Dungeonbowl Project

[the solitaire]

Light College: Dwarfs, Halflings, Humans, Norse, Werewolves
Gold College: Orcs, Snotlings, Chaos Dwarfs, Hobgoblins, Ogres
Jade College: Orcs, Goblins, Snotlings, Hobgoblins, Trolls
Celestial College: Wood Elves, High Elves, Dark Elves, Dryads, Treemen
Grey College: Humans, Chaos Humans, Snotlings, Beastmen, Ogres
Amethyst College: Skaven, Goblins, Snotlings, Beastmen, Minotaurs
Bright College: Dwarfs, Halflings, Humans, Norse, Ogres
Amber College: Dark Elves, Orcs, Skaven, Beastmen, Minotaurs
Rainbow College: Wood Elves, Halflings, Humans, Amazons, Treemen
Dark College: Skeletons, Zombies, Dark Elves, Chaos Humans, Trolls

This list looks pretty good actually, and the suggestion of having:

Max # of players in team = 16
with 0-16 linemen
with 0-6 positionals max. / team, limited to 0-2 of each of the positionals
with 0-1 big guy players

Each position must be filled with players of the same race/roster meaning that if you field a Light College team and choose Dwarven Linemen, all your linemen should be from the Dwarven team roster, and they must be from the corresponding position, in this case Longbeards and so on.

sounds well balanced to me. In dungeonbowl some advantages/disadvantages do not weigh as heavy as in BB due to the dungeon layout and the unknown ball location as well as a lack of "drives".

If you leave out any further requirements this would allow you to use at least one player from each race in the college of magic you choose.

You could of course add gold value to build your roster, but to be honest, I don´t see a reason to do so. If you want to pick 16 players, so be it. You can field 11 players for the game and when the first team scores a touchdown the game is over so there is no need for reserves.

When playing a Dungeonbowl league, which would be pretty interesting in itself, team value will of course become interesting. I always liked the "teams start out with 1,000,000 gold..." bit and that could be applied to the colleges of magic lists as displayed above without much of a problem.

Maybe just add "Azure College of Magic" Lizardmen, Amazons, Slann, Humans, Skaven

[yggdrasil]

I agree both with your points yggdrasil, and with the comment you quote.
However, the comment has been made about BB, not DB.
IMO it makes a LOT of difference, because they are almost two totally different games, that just share the same rules.

Aha, thanks! I didn't catch that from the linked thread, I thought when it was talking about dungeonbowl teams, it meant using them in dungeonbowl. If it was intending to use them in BB, then it all makes much more sense. Mainly because then the DB teams would have to be balanced to some extent with the existing BB teams. In pure DB, the idea (as I see it) is that all the teams are college teams, and therefore everyone has equal access to mixing and matching it up.

[yggdrasil]

This list looks pretty good actually, and the suggestion of having:

Max # of players in team = 16
with 0-16 linemen
with 0-6 positionals max. / team, limited to 0-2 of each of the positionals
with 0-1 big guy players

Each position must be filled with players of the same race/roster meaning that if you field a Light College team and choose Dwarven Linemen, all your linemen should be from the Dwarven team roster, and they must be from the corresponding position, in this case Longbeards and so on.

sounds well balanced to me. In dungeonbowl some advantages/disadvantages do not weigh as heavy as in BB due to the dungeon layout and the unknown ball location as well as a lack of "drives".

If you leave out any further requirements this would allow you to use at least one player from each race in the college of magic you choose.

You could of course add gold value to build your roster, but to be honest, I don´t see a reason to do so. If you want to pick 16 players, so be it. You can field 11 players for the game and when the first team scores a touchdown the game is over so there is no need for reserves.

When playing a Dungeonbowl league, which would be pretty interesting in itself, team value will of course become interesting. I always liked the "teams start out with 1,000,000 gold..." bit and that could be applied to the colleges of magic lists as displayed above without much of a problem.

Maybe just add "Azure College of Magic" Lizardmen, Amazons, Slann, Humans, Skaven

Glad you like the college race suggestions (and thanks to Axt for liking the golem). I'm not sure I understand the lineman suggestion though. You suggest that that if you field a Light team and have dwarf linemen, then all your linemen must be dwarfs. Why? I'm not sure I get the idea behind the suggestion.

The issue of positional players and big guys I am iffy about. On one hand, I prefer not setting a cap on specific position types (blitzer etc) because then you technically would need a chart indicating what each position "counts as", ie. if runners count as catchers, wardancers count as blitzers, etc. No more than two of any non-lineman position from the same race, lineman being defined as any position that is normally 0-12, seems simpler to me. On the other hand, if you ignore the chart requirement and just use common sense, then the traditional system works well too I think.

