T w e n t y S i d e d
Hey, folks, Rutskarn here. I think we can all agree that the one thing really missing on this blog–the one subject you’d demand a website called Twenty Sided cover–is the world of professional sports. With that in mind, may I present my foray into the first videogame adaptation of Blood Bowl.
“Congratulations, lad,” said McGurrt, “you just bought yourself a Blood Bowl team.”
I live a fast-paced life with little room for complications. That morning, I had followed a train of logic that followed: I needed money. Sports teams make money. This sports team was very cheap for probably no reason in particular. To learn any other details before signing the contract would be not only irresponsible, but inconsiderate towards the feelings of others, particularly: Vicker the Shark, Tomag Loansemdollar, Zigler the Shark, Knee Breakin’ Frank, Dickie the Shark, and Mr. I Will Kill All Deadbeats, Esq, whose interests rates were fantastic thank you very much.
“Something the matter?” said McGurrt. “You look worried.”
“What? No. Why would I be worried?”
“I don’t know. I mean, you haven’t even seen them yet.”
“Exactly!”
It turns out I’m not very good at spotting red flags.
As McGurrt showed me around facilities that looked and smelled like rotten teeth, I feigned composure as best as I could. So the team’s gym was a little neglected. I didn’t need to win the league to pay off my debts; all I needed to do was to turn in a half-decent season, score a few goals, get my sponsor to pay out, and we’d be golden. And the sport we were talking about was Blood Bowl, for crying out loud. The game’s ball just gave people something to do with their hands while their feet were busy killing people. Unless McGurrt had somehow been fielding a team of squat obese pacifists, I should be able to pull this off somehow.
“You’ve much experience with the sport, then?” he said as we came to the equipment room.
“Yeah! Tons. If you could actually just remind me real quick how, exactly, one…”
“Get the ball to the goal.”
“Right! Just checking. Here, hit me with a…pass? Pass.”
He lobbed the ball underhand to me.
“I gotâ€"oh. Whoops. That’s surprisingly slippery, huh? Is there a trick to holding it?”
“Oh, aye,” he said. “We think there might be.”
“Pardon?”
“Well, follow me, then,” he said. “Time for you to meet the boys.”
That’s when he led me through to the locker room. There were, in fact, the boys. There were a dozen pairs of wide eyes staring up at me.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
â€"
It makes sense that to have a diverse and well-rounded world, you need to have halflings. You can’t have everyone out there slaying dragons or discovering strange new metals or pushing the boundaries of magical knowledge. To round everything you needed to haveâ€"in the most broad and general wayâ€"someone willing to hunker down intellectually and emotionally over pastrami sandwiches. But this is a general principle; it does not apply fractally to all worldly pursuits. I stayed up all night checking: pastrami sandwiches do not actually feature much in Blood Bowl. Possibly even less than I had guessed.
My team was called the Skeeters. They had never played a match of Blood Bowl as a team before. They looked to me with eyes brimming with hope that they would be guided, mentored, and fed promptly. Good. Why shouldn’t they be disappointed?
“Let’s call roll,” I said. “Where’s, uh…Potatoe?”
“Present!” cried three people.
“Fuck me.“
The halflings winced at the sudden profanity.
“Sorry. Sorry. Broccoli…s?”
“Here!”
“Giant murderous tree thing number one?”
“Huuuurmgh.”
“Okay, quick rules question. How many of those am I allowed to have? Maximum?”
“Two!” piped Potatoe (A).
“Two? Okay. And how fast do they run?”
Broccoli squinted as though reviewing some internal playback. “I guess they can move.”
“You know what, let’s just get our strategy together right now. Don’t teams have specialists? So who here has thrown the most passes?”
“Does it count if it’s to the other team?”
“Sure.”
“Does it have to have been on purpose?”
“Well, yes.”
There was a long silence.
“Alright, look,” I said, taking a knee. “I’m not going to lie to you people. This is…the best team I have ever coached. All of you show tremendous promise. I guarantee each and every one of you is going to have a food stand special named after you before this season is over. You’re all…heroes.”
