Talk Fantasy Football

OK, I have a shorter season to build rules for, and am looking for rules to discourage in-game concessions. I don't think it's hugely important, but I do want a stick to beat pansies with to keep them from refusing to play the tough games. I doubt I'll ever have to use it ... if I make it clear. My major problem is that in the regular season no player on any team that would concede will ever likely have more than 51 SPP, and if such a player did exist, his quitting the team would probably drive such a coach out of the game. But I do want some really ugly tough love to keep people from considering a tactical concession.

How's this? Edit in bold

If you concede, your opponent gets your MVP and Winnings, and you automatically lose and lose the FF roll. Then roll 1d6 on the Forfeiture Table to see what other misery befalls your team.

Forfeiture Table: roll 1d6.
1: Walkout! 1d3 randomly selected players quit the team in disgust and go to the Waiver Wire. You may hire them back immediately at value, or later at signing cost (in a format without a Waiver Wire, the players would be gone forever).

2: Holdout! Randomly select 3 players. Those players refuse to attend the next match to protest your cowardice. Treat them as if they were missing the game to injury.

3: Blackout! Your fans stop giving you love. Halve your Fan Factor permanently, rounding down! Your Gate in the next match is also halved, as your fans are dispirited.

4: Down and Out! Lose one Team Re-Roll Counter, permanently, on account of disaffection in the ranks. After all, why try if you're just going to give up?

5: Washout! Your team has decided that its desperate straits can only be cured by culling the weakest link. You must cut one player of choice who is not scheduled to miss the next match. Of course, this tactic almost never works: roll again on this table, treating any further "Washout!" results as "Luckout!" instead.

6: Luckout! You suffer no additional penalties. Maybe your players are just happy to have the week off. Or maybe they've just come to expect such things from you....

So in theory, if I keep rolling 5, I can lose my whole team?

Tbh, I think this table is harsher than the "lose players at 51 spp".

It is harsher on a poorly developed team, but on a team full of stars I'd take my chances with this table. I could easily limit the 5 result to one re-roll: thanks for the heads-up.

Do note that you get to pick the player on a 5. Only a roll of 1 (or multiple 5s, which I agree should be nixed) could possibly be worse than losing a single player on the standard concession rules, provided the standard concession rules have any teeth at all, and even then, a 1 probably isn't as bad because it's a random guy, not guaranteed to be one of your stars. But any of these results are bad (though if you're winless, Blackout! is not a big deal, and Holdout! will just hurt for one week).

Wow, you might as well just say 'No Conceding' as that's quite the harsh penalty! For most teams in a short league losing 3 players for a game (or permanently) will just encourage a snowball effect of continually losing.

I just feel like to potential loss in Team Value (temporary or permanently) is just too varied to really understand what the risk of conceding is. I'd rather reward the winner for such a decisive victory by transferring all post-game rolls (MVP, Winnings and Fan Factor) over to the winner. If you want to be harsh, I'd stick at just 0-2 players miss next game in addition to the roll transfers.

God, I'd love a world where you could have a fixed schedule and a "no conceding" rule. But that's just dreaming. Conceding is unsportsmanlike, and conceding coaches should be treated with the minimum sympathy so that if they're not total pansies they'll suck it up rather than losing all hope. The worst thing that can happen is bad blood over Blood Bowl, and nothing makes bad blood like "I'm not going to play you, because I'd rather have a lost week than get beat up, so you win." Oh, except "You mean I flaked out ONE stinkin' game and my two best guys quit? What am I going to do now?"

Did you read the penalty in the rulebook? It's either nothing at all or the whole damn farm. Half your players with 51 SPP! Either you blow it off 'cause you don't have any, in which case the penalty is sleeping on the job, or it robs you of the gems of your team and drives you out of the game forever. I'm looking for a happy middle ground that says "conceding to save the team is never the right answer, but if I get stuck with a concession I can recover."

One way to handle Walkout would be to make it a d16 test, and if it comes up with an unfilled roster number nobody quits. That way, teams that are already low on men don't suffer as badly on average. I could also limit it to players with 50 or fewer SPP... or I could just make it a flat 2 players.

This is maybe a little complicated, but here's another alternative. Select a player at random. If that player has 50 or fewer SPP he quits the team. Then roll 1d6. If the result is less than or equal to that player's Star Player Rank, repeat this process.

Lots of fixes. @ Napking: are you saying that only Walkout is problematic? I can handle two small fixes on this table, so long as they don't add more than 20 or 30 words or use weird mechanics that are hard to figure out.

@ everyone: are Holdout, Blackout, and Down and Out good?

I've only conceded a match once, half-drunk and furious at the stomping I was receiving, and the shame of it is enough that I'll take my licks next time.

Wanchor wrote:I've only conceded a match once, half-drunk and furious at the stomping I was receiving, and the shame of it is enough that I'll take my licks next time.

That's a lad.

ah, you're thinking of coaches not even starting a game. I was thinking of it as conceding partway through a game in which you have no (observable) chance of winning.

Yes, you'll need big penalties for that.

