The Norman Boot - Lessons Learned
In my last post I discussed my experience at Carrot Crunch, and how I went about competing for, and winning, the coveted Norman Boot Award for most fouls.
Today, I want to help future foulers reach their potential. I will look at what I learned, what went well, and what could go better.
I knew the best two ways to maximise fouls was to either 1) take The Black Gobbo, or 2) take pile driver. The Black Gobbo allows a second foul action each turn, and Pile Driver gives a free foul following a successful block action.
That was what I knew going in, but what did the relentless tide of fouling teach me?
Fouling without assists is not very useful
Over the course of the weekend, I committed 119 fouls. 119! With those 119 fouls, I only got 17 casualties. Casualties for this tournament were counted from all sources. Blocks, special actions, failed dodges, anything which meant an opposition player ended up dead or injured meant that you scored a casualty point. 1
Only 17 casualties, and not all of them from fouls. In fact, one of them was from an opposition goblin that was eaten by a troll!
As far as I can tell, there are a couple of reasons for this rather gentle foul to casualty ratio.
The first was my opposition. I played against Undead, Goblins, Chaos Chosen, Elven Union and then two Orc teams. Four out of six teams that I came up against were rocking a healthy amount of Av 10.
The second, and more interesting reason was that most of my fouls had little or no assists.
Nazgob did a really interesting post about the differences between Dirty Player and Lone Fouler. This demonstrates just how much one or two assists improves the odds of breaking armour and removing players. Av10 only breaks about 16% of the time. Chuck in one assist, and that improves to almost 28%! Negative assists make it even less likely.
Because the majority of my fouls were committed with Pile Driver, I found the player doing the foul was isolated and without many friends. I had to block the player down, and then follow up in order to get the bonus foul. Sometimes, pushing the opponent away from assists was a deliberate choice, to try and increase the odds of there being a player on the floor to foul later. If you want to win games, don’t do that! Maximise the assists, and enjoy the increased odds of killing the unfortunate victim.
Pile Driver is better with Block
I had Pile Driver on three linerats, so Pile Driver was their only skill. I was blitzing with these guys so often, and this used up most of my rerolls. Block would have prevented a lot of those by saving me from the unwanted Both Down result.
Block would help in three ways.
- Avoid turnovers
Goes without saying, each block thrown with Block is less likely to result in my player going down than one without
- Increase odds of knocking down opponent
Without Block, I needed a POW or a Defender Stumbles to knock over a player and then Pile Drive. If I had it, each dice would be a 50/50 against an unskilled player.
- Increase the odds of fouls on my opponent’s turn
One of the neat quirks of Pile Driver is that you can use it on your opponent’s turn. 2 If they block you, and go down, you can Pile Drive them. Without Block, this only happens when they take a Skull. Get Block involved, and now a one dice from an unskilled player has a 1/3 chance of letting you foul them (unless they remove themselves from the initial armour roll!).
So Block would have been super useful. Next time I do this, I will try it with Dwarves!
The ref really isn’t very good
I rocked up to the tournament with four bribes and a biased ref. 280k - an obscene amount of gold to throw at a ref to turn the other way, and it was only that cheap because of Bribery and Corruption!
Over the six games, and 119 fouls, I had four players sent off. In one game, we got an extra bribe on the first kick off, so I had five bribes right up to the last few turns.
It feels that when I usually foul, there is a high chance I roll a double. That’s a feeling I know other Blood Bowl coaches share. It makes sense, as you’re far more likely to remember the times that the ref spotted you, than the times he didn’t.
If you don’t break armour, there is a 1/6 chance of the ref seeing you (rolling a double). If you do break armour, there’s an additional 1/6 chance. So the odds of being seen is 11/36, roughly one in every three successful fouls. 3 You then have a 1/6 chance of convincing the ref that actually what he saw was not that poor elf’s head being stood on. This is increased to 1/3 with the biased ref!
The long story is, you’re far more likely to get away with a foul than not. If you have a bribe or too, and no secret weapons to use them on, you can actually foul very liberally. Just remember, it is a turnover if you successfully argue the call, but not if you use the bribe! Sometimes it is worth skipping the argue and just sliding those gold pieces his way.
So there we have it, three lessons in fouling. Will fouling win you Blood Bowl games? Yeah, sometimes. Unless fouling is in your blood, a good rule to remember is the W Rule. If it is a Wolf, Witch Elf, Wardancer, Wampure or Wutter Wunner, stamp on its head!
Do you have any tips for Blood Bowl fouling? Let me know via email, I’d love to hear them!
Quack