Quirkworthy

Yesterday I was talking about Ultimate DreadBall and how this was the end of the first cycle. What I mean by that is that DreadBall, Season 2 and Ultimate DreadBall all focus on the official game, run by the DreadBall Governing Body (commonly known as the DGB or “Digby”). But DreadBall has a darker, unsanctioned side. This lacks the glitz and glamour of the stage-managed spectacle in the big arena. In its place it has more grime and sweat, and a lot more blood.

These days, Digby has enough political clout and certainly enough money to be able to influence governments, and for this reason it is actually illegal to hold unsanctioned DreadBall games. Technically even a pick-up game of Street DreadBall is illegal, though in  the case of kids the rules are often waived. The real target of the laws were the underground circuit of games at which vast amounts of cash change hands, both as hiring fees and as bets. The aficionados of this version of the sport want their blood too, and the illegal status of the games makes player casualties murder victims. At least in the eyes of the law. So the players are often masked, or otherwise disguised.

Games are held in hidden locations, organised secretly by shadowy figures who only release the information at the last moment. Digby’s own security forces fight a constant battle of infiltration and skullduggery to prevent these matches, with far less success than they would like. This has led to a huge campaign of media suppression in an effort to deny the existence of DreadBall Xtreme, even if it cannot actually be stopped.

So, we have a different, but related game. Current thinking is that this will be a completely self-contained boxed game. I say current thinking as I am writing this when the DreadBall Kickstarter is still running, and I have no idea how well it will be supported. I’d love to get all the way to writing DreadBall Xtreme, but that depends on the fan support. If there’s a demand, then I’m way ahead of you 😉

How will it play?

Well that’s not entirely nailed down yet. As I’ve mentioned, we’ve been focussing our playtesting on ensuring that the core game was as solid as possible. However, I’ve got some ideas and have tried a few out which looked promising.

Whatever happens it will be fast and furious, just like normal DreadBall. It will also be guaranteed to have more casualties.

The main features of the game as they stand in my head now are:

• No Ref, so no fouls. Do what you like. There is one exception to this to avoid complete anarchy, which is the maximum number of players in the arena at once. Apart from that, I can see a lot more injuries and deaths.
• Less armour. Another likely cause of major casualties is the lighter and more makeshift armour. Digby controls the manufacturing of official armour and there is no real incentive to fabricate major protection when what the crowd wants is blood. Xtreme will be a lot more gladiatorial than official DreadBall, though you should never lose sight of the fact that you still win the game by scoring Strikes.
• Fancy holographic Strike targets is a bit beyond the ad hoc nature of most Xtreme arenas, so the arenas themselves are laid out a bit differently. I am also toying with the idea of every Strike Zone being usable by both teams, but with a different points value for each team at each Zone, if you follow me. For example, in the Zone nearest my end of the pitch I can score for 1 point, but you get 3. This may not work as I envisage, but I’ll give it a go.
• Teams and team building will work very differently. In the secretive and illegal huddle of DreadBall Xtreme, teams are more fleeting and variable than normal. They form around a Backer who can pay for the hire of enough players. This is usually just for a single game. As players get injured or killed (or arrested) they come and go from the line up. In reality, what happens if that a Backer will have a large pool of players that he knows, and he will hire whichever ones he can find or wants for each match on a per match basis. This single match contract is the basis for the difference between official and unofficial teams. Normal DB players sign up for years, and so the teams change only slowly. In the board game, this means that you (the Backer) buy your team from a much wider selection of players and races than normal, and most Backers have a similar set to draw from (though I need to work on this to add more variety – I’m not happy with that yet). Regardless of the details, it’s a very different team set up from normal DB.
• The core moving and action system will remain the familiar one from DreadBall. It’s a violent parody of the same game, so there’s no need to fix what’s not broken. However, I’m toying with the idea of only 3 Team Action Tokens per Rush to reflect the lack of coordination in these temporary teams.
• The card deck will be replaced with a heavily revised version to better suit the different character of Xtreme.
• The league system will be modified to accommodate the different team system. It is possible that league hiring will all be auction based, like current MVP hiring. This might be a bit slow though. We’ll see how it goes.

New Players?

The player types you will see in DreadBall Xtreme are the scrapings of the barrel. They include all manner of cutthroat scum, ex-convicts, disgraced big league players, military deserters, criminal enforcers (not the combat unit), mutant aberrations as well as all manner of alien dregs.

