I’ve been playing in a Blood Bowl league for the past year or so with a group of guys I haven’t otherwise been much in contact with since high school. As we get together on the second Sunday of each month, I frequently find myself thinking, this game should be better.
It’s not that I don’t have fun. The monthly event is a good time, the game’s concept and world are fun, and it’s just the right game for the group. But as a game, it also seems like you put in more into Blood Bowl than you get out.
Back when the league started, we had these fantasies that the noon-to-four o’clock blocks we were scheduling would eventually—once everyone knew the rules pretty well—let us play two games each in an afternoon. Now, a year later, we barely got two games apiece done when we blocked out a whole day to do an eight-player elimination tournament. We had to reschedule the finals for February.
We’re as prone to analysis paralysis as the next group of gamers, and that can make games longer. But in Blood Bowl, where such central rules as those for throwing a block hinge utterly on the order of movement and the order in which blocks are thrown, and because the stakes of throwing an ill-considered block are so high—it can easily end your turn before you’re ready to be done—it just doesn’t pay to plow ahead without considering every… single… move. And that’s the opposite of how a game like Blood Bowl should play, right?
Let’s be clear: I don’t mean to slag on the game, because I truly and honestly like it. I wouldn’t spend so much time thinking about how Blood Bowl should be—and could be—better if there wasn’t something really compelling there.
And so it occurred to me during the aforementioned tournament the Sunday before last that Blood Bowl‘s chief sin as a game is that it violates, and extravagently so, the pack half principle.
You can download the last three editions of the Blood Bowl Living Rulebook from Blood Bowl Online.
Blood Bowl has a rule (and sometimes a chart, too!) for everything. Even its attempt at a single unifying chart—the Agility table—has so many situational modifiers that vary wildly from action to action that it’s just plain unwieldy. It’s a game with protuberances everywhere. Instead of packing half, it packs something like half-again.
There are two interesting things to observe, though:
First, we’re playing it anyway, and nobody in the league wants to stop after this season. The game is so popular that Games Workshop essentially failed to stop publishing it, even when they tried. There’s nothing new about a game whose setting or schtick is so compelling that fans stick with it even though the gameplay experience has more in common with a poke in the ear than with THX’s Deep Note. But even while that’s true, there’s a Blood Bowl league at work that I’d join in a heartbeat if playing a single game didn’t represent such a major time commitment.
Second, it’s not immediately obvious which parts of the game are the half that ought to be unpacked. And trust me, I’ve thought about it. Any serious revision of Blood Bowl (and who knows if we’ll ever see such a thing?) would have to untie a lot of knots and butcher a lot of sacred cows to get to the point where the game could be rebuilt with real elegance.
Even though there are no obvious solutions, here are some areas where I’d poke around under the hood, if I were going to try to apply the pack half doctrine to Blood Bowl:
1.
Allow every player on the pitch to blitz every turn, but stipulate that throwing a block costs 3 or maybe 4 movement points. This would eliminate the analysis paralysis involved in making sure you use your one blitz in just the right place.
2.
Eliminate the turn-ending rule for failed blocks. (But keep it for true turnovers—fumbles and bad passes—probably.)
3.
Make the field about two squares narrower (although just as long), and reduce the player-fielding limit to either 9 or 10 players. Fewer players will make turns go a little bit faster, and make games run a little bit shorter.
4.
Get rid of all the bizarre tables related to playing cards. At the absolute minimum, these should be custom decks with the rule right on the card.
5.
Eliminate the game-end MVP award, or, at the very least, make it correspond to the actual performance of the players in the game. (That’s right, your MVP is currently determined by a random roll. A player who didn’t even step onto the field can be your MVP as the rules stand.)
The non-obvious benefit is that this would curtail the strange and random skills constantly earned by otherwise unremarkable linebackers of no reasonable distinction. (Because skills are earned by the accumulation of Star Player Points, and being an MVP is the single biggest such bonus in the game.)
The problem with non-uniform skill proliferation is that when each of the 15 or so members of your team has a slightly different set of skills, then the players have to constantly refer to their team rosters in the course of play. “Does number 6 have Block? How about Dodge?”
6.
To further attack skill proliferation, I’d go so far as to lump all of the bog-standard linemen on a team into a single stat line, and advance them all as a group. (Not as easily as a single player advances, of course.)
