Talk Fantasy Football

I'm crazy.

OK, now that's out of the way, I want to recruit people to Blood Bowl, and start a league at my FLGS. I have a home made pitch with NAF block dice, and will see if I can borrow two more boards from friends who wouldn't be able to make it out to play. (Living far away, working.)

I've got a human team and an orc team all converted from miniatures I've collected over the years. So figure introductory lessons would be done with them. I was thinking it might be a good idea to use paper players for a few other teams so that people could play additional learning games before the league kicked off so that they could try different play styles.

1. What teams would people suggest for the taste of play styles games?

I was thinking of:
Wood Elves - passing game
Dwarfs - caging game
Skaven - running game

and allow people to use orcs and humans again if they like

2. How much of a gap between doing demos, and starting a league is best?

3. Do those of you who have leagues allow teams to play games between seasons? So for example if we have a season, and then those teams that don't make it to the play offs just play exhibition matches so they can try to get some team development.

4. How do you handle people who want to join mid-season?

5. Does twice a month sound like a reasonable pace, or would that be too slow to maintain momentum? I worry once a week may fall apart under the pressure of real lives TM.

Current theory:
week 0 - put up signs with the plan
week 1 - set up for demo on Thursday night (currently available as a standard night), Saturday afternoon, and if I can find space, on Sunday when there are people playing 40K
week 2 - another week of demos, repeat people can play additional learning games, and show people how to make their own paper pieces if they don't want to make a team right away, and how to make their own pitch and such for cheap if they want.
week 3 - last week of recruitment demos
week 4 - league starts
week 5 - off
week 6 - second game
etc.

The twice a month game nights would be the last day to get those match ups played, so people could play their game ahead of time if they need to. So at the end of the evening, I'd update the standings, and hand out forfeits as appropriate.

Points:
W/D/L/F
3/2/1/0 (basically making sure losing is more valuable than foreiting)

I'm in a league on fumbbl, and one on cyanide, and haven't played a table top game since LRB2 (I found my old rule binder from when a friend tried to get a league going many years ago, and that's what it was labelled).

Eric

You can pick up 20 mantic elves or dwarves for £10-15 on ebay these days. I'd suggest maybe - for one off games - humans, dwarves, orcs and pro elves... Or you're potentially going to end up with a lot of wood elf and skaven players in your league

Plus, these teams are then very easy for newbies to get hold of and get into converting and painting should they wish.

I'll leave the rest to people with commissioning experience, but good luck with it all - there's a good episode of 3DB featuring a teacher who introduces his schoolkids to BB. Worth a listen!

Cheers!

Steve

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Commish of the NZCBBL - Wellington NZ's Blood Bowl league and home of the Apes of Wrath - as featured on the legendary Three Die Block podcast!

We're in a lower population density part of Canada where GW minitures are often the only thing available, and I don't want to abuse the FLGS that is hosting us by being overly encouraging people to not support their host. (I think the closest place to carry Kings of War is multiple days drive away.) Heck, I'm going to be asking them if they can get Reaper in on special order through their distributors because I'd rather pay less than $3 for a troll from their Bones line, than the more than $30 GW charges.

That said, the high elf archer box might do for standard elves, as they lack the tall helmets and armour.

I've not tried elves before, but I have played a bunch of games with dwarfs, orcs, and humans (my preferred team). I think I've now played 5 games with skaven, and they seem amazingly easy to play with, but then I only played them after playing a lot of games with other teams. Similar deal with the wood elves. I tried them once earlier, and got squished, but when I returned to them, and had a better grip on things, it went much better.

I'll give elves a try on cyanide as per your advice, and consider letting humans represent the running game by themselves.

Eric

It should be relatively easy to find cheap miniatures on ebay, especially if you don’t mind them being badly painted.

In the early stages of teaching the game it may be simpler to treat the models as playing pieces so the main thing to worry about is that the 2 teams are easy to differentiate and the positions within the teams can be easily distinguished from each other. You could do this by utilising the 2nd edition colour coding of Green for blockers, red for blitzers, grey for linemen, white for throwers and yellow for catchers. Either use blue or another suitable colour for odd players such as assassins, orange would be ideal for slayers.

The other factor to consider is if you want to have a rigid scheduled league or something more open. The open option will make things simpler to accommodate mid season joiners as well as some coaches being keener than others. But you will need to be careful to avoid cherry picking and have a way of fairly determining league success based on playing a different number of games.

You may want to consider allowing some coaches to have more than 1 team, maybe imposing a restriction that only their main team can qualify for playoffs or that the secondary teams have to be tier 2-3 or radically different from the main one.

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I found these a few months ago:

http://paperplayers.wordpress.com/the-teams/

Which I was going to do up for teams beyond the orc and human ones I have models for. Then allow people to use either the paper playing pieces, or miniatures at their option when we got going. So the cheapest they can go is 4 colour sheets of paper, and a bit of time with scissors and a hobby knife. So I am being very careful to ensure people can play even if they don't want / can't afford properly representational miniatures.

Marking the base edges for miniatures that are less than clear is definitely going on my documentation for players. I was browsing the official GW figs, and couldn't tell many of the amazon models apart!

I have been waffling on open vs scheduled play.

When I was introduced to Blood Bowl those many years ago, it was an open league, and it fizzled out after a few weeks. I've also played in leagues with schedules, and seen coaches drop off the face of the earth, and/or be very difficult to schedule with, as well as keen coaches who are gung ho to get in all their games. A total lack of structure didn't seem to keep people focused, but structure can be hard to maintain, and be a challenge to welcoming to new people...

A third option has occurred to me that teams could play one game per play cycle, and have a continuous series of cups going on. So if your team was still in the running, you had a set opponent, but if your team had been eliminated, you could play any other team that wasn't in the running either. That would also support your multiple teams per coach option, by simply only allowing one team per coach into a cup.

Once people have been playing a few months, I suspect they'll be able to tell me what sort of structure they prefer, and we can change it. I just want to be sure there is enough impetus to get us off the ground.

Eric

Or make some TV 900, linemen, FF and reroll only rosters. It'll introduce the players to the relative benefits of stats and, later, skills. It should also be quite forgiving with lots of rerolls to enjoy (and manage). You may want to do this with:

Humans
Orcs
Norse
Amazon
Skaven
And with you playing khemri, since you've played before

Then if you play elves and dwarves later, the loss of rerolls at the low cost levels will be more pronounced.

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Commish of the NZCBBL - Wellington NZ's Blood Bowl league and home of the Apes of Wrath - as featured on the legendary Three Die Block podcast!

I'm following this one as I'm interested to knwo how it goes. I'm doing something similar up in Glasgow, or at least attempting to! My issue has been getting people who say they will commit but don't bother showing up for the main event. I am taking measures to get people excited and on board but any advice is appreciated

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Team Scotland: for Blood Bowl in Scotland http://www.createforum.com/teamscotland ... scotlandbb

Glasgow Blood Bowl League https://www.facebook.com/groups/273727376038744/

The Artist formerly known as "Shaheen"