Dungeonbowl Project

[axiom]

I can't believe you've made that old plastic mono-pose human look decent. I gave up on doing anything with mine, I found them that uninspiring. Your conversion might make me look at them again!

[yggdrasil]

I know, those humans (and orcs too) are really really difficult to work with. But ultimately the main problem is the weird head/helmet/bubble thing they've got going on. If you have the patience to saw the head off and add basically any other human head, they look pretty OK I think.

I've made a handful of Norse players for a BB Sevens team once out of them using the above method, they haven't been painted yet but this is what they look like in the raw.

[the solitaire]

Those Norse look pretty awesome.
An idea worth stealing maybe?

[Axtklinge]

Sometimes a little teak is all that is needed to give a new look to an 'old' mini!
Now we need to see some ink on them!

[yggdrasil]

That's what I like about making project log threads like this one - I haven't looked at or thought about these norse guys for ages, but now that they've come up in discussion here, I now feel inspired to work on them again. Cool.

Edit: I entirely forgot that I used those human models on the Grey Shadows team too, so here is another example:

[yggdrasil]

There's actually an issue I wouldn't mind feedback on in relation to this topic. I don't know if anyone is particularly interested in the design philosophy behind dungeonbowl teams, but hear me out.

In the original dungeonbowl, the rules were based on the idea that each player had to pick a team, not a team type, but a specific, named team - the ten ones that I am working on getting painted in this thread. This is all fine when working on a premise of one-off games and a boxed boardgame format, but when you move the game premise more towards a Necromunda-style campaign system where players build their own personal teams, this becomes a bit restrictive - what if two players both bring the Blood Axes? It diminishes a bit of the potential immersion in the game's atmosphere to only have ten unique named teams as the sole options for play.

I've been struggling with this for a while because on the one hand, I like the original setup and want to retain it, but on the other hand I also want to allow for a more satisfying campaign environment.

One obvious solution is to make each team into an archetype rather than a named unique team, as I was writing about before. My only issue with that is that if the teams are no longer unique, that makes me want to open the teams up for more flexibility in team creation. If there are a bunch of Bright College teams, then why do they all have to be built on the same exact mixed race template? Couldn't some of them have humans as the primary race and dwarfs as the secondary race, and couldn't some of them have ogres?

Based on this idea, I was thinking that maybe a nice team creation system would be to make the race selection a lot more free-form. I wouldn't want to make it totally free-form, ie. you can pick any races whatsoever to make up your team, because that would drain all of the character from the colleges if the college has no influence at all on the races you can put on their teams. However, a partial free-form system might work. I was thinking of having a list of five races for each college, that work within the thematic concept, and saying that a team from a college gets to make up their own combination of primary/secondary/tertiary races from the list of races available to that college (big guys only being available as tertiary races). This would keep the different colleges aligned with a specific theme (good/chaotic, elf/greenskin etc), but let the different teams within each college actually be somewhat varied in terms of race composition. For example, the allowed races for the Light College could be dwarf, halfling, norse, human, werewolf. Any three of these can be combined as primary/secondary/tertiary races, except that WWs can only be tertiary. This system would then let you build either the Doom Forgers (dwarf/halfling/werewolf) or the Tallow Candles (all halfling) as Light College teams, which would be very satisfying since the Forgers were described as originally being the all-halfling Candles in a previous incarnation. You could never actually build a Candles team using any version of the dungeonbowl team rules, but using this system, you can - just pick halflings as your primary race, and ignore the others (since only primary race players are mandatory).

My favourite aspect of this idea is that it totally eliminates the "generation problem", which is that the original DB rules and the WD DB update article had different race combinations. The reason this is a problem is that if a player either has a team from the original game, or wants to build a classic team based on the boxed game, then that team might not be legal following the updated rules. For example, the Grey Shadows was a human/snotling/ogre team, but a legal Grey College team could only field human/chaos/ogres under the update rules, so the original Grey Shadows would not be a legal updated Grey College team. To me at least, that is very unsatisfying.

The only concern I can imagine is that increased flexibility increases the potential for min/maxing, in the sense that players might feel that certain combinations of races are more powerful than others, and that each college would therefore have a default "most powerful" race combination and the rest would not get used. I don't see that as an issue per se though - this is Blood Bowl, after all, where people happily play goblin and halfling teams despite their unambiguous weakness, and Dungeonbowl is a particularly unpredictable and chaotic variant. Not being a tournament-oriented competitive game variant, the min/maxing weakness isn't something I see as a serious issue. I imagine most players would pick their races based on what races they like and what models they happen to have available, not what seems the most powerful. But even when they do, that would just be a kind of natural selection process that isn't inherently harmful I think. Having options is better than not having options, even if players choose to not use those options (like the Tallow Candles example above, where having the option of building a halfling team is about logical consistency and character, not about the actual need for halfling teams).

Comments and thoughts welcome if anyone has any.

