or another team with cornerstone players.
Turn 0 rock removes a Guardian, a Flesh Golem <insert the key positional you fancy>.
No redundancy can prevent that because key players are, by nature, limited, and, even with redundancy, you can't have many on the pitch and you can't replace them until the drive ends.
Now, as long as we talk about team with similar statline players a Lino could be used to replace a Human Blitzer, but you can't replace a Flesh Golem with a Zombie.
If the aim is discouraging minmaxing then an off-game mechanic should be added (Seasons, Ageing, something like that), because it's better to lose a key player in-between matches than on turn 0 due to a rock.
When a developed player (or even not a developed one, but still important for the team) is lost early in the game the balance is suddenly messed.
You can lose a player for an AV break due to a Block/Blitz, failed Dodge, failed GFI, but you have more control on that because it's generally a consequence of something you did. |
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Lex_Rocket
Joined: Oct 27, 2018
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| Posted:
May 16, 2020 - 17:47 |
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| JanMattys wrote: | My take is that the kickoff table introduces a degree of unpredictability to every game that is much needed. When pushed to very competitive play, every race and every matchup pretty much boils down to very few attack plans.
If you attack you must secure the ball and run down the clock.
When you receive, you either a) rush the ball and prevent the cage from forming, b) leave a side open and suggest/force an early score, or c) step 1 square back every turn, slow the cage and prevent scoring by passive resistance.
While dice contribute to make every game exciting and different, there's actually little strategic variability.
Kickoff results force the coaches to change plans abruptly: if you deploy too deep on defence, Blitz! is wasted. Perfect defence lets you reconsider once you see the opposing player setup and kick location, and prevents the opposing coach from exploiting your weak spots. Pitch invasion and Throw a Rock can open unexpected routes. Riot shuffle the "clock resource" for both coaches and, in its most important effect, turns nice and slow 2-1 grinds into unexpected high risk / high reward 2 turns plays.
Every game has 2-4 kickoff rolls on average, and they add another layer to the overall strategy by adding just about the right mix of randomness. No kickoff table would be extremely detrimental to the overall game. |
This guy gets it. The kickoff results are intentionally unfair to change the course of the game, a smart coach plays with them instead of denying they should be in the game. They basically ensure that no single game is the same. |
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Nelphine
Joined: Apr 01, 2011
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May 16, 2020 - 18:22 |
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Re: throw a rock
Consider this: you're playing in a game where the NEXT game is very important. You successfully score on turn 8 of the first half, leaving your opponent only one turn, and his team isn't designed for one turning.
You have at least 12 players available that you could put on the pitch, and you have an astronomically important star player on your team.
Do you put that star player on the pitch in case your opponent gets a riot?
Or do you keep him off the pitch in case of throw a rock?
This is a real, valid decision you have to make, and it's only even a choice because of the inherent randomness and unfairness of throw a rock.
And while I've used the obvious example, even if you scored on turn 7, it's still a valid decision. It's slightly more weighted in favor of just putting your star on the pitch but it's still there.
But it's absolutely something YOU control. You need to choose to play with a bench and then you get to choose whether you want to risk your keystone player each drive.
Throw a rock is there to destroy good highly developed players. It happens to have negative consequences for low developed matches, particularly non progression (or close to it, like black box trophy style).
Unfortunately, the coaches who are impacted by throw a rock often only fall into one of those demographics, so they may not get a taste of the good (or the bad) side of throw a rock. |
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JanMattys
Joined: Feb 29, 2004
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May 16, 2020 - 19:19 |
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| MattDakka wrote: | | D_Arquebus wrote: |
Re losing "Key Players", my advice is simply to build redundancy into your team. Min-Maxing a few key Stars and the rest cheap fodder is always prone to upsets imo.
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Consider this scenario: mirror match TV 1000 Tomb Kings , or Necro or another team with cornerstone players.
Turn 0 rock removes a Guardian, a Flesh Golem <insert the key positional you fancy>.
No redundancy can prevent that because key players are, by nature, limited, and, even with redundancy, you can't have many on the pitch and you can't replace them until the drive ends.