* * *
To apply the pack half principle to a game you like and know well—like Blood Bowl, in my case—is a great way to practice; it’s a lot easier to kill someone else’s darlings than your own, especially when you’re only doing it theoretically. Then, once you’re in the zone, you can move on to your own original material, with a better chance of spotting the extravagances and protuberances bogging it down.
We’ve house-ruled a lot of Blood Bowl in the Wolf Blight league. I think suggestion two is pretty solid, as it makes finesse teams a little more viable, because the dexterous teams are often held back by their low strengths, because they’re statistically likely to fail more of those blocks and end their turn than stronger teams. And that’s why I disagree with suggestion three — there’s already not enough room on the field for a well-maneuvered breakaway, which is the aspect of the finesse teams that makes them fun to play.
I haven’t played Blood Bowl for nearly a decade, but I remember loving it and I still recall most of its byzantine ruleset. I agree that all of these changes would help greatly – would that younger me could get back the many hours lost to move indecision and rules arguments!
Change #6 gets me thinking about reworking the linemen as a whole to be treated as a single group (much as base Warhammer treats groups), but that would quickly turn into adding more rules and special exceptions, which is exactly the opposite of the goal.
1. The next incarnation of the LRB (LRB6) is intended to be the more or less “final” version of the game for the forseeable future.
2. You’re right- the cards take up twelve pages in the book, and ought to at the very least be moved into its own file to be downloaded separately. Especially given that their use is optional.
3. I actually like the MVP the way it is. If your best player(s) earned it every time, those two or three players would advance way too quickly, and their advancement would ensure that they continue to do well, thus winning them more MVP awards. I don’t think it’d be easy to monkey with it without altering a lot of other things as well. (Not that that’s such a bad idea itself.)
I would take issue with the notion that unremarkable linemen with random skills is bad. Obviously, getting passing skills on your thrower or catching skills on your catcher is overall better for your team. However, the odd skill-up on a lineman helps considerably, provided you don’t blow it on a useless skill. Just one lineman with Block or Kick (or even better still, Guard) can drastically change how your line of scrimmage does at holding that line for your team. I think the random MVP helps to get those odd (yet necessary) skills on players who would otherwise only get them rarely if at all.
I would like to see dead players become ineligible to win MVP, though, That’s just insult to injury, and the only house rule I allowed in our league that directly affected play.
4. There was a league at work. 😉
I will comment on your individual points later, but there is something that I think needs be said. First, BLOOD BOWL is one of the best rational action strategic games ever designed. Second, this means that it is incapable of simulating its setting.
The BLOOD BOWL setting calls for quick, brutal, and unpredictable rules/outcomes. Instead, the rules are long, rarely brutal (unless you’re playing against halflings), and very predictable. The player who better understands territory control is invariably the one who wins. The more rational you play the game, the more you are rewarded by the mechanics.
Not the setting at all.
It is a very good game, but as you state any revision would have to be a complete reworking. I must admit that I actually prefer the 2nd edition, with the hardback supplements, because they are at least a little less predictable in outcomes. Though they are certainly “pack 3 times as much.”
Justin, finesse teams dominate our league. What the fuck am I doing wrong with these slow-ass dwarves of mine?!
Bexley, if we want to consider it a virtue that Joe Linebacker can eventually wind up with a marvelous skill, the MVP rule is still a bad way to get there, for my money. Better, for example, would be to give 1 SPP (or one-hand, or 1d2, or whatever) to every player who participated in a given game. Or to eliminate the intermediary step of assigning an “MVP” and just award a random skill to a random player instead, at the end of each game. For some reason, free-floating “experience” doesn’t bother me as much as free-floating Most Value. But that said, it’s the gameplay overhead of each player on the pitch having a slightly different stat line from his fellows that I think is the real problem.
You say po-tay-toe, Christian; I prefer the 2nd edition because of its badass polystyrene board.
Perhaps you will enjoy the upcoming BB video game, then. It is going to feature a “Madden NFL style” as the primary game mode, but what’s really causing the game to create a buzz is that there is a secondary mode, which is a direct translation of the LRB5. It will do all of the record keeping for you, and I imagine you would be able to read player’s stats/skills by hovering your crosshair over them.
