Principles of Defence

[ombwiri]

I was going to start a thread about my plan for a High Elf Pass Block/Shadowing defence system but before I get there I though there may be some value in a more general theoretical discussion of different methods of defence in Blood Bowl. I've not played nearly as much as people on here so while I may be starting this topic it's primary purpose is to garner comments from more experienced players rather than for me to give out advice. Most of what I'm going to write may be blindingly obvious but I'm hoping that it will act as a jumping off point for a more in depth discussion.

Let's start from the very beginning. You are on defence when your opponent has the ball and you don't. When on defence you have two aims.

1. Stop the other team from scoring
2. Gain possesion of the ball so that you may score.

As I see it when you set up on defence you chose which of those two aims to prioritise. This doesn't mean that the other aim isn't important but generally if you priority is gaining possesion you will have to take some risks that may make it easier for the other team to score. As an example; you try to blitz the ball carrier before the opposition can form a cage by flooding the opponents half hence leaving gaps in the coverage you have in your half.

This isn't however an either/or situation but more a spectrum. Ranging from going all out to win possesion to purely passivly preventing the other team from advancing down the pitch, making sure they don't score and waiting for Nuffle to smack them round the head or half to end. Most teams wont be quite so extreme but they will prioritise one over the other.

Most team sports have various ways of organising players on defence. A lot of these systems are cominations of spatial positioning and giving instructions as to how these players will interact with the oposition team. There are a handful of categories that trascend any given sport which I would summurise as being man to man making, zonal marking and screen defences.

Man marking is a defensive strategy where defenders are assigned a specific opposition player to mark rather than covering an area of the pitch.

Zone defence is a type of defence used in team sports, which is the alternative to man-to-man defense; instead of each player guarding a corresponding player on the other team, each defensive player is given an area, or a "zone", to cover.

Screen defence is a form of defence where you prevent the opposing team from advancing players beyond a certain line. The idea of this technique is to prevent the attacking team gaining any ground by tackling or holding them. However, the defending team can be vulnerable to any player breaking the defensive line.

Other defences are various combinations of these three types of defence.

Most of the discussion I've seen on here about defence follows a pattern of starting with a screen defence and then having players break off to man marking if line breaks are made. The screen defence has the massive benefit of not requiring any skills to work. It just depends on the natural tackle zones of your players. Of course having skills can make the screen work more efficiently and securely but even a 344 Ziggurat formation manned with nothing more than Human linemen requires at least 2 dodge rolls or a one on one block to penetrate.



However if the formation is penetrated or the defensive player wants to detach players from the formation in order to pressure the ball carrier or crack a cage then we enter a less controlled melee stage. You may still have a screen but it isn’t as secure.

What got me started on this subject was the idea of using Pass Block and Shadowing as my main defensive tools with High Elves against other non-bash teams.



In the play above Catchers 5 and 6 (just within the wide zones) have pass block, giving a 50%+ chance of interception across the pitch. Their second skills (and the primary skills on the other catchers) will be shadowing and then tackle. Blitzers are developed to crack cages and the guys on the LOS developed to stall a cage. The line elf behinds the LOS has kick. I think it will work, but will it work as well as a defence consisting of linemen in a ziggurat formation?

So my main question is what other methods of defence work? And at what level of team development do they start to do so? Or am I just barking up the wrong tree here? Is what I describe as a Screen not really happening at top level or is it just so much better than other methods of defense?

[Coach]

Shadowing and Pass Block can work well though only after getting more standard skills such as Block, Dodge and Side Step first.

Pass Block is only going to be useful when the opposing team passes and not many are going to to that rendering it useless against them.

If you haven't read over my articles on the individual High Elf players development then give them a go and I go into more detail there.

http://bbtactics.com/strategy/players/high-elf-players/

[mattgslater]

You're exploring some pretty well-charted ground, ombwiri.

[voyagers_uk]

hey matt, I just assumed it was you with an alternate user name...

[mattgslater]

Perhaps we can work together on this.

Here's where I'm stuck.

There's a large community of people here who play regularly against each other. They have developed a sort of groupthink on how to do what that's largely built on best practices that they love to share and have done a good job with... individually. (I'm talking about you, Coach.) Those best practices underly a few more fundamental truths, a geometry of the game, that is very hard to verbalize: there is some discussion of it through play-creator pics and podcasts and stuff, but there's no vocabulary to identify the key building blocks, or the larger structures built on them. Some people understand some of them intuitively or pick them up empirically without ever being able to communicate them through language. But being able to address them individually, that requires a vocabulary that we don't have. It's potentially very rich, in that tactical discussions suffer for it (which hurts us board-gamers in the backwoods), and if the large community groupthink is overlooking something, there's a chance it will not be exposed.

