Grak and Crumbleberry

[garion]

Thanks for the reply to a number of the points raised.

I'm glad you have got playtesters. I just hope they are people with screwed on heads - the geggsters, purplegoo, Joemaji's, spubbbba etc... of the world, rather than the cyanide crowd....

I assure you that we have some of those type of people. But that said, there are good players in the FUMBBL and Cyanide crowds as well, and I would be happy to have them provide feedback as well. Blood Bowl is not JUST a tabletop game, anymore, and smart coaches with "screwed on heads" are not found exclusively in the UK.

That's good to hear that you have experienced play testers behind the scenes. Please do not assume I was only saying UK based people have screwed on heads. I was simply pointing to a few coaches I know are level headed, rational very experienced and who would be good for this type of thing. Purely as examples of the "type" of person who imo should be trusted with this type of task. As you elude to yourself I am aware there are people with similar qualities based all over the globe.

Another small point I wasn't stating that there are no good coaches on Fumbbl or Cyanide. Again there seems to have been an assumption made here. Many of the names I listed as "coaches with screwed on heads" frequent Fumbbl. I was more so making a point that there are a lot of very inexperienced people that talk a whole lot of nonsense specifically on cyanide, that have only ever experienced that version of the game, an incomplete CRP and CPOMB style game play. So was simply saying to be cautious of the loud noises that come from that direction. Just my personal feelings anyway. There are though as you say some good eggs there too.

-Big guys have all kept their inflated CRP prices. Lrb4 pricing for Big Guys was fine. Even meeting in the middle would be preferable.e.g 130 Ogre

And yet virtually every team who can have a Big Guy will have a Big Guy, which proves the old adage that something is worth whatever people are willing to pay for it. The teams without access to Big Guys aren't generally dominating the teams WITH BGs, so I think this is a slight tweak towards a better balance between them.

While you make some fair points there, I personally do not really buy the old adage that something is worth whatever people pay. If that was true why the human Catcher price drop for example. People get players for fluff reasons too. I've seen Chaos teams with Minotaurs with Kick off return and Orcs with Leap DP Trolls in my time. So people will pay for the simple reason of "fun". This isn't a big deal though i agree.

I also do not think it is true most of the people that have teams that can take big guys do. I very rarely see Rat Ogres in Skaven, I understand it is more common on the fixed TV resurrection tournament scene, an area of the game I do not partake in. Similarly I see a lot of Chaos teams sans Minotaur, Norse teams sans Yheti/snowtroll and a lot of human teams without Ogres. Heck I even watched an all ogre tournament that was won by a team that had only snotlings and abused inducements. I would say Orcs are a pretty even split between taking troll and not and he is the best value for money out of all Big Guys. Lizardmen, I agree always have krox, Nurgle usually get a Beast at some point and the stunties obviously take theirs too.

As I said myself its the almost the minutiae, however I would say some of the big guys just feel very bloaty now, where as they didn't before when they were 20k cheaper, and they certainly didn't feel under costed. Its just Minos and Ogres really that feel particularly over priced. Rat Ogres too, though I understand the caution in making any changes to skaven that could make one of the best teams even better. But again I stress, this isn't a huge issue. Just the minor details.

-I guess the thing that worries me is this is all very reminiscent of 2001 in which we had 4 editions(1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 IIRC) of the rules and it became incredibly hard work keeping track of things. After this period we had the box set with 1.3 which never got updated again, and the rules online. I just hope as others have said we have a living rule book with all the up to date rules in.

How so? We currently have a main rulebook and one expansion book, which is roughly EXACTLY what we had circa 1994 when 3rd Edition and Death Zone was released. There's a supplementary list of teams which are, by and large, identical to what we've known for years. There's a pinned thread here where I've tried to collect all the new rules that have come out, although I admit I do need to update it some
.....
I will caution people not to expect too much too quickly. The new Specialist Games group will branch out to more than just ONE specialist game, and they will have some growing pains. They are not superhuman. They've hired more sculptors, but it takes time for these products to come to fruition. We do need to be patient. But there's a lot of good stuff coming down the pipeline and from what I've seen and heard, I think people will be happy.

Cool, well thanks for clarifying. I hope my fears are ill-founded really looking forward to the next release already!

OH one more thing, this is very VERY nerdy. But I was wondering: In 'Blood Bowl Death Zone Season One!' book. There is a DYK box on page 36. This uses a passage I remember from White Dwarf magazine 86. Albeit re-worded ever so slightly. In that White Dwarf the Snakeman team was called SSSchHit V'gghUYth. Where as in the new book they are called Kureshi Kobras. I was just wondering why this change was made?

