Why I hate "fun"

[JPB]

On topic though - I wonder whether you would solve any and all of these problems, simply by having the cards face up?

I've suggested something like this several posts ago.

But it feels a bit wrong, and more like a desperate measure (i.e. when cards start failing entirely).

Another option is to design cards in a way that they're always played in between turns, and only create a scenario the opponent coach has to build his turn around. Making it part of the turn's contemplation, and less the type of effect that appears to mess with made contemplations.

The other thing is that there should be two card sets. A fun one for campaigns and a balanced one with a more strategical approach. Mixing those two kinds achieves little as the cards are not balanced enough and too balanced to be full out fun.

[Gaixo]

There's a local tournament that used to award face-up cards. Sort of misses the point, I think.

[dode74]

Sort of misses the point, I think.

That's an interesting statement, I think. What is the point of cards? I mean that in the context laid out earlier by Domfluff of BB being a "perfect information" game by design.

[Baxx]

Sort of misses the point, I think.

That's an interesting statement, I think. What is the point of cards? I mean that in the context laid out earlier by Domfluff of BB being a "perfect information" game by design.

The point is similar to weather tables, kick off tables, injury tables and other tables. They add a bit of fun mayhem. If you play with cards, Blood Bowl does not have "perfect information".

[Domfluff]

The point of the cards in 3rd edition Deathzone was, explicitly by design (in the design notes at the back), to put back in some of the 2nd edition options.

e.g., in 2nd edition you could hire assassins before the game to kill or injure key players, and involved a couple of tables rolled during the pre-match sequence. This became a Special Play card (the 400K Jack of Clubs in the CRP), covering the same thematic ground, without the overhead.

Now, thanks to the BBRC, Blood Bowl has evolved a ton. The game as it existed around the time of the CRP has had an amazing amount of design work to produce a stable and competitive game, minimising a lot of the sillier, fluffy stuff and producing something that could apparently sustain itself without being supported by GW. I think it's very easy to underestimate quite how much work has gone into Blood Bowl - the game in 2018 looks quite similar to the 1994 release, but there are vast differences under the surface. Some of the choices were and are debatable, but the core of the game is very strong.

So... special play cards. What purpose do they serve now? Personally, I think playing a series of games against the same teams can get boring. I do quite like doing a best-of-three series or similar, but if Blood Bowl to you was a casual game to play with a friend, partner or child then I suspect special play cards add some colour, and help prevent repetition somewhat.

How does that apply to tournaments?

Blood Bowl is really weird.

The Stunty Cup (for example) isn't really a concept that carries over into other competitive games, and that you have teams with vastly disparate power levels are another unique element. Certainly, some teams (Goblins in particular) involve accepting a larger degree of variance ("fun"), so you could make the case that Special Play cards are just an extension of that - but the furtive nature of them really screws with that. You know precisely how likely a Chainsaw is to fail, or how stupid the Trolls can be, but if I draw a playing card you can't know what that effects, or to what extent, so every action is coloured by an unknown.

I don't think Special Play cards add too much variance to Blood Bowl, I think they just add the wrong sort.

Richard Garfield had an essay that's been reprinted a number of times about randomness in games. One example he gave was a game of chess, following the regular rules, but you rolled 2D6 each turn - if you roll a 12 then you win the game. This clearly is "bad randomness" - the randomness doesn't interact with the skills involved in Chess (those remain intact), but your reward for that skill is lessened, since you could make all of the worst moves and still randomly win. You could have an alternative ruleset, where where each time a chess piece captures, they roll 2D6, and the lowest roll dies. That's still a pretty terrible game, but there's much more reward for skill, and you can shift the odds in your favour somewhat (mostly the game would devolve into building the most capture attempts, and risking weaker pieces against stronger ones). That's "good randomness" (or better at least), since the core of what you're doing (captures, positioning, exchanges of material) remains the same.

Blood Bowl is about risk management, and hidden information directly conflicts with your ability to manage and understand risk. That mechanical conflict is also not a positive one - some designs create tension through limitations - but instead represents a heavy pruning of the decision tree, and therefore less reward for your actions.

The conflict between competitive gaming and fluff is not one Blood Bowl is going to resolve any time soon. Players approach the game from varying angles, and most of those approaches are valid. Some people approach this from a GW minis background, where Blood Bowl is a notable aberration (it's a much stronger game design than anything else GW have put out, objectively). Some approach it as a boardgame, with the (presumably) accidental genius of the turnover rule being a major selling point. Others as a competitive tournament game, where there aren't too many decent options for that. I imagine there's at least one person who really likes the novels.

[dode74]

The point is similar to weather tables, kick off tables, injury tables and other tables. They add a bit of fun mayhem. If you play with cards, Blood Bowl does not have "perfect information".

But those things are all known-odds events which you do have the information on and known when they may take place. That's not the case with cards. The fact that the cards take away that perfect information seems to be the point being made.

