Strong, free and safe: terms for "blitzability"

[mattgslater]

1) A marked or line player, for these purposes, is one who may be subject to a Block action on the opponent's turn. Both of those terms are, of course, larger than this, but for our purposes, a player who is marked or who is on the LOS at the start of the drive, is subject to a Block action.

2) A point or strong player is defined as (rather than including, as above) a player who is not subject to Block actions, but offers a positional advantage if blitzed, such as a hole, a chain or a partition.

3) A free player is one who could be blitzed, but not so as to offer a real advantage.

4) A safe player is one who can't reasonably be blitzed (it may be possible...).

This has applications at all times in the game. Because defensive setup has been described pretty readily, let's use it for our example. Here is the Ziggurat defense:


The nose and ends in the Ziggurat are on the line of scrimmage, so they're "line" players. A blitz against the midfield or wing opens a hole, so those players are "point" players. Unless there's a Quick Snap/Frenzy thing going on to create crowd-pushes, the flankers are "free" players. The safeties are, of course, in "safe" positions. Other defenses have it differently, like the safe flankers in the Inverted Zig.

Also, at other times in the game these terms may have different applications. For instance, if you're running out a partition or trying to defend against a midfield cage, you need to provide some backup for the interior players to keep your number of strong pickets to a minimum. And if you're discussing a cage from an offensive perspective, these terms could also come in handy (keeping the carrier safe, sure, but a lot of cages are built to include lateral "free routes" consisting of multiple screens that can't be cut off).

[Joemanji]

blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarggghhh

[mattgslater]

Do I make your head hurt, Joe? I don't understand why this would be. I figure this concept is both simple and helpful, and unlike setup terminology, it remains applicable when talking about all elements of the game. Setup was a good place to start, and I'm sure we have a lot more filling in to do there (like down-men defense), but really now it just serves as a handy metaphor for the broader concepts we'd do well to tackle.

Terms like this do two things. First, they stand in for ideas that are difficult to communicate ("square screen" for "two players, placed two squares apart, on the same plane"), and second, they highlight the concepts that are really important, like the relationship between the player's location and that of his teammates, or the impact of the player and his position on the opponent's likely course of action. If a player is holding down the middle of a multiplayer screen unsupported, then having a term for that can function as a mnemonic to help a coach avoid costly mistakes (I say this because, AFAIK, there is no such term, and I made exactly that mistake last night). Likewise, using specific terms for players who are next to each other, one square apart, and two squares apart, reinforces the differences in support between those different formations, and also reinforces the "screen" as the outer limit of the two-player structure.

[Kort]

Interesting. I am also convinced that naming is a vital part of communication. I would like to see how your classification fares in an actual game.

[The Painted Goblin]

I get what you're trying to do Matt, but the problem is this....

If you're not careful, it will turn into something like American Football, which (to the newcomer) is a brick wall of confusing terminology that needs loads of research to understand what the commentators are even talking about!

I'm not a slow-witted bloke, but I have to admit to getting fuzzy headed when you start talking about corners, or partitions, or square screens etc. Maybe it's something to do with being English, I don't know.....
If you give a pet name to everything, and it takes root, the game will need it's own dictionary and become inaccessible to a lot of folk.

Just my tuppence worth.

[Ulthuan_Express]

If you're not careful, it will turn into something like American Football, which (to the newcomer) is a brick wall of confusing terminology that needs loads of research to understand what the commentators are even talking about!

^ This.

Noses, Ends, Safeties and Corners... if you're not familiar with American Football positions and terminology, these things mean essentially nothing. Winger and Flanker are more commonly Rugby terms, too, which further adds to the potential confusion.

[Joemanji]

Don't be patronising Matt. Your may enjoy this but:

1) Such a terminology cannot be pushed onto a group by a single person. It will grow organically or not at all. For example the term "drive" was not in the rulebook before LRB5 but was universally accepted amongst the internet and tournament community before then. "Blodge" is another term not in the rulebook but very well known.

2) What you are doing here is not creating a useful vocab for BB. It is creating an equivalent of management-babble. We need to increase our synergy so we can clarify the journey and move forward together etc. I go to tournaments and play against international standard coaches who often write match reports. They seem not to find any need for an extended vocabulary such as yours.

[mattgslater]

Hmmm. Here's what I see.

1) I have an ocean of ideas that I can't express. I'm very confident that if I had the proper vocabulary to discuss them, it would make me a much better coach, as well as most likely anyone involved in the conversation. Silly me, I thought that was the whole point of this website.

2) I consider the "jargon" issue legitimate, but overblown. I think as much as possible, it's best to make any term as clear and self-descriptive as possible; certainly, we don't need to get into receiving trees (at least not with nine branches) or complex numbered route names with color codes and all that.

3) I'm not trying to invent it all myself; I'm just trying to get the conversation going.