“Are you okay?”
“I am crying because of this weighty destiny.”
“You look like you’re gonna be sick.”
“Sick with pride, son. Sick with pride.”
This was going to be a very long very short season.
I had five hundred thousand gold in war chest money to equip this team for the upcoming season. The money isn’t actually mine; it’s contributed by a wide network of investors and sponsors who are mathematically nearly as screwed as I am. The sport is heavily regulated, so fortunately nobody can just walk away with their money.
Unfortunately, nobody can just walk away with their money. Not even if you forge a dozen signatures and flash your team owner’s hat to an amicably sadistic goblin clerk in a cardigan. I was forced to pursue my last resort, which was to spend this money on the team.
The first thing to do after enrolling in the local league was to negotiate with my sponsor for additional cash. I projected to him that I would win ten percent of games and place second to last in the league; the sponsor rewarded what he optimistically assumed was my honesty by injecting a little extra cash into my kitty. I used it to hire some assistant coaches, accredited and overqualified by the fact that they’ve actually met a Blood Bowl player, a few apothecaries to keep the fatalities to a dull roar, a few “fans” to throw things and make a nuisance, and a few cheerleaders to sympathize with the burden of pretending this was going to be remotely okay. And that was that. My team was together. The season was starting. My fate was in their tiny, fat little hands. If i could win just a couple games this season, I might get out of this in one piece. A couple games. One or two.
You think the locker room has any extra kneepads?
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
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The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Good to be the King?
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
Whee!
Tactical comments for readers:
Okay, so Ruts has already made a serious error regarding halfling team builds. You see, Halfling teams have two types of players: halflings, and trees. Aside from the fact that they’re basically immobile and rapidly become actually immobile, the trees make for great bruisers. Halfling teams can have two. The trees job is to stand in the middle of the field and punch things, and to pass. Not the ball; they pass the guy holding the ball.He mentioned having at least one tree. It/they just weren’t on the roster because he couldn’t fit the whole roster into a single screenshot.
“dozen pairs of wide eyes” Math that with 14 numbers in the roster, although it says 16/16 players. I guess there might be two trees. Too lazy to work game cash numbers.
It seems like new people tend to like Halflings for some reason? Maybe it’s entertaining for a bit, hope there’s some mechanism for moving to a different team.
I prefer Skaven and Dwarves but I know that’s just me.
I like Undead. Having a bunch of players who can regenerate helps to keep player deaths down (and if your opponent loses a player well that just means more zombies for you). Although I don’t think the resurrect an enemy player as a zombie rule was included in the video game version.
I think people like Halflings because it’s funny to play with a team that’s composed of basically useless players. The other joke teams (Ogres and Goblins) are popular for the same reason.
The resurrect an enemy player as a zombie rule is included, though for at least one team where you’re supposed to be able to pick whether they come back as a skeleton or a zombie only a zombie is available in the electronic version.
I stand corrected. It’s been a while since I played the video game version.
Technically, the only actual advantage the halflings have is that they
have those cooks that MIGHT grant them extra, free re-rolls, if memory serves. So that’stwice the chance to fail miserablyat least.I wonder why Rustskarn didn’t just get the goblins. They have about all the same disadvantages of the Halflings like only having two actual tacklers… except that theirs trade in a bit of mobility in exchange to being too dumb to act, but with a much higher chance for hilarity to ensue. I mean, they can abuse the hell of the judges and use illegal contraptions that not only fail roughly 80% of the time, but ban the player that used it (if you’re out of bribes).
Many Halflings have died in the pursuit of a hail mary man-pass.
At least they die on landing instead of by being eaten.
Halflings have a great throwing game. Throw enough halflings down the field and one of them might survive long enough to get close to the touchdown line.
On the one hand I’m excited because I greatly enjoy Blood Bowl. On the other hand seeing someone suddenly start to play or talk about Blood Bowl fills me with dread because it’s an intensely dense game that is not easy to pick up, which leads to a lot of people complaining and not understanding.
I hope your Halfling Master Chief rolls well!