Now, as long as we talk about team with similar statline players a Lino could be used to replace a Human Blitzer, but you can't replace a Flesh Golem with a Zombie.
If the aim is discouraging minmaxing then an off-game mechanic should be added (Seasons, Ageing, something like that), because it's better to lose a key player in-between matches than on turn 0 due to a rock.
When a developed player (or even not a developed one, but still important for the team) is lost early in the game the balance is suddenly messed.
You can lose a player for an AV break due to a Block/Blitz, failed Dodge, failed GFI, but you have more control on that because it's generally a consequence of something you did. |
And?
Want non random games? Play chess.
(I understand that it might seem a jerk answer, but please consider the truth of it. BB is, after all, heavily affected by randomness. Asking the Kickoff Table to be fair instead is laughable.) |
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MattDakka
Joined: Oct 09, 2007
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May 16, 2020 - 19:34 |
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Sigh, always the same song with Chess.
I never said I don't want randomness at all, I just don't want a kind of excessive randomness ruining 1 hour long game.
Chess, deterministic game, replayability value is lower than a non-deterministic game, there is skill involved but skill boils down to memorizing openings, mid game and end game and moving pieces fast (for example, because in Blitz mode the coach who runs out of time loses the game). Played it for some time Chess, but games was similar after a while (not talking just about my games, but games played by guys way better than me).
I'd like to play an alternative Blood Bowl, non deterministic, but with a different randomness (with more modifiers, d8 instead of d6 system or another system allowing to use more modifiers/improving the dice roll distribution and reducing the chance of automatic failure and automatic success), some Kick-Off Events nerfed (I think the Kick-Off table adds replayability value and unpredictability to the game, but losing a player on turn 0 doesn't make for a good game), and more balanced rosters.
If Chess is at one end of the spectrum (no randomness, player skill only affecting the game) and current Blood Bowl is close to the opposite end (randomness but with coaching skill affecting the game), the Blood Bowl I'd like to play it's somewhere half-way of this spectrum (a bit less randomness/drastically affecting game randomess and with coaching skill affecting more the outcome of games). |
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Nelphine
Joined: Apr 01, 2011
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May 16, 2020 - 19:39 |
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That doesn't respond to my post at all about why throw a rock is inherently good for the game. |
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MattDakka
Joined: Oct 09, 2007
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May 16, 2020 - 19:42 |
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Throw a Rock is not good for the game, unless you have fun winning because your opponent lost a player/you have fun losing a player due to a rock.
I also explained that Throw a Rock is bad for TV 1000 starting rosters with no minmaxed super legend players, but maybe you didn't read it.
Yes I would place my super player on the pitch even if I risked him to be hit by a Rock, in case of Riot.
It's not a hard decision like you are trying to make it appear.
Also, if you are talking about a Box game and not a Box Trophy game, it's unlikely that the next game will be important.
Unless you are planning to join a Major or some tournament after that Box game.
And by the way, Throw the Rock doesn't discourage minmax teams or stacking skills on a single player.
The rock hardly manages to hit the super player. |
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MrCushtie
Joined: Aug 10, 2018
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May 16, 2020 - 20:05 |
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In league, I detest pitch invasion, but I think that's because (with my current mono-activating Chaos team in box) I have poor fame, and have had cases where the whole team is on the floor while my opponent is unaffected and can run in to pick up the ball. But while upsetting in the moment, in the long term it's something to get past. I'd forgotten it was only a 1/36 chance of that happening.
Throw a rock looks horrible, and I see where Mattius is coming from, but I think it's actually a good thing to have in tournament play, because it can make you more cautious about rostering a monster player. When I had a Block-Claw Rat Ogre for a tournament last year that allowed 2 doubles on a player, I was always praying to Nuffle that he wouldn't let the crowd kill it with a rock in the first turn.
And it's online. What would stick in my craw would be taking a weekend off to travel to a tabletop tournament, and then in the first turn getting your star player smashed off the pitch. But again, in the cold light of day I see you want to build your team and character to cope with that. |
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Purplegoo
Joined: Mar 23, 2006
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May 16, 2020 - 20:12 |
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Interesting topic, as I quite often receive a ruleset where Blitz! (for instance) has been house ruled because someone remembers that time it 'lost them a game'.
