Thoughts about the EXP system

[sean newboy]

Well pariah i consider it to be overpowered if i have a guy that gets aged after his 1st advance in the second game (has happened twice). As opposed to the exp system where i have had no bad things happen in either team after 1st, 2nd, or 3 games. Basically with the aging system your having nfl recruiters hire people 30 years old as rookies and i dont see that happening in the real nfl.

[Ghost of Pariah]

Well I feel the same way but I don't think it's cool to have it happen after 6 games either. To me the difference between 6 and 3 is not too much.

Especially when the effect of the ageing tabel are so freaking harsh!

I hate the fact that the EXP system and the Ageing system start making my players old in their first year on the pitch! When was the last time you saw a rookie retire from old age?

Ageing shouldn't even affect the players until they are threats. One skill does not a threat make!

[Talafar]

Ok I might be missing something here, but why do we have to have one of these complex systems?
I haven't seen the rules for the EXP system, but it seems to be quite time consuming, and problematic.
The current system is really unrealistic, and highly luck based.
Why don't they make a simple system, with no dice-rolling like:

All the players up for initial purchase represent young hopefulls. For someone to have a chance of being hired by a big bloodbowl team, they cannot be getting old this early in their career, especially as they are yet to develop any skills. While there are a few exceptions to this, they are rare, and so we need not concern ourselves with them. This means that a starting team's players will all start to get old at around the same time, and some will be retired, while the more talented will stay on, despite their age.
To represent this, after each game you should put a mark by each player on your roster (whether they took part or not). While this might seem time-consuming, it will in reality take up 10 seconds, so is no big deal. After a player has 30 "marks" they count as having a niggling injury. When they have 70 they gain another. At 120 they recieve a 3rd. And at 250 they must retire.

Doesnt that seem a LOT more simple, and still create the required effect?
If you really want to randomise ages (WHY?) you can roll 6 D6 and subtract 21 from the result; any remaining positive number is the amount that player starts with.
Of course I havent even played 20 games yet, so I may be talking rubbish, but this does seem like a more logical and playable solution.

[Grumbledook]

its just at time consuming as EXP and there isn't the space on the team roster, there are already far more simple solutions suggested

[Talafar]

Don't you have to roll lots of dice for experience? And a tally wouldnt take up that much space.

[Grumbledook]

counting players games has already been discussed a fair few times, I also don't like the idea of automatically getting a niggle at 30 games

[Milo]

To represent this, after each game you should put a mark by each player on your roster (whether they took part or not). While this might seem time-consuming, it will in reality take up 10 seconds, so is no big deal. After a player has 30 "marks" they count as having a niggling injury. When they have 70 they gain another. At 120 they recieve a 3rd. And at 250 they must retire.

Doesnt that seem a LOT more simple, and still create the required effect?
If you really want to randomise ages (WHY?) you can roll 6 D6 and subtract 21 from the result; any remaining positive number is the amount that player starts with.
Of course I havent even played 20 games yet, so I may be talking rubbish, but this does seem like a more logical and playable solution.

Talafar --

We actually considered a system like that at one point, but discarded it because it meant that every player on your original starting 11 will likely age at the same time, causing an entire team to worse at some arbitrary point.

A system which requires you to roll 6D6 and subtract 21 for EVERY player on your starting 11 doesn't strike me as simple. I actually proposed something similar to the BBRC, but only used a single D6 for starting players out.

Also, would it really be that easy to count up 250 ticks in a box? How big would the box have to be? =)

It's an idea that has some promise, but also problems. I think you'll find that few teams, if any reach 120 games, much less 250 in the course of their career. I don't know that I've seen any in my local leagues go beyond 50.

Milo

[High & Mighty]

To be honest, High and Mighty's idea struck me as a very sound one, and I was considering proposing it to the BBRC. (Still may, in fact.) I hadn't responded to it because I was still mulling it over and trying to find any holes I could poke in it.