[Axtklinge]

First just a question about the Grey Shadows picture presented above: Is is me or you've managed to convince a CADIAN to play DB?



Now unto more serious issues...
That could actually be a incredibly interesting take on the DB team building.
As you've mentioned, if we disregard competitive gaming like tournaments and the sorts, that kind of flexibility would open a fantastic gate of opportunities as far as team building goes.
I admit I haven't spent any time at all looking for possible 'power houses' with that different approach, but perhaps the randomness DB has to offer might somehow help to counter those.
And then, the appeal to use bits and minis from the 'lead pile', to put a fun-fluffy-flavour team together would probably outcome (IMO) the urge to win at all costs that we sometimes see in BB.
Much like playing Halflings or Goblins for that matter.

Mister, you might just have found the Columbus egg of DB right there!

[yggdrasil]

Yes! The Cadian heads were the best thing I could think of to look a bit like the helmets on the plastic humans, which is the style of helmet they show in the Grey Shadows artwork, without having to keep the plastic human heads which just look like genestealer hybrids and not human at all.

I'm glad you like the team list idea. I was thinking of something like the following racial options:

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

You have to imagine the different races each having their own team instead of some of the multi-race teams we see in the official BB rules, but I don't think that's too much of a stretch.

Also a thought: The races on a given team are not permanently fixed, but a team can only have a maximum of three races in total on its roster at any one time. This means that in order to introduce a new race on the team, the team would have to only contain players from one or two races in order to have space for the new race. For example, if you had built a Bright College team in the traditional configuration of Dwarfs (primary race) and Humans (secondary race) only, you could at any time choose to add a player from one of the other listed races as the tertiary race - you would not have to declare a fixed tertiary race when starting the team. Also, if all the Humans on the team should be killed off, their secondary race slot could be filled with a different race when repopulating the team.

Another appealing aspect from a practical point of view is that anyone with a small collection of BB models could build an ad-hoc mixed-race dungeonbowl team using the rules above - the lists should be varied enough that most combinations of two or three "evil" or "good" teams/races should be able to be merged together in one of the colleges. Unfortunately I couldn't seem to fit the Lizardmen-Slann-Kroxigor trinity in anywhere without breaking "character", so there'd have to be an 11th "high college" or "translucent college" or something added to bring in some lizardy goodness.

[Shteve0]

Good chat! I like this concept.

Just for reference, here is a post I put in elsewhere some time ago. There may be something usable in there that can help with this.
http://talkfantasyfootball.org/viewtopi ... l&start=16

In short, I was thinking along the lines of college teams being blooding grounds for future stars (not the finished product), so have adopted a three race system primarily of linemen. I also reckon that some special player types (and races?) are simply not going to go near a college at all (witch elves, wardancers, trollslayers), or are too rare or from too far afield to be anything other than a secondary or tertiary group (vampires, amazons, slann, wood elf).

May be some room for cross over. Just a thought

PS - I have that exact pic of your norse conversions saved for stealing from the first time I saw it posted. It's totally what I picture when I imagine a Norse team. Great job, with these guys (and everything else in the project for that matter)

[Aino]

Never played Dungeonbowl... but it itches more than ever, following this
I do like the non competitive oriented mixed race idea. Have 5 races for a maximum of 3 choices seems perfectly fine to me.
Also from a modelling point of view (usage of dust gathering led, plastic and bits) you are spot on i think, Yggdrasil.

Modelling-wise, I like your norse a lot. Not fan of all your work and your carry case/box makes even me break out in sweat (and I'm no known for handeling my miniatures correctly ).. But this is a great log!

Keep up the good and inspiring work!

W

[yggdrasil]

@Shteve0: That’s a pretty cool idea. I did something similar once with a ”mongrel team” for BB, based on the Mongrel Horde concept, where you could mix and match all the chaotic and neutral races at will, but could only field linemen. A lineman-based team system of the kind you describe could be like an amateur league variant kind of scenario.

Yeah, I also think the Norse look better with proper full body armour instead of the Conan the Barbarian look the current ones have going. Essentially these are built to be 2nd ed Norse with AV 8 rather than 3rd ed Norse with AV 7.

Once I feel ready to work on these plastic norse, I was thinking that I could utilise the principles above and make them into a Light College team with norse as the primary race, and maybe humans as secondary and halflings as tertiary.

Thanks for pointing me at Thadrin’s thread by the way. Since I am only qualified to post in the miniatures section, I don’t really look at other sections. The discussion about how to give access to positional players is very relevant to me. My system of 0-2 of any positions from any races has an issue of allowing 0-6 of any position type that exist in all three races, which is normally not possible, but I feel that it has the advantage of being simple. However, both this and the traditional 0-2/0-4/0-4/0-2 system has the weakness of allowing a huge number of options of combinations of race and position, and this huge number of options just isn’t elegant. Your system of almost all linemen solves that, but I really wince at losing the options, inelegant as they are. I like that for the two skaven players on the Amber team, I get to freely pick whether they are blitzers, runners, throwers or linemen. Having that flexibility is very much counter to the streamlining of team building that we tend to see in modern BB, but I’m not sure I’d be happy about losing it.

