Advice for starting a Blood Bowl league

[Cartercaine]

Got to say guys this has been a wealth of information. It's great to see the BB community is so strong and helpful. We really appreciate this and we can't wait to get started.

CC

[sann0638]

Added the thread link to thenaf.net - easier than summarising! http://www.thenaf.net/leagues/

[J_Bone]

Hi guys... Sorry we haven't updated much lately. We have been organising a lot of demo games, going out flyering stores, posting up on forums and generally doing everything we can do get the word out there about the league. We still have no clue as to how many people will be making it down but the first night is next Tuesday (1st of July) so we'll let you know how it goes!

Myself and Pete (CarterCaine) have had a chat between ourselves and also with some of the other guys who were involved in the league last season and we can't decide how to deal with the fact that people may not be involved in the league from match one.

Obviously, word of mouth may spread and people may want to join after we have kicked off. How is this best dealt with? We used a points averaging system in the last league because of drop-outs but if we have this same system in place using OBBLM it could result in new players who've not faced that many teams being higher in the table than they really should be. We could set a minimum amount of games but this still may throw up some issues where others have played every tough team going and appear to have performed worse than somebody who has played the bare minimum and had some easy matches.

Some members of the league are adverse to going to a system where it is purely based on points but I find it hard to see any other way working properly. However, if we do go that way does it not mean that the schedule has to be far more rigid? This is seriously beginning to cook my brain. I can't figure out what would be best for the league.

Also, Star Players and Special Play cards in a league... Yay or nay? We did not use them in our first league and have limited experience with them. Are they worth keeping or should we exclude them from play as it appears some leagues do?

[J_Bone]

Mine and Pete's thinking at the moment is to not average it and you have a set number of games and points are counted as they normally are with no averaging.

My concern is that I will try to cater for people who won't bother turning up often and want to play the bare minimum amount of games and drag the league down when really we should be encouraging the exact opposite.

[gregory_n_white]

At MBBL we have 2 approaches:

(1) relatively short seasons - only 7 games
(2) a social league runs alongside the main league - with no scheduled matches - anyone can arrange to play anyone else whenever they like; only limitations: cant play same team twice in a row and a team can not migrate from social to main league if it has played more than 6 games.

This means that people who join late can wait until the next season starts and can play social games to get their team some basic skills, and to prove their commitment/reliability.

[J_Bone]

Those are both good ideas. We had been talking about having shorter seasons so that newcomers wouldn't have too long to wait before they could compete properly but the "social league" is also a very good idea. We could just set up a separate division on OBBLM

[mzukerman]

We went with the a 10 game season. We had a couple interested in joining and then just joined the next season. In season five, I instituted the concept of scrimmage games to get more people to show up on game days rather than playing outside our normal schedule. So if you are there on game day and at least one of your opponents isn't there, you get to play a scrimmage to jump start or try out another team. This is a perfect opportunity for people who want to join the league but missed the cutoff of the beginning of the season to play some games and get their teams going.

Another option is to throw in a mid-season tournament to catch those folks who didn't make it from the beginning.

Another option is to do two half seasons and the winners of each of the half seasons make it to the playoffs. Maybe you mist the first half season, but you can join the second half season.

[J_Bone]

Quick update on how the league is going! We've had a really good couple of weeks so far, have averaged around 10 people a night and it still looks like more are interested. The first night we gave away some great figures courtesy of Warlord Games and last week we unveiled our custom DBBL pitches made by Deep Cut Studios...



Tomorrow night we are going to be playing our first ranked matches and are very much looking forward to it!

We have had a couple of issues with some people being a bit overbearing and complaining that they want to use their own oddball house rules while ignoring ours (the main one being us not enforcing the 'Illegal Procedure' rule) and that they don't use the internet and want us to run their teams for them on our OBBLM site but myself and Pete (CarterCaine) have decided we may have to take a firm stance on this kind of stuff as if it carries on it may be disruptive to the majority of other players. Especially where we are teaching the rules to complete newbies and they are coming across and confusing them with outdated rules or rules they just completely made up! (using I Got My Eye On You, re-rolling armour & casualty rolls, frenzying as many times as you like, completely different team builds etc etc ETC ETC ETC).

[Fold]

What points/schedule structure did you go with in the end?

I am having the same sort of issue knowing that some will be able to commit to a lot of games and others not so much. In the end I settled on it being a completely open perpetual league, where anyone can play anyone else and you can play as much or as little as you like. Points are 1 for a win, 0 for a draw, -1 for a loss.

