Balanced TR Leagues

[Mo]

The discussion in the Vault thread on how PBBL is deliberately set up to give the overdog a 2/3 chance of victory has me leaning much more in favour of Phil Bowen's suggestion of capping TR (say 150), and at the end of every game, each team adjusts up or down as needed to stay at 150. So new or recovering teams have a deep bench, and established teams have fewer players, but skilled ones.

There's still a sense of accomplishment of developing a team to your tastes, but still maintains a sense of fairness when playing any other team.

See: http://www.0-12linemen.com/012Linemen/C ... sHome.aspx

Has anyone here tried something like this?

Cheers,
Maureen

[neverdodge]

In my league (small tabletop league) we had one season ending with huge TR difference. So i decided to set some kind of cap and asked the top teams to low their TR.
As i think it s the better solution, i still think it s not that fair, cause you "punish" the top team from developing well.
For example a team could fire 1 or 2 players to stay in cap range and then loose 2 of them in the next game .

[mattski]

In amongst the many other things I have to do I am trying to work out a no-cash league with rules for drafts and free agents which you can find here: viewtopic.php?t=16749

Its already becoming bewilderingly complex but take a look and see if it gives you any ideas (or you would like to give me some ideas).

[MadLordAnarchy]

Mattski, I'd be happy to talk over your ideas perhaps via e-mail or PM. Putting together a new team construction format is not easy, it took me until 2003 to finally create something that worked.

A problem with TR to my eyes is that people game the system and sack players simply to reduce their TR and that just doesn't feel at all right to me. A TR cap might exacerbate this situation and rather than preventing development, it could create a system in which players are removed from the roster on a regular basis unless they happen to have acquired the right stat increases. For a one-off match that's fine but for a long-term league it just looks horrendously ugly. Without player continuity, teams do not really develop a history and the league is little more than a bunch of coaches who meet semi-regularly for a game of Blood Bowl. A league surely needs to have an identity of its own that coaches can buy into and feel a part of.

[DaImp]

Maureen, I tried those exact rules in my league for a season. While it did work very well in balancing teams it was a complete flop in terms of building up team character.

Most coaches found that the tension and almost physical pain of having players injured was missing. "So you just killed 2 players on my team. No big deal I can just replace them for the next game." Admitedly with the more experienced teams there were a few players that would be missed if they got killed or injured but part of the excitement of Blood Bowl got ripped out of the game with those rules.

You didn't feel the same aprehension with every block that you could lose a player and not be able to replace him. There was very little of the feeling of building up a team from TR100 to a powerhouse. The teams all stayed the same and only a few of the players actually developed any character.

I had hoped the rules would work better than they did in the end, and we have no reverted to using the Living Rule book, but are experimenting with the Vault rules, hoping that they may offer a better alternative.

[Darkson]

To be honest, those rules have even less interest to me than the Vault rules do.