No holes. Don't be silly... besides Pariah's been championing the niggle injury mods since times immemorial and he'll tell you he's never wrong.

I think the one thing most liked about the aging system is that it hits players based upon how much better they get. Get a skill, get a possible aging roll. I think the thing most disliked about EXP is that every player on the team is on the same clock. 1-2-3-4-5-6-aging

I don't know if it would make things too complex mathematically, but what if your EXP target at which you started to age was your cost (yes with the really hard divide by 10 skill)? It's not perfect in that it's not directly tied to your accumulation of skills, but it would help to ensure that skill positions would be less likely to get hit with premature aging.

This would be especially important for teams with expensive players like elves who can't afford the quicker than average ager and once they get higher on the winings chart, can't afford to quickly replace them either.

Problem with the two extremes though. Gobbos on the cheap end and wardancers on the far end. Having to get to 12 would probably mean a WD might never age (so you foul them alot)...while gobbos will age VERY early...is that a problem? Maybe. Perhaps their cost could serve as the point at which they start to lose stats? So after 6 you gain niggles with each EXP and at or after your cost, you make a roll on the aging chart.

It gets much more clunky the more issues you try to address, huh?

[Ghost of Pariah]

But the EXP system has the potential to age several players at the same time too!
What;s worse is that it can not only several players in one game but it can age an entire team over the course of 6 or 8 games.

Yeah, your numbers show that the average team wil age so many players every 3 rd game blah blah blah but it will happen. Somebody will go from a team of healthy champion bound players to old niggled farts in 6 games and hopefully that coach isn't somebody testing the waters of Blood Bowl. Cuz he'll be scared off. So it may only happen to 1 in 100 teams but how many blood bowl teams are out there?

The EXP system is no different than Ageing except it takes more dice rolling. So they ageing effects don't come at the same exact time as a skill upgrade? They come at around the same time and then they come fast and hard! And the worst part is that they will be the hardest on linemen who don't have the skill upgrades to balance out the negative effects.


H&M is right. We need to clear out all this clunky crap and I still can't see how the EXP is not clunky on the table top. Who wants to roll all those dice at the end of the game? H&M is also right about all players being on the same schedule.
Somewhere along the way we forgot that ageing is for limiting these monsters that push everyone around? I hardly see a 2 skill player or a no skill lineman as one of these players? Just because a TR is 250 doesn't mean that this team is going to run over everyone 20 points lower than he is.
I'm of the opinion that an ageing system MIGHT not even be needed with all the other stuff we got in LRB.

[Talafar]

Good points there Milo, I didn't think about the "whole team gets worse at once" problem. But if everyone is playing everyone, then it should happen at roughly the same time for most people. Or you could only check for it at the start of a cup/end of a league.
The 6D6 thing I just added for people who want it more detailed, I dont think its necessary.
It wouldn't be that hard to count the ticks if you used a tally, particularly as most coaches seem to update their team rosters via a computer anyway.
I guess 250 games is quite a large amount, but there has to be a ceiling somewhere, and its nice to make it quite far off. In practice you would only worry about this for one or two players who have got such incredible skills, that you would play them with 3 niggling injuries.

[Milo]

To be honest, High and Mighty's idea struck me as a very sound one, and I was considering proposing it to the BBRC. (Still may, in fact.) I hadn't responded to it because I was still mulling it over and trying to find any holes I could poke in it.

No holes. Don't be silly... besides Pariah's been championing the niggle injury mods since times immemorial and he'll tell you he's never wrong.

I think the one thing most liked about the aging system is that it hits players based upon how much better they get. Get a skill, get a possible aging roll. I think the thing most disliked about EXP is that every player on the team is on the same clock. 1-2-3-4-5-6-aging

Okay, let me be wild and crazy and actually share what I'm thinking instead of keeping it to myself. This is just a wildly unformed idea I'm considering:

What if we isolated aging checks from SPR checks on the SPP chart? Say aging occurred every 10 SPPs instead of when a skill is gained? That would solve the problem of aging at the same time as geting a skill (although it could sometimes overlap, depending on how many SPPs a player got in a game.) If it happens to turn out too often, it could start at 30 SPPs or something. Aging checks would still increase based on the number of skills you have.

