Cross Swords Blood Bowl League

Hi all, there has been increasing chat on the Facebook page regarding Blood Bowl so I thought I'd give the topic a permanent home on the forum, especially as at least one of the current players at the club doesn't use Facebook.

As many of you won't know me, I' Pete and have been with the club, mostly on the roleplay side of things on and off from the very early days. Five of us have been playing some friendly BB games recently, with a view to starting a league proper around Oct/Nov. Anyone and everyone is welcome to join; the plan is for me to act as league commissioner but if anyone would like the job who perhaps has more experience I guess I'll be happy just to play as long as all players are happy with the arrangements.

As for the proposed league, we would be playing every week so it will be quite a commitment. The plan is for each coach to play a 'home' and 'away' game against every other player in the league with playoffs for a couple of weeks after that, so we'll be looking at running perhaps as far as March next year depending on the number of players. If all goes well the season will repeat once we have all had a satisfactory break to pursue other things (look out for Mordheim next year!!).

The current 'official' rules are called the CRP1, or Core Rules Pack 1, which was intended by the developers as the final version of what had been the living rulebook. It is therefore exactly the same as LRB6. It used to be easily available from the GW site but since their big update I haven't been able to find it. Luckily it is hosted in several other places online, such as here

As I say this is the same as LRB6, although the text is a finalised version without the red edits marking it out from the previous edition. There is a problem with it, however, in that it only features the teams from the last released version of the game and omits the 'BBRC Approved New Teams', being the Chaos Pact, Slann and Underworld teams, which you are more than welcome to play and can find near the back of the LRB 6. One other new team that I am familiar with is the Khorne Daemons, as featured in the Cyanide PC game, which looks like a really fun and challenging team to play and is also more than welcome in the league and can be found along with a tactics playbook here. I appreciate that's not the best presented roster so if anyone finds a better one please post it. If there are any other teams out there that folks are aware of please also point the rest of us towards them for consideration.

Those of us that are already in have been talking about starting the league with three lots of 6 SPP to dole out as you wish so that three individuals on your team start with a level up, which can only be taken as a basic skill. I am also keen to use the special play cards in addition to the traditional inducements, although I have reservations about a few of them as some seem very strong (like getting two blitzes) while others are rather situational. I would love to hear your thoughts on them. We currently have, I believe, four or five grassed boards made by Rich Kua to 40mm x 40mm scale so big guys can be easily accommodated. I will be producing passing templates to fit them by the time the league starts and we should also have some more boards by then, too. There are no firm restrictions on the models you use as long as you can of course differentiate them, keep track of who is who etc. It would however be fantastic if every team was built and painted to look the part, and I am sure everyone is as excited as I am to field a unique and great looking team. If we get it right this league will be quite a big deal for Cross Swords and will hopefully grow and improve season upon season! I am also hoping we can photograph the games and maybe get a blog going with results and interesting plays detailed etc.

The last thing to organize is getting a trophy to be awarded to the eventual league winner, which will stay in the club and of course be awarded every season, with the current champions gaining a bonus such as an extra team reroll.

That's about all there is to say currently, please do use this thread to talk about anything BB. I will be at the club every Thursday in the skittle alley room so please come and say hi.

One final idea I had was to play a special 'Xmas Bowl' on our last night in December rather than the regular league, which would be a random draw with no inducements but instead Santa will give each coach a stocking filled with presents for all your players to use for that game only - potions and magic items that confer various skills or stat increases. Whether we keep the SPP and injuries or just play entirely for fun is something we will need to decide on!

Phew! Thanks for taking the time to read this, I'm really looking forward to BB and I hope I've managed to get you a little bit excited about the prospects for a Cross Swords league!

All sounds good. I especially like the christmas idea! As for the trophy, we will definitely have to look into getting a proper one sourced!

Sounds brilliant to me cant wait. Just gotta hope my pre ordered elf team arrives in time. I could do with a few refresher pre season friendlies though

Im sure we can get in a few games before it all kicks off... cant promise there will be anything friendly about it though!

I wouldn't have it any other way lol

I need some practice against elves for sure! Mike, what are you thinking of playing?

Still not entirely certain. Quite like the idea of painting a underworld team, but more into the idea of being able to make and play either a Khemri team or amazon.

Amazon are a nightmare to play against all starting with dodge first upgrade is block....whole team with B&D is a real pain lol

Tempted to go down a 'mud wrestler' look and just give them all wrestle haha.

Hmmm the idea has merit

LOL! Amazons are definitely a decent team. I think they play a great running/ quick passing game.