I actually just recently got into watching Blood Bowl 2 (don’t have the cash to get it), and having never even seen blood bowl 1, or the table top iteration, I was able to grasp the rules pretty quickly through watching BB2 play, but then I did go back and watch a match of BB1 and it is way worse at handling information easily.
On the other hand, Ruts is used to dissecting and creating all sorts of game systems, so I don’t see why he would have a particularly challenging time with this one in particular, though it is extremely punishing and the dice can be… cruel.
The only proper BB computer game is the java applet ,dammit. BB: the Game even has a Real Time version! The horror!
I’m sorry, I’m a board game fan :P
That said, there’s a difference between grasping the general rules, and all the intricacies to make a top team.
One good first hint, though: Don’t play halflings.
Or dorfs. Dorfs suck.
Chaos Dwarves, on the other hand, rule and are one of the two only teams to play. Always play CD when available. Or Khemri.
(I’m not saying these are the “best” in any actual gameplay way. Quite the contrary. They’re fun teams to play with in my opinion, though. All depends on personal preferences. The Elven teams tend to win by a landslide against both of these…If any elves survive >:D
)
Sorry for other OCD afflicted people :)
FUMBBL for the win indeed.
I’m confused. He said he was playing the first video game version, but that would be the 1995 game, and this looks nothing like that….
I think I’m in a perfect spot for this, I know just enough of BB gameplay that I can hope to understand what’s going to happen but I never really got invested into the game so I won’t feel frustrated with someone else’s play or feel the need to give advice.
Yay, Blood Bowl! I remember trying to gauge interest on the forum for this game a while back but nothing came of it. Nice to see some coverage of it–it’s the “real” fantasy football!
This is beautifully written, by the way.
Hard to use the forum when the Comments are already so hectic. I don’t even remember which password I assigned to the forums…
Ruts, I have a burning question. Will your series adhere to the rich Blood Bowl canon?
Praise Nuffle!
You laugh, but Black Library has a Blood Bowl novel.
You say novel when I think you mean trilogy.
Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull God! Halflings for dinner!
I feel inclined to correct you there, it’s “Skulls for the throne of Khorne” >:(
If you’re being finickity I believe the standard chant is ‘BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!’
Khorne isn’t actually mentioned as far as I can remember. Kinda depends where you’re taking it from, but then you were the one to pick holes first.
I thought the full version was “Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne of Khorne!”? It’s been a while though, so I’m not sure.
I look forward to seeing how this train wreck pans out!
Question: How much (if any) Blood Bowl has Ruts played before?
Somewhere between none and 0 hours,I guess.
If the Ye Olde Chocolate Hammer Annals are to be believed, more than that.
I don’t know if you’re interested in this at all Ruts, but if you’re trying to optimise a ‘fling team look up the ‘three tree’ build.
I actually have a couple of questions about Blood Bowl. Years ago I tried playing the game on console and it ended terribly (I also could not for the life of me figure out the rules). So with the release of Blood Bowl 2 I’m just wondering how fun are they to play? I looked at Steam and the first issue is that they have the Blood Bowl Legendary Edition and the Blood Bowl Chaos Edition, where Chaos came out 2 years after Legendary. Are legendary and chaos two different games? Is Chaos actually legendary but with additional teams? I read that Chaos has 23 playable races. Which game of the three would be the best for starting? Any help in figuring this out would be greatly appreciated.
Chaos Edition has 23 teams, 3 extra teams beyond what Legendary Edition has–Chaos Dwarves, Underworld, and finally Khorne Daemons, who like the Bretonnians of BB2 were created just for the video game (sort of, but it’s a long story). They’re cross-compatible with each other, though (that is, if you have CE you can play against friends who have LE and even use the extra teams).
If you don’t care about completionist tendencies, you’ll be fine with the Legendary Edition. The new teams aren’t top tier, but they do add a few more teams who are capable of getting mutations on their players, which are one of the more interesting ways to advance players.
There are a couple of bugs / errors in the CE / LE game that really irritate tabletop fans, but as someone who’s only ever played the digital version I don’t care that much.