This comment by sbubba is particularly worth some reflection I think: “One of the best things about BB is that we have 24 distinct teams all with varying playing styles and power levels at different TV’s. If you just mash them together with no real thought then they risk ending up being too samey and bland.”

The DB teams in their most base form certainly are just mashed together with no real thought, just a vague theme as a guiding principle, but rules equality has definitely not been a concern. The question is whether the result is that they are samey and bland. Personally I feel not, but if that’s a risk, then the proposed free-form system would amplify this problem tenfold. I guess the idea is that with a team like the Amber College, you combine the toughness and strength of Orcs with the AG 4 Skaven and Dark Elf players to make a team that is both agile and strong, and thus has no weakness, and therefore is both too strong and boring and bland. In comparison, other teams don’t gain as much from their combinations – a dwarf/human/norse Bright team has neither S4 or AG4 players, for example, just variations on a series of ST/AG 2/3 players. Not very elegantly or fairly balanced, you might argue.

I think this can definitely be an issue when looked at from a certain perspective. I just don’t see any way to resolve it without abandoning the race combinations that the original team lists were based on, ie. sacrificing legacy for design modernization. If I saw a modernized system that was both elegantly and fairly balanced, and also felt true to the spirit of the original, then I would probably be willing to abandon the old teams and adopt the new system. But since I haven’t seen such a system yet, my allegiance still lies with the traditional race combinations, and having them be a legal option is therefore my main priority. And as I indicated previously, I feel that success in dungeonbowl is (should be?) so based on random factors that competitive balance between the different team options isn’t as important to the enjoyment of the game as it might be in normal BB (halfling and goblin teams aside).

@Aino: Thank you very much!

[yggdrasil]

This is one of the new wandering monsters I've been working on for the last few days - the mighty Dungeon Golem!

[cyagen]

I tried to adapt the 3ed DB rosters to the current edition a while ago. These are the general rule I came with for team creation:

You can have a total of 10 positional players (non-linemen or non-Big Guy) and 2 Big guys. Linemen are unlimited.
For the first race, the limit is the team limit, for the second race, the lower of 0-6 or the team limit divided by 2 rounded up and for the last race the lower of 0-2 or the team limit divided by 2 rounded up.

I looked at the colleges and made the following changes, trying to keep with the original idea:

Jade: Gobos - Orcs- Human
Celestials: H.Elves - Pro Elves - Flings
Amber: D.Elves - Skavens - Orcs
Bright: Norse - Human - Dwarves
Dark: Undead - D.Elves . Chaos

I created 3 other colleges

Necro State College: Necro - Vampire - Kemries
United Chaos U: Chaos . Nurgle - C.Dwarves
Lustria College: Slanns - Lizardmen - Amazones

With that you cover all the teams in the LRB, except C.Pact and Underworld but it is OK since they are mixed team and would no fit my system (You can play UCU or Amethyst if you like the team).

I got no clue about the balance of the teams, but on paper it looks OK.

I addition, in a DB league, Leap must be a G skill.

Just my 2 cents.

[Axtklinge]

(...)This comment by sbubba is particularly worth some reflection I think: “One of the best things about BB is that we have 24 distinct teams all with varying playing styles and power levels at different TV’s. If you just mash them together with no real thought then they risk ending up being too samey and bland.” (...)

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.
(Ok perhaps not completely different, but I hope you see my point).
Take the example of BB7's, would you say it is a game well suited for Dwarfs or other slow moving teams?
Or Streetball for low armour teams?

Where I'm aiming at is, as we stand, the most balanced game and teams of all this fantasy football "versions" we have, is without a doubt BB (more playtested and all), and even there we have different opinions about the balance of the teams, and from times to times even evolve the rules slightly.
I agree when you say that certain DB team mixes may have potential to be better suited ones, but truth be told, if you take BB example that never stopped no one from playing with all the others teams possibly 'less able' (halflings, goblins, ...).

Bottom line is, this bigger race flexibility of the colleges of magic, increases the building "unique teams" appeal, which is a major step to have more ppl playing the game, even if some team mixes may seem to have an edge.

...
And I like your golem!

[Axtklinge]

(...)Another appealing aspect from a practical point of view is that anyone with a small collection of BB models could build an ad-hoc mixed-race dungeonbowl team using the rules above - the lists should be varied enough that most combinations of two or three "evil" or "good" teams/races should be able to be merged together in one of the colleges. Unfortunately I couldn't seem to fit the Lizardmen-Slann-Kroxigor trinity in anywhere without breaking "character", so there'd have to be an 11th "high college" or "translucent college" or something added to bring in some lizardy goodness.(...)

Two suggestions
"Life College" (after all according to some sources of fluff they 'created' several other races) or,
"Emerald College" (not so fluffy, but they do show up pictured in green most of the times...).