As others have alluded to earlier in the thread, the offence has such an advantage in a half of Blood Bowl. Those opening blocks drive the position and the formative direction of a drive, which generates more blocks down the road, additional tempo and really set you up to dictate. It can often take a defending player who is playing better Blood Bowl 2-3 turns to really get back to parity and ask his own questions, rather than just react to what is happening to him. Events like Blitz! might be a blunt tool, but they serve an important purpose in just checking offences and giving them at least something to think about. And they 'lose you the game' far less than you remember anecdotally.
The more random stuff (PI, TaR, etc.) is rare enough that it's fine, in my opinion. Yes, I've had a game where all 11 of my guys went over on a +1 PI and the other guy survived, but the chances of these events dominating a game are not high. I lose games on mistakes many, many more times than on rocks. In a progression team, if I win lots my FF goes up anyway, so I have some sort of defence against some of it. |
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Nelphine
Joined: Apr 01, 2011
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May 16, 2020 - 21:01 |
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MattDakka, I'm not talking about box or box trophy. Those are both environments where the next game isn't important. A league game where you're in a fight for a play-off position, a major game with a KO style tournament, games where you are often playing with 1800+ tv teams; the existence of Throw a Rock absolutely helps you make team building choices before the game starts. Once the game starts, you're stuck with what you chose, and yes that includes on turn 0 when you haven't had a chance to do anything but set up. You still CHOSE the team you brought in and who you set up.
I don't LIKE 1000 tv (particularly resurrection style). I think the game is poor at 1000tv. I don't like box, as I'm in NA evening, and since deciding against playing my Nurgle, I've never really given it a chance for a variety of reasons. I think the choices that environment forces on you are less interesting than in a progression league with a set number of games per season, where every season you are trying to do the best you can, but you also are expected to (generally) play the same team the next season (but I realize that is my personal bias of what I like in the game). And I absolutely, many times, have left a super star player off the pitch when I was setting up on turn 8, because of Throw a Rock. If you don't, that's fine - but don't say you didn't have that choice. Similarly, it may not encourage you not to minmax, but it does (whether its successful or not) encourage rosters of more than 11 players.
So with that in mind, that there are very different environments out there in existence - yes throw a rock has bigger negative impacts on some of those environments, particularly including the ones you seem to like. On the environments that I enjoy (and I don't think everyone SHOULD enjoy the same ones as me, nor do I think they are somehow necessarily better environments) throw a rock has positive impacts on the game.
All I'm trying to say is that since we currently are stuck with a kick off table that has to be used for all different environments, simply saying that it is poor in the environment you like, doesn't mean it's poor everywhere, and that might mean that you can't get rid of it, even if you think it's bad for your game. |
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koadah
Joined: Mar 30, 2005
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| Posted:
May 16, 2020 - 21:29 |
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| MattDakka wrote: | | Throw a Rock is not good for the game, unless you have fun winning because your opponent lost a player/you have fun losing a player due to a rock. |
I suppose that is it. Winning and losing is more important to some people than others.
Some people do think it is funny when the very best player on the field is taken out by a rock before the ball hits the ground on the first kick-off. Or when they are lining up on T16 for their one turn attempt. 
Some will just say "that is blood bowl" and laugh. Some will have a fit. I suspect that the first lot laugh much louder if they think that the other coach is having a fit  |
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gamelsetlmatch
Joined: Mar 05, 2013
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May 16, 2020 - 21:40 |
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The Number One Rule of this game is to have fun
I would get involved in a few communities of coaches (Discord is probably your best bet to help this)
When you are in a league
..you wont be cherry picked
..you will be mentored through games and even things to consider when making skill choices
..you will get a healthy experience for how different races perform and what help your team needs to thrive
..you will have much more FUN!
The Mechanics of the game will become a tool for you to use for your own personal play style (Once you get that down, you get to curse the dice and Nuffle like the rest of us =P) |
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