Another rule we've been playing in friendly games is that you pick your opponent's MVP, with the chance to discuss and look back on the game to help you decide. Obviously the intention is for players to be very sporting to make sure the MVP is awarded to an appropriate player. We have said that if you don't like the choice made for your team, you can choose to randomise it instead, but I'm tempted to forgo that last bit, assuming we're all going to play nice!

Thats a really nice idea i have thought that the random way was not quite right from when i played before. Nice idea seconded from me

Hi guys just thought I'd join the goings on and agree with Pete that the MVP rule we tried worked really well

Thanks, Ollie. Good to have you here.

Hi all, I've been thinking about passing ranges. Ollie has an old edition of Blood Bowl (possibly 2nd) and has kindly given me the passing range measurements in squares so that I can get some scaled up templates made. The problem I have is that they are slightly off from the Cyanide game and I'm not sure which to go with. In neither are any of the ranges completely exact to a particular number of squares but in Ollie's they come to roughly four squares for each of the first three marks then a further three for the long bomb whereas in Cyanide they are all about half a square shorter. The furthest possible range in Ollie's version is therefore 15 squares whereas in Cyanide this is reduced to 13.

Fairly small differences, perhaps, but possibly important ones. I almost pulled off a very cheeky throw in a recent game, which would have quite easily worked were it not for my ineptitude as a coach, while I've also had a couple of passes pulled on me that I didn't see coming as I thought the range was too extreme so I personally think I quite want to go with the shorter ranges but I really want to hear some other people's thoughts first.

On a related note, does anyone know how rigid a 0.5m+ long sheet of 2mm acrylic would be?!

Just thought I'd link this weird page I came across on Fumbbl of experimental teams. The ones I've clicked on seem maybe a bit out of date and generally shit but you might find it interesting or a good prompt to come up with some variations on teams that we can think about trialing some day.

Hey all, i'm realy rather looking forward to this league, not played blood bowl in over a decade!

I aquired a hobgoblin team sometime back mixed in with a load of old gobbo minis, not even sure where or when i got them, but either way, i haven't been able to find any "official" rules or roster for them, however thanks tp the link mr Pete Jaques posted in this thread, i did find an unofficial roster, not sure how ballanced it is, and i was wondering if your wonderful selves might give it a look over and see how well balanced it is.

the roster is the "hobgoblin slavers" team on mr Jaques linked site.

i hope it is all good or only needs minor tweaking, as short of the troll, i have a buch of all those guys alredy, justt awaiting a repaint

many thanks for any and all help folks, and see you at the club soon

Awesome, will be great to have you on board. The slavers team looks pretty reasonable to me. I'm familiar the creator, Garion, and he usually seems to know what he's talking about so I'd be interested to see it in action.

As for the troll, Rich Kua is often able to provide the odd model or two.

Awesomesauce, i shall get stiripping (the models lol) then, got a mate who should be able to provide me a couple black orc blockers (classic plastic no less lol) and i'm bidding on a old ripper bolgrot troll on ebay, so mayhap it will all come together, i cant wait to get back on the pitch, it has been far too long

also wondering if anyone might know where i can get my hands on the blood bowl magazines? either hard copy or pdf, i dont mind

Hi all, I thought it was about time to show some love to the poor old forum!

So, I've been speaking to some people about how to run the league and I've come round to thinking that an open league that presents no obligation to play every week/ drawbacks to missing games (other than missing out on SPP and money!) would be best. This will allow people to play when they can, start new teams or run more than one team at once, as well as be much easier for new members to join at any time. It could also run indefinitely, so people could play other things, dipping in and out as they wanted.

It will probably work on a points system (eg. 5 for a win, 3 for a draw, 1 for a loss) that does reward playing games. This is because I would hope to use league standings to seed players for tournaments, which we would run intermittently, either over several weeks on normal club nights or for a whole day at weekends. To be eligible for seeding we'd say something like you must have played at least half as many games as the average number played for all players in the league (hope that makes sense!) Therefore a player who has only played say three games but won them all would not be eligible for a seeded position if everyone else had played eight games each. There was a reason for this but reading it now I'm not sure it's best...

Keen to hear your thoughts on this stuff, either on here or face to face on Thursday.

Some other issues that have come up are the need for a passing template for the 40mm boards so that we can work out interceptions, and the lack of block dice. We're definitely working on the latter, and I promise I will get the template sorted, I just need to get the measurements so that we are all happy with them!

I really like the idea of an open league i think would work well, i think either comixinos or Tritex sell block dice either a single set or bulk. i would be happy to chip in with a few others to grab a few sets for the club. I have ordered a set for myself already and a box of "balls". Seems they will arrive before my bloody elves lol.