[J_Bone]

We decided to go for a reasonably short (around 10 games) league where everybody will ideally play everybody else once and the points are just to be scored 3 for a win, 1 for a draw and 0 for a loss with no averaging. We had a lot of chats about it and decided in the end that keeping people having played a similar amount of games and not averaging points would give a fairer assessment of how well people have performed in the league. "Strength of schedule" will always be a bit of an issue but it can't be helped as far as I can see.

We would like to run the league as a perpetual league in the future but are happy to restart every season until we have a good core membership. I don't want newbies coming in and having a non-starter because they received 7 casualties from a CLAWPoMb monster and not coming back. Not yet anyway!

[mzukerman]

That's great J_Bone. I'm happy to hear you're doing well. My advice on the "disrupters" is to tell them that they need to adhere to this ruleset now. The goal of the league is to get the new players on a good footing and to let everyone have a chance to enjoy the game. You can put up votes on rules at the end of a season if people are that passionate about it. And there can always be exemptions for new players (we do that). But it's important that they get on board with the idea that this needs to grow in maturity and fun before it can grow in size.

Good luck!

[Kikurasis]

From paragraph 5 under "Blood Bowl Leagues":

In a league, the Commissioner’s word is LAW. He is allowed to change or modify any of the Blood Bowl rules as he sees fit, including any of the League Rules that follow. In the immortal words of fellow game designer Tuomas Pirinen: If the League Commissioner says that Dwarfs can now fly, your reply must be 'Yes Sir! How high?' If you don’t like the way a commissioner runs his league, you have two choices; put up with it, or leave the league. Arguing with the commissioner NOT an option. ‘Nuff said, I hope.

'Nuff said, indeed.

[J_Bone]

Thanks for the advice guys... We had a quiet word with them last night and it seemed to be taken in the right spirit. We'll see how it goes from there!

We also had a really fun first round of matches for the league and next week looks to be more of the same! It's going really well.

The only issue now is how to manage match selection... A Hell of a lot of people seem to be keen on playing against Pete's goblins for their next match! I wonder why?

[TlawsonTim]

I am little late to the show, I see that you've started up already so here's some thoughts for next season. I run a league of 32 coaches, with a scheduled opponent each week. We currently run a 2 conference league in the conference there is 2 divisions, each team will play their division once and a 2 crossover games with in their conference. (These had to be scheduled separately.

1) Create a rules document; it will be your Law outside of LRB 6. In the document I've explained how scheduling will work how playoffs will work. Because opponents are to schedule their weekly matches I've added in how scheduling forfeits will work, what happens if a coach cancels last minute. This document also has all the rewards, how to file for bounties and how team sponsorships work, it's a lot of pre-work but in the end this document has everything and is sent to the coaches prior to the season. (I've attached the rules pack for anyone who wants to take a look)

2) Let the league adapt as it grows, we've changed formats a few times, listen to the feed back but you don't have to change everything or anything if you don't want to. You are the commissioner and it is alot of work, so don't let the coaches brow beat you, I've been in that position it can become very tiring.

3) I saw fluff mentioned, this is what makes Blood Bowl awesome, the more fluff coaches provide the better, consider a bi-weekly news letter. Try to get the league involved (this might not be easy) it can take a load off your shoulders.

4) Make the league fun, I try to send out updates on the league, who's currently making the playoffs and so forth. The biggest thing I do is the Player of the Week, each week I go through the games and look for the player with the most SPP and send an email out the league with a little write up. I provide that coach with a trophy for their player. Make these fun we've had the following; a steel egg cup, Plastic Trophies and this season the PoW gets a Lawn Gnome. (If you have a dollar store nearby or cheapies you can find some great ideas there)

5) Have fun with it after all it is a game and the end product should be fun for everyone involved.

If you want any more support documents let me know I can email or post them here.

[J_Bone]

Thanks for that, Tim. We have the couple of actual, proper 'house rules' that we play by up on the website but after seeing your post I created quite a comprehensive DBBL specific 'clarifications' document based upon the NAF one with just the minor changes that we tend to play by on there.

The league has been going very well so far and everybody is getting into the spirit of it and putting cool little write-ups on their matches etc. The only issue we're hitting at the minute is trying to keep the scheduling working. We're finding we have certain guys turn up every week and others quite rarely and without scheduling matches ahead of time we're worried that the more regular guys will stop turning up (as they will end up turning up repeatedly in the hope that the guy they need to play turns up that week). We're running it by everyone to see what the coaches think and I hope the majority are into the idea because otherwise I can see us having trouble down the line when four guys all need to play one guy who doesn't show up very often.