In my opinion these kind of fluffy rules should be reserved for the fun stuff. If a rule is meant to root out unsportsmanlike behaviour make it clear, stern and totally lacking of fluffy 'fun'. That will sent a clearer message, that these rules are not meant to be used.

Severity is another issue, and is more debatable. A simple rule that forbids tactical concessions and states that the league commishioner will look into cases and decide on the penalties would seem enough. The threat is vague enough to scare people from conceding frivolously.

Yeah, but if I don't specify a penalty and then try to enforce one, I look like an ogre (I look like an ogre anyway — I'm a 250-lb Norwegian-Cherokee — but at least I can stick to looking like an ogre literally and leave the figurative part out of the picture). I could easily adopt some rule and stick with it, but I have no faith at all that I'll find an equal-opportunity hate machine. If I attach a die roll to it, it's more likely that one or more results will have actual deterrent value.

I still agree with you that conceding purely for tactical/cowardly reasons should be strongly discouraged, but disagree with the method.

Random penalties for out-of-game coaching violations just don't sit well with me. "Hid a miniature of your opponent to prevent that player from playing? *roll* A six! Well, of you go then."

Maybe then just put a bulleted list of possible repercussions? For instance:

Giving a clearly tactical concession, to be judged by league commissioner, will result in one or more of the following penalties:

• removal of one or more rostered players
• removal of team re-rolls
• loss of fan factor
• game penalties for players (MNG)
• ...

Then everyone knows what could happen when chickening out. And also there's the freedom of choosing the severity of the penalty with accordance to the blatantness of the 'crime'

Voted too cute. Oxynot makes a good point about being too cute with sportsmanship rules. They should really be simple and not random at all so that it is always enforced the same way.

Borrowing an idea from our league, how about:
1st concession - yellow card (Warning)
2nd concession - red card (banned from playoffs/bowl games for this season).

You can call it the "play like you've got a pair" rule (as in Warmachine).

The problem is that none of those penalties individually can be applied with confidence: some team somewhere won't care about any given one of them, unless I make it crippling, which isn't acceptable either. This is the fundamental reasoning behind a random penalty: some teams will be worried about losing players, others about losing TRRs. If you can think of a penalty that hits everyone equally, I'm all ears. Again, the standard is big enough to be a better deterrent than a game against a killer team, and small enough that one can recover from the blow (except in the playoffs...), for every team.

Banned from the playoffs means suspended from the league, a pretty severe step. I'd rather keep it in-game, but I do like that as a second-offense penalty. I'm dead-set against a "warning" mechanic: I have a set of much softer concession rules for special cases.

napking wrote:I was thinking of it as conceding partway through a game in which you have no (observable) chance of winning.

Mercy rule? You can take the softer concession rules immediately after an opponent scores in the second half if you're down by three or more (you must concede before rolling KOs). You receive the lesser penalties for conceding (give up MVP and Winnings, lose FF roll), but no players quit, no roll is required on any table, or whatever.

Hmmm... needs salt. How about changing minimum 3 players to minimum 4, 5 or 6? Or allowing a team to concede without quitters if it ends up missing at least 25% of its total attendant on-roster players for the following match? How about if more than half the team is in the Cas bin, or after the third final 51+ result? It also needs to be a "start of turn" thing rather than "end of drive" as its primary objective would be to reduce the impact of stalling. It can't be allowed to work in the first half: if you can't take 8 turns of heat....

I don't think I like this idea, or maybe the softest version of it, like allowing concession without penalty if the team can field up to 3 players, instead of up to 2.

I've conceded a match before. I was undergoing a drug therapy that left me exhausted and irritable, and the coach I was playing against decided it would be fun, up 3-0, to start picking off my players to foul. I realized at that point that I just didn't care enough about the game at that point in my life to sit through it, so I conceded the match and left the league for the season.

And in my mind, the penalty for conceding has to take into account the very real possibility that the people at the table are not having a congenial time, and the very real possibility of violence or extreme longterm league damage exists.

So a concession rule has to have a harsh penalty (so you don't dodge the tough coaches and teams) but not completely destroying your longterm enjoyment (because some weeks are bad weeks, and sometimes two people aren't getting along- but next week will be fine.)

In a short term league, there is a real risk that coaches might write off the prospect of playing an opponent, rationalizing that the MVP, odd SPP's, and ~40k in winnings isn't enough to make him play the match... so he could concede, or start the match and concede once things got rough or out of hand.

I think there are two approaches I would consider.

1- a penalty which gets lesser as every turn goes by (so conceding on Turn 1 of the first half is handled tougher than conceding on Turn 8 of the second half.)

2- A set penalty which has the risk of doing longterm damage to your team.

For 2, I think a good rule would be to simulate the riot that the fans throw after not getting in a full match

1d3 randomly determined players make casualty rolls.

The potential for 3 serious injuries or deaths is not very high, and 50% of the time you get off with no longterm damage (only MNG or BH.) The rest of the time, you soak up some team damage, but with inducements, the team is still playable.