Hi all. Sorry for the lateness of this post, I hope you all had a great Christmas and new year. As mentioned on Facebook, our league is due to start tomorrow, Thursday 8 Jan. Hooray!!!

In all honesty, things may not be much different to before Christmas. It's an open league so you can play as (in)frequently as you like, arranging games amongst ourselves each week. We were pretty good at scheduling on a casual basis before so let's carry that on.

Contrary to my first post in this thread, there is a major difference between CRP and LRB6, namely the bank. We will be using LRB6, therefore you can bank 200,000gc before any extra starts impacting on your team value.

I'll keep a record of games played and the scores of those games, as well as points for the season. You get 3 for a win, 1 for a draw and 0 for a loss. Without everyone playing an equal number of games a points system may not be hugely relevant but we will try and apply it to create seedings in tournaments. Having said that, I do foresee that the vast majority of us will be playing games at the same pace so it will be fun to see who is where in the table.

As discussed, coaches can run multiple teams, and should feel free to retire and restart teams as they need/want to.

Please only play with your league team on club nights, we won't count games you play in your spare time, unless you miss a game and arrange to play it another night etc. For example, Simon and I can't play an extra game at one of our houses each week and race ahead with points and team value.

Please name/ number your players, making sure the models themselves are clearly differentiated. Assigning spp to one of four random blitzers is not ok now that we are playing 'officially.' I'll bring along some white paint and sticky labels so anyone who needs to mark their players will have a range of options to do so.

There's not much left to say other than the following points I thought of to make sure we're all adhering to the same basic mechanics:

i. If not using proper block dice, the order is:

1 - Attacker Down
2 - Both Down
3 - Push Back
4 - Push Back
5 - Defender Stumbles
6 - Defender Down

ii. We'll all use the official scatter template, which looks like this. I can't decide if the "1 2 3" side should point towards the endzone being aimed for by the currently active player (ie. it faces the right way up for you in your own turn) or standardize things even more and say it points towards the skittle alley or something. We'll decide before we start playing on Thursday.

iii. Please make sure you are running through kickoff events in the right order, I've seen people get it slightly confused:

Place the ball
Roll d6 and d8 for scatter
While it's "in the air" roll on the kick off table and carry out the results
Bounce/ catch/ touchback

iv. The same sort of thing goes for some finer points of the game. One I can think of is making sure you decide whether or not to follow up a block before rolling any other dice. If you knock down a ball-carrier and the ball scatters onto another player, it could make a huge difference to their catch roll if you decided to follow up, for example.

v. Try to remember to move your turn counter. I'll leave it up to players to decide if they want to play to penalise each other in individual games, as I wouldn't like to impose this on anyone. I would probably encourage it at this stage, however.

vi. Some people (namely me) have been a bit precious about fouling, especially on turn sixteen. Happily, I have found a solution - stop being a wuss about it. Seriously though, in terms of league mechanics I have found something really cool that make fouling even more fun than it already is. That is - the Bounty rule:

When a season is running a team participating in that season may put some of its money on any player participating in the season as a bounty. After each played match a team can put up to 50k on bounties - no more.
If a player with a bounty on his head dies (and is not healed/regenerated), the opposing team gets the reward. If the player retires, the bounty money is lost forever in the stockpile of the greedy league commission, hehe.
To avoid loads of small insignificant bounties, the minimum bounty on a player is set at 20k.

I hope you all like the sound of that.


Finally, I found this amazing resource from the same place I got the above rule (top link). It's an Excel roster and it's frikkin' awesome. I'd like to have a copy for each team so that I can keep track of what's going on and make reporting back to everyone that much easier. I'm sure you'd all like to have one too. If each person would therefore like to complete one of these, that would be great. I've got one set up ready to be completed for each player on my laptop, which I'll bring tomorrow, but if you'd like to do it before then and email it to me at pkjaques@gmail.com, so much the better.

If you think there's any detail I haven't covered please post on Facebook. Can't wait for tomorrow, see you all there!!

I remembered one more thing: still no passing templates. Sorry I haven't got this sorted yet. If there's any doubt about whether an interception should be possible please recreate the scenario with one of the standard boards and passing template. I know that sounds fiddly and long winded but I don't think it should reallly take much longer and it's the best we've got at the moment (d'oh). The main reason I haven't got them yet is because comixininos wanted like ten quid off me for delivering a piece of plastic and about twelve dice so fuck them. Now that I think about it, that's probably not entirely uncompetitive. Maybe I'll wait for the oil price drop to filter down to international shipping rates. Shouldn't be long, I paid 86.9p/l for petrol the other day. Oh, brave new world!