Hello all,

The recently released rules for the The Bugman’s XXXXXX League Cup (tabletop tournament at Warhammer World) have caused a bit of comment and mockery in the community. If you haven't seen them you can find them here : http://warhammerworld.games-workshop.com/the-bugmans-xxxxxx-league-cup/ . But to summarise briefly, there are no points awarded for winning, drawing or losing a game. Instead you score a number of 'league points' roughly equal to the SPPS you'd normally earn during a game - so 3 for a Touchdown, 2 for a blocking casualty or interception and 1 for a completion or having a player sent off for fouling. So yes, you can win a game 3-0 and still score fewer points than an opponent who gets lucky on casualties or concentrates on throwing a completion every turn. Madness you say! How can GW create such a ridiculous ruleset? I might be playing Devil's Advocate here ... but is that actually any worse than the rules we already use for some NAF tournaments?

If you are running a tournament, it by definition seeks to crown a winner. If you are going to crown a winner, I think most people can agree that good rules would be ones that seek to crown the 'right' winner. The person who has performed best over the weekend. Factors such as sportsmanship or painting could be brought into consideration here, but as the Bugman's tournament is not doing so I won't digress on that subject. If you are looking to crown a winner based on their performance as a Blood Bowl coach you want rules that award points for performing well in your games of Blood Bowl. We could run a tournament that awards 3 points for a win and 100 points for being the tallest coach, and at most one person is going to find that satisfactory.

So with the preamble over, are the Bugman's rules less fit for purpose than some others we use? There was a NAF-ranked tournament (to remain unnamed) that used the following rules:

3 points for a win.
2 points for a draw.
0 points for a loss.
1 point for a casualty (unlimited).
0 points for a touchdown.

You read that right. A coach could win 5-0 and still score fewer points than his opponent. And in fact that actually happened. One coach finished with the best record, a 5/0/1 including three 5-0 wins, and finished in 4th place (it was not me, I did not attend, this isn't a waa). But with the Bugman's rules, a 5-0 win would garner at least 15 points, which an opponent would struggle to make up with casualties or completions (most teams being unsuited to pursuing both in the same game). So which ruleset is more sensible here?

The NAF tournament example is a fairly extreme example, so perhaps we should look at a more normal situation. The following is a very common scoring system :

10 points for a win.
5 points for a draw.
0 points for a loss.
1 point for a touchdown (max 3).
1 point for a casualty (max 3).

Looking at a 5-0 (0-5) result and a 3-3 (3-3) tie under all three systems for example :

Bugman's : winner gets 15 points, loser gets 10 points, tie gets 15 points (with the possibility of extras on both sides for completions etc.)
NAF Tournament A : winner gets 3 points, loser gets 5 points, tie gets 5.
NAF Tournament B : winner gets 13 points, loser gets 3 points, tie gets 11 points.

This isn't meant to be a rigorous analysis, I'm sure there are other results that could be presented to put this in a different light. But at first glance it seems that the Bugman's rules are entirely within the parameters of what we have come to expect from a NAF tournament. It is just that they have been presented in a slightly different way.

There is an argument that coaches might try to 'game' the system, by ignoring normal tactics and just trying to max out the points for casualties or throwing completions. But again is this a bad thing? I would never personally do this, as it isn't how I want to spend 2 hours of my time. But if a coach chose to do this it would actually be a reasonably skilled achievement. Throwing a completion for 8 turns and then scoring without losing the ball would be a very impressive feat, and anyone who pulled it off would be a 'worthy' tournament winner. Is this true of a coach who just took Mighty Blow and racked up a load of casualties at the above NAF tournament?

We must address the point that GW have designed this ruleset for an different purpose than crowning a winner of course. That is entirely incidental to them, they traditionally run events as an excuse for people to mess about with the game and experience Warhammer World. Being competitive is antithetical to the GW message - just look at what they did with Age Of Sigmar. And in that, are they not being more honest than some NAF tournament organisers?

All the best,
Joe



For a lovely summary of bonus points and why they are stupid, I'll quote below a post by Purplegoo.

The area that really irritates me (in general, not just here) is tournament scoring systems. Scoring at NAF events is my absolute personal bugbear, and something with a NAF badge on it not giving an example I see as the ‘correct’ version in this summary makes me grind my teeth a little. I’d rather this piece not steer new TOs down the all too common path of ropey systems.

We all attend BB events to have a laugh, meet friends and have fun, no-one spends time and money travelling to win first and foremost. That is a given, and I wanted to get in before anyone else did. However, these things are ‘tournaments’, so something as trivial as getting the scoring system that determines final placings right should be pretty easy, and isn’t really an area for flair or innovation. Keep it simple and correct.

Blood Bowl is not football. A win should not be valued more highly than double a tie. We have no spectators to please (Jimmy Hill be damned), and the mechanics of our strategy game are often not suited to pressing for a win over a tie if behind at the half (for instance). Indeed, scoring systems that value a win as more valuable than two ties can very easily encourage coaches to play badly, which is counter intuitive.

Bonus points are a plague. Again, rewarding poor play (pushing for 3-0 at the expense of consolidating a victory) or rewarding a good Swiss draw twice (woo! I’ve drawn 16 Snotlings, I’ll win. Woo! Not only will I win, I will collect loads of bonus points equivalent to a whole tie, when those two guys playing out a fantastically coached 0-0 will just get a bad draw’s worth of points) is the sort of thing that shouldn’t happen.

BPs are easily dismissed with a wave of the hand as just a bit of fun, but all too often they impact tournament results more than they should. Rather than adding transparency, we are too commonly left in a situation where the proper tournament winner on 5/1/0 is awaiting a handshake, only for the guy on 4/2/0 (or worse) that killed everything to become the shock winner, to the surprise of everyone following the top tables. Whilst no-one goes home and punches a wall, everyone looks at each other and says ‘well, that’s a bit crap, sorry buddy. See you in a month or so?’ and the winner is left ashen faced. It’s perverse that we go out of our way at tournaments to crown incorrect winners. Nothing in a rulespack is really sacred; skills packages, tiering systems, gold to spend should be, and are, all up for grabs. But intuitively, the scoring system should be the one thing that is bloody sacred. Bonus points for sendings off, indeed.

2/1/0 / SoS tie breakers is very slowly creeping in as ‘standard’ at both flagship events and some smaller tournaments. Like democracy, it’s not perfect, but it’s the best system we’ve got by some distance. I can accept 1000 /500/0 with a point or two for TDs and CAS if you must, but why meddle with something so simple and elegant?

So, er, TL:DR, at least put the best system in, like?