Talk Fantasy Football

Casualty Table: roll 1d8+2d6. The d8 provides the major theme, the 2d6 are for the details.

D8 Result
1-4: Badly Hurt: The player misses the rest of the match. Feel free to roll on the Badly Hurt table, but it doesn't really matter.
5-6: Seriously Injured: The player misses the rest of the match and the next one too. Feel free to roll on the Seriously Injured table, but it doesn't really matter.
7: Critically Injured. The player is Seriously Injured, and in addition suffers a permanent penalty. You must roll on the Critically Injured table.
8: Out of Commission. The player may have been killed, or just taken out of action for the season. Either way, the player is removed from the roster. You must roll on the Out of Commission table.

Badly Hurt (2d6). The player misses the rest of this match.
2 Bruised Ego
3 Stubbed Toe
4 Bruised Ribs
5 Bump on the Noggin
6 Funny Bone
7 Twisted Ankle
8 Shin Splints
9 Missing Teeth
10 Broken Nose
11 Sore Back
12 Broken Fingernail

Seriously Injured (2d6). The player misses the next match.
2 Broken Thumb
3 Foot Fracture
4 Turf Toe
5 Concussion
6 Sprained Ankle
7 Sprained Knee
8 Sprained Elbow
9 Broken Ribs
10 Torn Biceps
11 Broken Jaw
12 Leg Fracture

Critically Injured (2d6). After generating the result, modify the profile, and the result is otherwise treated as a Serious Injury (the player misses the next match).
2 Broken Collarbone: -ST
3 Damaged Back: -ST
4 Torn Knee Tendon: -MA
5 Pinched Nerve: Niggling
6 Broken Jaw: Miss an extra match.
7 Severe Concussion: -AV
8 Neck Injury: Miss an extra match.
9 Shell Shock: Niggling
10 Smashed Ankle: -MA
11 Gouged Eye: -AG
12 Broken Hip: -AG

Out of Commission (2d6)
* 2-5: Career-Ending Injury. The player is erased from the roster. Howevery, you get a free Assistant Coach or Cheerleader (choose), as the player is available to advise or inspire his teammates.
2 Severed Foot
3 Severed Fingers
4 Smashed Hip
5 Smashed Knee
* 6-8: Season-Ending Injury. The player is erased from the roster for the season, but may be returned to the team roster after the season, so long as the return of the player would be legal (you may fire someone to make room). If you prefer, you may take the free Assistant Coach or Cheerleader instead, as if a 2-5 had been rolled.
6 Broken Arm
7 Fractured Skull
8 Broken Leg
* 9-12: Dead dead dead! The player is erased from the roster. You get nothing.
9 Broken Neck
10 Smashed Head
11 Stopped Heart
12 Crushed Lungs

A whole lot of tables for not much difference. I prefer my house rules to be simple yet substantial in effect.

It's actually quite scalable: the BH and SI tables are nothing but fluff. I've been playing with the idea of changing the out-of-commission table to just a bunch of gruesome dead/career-ender results, but I like the team-management aspect of season-ending injuries an awful lot, so I don't know if I want to drop that bit or not.

Part of my reasoning, which I should have explained, is that my coaches all miss the bloody old days, and want a system with more casualties and less handicap, but that otherwise takes advantage of the superior range, fluff and clarity of LRB5 (maybe with a few more bells & whistles, as long as it doesn't get out of hand). I can sort of make that up with extra money, but trading blood for money mostly benefits bash at the expense of agility, which really isn't necessarily what I want (maybe a little). I am doing that somewhat (and accounting for it with TV rules), but I need something else to take the edge off casualties.

This table changes the probabilities meaningfully, at least in the big picture. The odds of a death drop by 25%: niggle and stat loss drop by even more, but the 10 perms of M2G help make up for it, I hope. That extra half-permutation on the d6 (which is essentially what one ends up with) gets turned into SI with no permanent consequences (plus the aforementioned M2G results), so the BH result is unchanged in probability. This allows a team to suffer a third more casualties with the same number of deaths. That means management issues become a much smaller deal, which really helps if (as my coaches demand) I'm reducing the value of the underdog's handicap.

I could take out M2G... that means 9 perms (8, 9) for Niggle, 9 for -AV (4, 7), 9 for -MA (5, 6), 5 for -AG (10, 11), 4 for -ST (craps). That runs afoul of Joe's criticism of sameness, but I just like the idea of having all those different results with no attached mechanics, so you can just ignore the 2d6 if the d8?6, or you can roll the dice and go "Aww, man! What do you mean you can't play?!? It's a fingernail, you #@$%! And you call yourself an orc." Plus, there's the d8 thing, which really helps balance out my fouling rules (see relevant thread).

So I guess:

1) Is it excessively baroque?

2) Does it look like more fun than the d68 table?

3) Would a d86 table with much less fluff be a better idea? It comes with free fluff ("86'ed" is slang for "ejected," but "carried off on a stretcher" isn't much of a, um, stretch), but would be a much shorter table.
11-46: BH.
51-64: MNG.
65-66: Niggle.
71-72: -MA
73: -ST
74: -AG
75-76: -AV
81-86: Dead.

It's sort of a half-measure (identical chance of a 51-58 from the LRB5 table, but 25% of death perms go to MNG instead). It's much less fluffy, but it's also more space-efficient and it does what I'm really looking for (allowing more casualties without increasing the number of deaths). Contrary to appearances, however, it's no more or less complex or speedy in resolution: same number of rolls and table-consultations, provided the tables are in the same place. More tables doesn't matter if a) it's immediately obvious which ones you can ignore and b) there isn't a lot of paper-shuffling.

Where else can you talk about death perms? Gotta love Blood Bowl, and goth salons, I guess.

If I were looking to complicate it I'd probably add the negative traits in as well. In particular adding bonehead would be fun although has some extra complexity (e.g. if you've alread got bonehead get really stupid, what about WA & BH? etc).

I thought about that, but I'm concerned it'll make the game harder to play. Complicating the rules on the ground is not my intent: the process can be messy, but the product can't. It can feel slightly bulkier than LRB5, but only if the extra bulk is mostly optional. It can feel slightly wonkier than 3rd ed, but only inasmuch as the clarity is improved. However, this is a place where I can add in rules without adding in errata, and that's always tempting.

One thing my league has house-ruled in is to actually have a consequence for Gouged Eye: if a player suffers this injury twice, he must automatically retire as he can no longer see! (We kinda toyed with the idea that you could keep the player and simply move him randomly a la the 2nd Edition on-field referees, but it's not as plausible). We've also discussed another GE idea, that a player with one Gouged Eye would be at a permanent -1 to throw, catch or intercept the ball, due to lack of depth perception. Not quite as bad as a loss of AG would be, at least IMHO.

I like the idea of having a wider variety of injuries to suffer from, so that would be where my vote would go if it came to that. Hell, I've played long enough to remember the 1st Edition Injury Table result "Broken Arm and Leg." Ah, the good old days before nerfing and PCism caught up to Blood Bowl...