I’m not one to care much about graphics, and I’ve had a lot of fun playing when with my friends. BB2 looks nicer and has a few additional features, but for the most part I’d consider it a gimped version of the game with only 8 available teams. Until they release more I probably wouldn’t start there unless you just really like the look.
Thank you very much. See this is the problem with always releasing even more editions. Here’s the complete edition. Now the game of the year edition. Followed by the elite edition. It just becomes a confusing mess where you don’t know what to go for. I mean anyone doing a cursory glance would assume the Legendary edition was the full one. Then looking at the release date and pricing you sit and go…what is happening here?
At least the Chaos Edition is sensibly named (all the new teams are worshippers of Chaos to some degree)!
At least in Blood Bowl 2 they’re just making all new teams individual pieces of DLC in the base game.
Your mileage may vary on whether you think that a good thing or not, since the legendary edition gave you a *lot* of upgrades for the price of what comes down to 3-4 teams under the new system.
I picked up Blood Bowl 2 after having never played the board game or the first game on PC or console.
The campaign mode of Blood Bowl 2 seems* to be a slow and drawn out tutorial. It introduces new mechanics each match (and between each match), so you get a chance to figure out what you are doing without being thrown into the deep end.
* I have only completed the first 3 matches.
See that seems really useful to me. I tried playing the Xbox 360 Blood Bowl years and years ago and just couldn’t get my head around it and just stopped. The only issue is Blood Bowl only has 8 teams to start whereas Blood Bowl Chaos has 23! As someone who loves playing alts and is constantly changing chars/teams that really appeals to me. So it would seem it really comes down to whether the variety of teams outweighs the amount of potential frustration I could encounter.
Ruts, are you playing Legacy Edition or Chaos Edition?
You started out playing Halflings? I admire your devotion to the comedy.
(For those not in the know: Halflings are widely considered the worst team in Blood Bowl, including by the fluff. They’re intentionally underpowered. At least if you pick ogres or vampires you don’t lose half your team every match.)
PS: If you’re planning on taking them online I’m available for matches.
Actually, with vampires you can lose half your team in a match due to your own teammates with bad blood rolls…You may not kill them but you can be down to a few vamps and a large lacking of mobile snack foods.
Yeah, but the players you are left with are easily worth three halflings each…
Well I did specify every match. Every Blood Bowl team loses *someone* sooner or later, even the toughest of dorfs or the dodgiest of elves. But only halflings and ogres (due to the snotlings) can expect every match to come with a 40+% KO or injury ratio in players. And in the ogres’ case, the 60% you got left can brutalise the opponent right back as long as you don’t bonehead too much.
On average I’d say a “good” vampire team (4 vamps, and some people consider that number excessive) causes 2-3 thrall outs per match even if you never spend a reroll on blood lusting, and most of those will be KOs that may bounce back. Even if you get a lot of bad rolls and double that number, vampires can actually do stuff with what they’ve got left like the ogres.
So, if someone were to post this link, here, would that be frowned upon?:
https://www.patreon.com/rutskarn
Just hypothetically, you understand – I’m not actually posting this link:
https://www.patreon.com/rutskarn
of course, given the risk that posting this link:
https://www.patreon.com/rutskarn
might be a terrible forks pass.
First of why halflings and not gobos. There is more murder with goblins and they are about as capable.
And second, may Nuffle be with you.
Goblins don’t radiate the same aura of comedy of errors mixed with schadenfreude-imbuing despair on the part of the narrator. Their malevolent enthusiasm for the game leads to a duology of slapstick, of hurting while they themselves get hurt, while the starry-eyed innocence of the halfling leads to the pathos of getting squished in an undeserved one-way trip to Nuffle’s bowels for our amusement.
It’s probably on account of the chainsaw.
The ball-chain can also be of use. It only murders your own team about half the time. Which, considering Goblins, are great odds.
My only piece of advice. ALWAYS BUY HALFLING CHEF! It’s the only advantage the halflings get and if Nuffle smiles on you, you can gain a lot of rerolls while you’re opponent has none.