4) I don't think that "I don't follow you" means the same thing as "you shouldn't have this conversation." I also don't think that having a dense jargon is the end of the world. Look at Chess. Chess is loaded with jargon, but if you're a casual Chess player like me you don't know much of it at all, and you don't care, so long as the people you play with don't know or care either.

5) If you're on TFF, you've already taken the time to learn this very difficult game. You're the kind of person who plays difficult board games. I can't assume you're experienced, but I can assume you're hungry to get better. So I can probably also assume that if you need to occasionally pop your head into some glossary thread-sticky or ask somebody to clarify something in order to follow the conversation, you will. If you're puzzled by American football terms, it's probably because you just sat down to watch, and most likely because you're not a team-sports person. Get some non-gamer to just sit down to play BB and watch their reaction. So, sorry, if you care enough to be here, a little terminology isn't going to throw you.

6) A question for Joe: How do those coaches describe the itty-bitty minutiae of the game? I mean, they don't, because they don't have to. They just need a broad general sense of how the game is going, what's happening, all that, and for that they probably use only a little bit of homebrewed or common terminology. But the minutiae are my only concern; this is a game of inches, and getting better at that stuff in a way that's conveyable and repeatable requires terms that just don't exist in BB today.

[stick_with_poo_on_the_end]

I would allways use a tight end safty, but I worry that if I leave my deffensive nose unguarded, then I will end up on a negative blooty on a quack candle and wind up on the jessop jessop jessop!

[The Painted Goblin]

All fair points, but I've never felt the need to say "now if only I knew what to call that role/player/position, I could really nail this play....."

When it comes down to it, most of the names are already there:-
Ball-carrier - doesn't need any further explanation
hunter - same
safety - slightly jargony, but easy to guess as to it's role
blitzer - not tied to the piece, but the term applied to whoever is blitzing on that turn.

Once your kick-off set-up has broken up in the flow of play, position names are meaningless:- it turns into situtational stuff, like
whoever is throwing a block, it's "that bloke there will block that bloke" <point....point>

I could go on but....actually, you're right....if it helps you become a better coach, then by all means. My point was I don't see (and have never felt) the need.

[mattski]

Don't really have much of an opinion on the thread itself since I don't really care that much about it. But I did take a double look at this:

5) If you're on TFF, you've already taken the time to learn this very difficult game. You're the kind of person who plays difficult board games

As someone who tried to play Star Fleet Battles and ASL both of which you could use their rulebooks to prop up your car whilst changing a tire I simply can't think of BBowl as being anything even approaching difficult. Challenging maybe but that is more about the concepts behind the game and learning about risk-management (wow, how about that for making the game sound 'fun').

At the end of the day if using all this terminology helps players to think of the game in a conceptual sense and is useful to them then great. If not, well then the only person who is losing out is New Concepts, I mean mattgslater and maybe just typing all this out is helping him think more about the game anyway. Hmmm, seems like I did have an opinion after all...

[mattgslater]

=Once your kick-off set-up has broken up in the flow of play, position names are meaningless:- it turns into situtational stuff, like
whoever is throwing a block, it's "that bloke there will block that bloke" <point....point>

It's the "<point....point>" that I'm trying to get to. Why does this bloke block that bloke and not the other bloke? I mean, he's in both of their TZs, and you could work out an assist either way, right? Well, maybe that bloke is the "inside picket" in a "hedging screen," while the other bloke is part of a "trap wedge" and blocking him does you no good.

@mattski: I think any difference of opinion on difficulty, challenge, complexity, whatever is likely semantic. There are a lot of games with thicker rulebooks that are in my mind less "difficult." Sure, there's more to learn and remember before you become fluent with the rules, but generally speaking, tactical wargames just don't have the same depth of strategy as Blood Bowl. And I think we've only scratched the surface. ASL and SFB I'd say are both kinds of difficult: Blood Bowl is much simpler, but it's not any easier.

Definitely, getting through just one BB season should give you the framework to pick up almost any term worth using right away, either because you guess what it means from context, or because you ask somebody or read it in a glossary, and go "oh, that." Unless you go "oh, wow" instead, which is the real objective. But to get to the superlative, you have to be fluent with the banal. This isn't easy, because the banal doesn't by itself scream for definition, but if you don't define it you'll never really understand it. Even an incomplete or inaccurate definition is okay, so long as you can adapt it when it's challenged; by seeing how something doesn't fit your frame, you can reframe and get stronger still.

[mattgslater]

So, since "marked" and "line" are already in the common BB parlance, that leaves "safe" for a guy who can't get hit or marked, "free" for a guy who won't get blitzed but may or may not get marked, and either "strong" or "point" or something else that says "worth blitzing, but can't be blocked."

See? Baby step. Real intuitive.

[Purplegoo]

I would allways use a tight end safty, but I worry that if I leave my deffensive nose unguarded, then I will end up on a negative blooty on a quack candle and wind up on the jessop jessop jessop!

I had a quack candle when I lived in Leicester. Standard issue?

[Joemanji]

Standard Charlie Brown.