But there's a lot of opposition to it: a lot of people don't see the value in taking a different approach to the same old (to them, and maybe you) thing, especially if it's been working for them, personally. They'll tell you they want to know where you're leading, as if you're leading somewhere directly, rather than putting together the foundations of something larger, a future development probably not of your making. Also, you aren't getting paid for this, so you have to do it all in your off-time. And you can't do it if you're not playing, also in your off-time (doesn't have to be a lot). Got a job? A significant other? Kids?

Personally, I think the start lies in TZ interrelationships between two or three players. Because from there, you can explain any segment of the field in salient terms. I think the best bet is having a few levels of simple terms that can compound when necessary.

[Smeborg]

hey matt, I just assumed it was you with an alternate user name...

So did I.

[Asperon Thorn]

I need the cliff notes. . .

So scanning what I did read. . and then reading matt's thing about the backwoods (where I am even more backwoods then he.)

There is a certain satisfaction to challenging the groupthink. However it has to be proven. Sub cultures of BB based in isolated areas are not necessarily bad and in some ways better, because the groupthink ends up with blind spots. A RL example would be the "Wildcat Offense" in the NFL. Ignored for years because it didn't work in the NFL and was just a trick play. However it has a lot of recent success because nobody is prepared or drills against it anymore. . .because you'd have to be stupid to use it why waste time trying to stop it?

As for Pass block, like strip ball and diving tackle, I find that it is one of those skills that improves exponentially the more you have. One Pass block shadowing player can be avoided. Two. . not so much, 3? You have the field covered and the opponent is forced to consider it, possibly completely change their game. It does work. . but it is a HUGE investment and it is practically useless against teams that just won't throw the ball. I mean, against Wood Elves or High elves. . .they have to rethink their play style. Against dwarves. . .that's 4-6 skills that are useless individually, combined, or otherwise.

So, if your league is Skaven, flavors of humans, flavors of elves, or possibly Orcs. . then it is a great thing to do. If you have Chaos, Dwarves, Nurgle, Flavors of Undead, and lizards. . .then you might as well forget it.

Asperon Thorn

[mattgslater]

See, I think challenging groupthink is what you do when you have one of two things going on:

1) an epiphany;

2) an institutional disadvantage.

#1 comes only from having a very solid base of knowledge, and a quick, clear, distinct awareness of the component elements of that base of knowledge. Knowing not only how to do it right, but exactly what it is that makes what you're doing right as opposed to some other course of action, which may or may not be "doing it right" by some reasonable definition. This is where jazz comes from.

#2 comes from not having the tools to do it the conventional way. Coaches who play lower-tier teams or teams that take a bad beating sometimes have to get creative, for example. Also, coaches who play teams that lack a clear edge in weight or speed sometimes have to develop "third-way" plays that other teams see as desperation ploys. Some teams are designed to be good at that kind of thing, like Amazons and Dark Elves. This is where punk comes from.

In this case, we have #2 going on; several of us lack the ability to go toe-to-toe with the highly respected coaches we talk to on a regular basis. We also have a lot of potential for #1, as an entire facet of the game is only poorly explored because we lack the tools to get there.

[Warpstone]

Urr, Matt, I think you lost us after Epiphany.

Regardless, I'm not sure there's much reason to be isolated anymore in your Blood Bowl. I live in the west of Canada making Seattle about the only comfortable location for a roadtrip tourny. However, I've played on MBBL, FUMBBL and the Cyanide platforms and been exposed to the supposed groupthink you're referring to. I grant that leagues can have their own micro-cultures, such as those composed of guys who love their man-barbies too much cope with player turnover (shoutout to Endycarus for that awesome term).

But if you're involved in the greater blood bowl community, either through online play or at major tournaments (i.e. competitions where more than just the locals attend), then your frame of reference grows and your sticking points are no longer an issue. You may find that the groupthink was going on at your club level because you never before saw how the game was played in environments where a wider set of skilled coaches are experimenting.

I don't really mean to be a dick here, but when you start pontificating about the game AND you've only been exposed to a micro-culture, we tune out. It only takes one coach with outside experience to shakeup a league where everyone has developed preconceptions about skills and rosters (i.e. the "Dwarves are TOOOO good!" rant). It can also work the other way around if you travel to a tourney or seek out online matches outside your normal circle of influence.

[mattgslater]

Man, it's not like I haven't read everything there is to read. I'm pretty sure that I know most of what anybody else knows; I just learned the same thing through a different mechanism. Watching some online game replays has pretty much convinced me that my league has mostly picked up most of the best practices. Lots of us out there have one or more reasons not to play BB online, or simply prefer not to play BB online (me, I don't game online at all). Others of us do play BB online with one community, and on tabletop with another community that doesn't play online.

If you think there's no value in a perspective, and if you think the perspective is descriptive of the situation in any way at all, then you're guaranteed to be half right, because those states are dichotomous. Tune out all you want. The truth is that this game can be seen as a set of spatial relationships and probabilities, and therefore it should be seen that way, though perhaps not only that way. After all, there's no limit to the number of perspectives one can hold simultaneously, provided one has a gut understanding of all of them. The more points of view you have, the easier it is to get still more. Filter for what you use, and if you go wrong it will be for not having enough.