“why are you playing halflings? they’re objectively the worst possible team.”
“you just answered your own question.”
One thing I never understood is why the Vampires are considered on the sewer tier with Goblins and Halflings in this game.
I mean, yeah, they have 1 chance in 6 of going crazy with each single move, but they’re agile like elves while being tough while orcs, you can have quite a few vampires in the team, they don’t need any special skill to perform well in any role AND they have a special ability to disable the most troublesome enemy players from your attempted play. As long as you provide a good amount of thralls to sate them, they pretty much steamroll over any team.
Though they do start to suffer if the game goes on too long and the thralls start to dwindle.
Technically speaking the “sewer tier” is ogres, goblins and halflings (in that order of terrible); vampires are generally considered on the level of khemri and underworld in that they’re workable but very limited. Anyway, to answer your question…
The problem with vampire teams is that blood lust is, to put it simply, the most crippling “you fail on a 1” drawback in the game, in that it forces your player to either injure a friendly player within reach or get effectively KOed and cause a turnover. None of the other nega-traits (bone head/really stupid, wild animal, take root) can cause turnovers. If an ogre goes bone-headed his action is wasted and that may cascade into a wasted turn because you needed his action to do something with another player. For a vampire, that failure means not only a wasted turn but being forced to reposition or take out another piece that may be equally important, or to lose that piece for the rest of the drive.
This means that vampires by nature are cripplingly re-roll dependent but also that they’re forced to play conservatively. A vampire must always have a thrall within reach to bite, or else you risk causing a turnover just by activating him. Vampires are as agile as elves, but you can’t run them deep into the enemy end zone for pass plays like elves because you need a thrall in reach to touchdown. Vampires are as strong as chaos warriors, but every block you make must be assisted by a thrall so that 4 strength is essentially wasted against a 3 strength piece. Also, vampire teams have no skilled positionals. None of their characters start with any skills whatsoever, meaning that just like chaos they tend to suffer from a lack of pieces that can reliably do blocking, passing or running without burning the team’s oh-so-precious rerolls.
From experience, it is actually better to for vampires to play offensively. They need to create an early advantage from their natural stats and then cling to it. Generally, use your re-rolls for those early bad bloodlust triggers and just keep those thralls handy. And the 4 strength is not really wasted, it means one less ally close by to get an advantage in the line… and that if the opponent only has a single character to try and tackle a vampire in the offensive, that character is probably going to be in a disadvantage. It is actually quite easy to get both a vampire and a thrall in position for interception by making holes in your opponent’s line with hypnotism, and since their stats make them have a good chance of success in both tackling and receiving, making plays once you get the ball make for easy scoring.
As always, just leaving the risky plays for last diminish their disadvantage by quite a lot. And vampire players are just slightly worse than specialized players at their task (unless it is super specialized, like an elf catcher), but at any task, making them extremely versatile, as long as the thralls are nearby for insurance.
I dunno. For me they just seem unbeatable at gaining that early advantage because you have to commit way too much players to hold any single vampires off, while they’re nimble enough to avoid the real threats of the enemy team (like Ogres, Trolls and Flesh Golems). The only strategy that seems to work reliably against them is coming down hard on top of their thralls to deplete them as fast as possible.
I have the second edition of the computer version of the game, was playing ogres.
Basic tactic is to bash everything, then once that is done, try and score a goal.
Most useful thing snotlings can do is to help gang up on enemies to give the ogre more of a chance to do damage.
Good times…
You forgot the middle step between “bash everything” and “score” which is “bash it again”. All those juicy targets laying on the floor having a nap make for good fouling opportunities!
Out of curiosity, does anyone know enough to summarise how the game rules have changed since the original tabletop game. I got it back when it first appeared, and granted we were ten-year old kids and therefore not really up on refined strategy, but all our games went the same way: a mass brawl near the middle of the pitch until one team ran out of healthy players, followed by the winner of the brawl scoring 3 touchdowns in quick succession against the outnumbered opposition.