You're right that you don't really need to build a team using gold values - BB and DB in 2nd edition just had you pick the players you wanted too, after all, without having to pay for them. However, in our league we've been building teams with gold following the normal BB campaign rules. I think it does matter somewhat how many players are on a team - you get to teleport in players from your reserves into the dungeon each turn, after all, with no cap, so a 16-man goblin team will have a numerical advantage over an 11-man elf team relatively quickly, especially if some of the elves get hurt or lost in space. Also, without gold you don't get to make interesting decisions about whether to prioritise more players vs. re-rolls vs. apothecary and so on. If you have any thoughts about issues with team value, please let me know.

My only problem with an Emerald or Azure College team is that it feels wrong to add to the traditional eight colours! Therefore I thought it would be more appropriate to add a third "meta"-colour that doesn't have a specific colour as such, like dark (no colour) and rainbow (all colours). The "High College" idea was supposed to be a "beyond colour" concept of some kind, though I'm not sure how this could be reflected in uniform. Some kind of silver or grey perhaps?

[Axtklinge]

(...) The "High College" idea was supposed to be a "beyond colour" concept of some kind, though I'm not sure how this could be reflected in uniform. Some kind of silver or grey perhaps?

I'm sure there's a "Grey" in there already.
How about staying away from colours altogether, and aiming at a more abstract concept?
I've mentioned "Life College" before because according to some 'fluffists' the Slann were descendants of 'the old ones' (either that or the old ones themselves), and were deeply involved in the creation and/or evolutionary process of several races including humans, orks, etc.
On the other race (Liz and krox), if I picture Lizardmen and think about the environment were they fit, I can easily relate that to "life" concept.
But I'm sure there's plenty of cool options among those lines if you don't like the "Life College" idea.

[the solitaire]

Glad you like the college race suggestions (and thanks to Axt for liking the golem). I'm not sure I understand the lineman suggestion though. You suggest that that if you field a Light team and have dwarf linemen, then all your linemen must be dwarfs. Why? I'm not sure I get the idea behind the suggestion.

The idea behind having each position in the roster (linemen, runner etc.) filled up with players from the same race is to keep things somewhat simple. That way there is no need to make a chart with "counts as" for each of the positionals. If you want a list with 2 gutter runners, 2 witch elves and two orc catchers along with a bunch of linemen, I don´t see why this shouldn´t be possible. The opponent might take 2 orc blitzers, 2 dark elf blitzers and 2 stormvermin. Still don´t see a problem as both variants have advantages and disadvantages and I would personally prefer a good mix rather then specializing on team choice, even if it´s only for fluff reasons.

The issue of positional players and big guys I am iffy about. On one hand, I prefer not setting a cap on specific position types (blitzer etc) because then you technically would need a chart indicating what each position "counts as", ie. if runners count as catchers, wardancers count as blitzers, etc. No more than two of any non-lineman position from the same race, lineman being defined as any position that is normally 0-12, seems simpler to me. On the other hand, if you ignore the chart requirement and just use common sense, then the traditional system works well too I think.

I do think we are thinking along the same lines but use different ways to define what we mean.

You're right that you don't really need to build a team using gold values - BB and DB in 2nd edition just had you pick the players you wanted too, after all, without having to pay for them. However, in our league we've been building teams with gold following the normal BB campaign rules. I think it does matter somewhat how many players are on a team - you get to teleport in players from your reserves into the dungeon each turn, after all, with no cap, so a 16-man goblin team will have a numerical advantage over an 11-man elf team relatively quickly, especially if some of the elves get hurt or lost in space. Also, without gold you don't get to make interesting decisions about whether to prioritise more players vs. re-rolls vs. apothecary and so on. If you have any thoughts about issues with team value, please let me know.

My only problem with an Emerald or Azure College team is that it feels wrong to add to the traditional eight colours! Therefore I thought it would be more appropriate to add a third "meta"-colour that doesn't have a specific colour as such, like dark (no colour) and rainbow (all colours). The "High College" idea was supposed to be a "beyond colour" concept of some kind, though I'm not sure how this could be reflected in uniform. Some kind of silver or grey perhaps?

I think the college of Life as suggested by Axtklinge has a nice ring to it

[yggdrasil]

(...) The "High College" idea was supposed to be a "beyond colour" concept of some kind, though I'm not sure how this could be reflected in uniform. Some kind of silver or grey perhaps?

I'm sure there's a "Grey" in there already.
How about staying away from colours altogether, and aiming at a more abstract concept?
I've mentioned "Life College" before because according to some 'fluffists' the Slann were descendants of 'the old ones' (either that or the old ones themselves), and were deeply involved in the creation and/or evolutionary process of several races including humans, orks, etc.
On the other race (Liz and krox), if I picture Lizardmen and think about the environment were they fit, I can easily relate that to "life" concept.
But I'm sure there's plenty of cool options among those lines if you don't like the "Life College" idea.

You're right that grey is already a colour, I was trying to think of it in terms of "colour neutrality" if that makes sense... But that concept does kinda break down when white, grey and black are already existing colours. Since metallics are kinda taken by the Gold college, I guess all that is left is an alternative rainbow scheme - the rainbow colours traditionally used the primary colours yellow, red and blue, so a pseudo-rainbow college could use green, purple and orange. Or something.

