we've been using a homemade Daemon BB team for several years now.
I recently described it to Nazgit, who figured it was insanely overpowered.
Even though we've run lots of playtest, and the daemons haven't fared particularly well, I figure that such a gut reaction means that the team appears powerful. So, against my better judgement I've decided to weaken the team slightly.
In it's slightly weakened state, the team looks like this:
******Daemon Team********
The daemon team is _the_ strength team, but is severely handicapped when faced with the ball. The daemons have a nasty habit of vanishing back to the warp, when faced with a hard hitting opponent.
-----------------------------
0-4 80K Plague Bearers..5417 horns, foul app.;.G+PH
0-4 80K Blood Letters...5427 piling on;........G+ST+PH
0-4 80K Daemonettes.....7327 claw, gaze;.......G+PH
0-4 80K Pink Horrors....6337 big hand, pass....G+PA+PH
80K Rerolls, apothecary + wizard as normal.
***************************
*Design Ideas:
-I wanted to create a daemon without tons of special rules and new skills. A "normal" team.
-I couldn't imagine major daemons bothering with Blood Bowl, so the team is minor daemons only.
-I made it an all daemon team, rather than a mixed team.
-The 4 chaos powers had to be represented by an equal ammount of players (4) so that no god got the upper hand on the team. Also, the players should be equally good (80K) for the same reason.
-Even with this balance, the daemons do not like eachother, so rerolls should be expensive.
-Daemons are nasty creatures. As the teams unique feature I decided that it should have lots of strong players (8).
-Finally, I looked to WFB for descriptions. These minor daemons are the same all over the time/space continuum, so I figured that they would also be the same in the BB world.
*Balance:
To offset their high strength and bashy skills, the daemons have many weaknesses:
-The team has very little AG, because the players have just 1 eye, claws for hands, or are generally disinterested in the ball.
-Their low AV reflects that the daemons are prone to being "banished". AV7 is a big drawback when you are in fact a fighting team (with expensive players).
-The team has no big guy.
-The team is very expensive. And the players are slightly overcosted rather than undercosted.
-Still, if value is any indication of power, then the daemons can put less GCs of power on the pitch than the elf teams can.
*Playing a daemon team:
-If you start your team with a reroll (or 12 players) you won't be able to afford an apothecary or a good fan factor. You are likely to need both, because your frail daemons will suffer as many casualties as they dish out themselves.
-You could also start with FF9 and no apothecary. A risky proposition, but at least your FF and an assistant coach might get you a reroll from the kick off table now and again.
-Lack of block, reroll skills and team rerolls will leave you turnover prone, just like the ordinary chaos team. Consider this when you chose your skills.
-Also like the chaos team, the daemons can grow into a very hard hitting side, but developing a team takes quite a bit of time and effort because you will be losing players.
-Like the Norse, you may realize that being hard hitting yourself isn't always enough once your opponents start to sport some firepower too.
*On pitch Problems:
-apart from having expensive fragile players, your main problem is that you can't put all of them on the pitch at the same time. You'll definately need a player or 2 who can pick up the ball. If you want to take advantage of your high strength then you won't be able to use many claw players. If you maximize your hitting power, then your on-pitch strength goes down.
-You won't win as many player to player match-ups as you'd think. If faced with a big player you can't be expected to dodge away, and chump-dodging (aka taking a dive) isn't so great with AV7. When you've got the strongest player, opponents will often dodge away, or take a 1-dice or even 2-dice-against block - which isn't all that great when a "both down" result is potentially devastating for you.
*Playtest: League:
We've been using variants of this daemon team for 4 years now.
After every season we've tweaked it a bit up or down, and the team, which this team is a weaker version of, has performed decently.
All in all, the current version is based on about 250 matches.
Still, local house rules may be affecting results, so the data may not be 100% reliable.
We've gone through many versions, but it is the new weakened gaze and piling on skills that have made everything fall into place.
*Playtest: LRB:
So, we've also played 4 games (so far) under 100% vanilla LRB rules. 3 with a slightly better version, and 1 with the team list shown above.
The daemons are yet to win their first game in this format, but games have been close.
Games and teams were designed and played as though in a league setting, (meaning high FF and no using the apothecary on your first KO).
Games were played by skilled coaches of comparable ability.
(Coincidentally, the daemons have had the first drive of all 4 games, which is kind of important when you are a squishy team on the LOS.)
They playtest team was comprised of:
2 plague bearers, 4 blood letters, 3 daemonettes, 2 pink horrors. apothecary, 7FF, 0RR.
This lineup was chose to maximize both their hitting power and strength advantage.
The games were:
0-1 against Khemri. A very nasty opponent for Daemons. No contest. Closer to 0-2.
0-0 against humans. A better match-up, but the ogre and catchers caused problems. The humans were very close to a lucky score on the last turn, but failed the scoring GFI after making a freak (5+) pick up.
1-2 against dwarfs. The dwarfs came back from trailing 1-0. Their high AV, block skill and slayers made the difference in a tight game.
1-1 against high elfs. Probably the "easiest" opponent for the daemons, but the elfs managed to dodge away a lot in the first half, steal the ball and score. But reduced in numbers their luck ran out, and the elfs had to cough up the ball on their own drive for a 1-1 draw.
Comments are welcome.
Feel free to try them out for yourself
Martin
) but AG2 seems a bit low (for dodging etc.)
Sorry Mr Wardancer, this drive you're eeevvilll 