Hey I’m playing Blood Bowl for the first time this week! What team should I field?
Also, so why complain about how bad the game is? Design a better one! IT CAN BE DONE!
Skaven are tearing up our league, Matt. They fall apart when hit, but they’re speedy. Humans seem to be strong across the board.
Also, who says I’m not designing a better one? (But, given that, while “design a better fantasy-genre football-style game” is certainly a worthwhile pursuit, “sell it into the marketplace” is not likely to bear much fruit for the reasons you talked about in your SquareMans post on WoW-killers.)
I have never played Blood Bowl.
Here are my completely unfounded insights.
http://www.squaremans.com/?p=81
Weird that Jeff was posting about BB just as I’m joining a league and playing for the first time.
To: J. Tidball
Re: Changing Blood Bowl
Jeff,
I submit to you that converting all actions into Movement Points and using MP to govern everything would solve a lot of problems.
Passing, Hand Off, Blitz, etc…. You can do as many as you want with each man, but each costs 1 MP. Failure ends *that player’s* action, not the whole team’s.
This would increase the amount of action in the game drastically. Lots more passing, hitting, all the fun stuff basically. It simplifies a couple of rules (like the fact that a guy who stands still can hit someone, but only one moving character per turn can hit someone) and would still allow all the tactics we see in play. Scores would be higher too, and chicks love the long ball.
The second critical step I’d take, is flipping Guard so NO ONE provides support, UNLESS they have Guard. Watching players calculate this (to my way of thinking) very 1980’s matrix wherein they need each player on the field to be in a specific square in order to maximize the number of support zones and stymie any attack is, I think, a lot of time and brainpower spent to no good end. It’s not fun. It’s fun to hit people, it’s fun to throw the ball, it’s not fun to arrange your mans on a grid like you’re playing Go. Go is fun, Football is fun, putting a Go mechanic at the center of a Football game is not fun.
Shit, fuck it. I’m going to do this and see how it works.
I keep thinking what you really need is a quarterback.
Obviously this would radically change the game because it would mean you’d need downs. I’d be willing to accept this challenge, design-wise, and furthermore I think it’d distinguish any potential game from the existing BB.
Watching my first game last week, I was surprised that when the ball hit the ground, no longer in anyone’s control, it was still in play and anyone could pick it up and run with it. “Hang on,” I thought, “that’s not how it works.” In American Football, recovering a fumble is so unlikely, the overwhelming likelihood is someone’s just going to fall on it.
A game with downs, a real line of scrimmage, punts, etc… would be a lot more like a Football Simulation but it seems like a lot of people like Football, so I’m not sure that’s bad.
But all this is not my point. My point is you need someone to be the Special Character. I don’t think you take your “all linemen have the same stats” idea far enough. I think all mans of any type, all catchers, all blitzers, etc… should have the same stats and special abilities. Thereby eliminating the need to constantly refer to your sheet to figure out which dude got the skills last time.
It might take several games to advance ALL your Catcher’s for instance, but they’d all advance at once. Whereas each game your Quarterback would have a chance at a special ability, and that’d be fine because he’s unique anyway. Actually all unique characters should work like this.
A MVP actually related to the actions you take, it seems, would be…whatever the opposite of a Death Spiral is. That character would tend to get better faster over time.
I could get behind converting all actions to movement points if an acceptable solution could be found to the scenario where a player could make five or six relatively short passes in rapid succession on the same turn, bringing the ball from one end of the field to the other at relatively low risk. I don’t know that a turn-ending turnover rule would be sufficient to prevent that.
I dig your revised Guard/block-support rule.
I don’t think the game needs downs, a line of scrimmage, etc. I think you’d spend too much time resetting your mans between them. I think that the continuous action of the rugby-style play is more compelling. Grab the ball from your opponent and just keep playing—that’s fun.
I can agree with you that the game takes to long to finish, but removing the individualism from your players would be(in my opinion), the downfall of bb.
One of the reasons(one of the many reasons) I love this game so much, is that each and every player is unique, at least after half-dozen matches or so. And if saying that you always have to check the team roster means that you’re not playing often enough :P.
Instead of doing a complete tournament in one day, spread it out, and play it over the course of two weeks. This will help you remember which stats/skills belong to which player.
