Talk Fantasy Football

Has anyone ever thought of the possibility of using "allies" in their leagues/friendlies at an extra cost??? For example, a human team might want to take on a troll slayer as a ready-made "extra" blocker with Frenzy rather than take the time to skill one up or, similiar, a wardancer for a bit of speed & agility.

Ditto for all races; though something tells me you'd need to be careful not to make one race too strong with the extra ally/allies. Eg: perhaps a Necro team with 2 wolves, 2 golems may just be too much with a mummy or two?!

Ta

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It was a houserule for 3rd ed, and didn't work to well, normally giving teams 1 or 2 players that covered the weaknesses deliberately bult into the rosters.

The MBBL2 allows allies, which have the equivilent of LONER.
http://www.midgardbb.com/MixedRace.html

yeah, it's DEFINITELY been done. JJ himself even wrote big guy and ally rules back in the day for 3rd edition. basically each team had a list of available teams it would ally with, and you could take any player off the other roster that had was at least a 0-4 spot on that teams original roster.

in other words, for example a dark elf team could have chaos and goblin allies. that would allow them to take 1 chaos warrior, up to 3 beastmen (beastmen were stiil 0-12, not 0-16 like now), and up to 3 goblins as well.

as darkson said, it just meant you'd see a dwarf team with a wood elf catcher one-turn scorer, chaos teams with a 1-turn scoring gr, a wood elf line with a treeman and 2 dwarf longbeards with guard, and other abominations on the game that should never be.

that could be alleviated somewhat by only allowing lineman-position allies instead of anybody that was at least 0-4, but then some teams got screwed with their ally options...because having chaos dwarves as an ally then meant no chaos dwarves...only hobgoblins.

also, each ally after the first cost your team a point of ff, as racial purist fans were driven away.

in short, it was fun to play with the permutations for a while, and it did really give teams a lot of individuality...no 2 orc teams looked the same, that's for sure. but in the end, as darkson said, it took away the natural balance of strengths and weaknesses that each team has, and should have.

Allegiances are horrible. I really don't like the single race teams so I've tried out all sorts of options and allegiances are the worst.

Just be glad Second Edition is no longer the standard! Mixed-race teams galore with those rules...way over the top (although in my league we actually were keeping track of "kill-hat tricks" because they happened so frequently, and that was kinda fun).

Those 2nd edition mixed teams worked fine, as long as you tweak the rules a little. Salary cap seemed to work the best, especialy when the price was much higher to account for luring the player away from their homeland. That made it possible to field a great team of mixes, but you'd have no depth. Especialy since dead/injured players still counted against the cap.

www.olbbl.com

The original online BB community used 3rd /4th ed and houserules including Allies. Makes for an incredibly balanced set of races, and you can make super teams. This is what brought me back to BB in 2000.

This reminds me of something else I'd been thinking about; in quite a few RPG games I've come across, there have been half-elves & half-orcs involved. Anyone dabbled with anything like this or other mixed races?

Yep - http://www.midgardbb.com/BloodBowlTeams.html

things are ok with linemen from just about any race. The balance issue comes in if you get too many big guys, enough blockers for a wood elf LOS or the worse one is fast (MA8+) players on slow teams like dwarfs. A Lone human catcher with sprint and sure feet would mean that slow rumbling dwarf cage only has to advance a few squares before its in scoring range. very difficult to stop.

That's not strictly true as a Wood Elf Lineman disrupts a heavy team and you then need to start putting balancing measures in place. I went through a bunch of leagues to get multi-race teams right and I had to re-write a lot of the rules, just tinkering with one aspect isn't enough.