It is especially interesting to me as I created a Snakeman team based off the team SSSchHit V'gghUYth and their fluff a long time ago. While there was little to no fluff about Snakemen in existence, either in WFB 3rd edition, or the BB background that appeared in the 2nd ed area, the background I wrote for my Snakeman team was based in Kuresh. I love that this newly named team is clearly based there as it confirmed my feelings that they would be the region of the world (sort of Cambodia Vietnam as I'm sure you are aware) they originated.

[JT-Y]

The name was changed because SSSchHit V'gghUYth translates as 'sh!t figures', which was hilarious in the pub back in '87 when it was scrawled onto a beermat for posterity, a beermat that still resides in GW's vault along with many, many other such beermats and not an inconsiderable number of fag packets.

That's not true. These days all names are presented in a pronounceable, human tongue so that people can actually talk about them in conversation.

[Milo]

Cool, well thanks for clarifying. I hope my fears are ill-founded really looking forward to the next release already!

OH one more thing, this is very VERY nerdy. But I was wondering: In 'Blood Bowl Death Zone Season One!' book. There is a DYK box on page 36. This uses a passage I remember from White Dwarf magazine 86. Albeit re-worded ever so slightly. In that White Dwarf the Snakeman team was called SSSchHit V'gghUYth. Where as in the new book they are called Kureshi Kobras. I was just wondering why this change was made?

Again, just to clarify, the playtest group was NOT involved in the production of Death Zone season one. Unfortunately, we can't really shed any light on issues like this.

[garion]

Cool, well thanks for clarifying. I hope my fears are ill-founded really looking forward to the next release already!

OH one more thing, this is very VERY nerdy. But I was wondering: In 'Blood Bowl Death Zone Season One!' book. There is a DYK box on page 36. This uses a passage I remember from White Dwarf magazine 86. Albeit re-worded ever so slightly. In that White Dwarf the Snakeman team was called SSSchHit V'gghUYth. Where as in the new book they are called Kureshi Kobras. I was just wondering why this change was made?

Again, just to clarify, the playtest group was NOT involved in the production of Death Zone season one. Unfortunately, we can't really shed any light on issues like this.

Ok fair enough. If in future you get to feedback to the people that do produce this stuff before it is mass published please stop something like this happening again.

For me and others I assume Blood Bowl has a living breathing world. stuff like this detracts from the immersion as it feels like history is getting rewritten.

I do love the new snakeman team name but it would have been better if new fluff had been created rather than reusing and changing existing fluff.

cheers for clarifying though.

[Olaf the Stout]

The big two GW games, Warhammer 40k and WHFB/AOS, are continually updated and new rules come out for the all the time. Sometimes the rules are army-specific, like new codexes; sometimes they introduce entirely new ways to play the game, like the Apocalypse 40k rules. Yes, change means that you will need to occasionally reference multiple rulebooks, but it also means the game will never become stale. It means that the product remains financially viable, with a continuing return on investment, which gives GW an incentive to not treat it like a red-headed stepchild.

Except BB isn't WH40K or Warhammer AOS. Blood Bowl has never had a codex approach and I think a lot of BB coaches would get annoyed if GW decided to have a continuous rules cycle like those games have.

This is even more true when when the rules have been in one rulebook for a decade now.

[Milo]

Cool, well thanks for clarifying. I hope my fears are ill-founded really looking forward to the next release already!

OH one more thing, this is very VERY nerdy. But I was wondering: In 'Blood Bowl Death Zone Season One!' book. There is a DYK box on page 36. This uses a passage I remember from White Dwarf magazine 86. Albeit re-worded ever so slightly. In that White Dwarf the Snakeman team was called SSSchHit V'gghUYth. Where as in the new book they are called Kureshi Kobras. I was just wondering why this change was made?

Again, just to clarify, the playtest group was NOT involved in the production of Death Zone season one. Unfortunately, we can't really shed any light on issues like this.

Ok fair enough. If in future you get to feedback to the people that do produce this stuff before it is mass published please stop something like this happening again.

For me and others I assume Blood Bowl has a living breathing world. stuff like this detracts from the immersion as it feels like history is getting rewritten.

I do love the new snakeman team name but it would have been better if new fluff had been created rather than reusing and changing existing fluff.

cheers for clarifying though.

How do you know that Kureshi Kobras isn't just a translation of SSSchHit V'gghUYth?

And I can tell you definitively that details as miniscule as dates in the fluff were debated and adjusted based on feedback from the playtest group for DZ2.

