Talk Fantasy Football

Hey all

After playing through some more Blood Bowl matches on the computer game, I chose to experiment a little, and considering I always felt flat bored with other teams I thought "How can I make my goblins more interesting?" Five minutes later im in the matchmaker using 13 regular goblins and 2 trolls. I thought to myself, wow time for the biggest ass whooping in the world. Match ends 2-1...to me. I thought this was a fluke but turns out that second match, playing my cards right, I managed to pull a 1-1, although admiteddly both times the dice were fairly decent, but sticking to a game plan of opening tackle zones, split team to killerz and playaz, seemed to work pretty comfortably, even against Orcs in my fifth match.

Im not sure, maybe iv gone mad, but I am now greatly tempted to start an "old school" Goblin team in my local league [Or was it after LRb1 the Goblins got two trolls?"]. The reason iv started this thread is, I want to know what other people think? In a nutshell I would be a slightly tougher/faster and hit/miss reliability team over halflings [Take root or stupidity? Give me stupidity!]. However, it seems that the lack of secret weapons, while stealing away a lot of offensive power and wackiness, it seems that your team becomes somewhat more stable, because no one is going to be sent off aside from fouling.

Im not suggesting that I want to actually win with my Goblins, so to speak, but it seems to be a nice spin and more challenging than your typical Goblin team. What are other peoples views on this? Also I would like to know what edition Gobbos got their two trolls access to see how "old school" old school goblins really are.

Cheers

My old (i.e pre-LRB5) goblin teams never had SW, as they were only on the Stars, and we never played with Stars. I did ok.

IMO the stars add a lot of value to the goblin team. You don't need them, but you will do better with them than without. However it does drive a slightly different playing style to vanilla gobbos & trolls.

I don't like taking all the SW. Its just too easy to be pinned with one turn for one or two of them and Goblins, I have found are always short of guys and having four kicked out during the game just is too much. One or two I find is ok, but no more for me. Also induce Ripper as often as possible.S.

You will definitely have more (than usual) inducements and it sounds like fun to me.

Goblins are not too bad at the start. Especially your roster. This is due to:

You have 15 players and can foul as much as you want. Be aggressive with this.
Most starting rosters only have 11 players and are weak on positionals due to trying to get all those expensive rerolls. So they are vulnerable to the above tactic of fouling and hopefully to troll blocking.
Other goblin teams buy the SW players and then run out of steam by the second half or they backfire...
Other teams do not have tackle and a limited amount of block (unless you are facing dwarves / chaos dwarves). Norse will have block but only 7AV. You have a chance...

Once you get to games 5+, you will start to have the standard goblin problems.

The 3rd Edition (1993/4) Gobbo team is just Gobbos, but of course the Star Player system was different then.

I think your concept team will play fine, but it will play very differently to a Gobbo team with SWs.

The SWs are playmakers with a disproportionately high influence on the game (which is why they come with SW). For example, in my first game of the season last night with my rookie team Woteva (vs. rookie Necros), the Looney CASd the lone Ghoul (big influence) and the Fanatic sacked the ball carrying Wight (ultimately turning a loss into a draw).

Playing without the SWs implies a less technical and more "orthodox" style of play. which is fine. As pointed out above, you will have a more resilient roster (but of course in return you will have less ability to inflict damage). You will also have a somewhat leaner TV, as well as a different set of implied inducements (because you do not need bribes).

Have fun and let us know how you get on.

EDIT: Since this wasnt actually 100% relevent to my initial intentions, I will pop up a report soon as soon as I get a 100% gobbo team game under.

Wee Gobbo wrote:Firstly, the match was being played via the box set rules [LRB 2?] with LRB 5 rosters so....

Why?

I think it was out of genuine convenience, apparently, but I am not quite sure to be honest. Probably just easier to get the book straight out of the box than lurch around for the new rules.