Any attempts at ball-related strategy never seemed to pay off. The principle of “the opposition can’t score if all their players are unconcious or dead” seemed to dominae over all other considerations.
Presumably later revisions of the rules managed to alleviate this problem?
In essence, it’s become less “Warhammer Fantasy with a football” and more streamlined. There are only four stats (movement, strength, agility, and armour) and clearly defined limits on teams (11 players per team + up to 5 substitutes), game lengths (16 turns) and the ‘turnover rule’ that immediately ends your turn if any of your players fall down or you lose possession of the ball for any reason.
Modern-day Blood Bowl is usually played in championships similar to that of FIFA-football rules (so you get an even number of teams, division play where the top advances, followed by playoffs until only one team is left) where everyone starts at 1000 points/team value and your players skill up as you play matches. Which teams dominate depend on where in the league you are: Teams like amazons and norse tend to sweep short leagues, while elf teams, lizardmen and chaos do better the longer the leagues last.
In online ‘blackbox’ play like in the official leagues of the PC version (perpetual open leagues with no playoffs and no divisions, teams get matched up at random to the closest point value the servers can find), elf teams (especially Wood Elves) and Chaos tend to dominate when you get into higher values.
LOL. That was awesome!
Halflings are sort of workable for a human player against the often stupid AI.
It is a steep handicap you’re giving it, so you’ll need to stretch your wits to get results. Not that the idea is necesarily to get results.
PASTRAMI SANDWICH FOR THE HALFLING GOD
Halflings? I love halflings! They’re like little waddling sacks of Star Player Points!
I played an Amazon team with four Blitzers of the Killer Amazon Blitzer variety (Dodge, Block, Mighty Blow, Frenzy, Piling On, etc, etc), and another eight Amazons whose first skill was used to turn them into Blitzers too. Against Stunty teams the goal wasn’t to win, it was to get as close as I could to putting all 16 opposing players in the infirmary or the morgue.
I am currently playing a Campaign with a Chaos team. Had 2 consecutive matches against the same halfling team. During those 2 matches I think I injured 16 or 17 halflings and 1 tree, also killed 1 halfling. I got a lot of rank ups.
It was also nice seeing their team’s value decreasing because of the death in the first match.
I once got a Goblin team down to 2 players fit to play. I was scoring touchdowns not just for the points and the associated SPP, but also in the hopes that a few of the KO’d goblins would recover enough to be fed back into the grinder.
Oh man. Bloodbowl. To the folks here not particularly acquainted with this noble sport, what is going to happen is that Ruts here will kill half his team, by himself, by literally throwing them. While this happens, the other half of the team will be mercilessly beaten to death by the other teams scrawniest players.
At least its not as bad as trolls, who stand a fair chance to straight up eat the player they are supposed to throw.
Getting 16 players was a big mistake. Halflings tend to have a huge difference in team value, enough to get a star player or two almost every game. Problem is, you can’t do that with full slots.
P.S. Not to worry, though. A place is bound to be freed within the next 2 games.
That’s assuming the team can even survive the next two games…
This is really funny. I was giggling so much, I tried to explain by reading a section to my wife without having to read the whole post out loud. It didn’t work. But I was laughing the whole time anyway.
Hey bloodbowl fans, it’s time for another exciting season of bloodbowl! We’ve got an amazing line up this year, isn’t that right Jim?
Oh definetly Bob, we’ve got a wonderful season lined up. With the recent treaties even the Chaos Dwarves are being allowed to play this year
That’s great Jim, those squats sure know how to shed some blood on the field!
Of course we’ve got some new teams entering the league from the current teams, as well as some returning oldies with new coaches. Let’s see…oh, dear
It wasn’t me, it was the camera guy.
Not that Bob. It seems someones gone and bought the halfling Skeeters
The skeeters? What idiot decided to buy them?
Frankly Bob, I’m amazed their are any left after the unfortunate ‘Halfling Jam’ incident a few years ago. Really, when the ogres decide to throw something like that you’d think people might realize it’s not about music
Didn’t you attend that?
Well Bob, I AM a vampire.