[Milo]

The big two GW games, Warhammer 40k and WHFB/AOS, are continually updated and new rules come out for the all the time. Sometimes the rules are army-specific, like new codexes; sometimes they introduce entirely new ways to play the game, like the Apocalypse 40k rules. Yes, change means that you will need to occasionally reference multiple rulebooks, but it also means the game will never become stale. It means that the product remains financially viable, with a continuing return on investment, which gives GW an incentive to not treat it like a red-headed stepchild.

Except BB isn't WH40K or Warhammer AOS. Blood Bowl has never had a codex approach and I think a lot of BB coaches would get annoyed if GW decided to have a continuous rules cycle like those games have.

This is even more true when when the rules have been in one rulebook for a decade now.

Well, no one is taking that one rulebook away from you, and even now, you could probably summarize all of the mandatory BB2016 rules changes from the CRP in a single page.

I've already outlined the problems Blood Bowl has always had as a non-revenue product for Games Workshop. It doesn't produce a long term revenue stream (or rather, it hasn't in the past), so eventually GW investment, both in sculpting time and print space, declines to nothing pretty quickly. It's just not financially viable for GW to put more money into Blood Bowl when a similar investment into one of the "codex approach" games will return a much larger profit for them.

BB2016 is changing that. So would you rather have a return to 3rd Edition: one box set, one expansion several months later, 12 teams of miniatures and stars and then nothing? Or would you rather have Blood Bowl becoming a long-term resident on the shelves, with continued support for the next five years+? With new options and rules to bring new life to old leagues?

Keep in mind that if Blood Bowl has stagnated in the 80s, we never would have had block dice. If it had stagnated in the 90s, we never would have had half the team rosters we have now. Why is it preferable to opt for stagnation, to say "this rulebook was written ten years ago and it should never change"?

[Manuel]

Because we were happy and the number of players was increasing, although slower than it is now. But stagnation? There is nothing supporting that claim. BB was more dynamic than ever before. Multiple kickstarters every month, dozens of tournaments worldwide, and a very active online community. So no, I won't buy the stagnation argument.

Changing "just because", with products such us Grak and the Noblemen, is way worse than staying with something that worked perfectly for tabletop tournaments.

And "no one is taking that rulebook from you". Well, as a matter of fact, they did ask it to be removed from NAF's web. It is easier to be polite when you are the strong one, but they did take the rulebook we used from our website, yes.

[JT-Y]

I think you have a very narrow view of how it was. The truth is that year on year there were fewer people playing the game. I don't care about other companies releasing BB related models, and nor does GW, and I'm damn sure these companies don't mind having increased custom either.

It was stagnant. There was no new content, nothing to attract fresh blood, and there was never going to be. Just a constantly diminishing pool of people who liked that until they got bored of it and moved on.

We have had an influx of hundreds of thousands of new players, people who otherwise would not be playing this game.
And you complain about limited edition models like G&C, or two silly rosters stuck on the app aimed at giving total newcomers something else to do with their starter set.

You'll have to forgive me for not sharing in your misery, but I'm also not having this silly argument again.

[garion]

I'm not with you here Manuel, while I get the TT tournament scene was healthy and numbers were great. For me and many other the game was stagnating big time.

In fact I had stopped playing almost entirely because CRP seemingly had no future and I didn't like a number of things about that rule set.

While Grak and Cumbleberry was clearly handled badly by GW and who ever was involved. It is a very minor detail. Hopefully it wont happen again.

The thing to remember about the TT Tournament scene is - how much has it ever really changed since 1993? Not much at all. You can still find tournament reports from Fanatic magazine back in the day and the builds people took were pretty similar. Because the game in that setting has always been played at low TV with a few fixed skills, resurrection style its not changed much at all. The only differences really are Wrestle is now a skill, Big Guy became Loner (no rr, to 50% chance of rr), fouling is weaker and the stunty teams got a bit of love with inducements. None of these things have changed from CRP to 2016 edition.

edit: appears i was ninja'd

[lunchmoney]

I think you have a very narrow view of how it was. ....

Well said.

[dode74]

continued support for the next five years+? With new options and rules to bring new life to old leagues?

Depends on how much that "continued support" is going to cost the customer, how well considered these "new rules" are (and I reserve judgement on the full team's input until after DZ2 is released) and how easy they are to access.

Come up with new minis, pitches etc on a regular basis, and additional considered and tested house rule ideas on a semi-regular basis and make those accessible as PDFs (again, not necessarily formatted for A4, just downloadable) and I think most people will be very happy with that.
Come up with another DZ season every 3-6 months and a set of rules which is spread over several volumes, White Dwarf issues and backs of blister packs, with unclear wording and rushed proofing/printing leading to errata to the errata and you'll likely see a different reaction.