[Moraiwe]

The conflict between competitive gaming and fluff is not one Blood Bowl is going to resolve any time soon. Players approach the game from varying angles, and most of those approaches are valid. Some people approach this from a GW minis background, where Blood Bowl is a notable aberration (it's a much stronger game design than anything else GW have put out, objectively). Some approach it as a boardgame, with the (presumably) accidental genius of the turnover rule being a major selling point. Others as a competitive tournament game, where there aren't too many decent options for that. I imagine there's at least one person who really likes the novels.

I tend to approach it as simplistic role-playing game. Instead of a character you play a team. The team's health (TV) is in a constant state of flux; you have 3 main character classes of Fighter/Acrobat/Misfit (bash/dash/stunty); instead of adventures you play matches; you have abilities (players) within which you can learn differing levels of expertise and specialisation (skills). You spend most of your loot (winnings) healing your team (buying players) and hiring the occasional NPC (star players, wizards, etc.).

[besters]

The point is similar to weather tables, kick off tables, injury tables and other tables. They add a bit of fun mayhem. If you play with cards, Blood Bowl does not have "perfect information".

But those things are all known-odds events which you do have the information on and known when they may take place. That's not the case with cards. The fact that the cards take away that perfect information seems to be the point being made.

I think that's a valid point, but as I said earlier, weather and kick off tables have a lot of people who aren't fans!

[Darkson]

Blood Bowl is not a "competitive" game, it's a "beer & pretzel" game.
That it can also be played competitively is a testament to both the original design and the subsequent BBRC changes.

If you don't want to play with cards, don't, they are listed as optional. If you really don't want to use them, don't join leagues/play in tournaments that use them.

[Domfluff]

There are an awful lot of tournaments for something which is "not a competitive game".

Suggesting that Blood Bowl is not competitive, strategic or deep (what "beer and pretzels" is usually defined as, in negation) is nonsense. If it wasn't, the game, this forum, the NAF, Fumbbl, and so forth wouldn't exist. People play Magic: The Gathering, they don't play Games Workshop's "Warlock", despite these games having the same theme and the latter being released first.

Blood Bowl can certainly be played in a less competitive manner, and that's not invalid. So can poker. The difference between "competitive" poker and "casual" poker (for example, the difference between Texas Hold 'em and Five Card Draw) is that the former has a near-maximum amount of shared, visible information and four iterations of betting rounds per hand, despite both having the same scoring conditions. Even with this, the variance in a given round of hands is staggeringly high, and thus it requires many hands to create a competitive situation - which, again, could be defined as simply as "the better players win more often".

Worth noting that Heff's post was also about the use of special play cards in the context of a tournament.

[dode74]

I think that's a valid point, but as I said earlier, weather and kick off tables have a lot of people who aren't fans!

Absolutely, and I suspect that's for reasons of excessive variance reducing agency with some of those results. Sweltering Heat, Blitz, and that damnable Rock etc are, I think, some of the major culprits here as they can change the shape of an entire drive. Part of the issue is the value of a single drive within a match: with most games being low-scoring (3 or fewer TDs total) every drive is vital to success, and changing the odds on the whole drive is quite the alteration to the match.

[Domfluff]

I certainly think that the Kick-off table is the highest variance/lowest agency ("worst") part of the game that's still extant. One issue is that there isn't a realistic vector to change this anymore, since the BBRC ended.

Some of the changes that have been made there are good - changing Bad Kick (2D6 scatter) to High Kick (place chap under the ball) was a good decision, but the weather/kick-off table are the offenders.

Fortunately, this is something which a tournament organiser can change, since that seems to be well within the limits of NAF sanctioning.

[Joemanji]

The KO table is really important for keeping people honest, Blitz/Quick Snap/Perfect D in particular. But they can be a bit too swingy. Perfect D is much stronger than people think, there are many times I've seen it be more effective than a Blitz! Might be better to just squeeze down the power level of all these events. E.g.

Throw A Rock - player is merely stunned.
Pitch Invasion - each team has D3+FAME players stunned.
Blitz! - team can move D6 players
PD - players who were in a TZ must stay where they are.

In this case you might want to move stuff around, maybe even pushing Riot above Get The Ref.

[Domfluff]

I think that's the right kind of solution - even if the blitz was limited to a single player, that would be powerful, or the 10 result could be shifted to 12.

Obviously choosing your cut-off point is the thing - Throw a Rock could only Badly Hurt (as with the changes to Vamps), or KO or Stun, for example. I do like the narrowing of the pitch invasion to D3+Fame though - that still maintains a significant advantage for the +FAME player, whilst not turning the drive into a joke.

[Darkson]

Saying BB is not "competitive" is not "nonsense", it was how the game was designed, and JJ has confirmed that point in the past.
You'll notice that I didn't say it doesn't work as a competitive game.
But it is a fact that 'competative' BB is a variant of 'random (fun)' BB, not the other way round. It was the 'fun' elements of the game that drew me to BB (as opposed to the 'gritty' nature of the other games I played at the time [40k, WFB, Necromunda and later Mordheim) - the competitive side of the game came much later.
There was, what, 5 or 6 years from the games re-release before the first official tournament?

And I know Heff was talking about a tournament (I was at the same one) which is why I said if you don't like cards don't play in a league OR tournament that uses one.