I really like the thinking behind the Life College idea, as a kind of primordial pre-colour, and it was essentially the same concept I was thinking of too. My only issue is with the name "Life College". As I understand it, the Jade College uses a list of spells called the "Lore of Life" in current Warhammer, and therefore to me, Jade is already the "Life College", if you know what I mean. Also, I work at the university of Copenhagen, and up until recently we actually had a faculty called LIFE, which was the school of veterinary sciences.

I do think we are thinking along the same lines but use different ways to define what we mean.

Yeah, it sounds like it. It sounds like the only differences between our versions is that yours says that you can only have a maximum of 6 positional players in total, and you can't have more than one kind of lineman. If I understand that correctly, could you maybe explain further what the thinking is behind the two restrictions? Is it purely that you feel that having too many options becomes unwieldy, and not being able to have linemen from different races is more elegant?

[the solitaire]

Yeah, it sounds like it. It sounds like the only differences between our versions is that yours says that you can only have a maximum of 6 positional players in total, and you can't have more than one kind of lineman. If I understand that correctly, could you maybe explain further what the thinking is behind the two restrictions? Is it purely that you feel that having too many options becomes unwieldy, and not being able to have linemen from different races is more elegant?

Based on the rules for Dungeonbowl team creation (2nd edition) I tried to think how dice rolls would work out for 5 rather then 3 races and couldn´t come up with an elegant solution.

Of course I have nothing against linemen from different races, but setting up a system to work out how many of which you can take will be tricky. I preferred a simple solution. I might give it some more thought though

[yggdrasil]

Ahh, you mean where you rolled on a table to see how many players you got from each race? Interesting! Random team creation is certainly not something I'd considered. For one-off games it seems like it could be a lot of fun.

Are the differences between our systems then based on the fact that you're using a dice rolling system and I'm using a gold cost system?

Also, painted troll.

[Axtklinge]

Cool!
Love those helmets!

[the solitaire]

Love the trolls! Great work

Dice rolls for team creation is interesting and a lot of fun. I really liked it in the original Dungeonbowl rules.

It´s not that easy to try and get 5 races in though.

I would think something along the lines of:

Choose primary race from the list of 5,
then choose secondary, tertiary, quaternary and quinary race

For example, I wish to play Light College

List of races: Dwarfs, Halflings, Humans, Norse, Werewolves

I choose Halflings as primary,
Humans as secondary,
Dwarves as tertiary
Werewolves as quaternary
Norse as quinary race

The amount of players I can (not must) take from each of the choices is:

Primary 0-16
Secondary 1D6
Tertiary 1D4
Quaternary 1D3
Quinary 1D2

Big guys count as 2 players
Maximum amount of players on the roster is 16

I´m not sure what to do about positionals for the team when going by this concept though

[cyagen]

The Trolls are great!

I like your system Solitaire, more than mine.

However I would make the following changes to make sure that number of players fit the order of the races:

Primary 0-16
Secondary 1D4 +2
Tertiary 1D3 +1
Quaternary 1D3
Quinary 1D3 -1

With that you are sure that you'll get at least 3 Secondary, 2 tertiary...

For the positionals, make a flat allowance of 10 positionals. A positional being a non-BG, non-lineman player. A lineman is any player from a team that you can take 0-16 of (a gobo is a lineman, but the loony is a positional).

[the solitaire]

That looks good cyagen. I like those die rolls better then the ones I listed.

Who knows, we might be on to something good here I would love to be able to roll together teams again using Yggdrasils lists of colleges

I would prefer a limit of no more then 50% positionals (8) or even less (like 6) to make sure here actually are linemen on the field at some point during the game.

[velvet mark]

Those troll are really good! I think the green armour has come out very well:) Great job again!

[yggdrasil]

Those troll are really good! I think the green armour has come out very well:) Great job again!

Thank you! When I finish the last hobgoblin, I will try and take a full team shot for completeness' sake.

Regarding the races for team construction, my original intent was to have five different races to choose from, but still only allow a maximum of three races on the team at any one time. That way, you keep the original DB team structure, but simply allow flexibility about what races go on to a team, so that two teams from the same college don't always need to follow the same structure - so one Jade team could have Orcs as their primary race, and another Jade team could have Snotlings as their primary race, for example. The mixed race teams would thus have much more of a "build your own" kind of design potential. And this would work equally well whether you roll for the player types on the team or not.

That said, the idea of having five different races on a team at the same time is interesting too!

I just got a pair of Warhammer Quest doors in the mail that I bought a little while ago. Not 100% sure what I'm going to do with them, other than turning them into doorway tiles in the dungeon, obviously. I have a plan of turning them into doors that can be opened and closed, like the original DB plastic doors could, using lego door pieces, but I'm not sure if this will work yet. I will try and order some lego doors and then we shall see.

[axiom]

Love the new troll. What a cracking pair