[Milo]

Because we were happy and the number of players was increasing, although slower than it is now. But stagnation? There is nothing supporting that claim. BB was more dynamic than ever before. Multiple kickstarters every month, dozens of tournaments worldwide, and a very active online community. So no, I won't buy the stagnation argument.

Changing "just because", with products such us Grak and the Noblemen, is way worse than staying with something that worked perfectly for tabletop tournaments.

How were players increasing? With no boxed set in stores, no GW involvement, how were coaching numbers increasing? I bet if you tracked NAF registrations, you'd see they've been declining for years -- PRIOR to Blood Bowl 2016. Maybe Mike could confirm or reject that theory.

Yes, there are a ton of third party miniature manufacturers now, and I'm thrilled about that. There is a variety of teams on the market unheard of in the past. That's a great thing -- and the CRP is a very solid ruleset for tournament play, as it was intended. It is a "competitition" rules pack, after all. But it lacks some of the wacky, goofy panache of previous rulesets, and for that reason, I think it's a little less appealing for "fun" league play. (If you want to run your leagues competitively, CRP is gold.)

Now, nobody is changing "just because". That's not the intent of the Death Zone books and it wasn't the intent of G&C OR the alternate team rosters. G&C were designed so that Blood Bowl could have an exclusive product for Warhammer World, on an equal footing with Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar. Now, you can quibble with the rules, certainly, and I won't disagree with you on that. I think the development team has learned a lot about the Blood Bowl community since those were designed (as evidenced by the creation of the review group), and if they were created now, I expect the rules would be considerably different. But can't you recognize that it's a GOOD thing that GW is making efforts to put BB on the same platform as 40k and AOS?

The alternate team rosters were designed to give new players to the game a chance to vary their rosters to utilize their existing miniatures in a different way. Again, I'm not going to argue that the rules were perfect, I think they could use some tweaks myself. But at the time those came out, there were three sets of official GW miniatures available. Hopefully those players will eventually develop the love for BB we do, and investigate the possibilities from third parties and all the races that are available to play, but you need to consider the audience those teams were created for. They gave casual store leagues a chance to add some extra variety to their leagues without requiring new players to buy a new team or convert one from other minis. If those rosters help a few new leagues and coaches survive until GW has more product out (or the coaches realize how much is available for BB on the internet), then they have done their job.

I guess it's understandable here and on the Facebook communities, but the overwhelming feedback is all about "how these changes affect me". Well, they don't -- directly. I've never seen a tournament without a clear tournament rules pack which dictate precisely what is allowed. It takes all of 30 seconds to add "Grak and Crumbleberry are not allowed. Savage Orcs and Human Nobility team rosters are not allowed." The same goes for leagues, most of which have some degree of house rules already implemented.

But if GW's additional focus on BB brings in more coaches for those tournaments and leagues, more coaches who have the potential to become die-hard Blood Bowl coaches like us, that can ONLY be a GOOD THING(tm) for the rest of us.

Look at this forum, for instance. TFF is the longest-tenured, biggest Blood Bowl discussion site on the internet. Yet the "General Discussion" forum only needs to go back four pages to find topics unanswered since 2015! The new release is creating threads on Facebook that have hundreds of responses. And nearly all of the recent posts in the General Discussion forum here are discussing those very controversial topics you mentioned, or the BB2016 new releases. The new releases, positive or negative, are having an invigorating effect on the Blood Bowl community.

Take a look at DZ2 when it comes out. I hope you will like most of what you see and I doubt you will find anything to opposed as strenously as G&C or the app teams. At least all the Stars have Loner.

[Darkson]

I bet if you tracked NAF registrations, you'd see they've been declining for years -- PRIOR to Blood Bowl 2016.

From the NAF accounts (2009-2016):
2009 - 1570
2010 - 1863
2011 - 1961
2012 - 2216
2013 - 2106
2014 - 1879
2015 - 2096
2016 - 2225

[Darkson]

Has anyone asked Andy (etc.) about the possibility of G&C being reworked so they could actually be used sensibly, and not just discarded as many have done?

I for one like the idea of the whole combo, but there's no way I'd allow them in a league or tournament I ran as they are now - good concept, bad implementation. If they were rewritten (at least Loner added and costed correctly) they'd be a much more viable choice, and if the wacky kick rule was improved/balanced then I'd be more inclined to allow them (and buy them myself).

Better rules = better sales (not everyone has to buy everything "just because it's Blood Bowl").