After the umpteenth touchback from my Kick-orc, I've settled to give him the boot (har har) as soon as circumstance allows. An honourable death on the pitch is preferred, but if my other line orcs make him obsolete by getting guard, Haldir will be shown the door. The only chance for survival will be if he progresses and manages to impress me with a doubles-skill or a stat increase.

I sometimes wonder if I'm using kick incorrectly. Normally I place it along the inside of the line marking the wide zones, so there are 4 squares between the desired position and the boundary. I also tend to place four squares into pitch in each direction. The reasoning is obviously that 3 squares of drift plus one roll still keeps the ball on the pitch. Keeping to these rules, there are several squares which I can place.

The decision of where the ball is places is based on how the offence has set their team and how I've set my own. Since I like symmetrical defences, I generally try to place the ball furthest away from the best ball players though generally the difference is minimal. Using this strategy, I'm finding Kick isn't really doing very much for me. If someone has any ideas or can tell what I'm doing wrong please let me know.

While the skill isn't exactly useless, it just underperforms in my Orc team (as previously mentioned, Orcs Are Elves Too). Is Kick just a bad skill for teams without high movement players? I don't seem to notice that much of a difference between Kicking with Haldir and me placing the ball in the centre and letting Nuffle do the kick all by himself. The only time that I see it helping is when the opponent places 3 players a triangle to retrieve the ball; with Kick, I can guarantee that one or maybe even two of them won't be able to reach it in one turn, but I think the same thing occurs when the ball naturally scatters one way or anther.

Having decided that Kick isn't a very good skill, I thought of what I would have in its place. Hating how something works is all fine and good, but having an idea on how it can be improved is better. From memory, the d3 is only used in Blood Bowl for the Kick skill (if I'm wrong please correct me!) and so getting rid of it makes the game that little more streamlined.

My first idea was to have Kick allow you to re-roll the kick-off scatter (the drift, not the bounce): nice and simple, no new mechanics. By default you would have to stick to the re-rolled result, just like for Pass, which may net you an equally unfavourable result. This might make the skill fairly crappy to some people, plus it makes using the skill take up that little bit of extra time to decide whether to employ kick of not. I then thought maybe the best-of-two results would make the skill better, but then it becomes too fiddly and I've replaced one rule that I don't like with something complicated and not really conceptually congruous with other BB mechanics.

My next idea was to use the three-direction throw-in template instead of the eight-way scatter template. This option actually gives you a fairly high amount of control on where the ball will end up. Again this control comes at the cost of extra time for decision making, but at least the choice is fairly meaningful. The kick-off is an event measured by favourable and unfavourable outcomes rather than success and failure. This form of control definitely increases the chance of favourable outcomes because you see exactly the 18 squares in which the ball can land (discounting the Bad Kick kick-off table result, which is replaced in LRB5 anyway). With only three possible directions of drift, you can fairly easily settle for a safe option where there is no chance of giving a free catch attempt and by accepting an element of risk you can try to punish players starting too far forwards by placing the scatter to go behind the deepest receiver.

As a player (of games in general), I tend to prefer options that give me meaningful choices and rather than lessen the impact of a random events. In BB terms, the best analogy I can think of at the moment is the difference between the LRB5 skills Stand Firm and Wrestle on a Dwarf Longbeard being blocked by someone else with Block and the dice show Pow/Skull and Push. In the case of Stand Firm, what you have done is limit the opponent to a meaningless choice (lessen the impact of a random event). With Wrestle, you present an opponent with a more complex choice (push back or have both players fall) and that is what I think makes for a more interesting game. Of course, this doesn’t mean Wrestle is better than SF, just different and different in a way that I like.

Anyway, that is it for my latest serving of food for thought. Hopefully this is something I can explore further with the real life game.

EDIT: Rijssiej gets a cookie! He correctly pointed out that Kick in fact divides the distance in half, rounded down, diving values of 0, 1, 2, and 3. I guess this makes kick a little bit better. If anything, Haldir might not be quite so suicidal. Haldir salutes you Rijsseij!