Secondly, what if we had an aging result table like this:

2-10 Niggling Injury
11 AV -1
12 MA -1
13 Bonehead
14 AG -1
15 ST -1
16 Career Ending Injury

You'll notice that that has results that can't come up on 2D6. Add to the 2D6 roll +1 for every niggling injury the player has.

So, on your first aging, you'll never get more than a -1 MA or -1 AV, which is not nearly as crippling as the same reduction to ST or AG. Most likely it's a niggling injury, which is damaging but not crippling.

However, the aging table does have some really nasty results, but they'll only hit players who have been in the game long enough to acquire a considerable number of niggling injuries, whether by injury or previous aging.

Again, this is just a brainstorm idea right now. I'm fully aware that there may be major problems with it, and I encourage you guys to pick it apart. It's kind of a combination of the niggle injury mods with the current aging system, with some minor changes to accomodate the common complaints of aging too soon, too harshly, and at the same time as a skill gain.

Milo

[DoubleSkulls]

Secondly, what if we had an aging result table like this:

2-10 Niggling Injury
11 AV -1
12 MA -1
13 Bonehead
14 AG -1
15 ST -1
16 Career Ending Injury

You'll notice that that has results that can't come up on 2D6. Add to the 2D6 roll +1 for every niggling injury the player has.

I think a system like this would go a long way to fixing the current system whether the link to skills is kept or not. To be honest keeping it linked to skills keeps it quite simple and easy to remember.

[Zombie]

What if we isolated aging checks from SPR checks on the SPP chart? Say aging occurred every 10 SPPs instead of when a skill is gained? That would solve the problem of aging at the same time as geting a skill (although it could sometimes overlap, depending on how many SPPs a player got in a game.) If it happens to turn out too often, it could start at 30 SPPs or something.

Such a system already exists and is called Wear and tear, or WAT for short. Just go there to have a look:

viewtopic.php?t=5394

[Mestari]

Both Milo's suggestion and the WAT system are nice.
With WAT the aging becomes too frequent over time. Having to make an aging roll 2 out of three games as in the end is a bit too often.
That's the main reason why I like Milo's suggestion more.

Then the suggested aging table in that suggestion. I think it has a lot of room for what Pariah referred to as fun results. The nature of the result "2" could also be exploited (as it can come up only if there are no niggles) by making it also a positive result. Also, I doubt that there will be too many players with 4 or more niggles making aging rolls, so some of the high-end results can be brought downwards.

Suggestion:

2 Gets Pro + Niggling injury
3-9 Niggling Injury
10-11 Stat decrease: d6: (1-4) -1AV, (5-6) -1MA
12 "Fun" result
13-14 Stat decrease: d6: (1-4) -1AG, (5-6) -1ST
15 Career Ending Injury

"Fun" result table:
--------------------
1-2 Bonehead + +1AV
3-4 Really Stupid + Thick Skull
5-6 Wild Animal + Frenzy

Those could also be divided in half so that only half of the results give a bonus in addition to the negative trait.
These results can give raise to fluffwise interesting players. The Mighty Zug would definitely be of the "Bonehead +1AV"-type, for example.

Something like that, eh?

[Balrog]

What if we isolated aging checks from SPR checks on the SPP chart? Say aging occurred every 10 SPPs instead of when a skill is gained? That would solve the problem of aging at the same time as geting a skill (although it could sometimes overlap, depending on how many SPPs a player got in a game.) If it happens to turn out too often, it could start at 30 SPPs or something. Aging checks would still increase based on the number of skills you have.

Hey! That was my idea (2nd post of 2nd page). w00t!! I got an idea that Milo likes!!

-Balrog