[Warpstone]

Man, it's not like I haven't read everything there is to read. I'm pretty sure that I know most of what anybody else knows; I just learned the same thing through a different mechanism. Watching some online game replays has pretty much convinced me that my league has mostly picked up most of the best practices. Lots of us out there have one or more reasons not to play BB online, or simply prefer not to play BB online (me, I don't game online at all). Others of us do play BB online with one community, and on tabletop with another community that doesn't play online.

If you think there's no value in a perspective, and if you think the perspective is descriptive of the situation in any way at all, then you're guaranteed to be half right, because those states are dichotomous. Tune out all you want. The truth is that this game can be seen as a set of spatial relationships and probabilities, and therefore it should be seen that way, though perhaps not only that way. After all, there's no limit to the number of perspectives one can hold simultaneously, provided one has a gut understanding of all of them. The more points of view you have, the easier it is to get still more. Filter for what you use, and if you go wrong it will be for not having enough.

I have no idea what your point is anymore.

Matt, seriously: your league does not sound like it's representative of most other clubs. You may very well be a tactical genius in your circle, but it's also just as likely that you're the big fish in a pond of minnows. As such, you need to consider whether your league experience is applicable to the greater BB world at all. You may indeed have great ideas, but without competition against the greater BB community, you will continue to have no clue or humility about what you don't know. No amount of bullshit is going to cover this up.

[mattgslater]

I don't know why you're going after me on claims I haven't made. I'm not putting myself forward as a better coach than y'all. I have many times acknowledged that I consider myself a big fish in a small pond (don't overdo it; there are a lot of us, and I sometimes play people who have played hundreds of coaches over decades, and who study this stuff religiously). I will admit to have made suggestions and then backed them up with "it's worked for me." That's quite open to attack, but please follow it up with an argument, not just a snub. Oh, and my math is as good as anybody's. That I maintain, and no, playing on the circuit doesn't make you better at math.

My problem is that I can't get better in the pool I can compete in, and the only way I'm going to fix that is if I help my coaches improve to my level or above. I don't play games online; long story, don't want to tell it. This is about BB.

Until two years ago, everything I did in BB was basically the confluence of intuition and basic skills (I started with a knack for blocking and Backgammon) and a piecemeal, ad-hoc development of what little I'm gleaning the web, which has been considerable, but mostly confirms what I already know or have considered and rejected. Still, I've picked up a lot of little pieces of insight, mostly derived from rules changes. I do think that I have an alternate "school" of playing, informed by the mainstream tournament community, from afar, over a long time.

In '08, I finally got all but one of my coaches to buy into LRB5; we'd been playing a 3e house-rules variant (that really felt like a huge LRB mishmash) until then. We've played probably 30-300 games apiece with the new rules, and we feel like we've learned a lot from the online community. But digesting it has been haphazard, and though I think I've grown about as much as I expected to (I seem to have figured out most of the best practices on my own), my group has only grown about the same amount around me, and that's not enough. Part of it is that I have a couple technophobes and a guy who can't read (he has a good excuse). So podcasts and reams of articles are only going to take us so far.

So I started thinking about all this stuff I'd been reading, all this stuff I'd been doing, all this stuff that had and had not worked against me over the years, and I got this vision. It popped into my head all of a sudden, and it lays itself over the pitch whenever I play or watch a game. Players within two squares of one another create a relationship which is itself an object on the pitch. I know that doesn't sound all that profound, in that it describes a basic truth of the game that most coaches pick up on Turn One of their first game. But if you then look at those relationship-objects as individual objects, with different shapes, sizes and densities, you discern properties in those objects. Giving those objects names, identifying the things we use but don't talk about, should be a very powerful tool for scheming on-the-fly.

And then comes the wave of resistance. I try to say something mundane in a new way, and I get a scream of, "It's just another way to tell me what I already know!" Well, duh. Thanks for the affirmation. You gotta learn to walk before you can run. But you don't know what you can put together until you spend some time on an inventory. It seems to me that that's what I took all that flak for....

Rant over. Time to go to work.

[nazgob]

If it helps, I quite like some of you ideas Matt. I just wish that I understood American Football terminology.

[voyagers_uk]

I feel like I am in a minority here sometimes Matt but I agree with your view too. I was the same. But as I no longer have a league I can make it to it is less of an issue.

Keep it going, eventually we will have a language and t.o.r. that others can use.

[mattgslater]

Logged in, don't have long. But I wanted to reply to Nazgob.

If it helps, I quite like some of you ideas Matt. I just wish that I understood American Football terminology.

Yeah, I realized pretty quickly that we need our own terminology. I want to have a little American, a little Association, and a little Rugby, but the whole only for flavor in a blend that's all about BB. But if you leave it to me, you'll see a preponderance of what I know, which is mostly American.