On your point regarding 1 blitz per turn, and making everything cost ACTION POINTS, would make it more dynamic, in combination with failed blocks doesn’t invoke a turnover. This way, coaches will have the ability to think on the run, change their original idea, as opposed to rules today, where you calculate everything, and execute it in a specific order, and if anything goes wrong, you’re pretty much fucked.
Of course, this doesn’t always hold true, but in my experience, this is one of the reasons those blasted agility-based teams succeed to this overproportioned extent. As soon as you’re trying to pick up the ball with those chubby, dwarven fingers, it’s slips out of your grasp, and who’s there waiting? A gutter-runner or wood elf catcher, nipping the ball in front of you, and skipping down the fast lane for yet another td..
Changing the way assists work, would mean a total repaint of the skill tree as we know it today. This is something that gives those slightly weaker teams the chance to knock that one blocker out of the way before they’re home free, although a viable solution to the problem would be to give catchers the guard skill. catchers, with their overall weaker strength, would mean putting them in the LoS would be risky, and the skill would rather work as help to get the ball carrier(often the catcher) to the endzone, by mutual protection and assist.
Of course, as improvements are being handed out, more players can get the assist skill, but without key players starting with this ability, the agility-based teams would take a heavy(too heavy) blow to the kneecaps, resulting in them never getting the ball over the line.
Some of those changes have seen play in various ways in earlier editions, They all make the game /much/ slower.
If you want to speed it up, set up a 2 minute timer with each board. After the timer goes, you get to finish with the man in play and then turnover. That’s 32 player turns /safely/ under two hours with slow setups and a few touchdowns.
For the varied lineman skills (which add a lot to the experienced teams, IMO), grab some of those little coloured sticky tabs (or paint, if you’re OK with that) and put them on the base of your mens. Red = Block, Yellow = Dodge, Blue = Tackle, Black = Guard, and write any unusual picks on a white tab.
Here’s an alternate Block-assist mechanic that occurred to me the other day:
Blocks are only ever one-on-one events. Blocker’s Strength vs. target’s Strength, without assists, resolved otherwise as per the current rules.
However, each time a given player is the target of a block, he gets a counter, no matter the outcome of the block. Subsequent blocks thrown against that target in the same turn get a +1 Strength bonus per counter present on the target.
If your horde of little guys gangs up on the monster, the first couple of them are going to get their arms torn off. But when it comes time for the fourth and fifth guys to make their one-on-one rolls at +3 and +4, it starts to look ugly for that Troll.
I think that this is exactly the right “reality” for these rules to model. It introduces a minor fiddly bit (the counters), but almost completely eliminates the brain-burning calculation of who blocks first, who assists whom, who can move when, and so on.
This only works if you eliminate the failed block as a turn-ender, of course.
Good tip on the sticky tabs, by the way, tussock.
We’ve talked about using a timer, but decided we’d rather play longer games than become fast-acting stress cases.
By the way and for those following along at home, my dwarves, the Solidhall Mayhem Authority, finished 3rd out of 8 teams in the consolation match, played yesterday. The league winner was the Elf team that beat me in the second-round bracket. Second were Skaven.
Late to the party, here; however, there’s one thing I wanted to add to the discussion: “HeroClix.” If GW came up with a way to do what I’ve done in all my BB tabletop league play (which is attaching coloured magnetic counters to metal bases indicating basic stats, along with modelling the proper “skills” onto the figure), they would streamline play remarkably. Gone were the days of two-hour bouts once we cast those counters and modded our minis. We even tooled a set of standard armour/body pieces for use in conversion so noone doubted that Joe’s Beastman had a Prehensile Tail or Jim’s “Bullroarer, the Mightiest Halfling” SP had +2 AV and Block. o_O
If they rehabbed the game with their new plastics (more reasonable prices this time, please, GW), I think it would greatly reinvigourate a new release (much as it has with 40K).
That sounds awesome. In my case, piss-poor modeler that I am, I’d probably spend more time modding the figures than I’d save on game day. (My poor dwarves aren’t even painted.) A modular system for basing, though, that’s easy to change to reflect changing statistics… that’s fantastic.
Here I thought the official colors of BB teams were “primer grey,” “primer black,” and “primer white.” They are for my group.