Should be a laugh 😉

This gets increasingly Blue Sky, but what the heck. Might as well talk about it now, right? Once DreadBall is out, and assuming that we’ve sailed through the Kickstarter levels to get Season 2 out as well, we’ll have a fully developed game with 8 nicely balanced teams and, let’s say, 20-30 MVPs. We’ve got coaching staff, cheerleaders and a slick league system. What else could we possibly need? Well, remember I said yesterday that games have a natural size? This one ain’t done yet.

Ultimate DreadBall is the end of the first cycle of DreadBall – the clean and shiny DreadBall in its official and sanctioned format. This is the one you see on the tri-vids and is where the big name players strut their stuff. What we haven’t touched on yet is three main areas: really big players, variant pitches, and multi-team games.

Of course, while I’m about it I might as well include 4 more teams and a bunch more MVPs. It’d be rude not to. Exactly who these might be is a little fuzzy still, but some candidates include Asterians and a team of John Doe-like aliens (and their friends). These and other teams will probably be closely related to the new rules.

My, You’re Tall!

The larger models in DreadBall already make the hexes squeak at the edges, and I have a hankering for some really big players. I mean, it’s science fiction, and if I can’t have rampaging giant robots then, when can I? I’d also like to do some enormous alien monstrosities because they’d be fun too. All of these mean multi-hex models, and that causes all manner of problems with rules and rule clarity. That’s why they come at the end – more playtest time.

In a practical sense, I think that 3 hex beasties is about the biggest you could have without making all the 1 hex players completely redundant (which would be another, different game entirely). They would still be a pretty imposing sight on the pitch, and would be very dangerous for their opponents. Getting this to balance into a fun game, plus keeping the rules simple, is going to be tricky and will need a lot of testing. By the time I’m done it will be clean and slick and you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about, I’m sure 🙂

Anyway, huge monsters, giant robots and all manner of bigness will appear in Ultimate.

Actually, I’ve just had a thought. I wonder how many hexes a Forge Father Iron Ancestor takes up. He’d need new arms, and is possibly a tiny bit too big to be practical, but it gives you an idea where I’m heading here.

Variant Pitches

The pitch you will be familiar with is the standard format for league matches. However, there are other types of pitch with different patterns of Strike Zones and different overall shapes. Most of these have not yet been playtested as we’ve been concentrating on making the core game as solid as possible. However, I keep all these ideas in notebooks, so if everyone is as keen as I am then I can roll them out 🙂

Would they be posters, mounted boards, acrylic or MDF? I don’t know. That level of detail is getting ahead of ourselves. I’m just letting you know that arenas come in more than one shape and size. Multi-hex players may also need a size and shape arena all their own.

Multi-Team Games

Two player games are great, but once things get all crazy with Ultimate DreadBall I’d like to introduce bigger arenas with giant robots, monstrous aliens and, of course, more than two teams at a time. This is the sort of thing for grand finales of leagues, spectacular demonstration games and other grand events. It’s also loads of fun. It is Ultimate DreadBall.

Mechanically, it’s another headache because one of the central features of DreadBall is its speed of play. More players means more downtime between Rushes, so this requires some serious tinkering with to retain the frantic atmosphere. I have some options in mind, and I’m confident it can be done. But again, it’s more fiddling and a load more bespoke playtesting, which is why it comes at the end of the cycle.

Still, it’s an exciting development

Ultimate DeadBall

So in summary, UDB will add more teams and more MVPs, many of which will be playable in your normal games. It will also add rules for the events after which it is named: Ultimate DreadBall – bigger arenas, multiple teams, giant players!

More?

And while this is the pinnacle of the neat and clean DreadBall, we’re still not done with the sport yet. I have a niggle at the back of my brain that tells me there is one final twist in the tale.

Tune in tomorrow and I’ll tell you all about my ideas for DreadBall Xtreme.

Just for a change of pace, I’d like to talk about where I’d like to go with DreadBall in a design sense. Before I go further, let me say that none of this is carved in stone. The nearer stuff is more solid, but we still haven’t published the core game or finished the Kickstarter yet!

Ronnie, being Ronnie, has already spilled many of the beans with update 26 for Kickstarter. Pesky blighter just beat me to it. I’ll assume you’ve read that.

Starting Points

When I design a game, I find that it has a natural size – an amount of rules and number of options that just suits it perfectly. Sometimes it’s big, and other times petite, but if you listen to a game it will always tell you.

I may have said something similar with Dwarf King’s Hold because I wrote a similar article for that. We’re most of the way through that vision now, and I am looking forward to the next (very exciting) step. For DreadBall things are a bit different.

Apart from Mantic having a bit more experience about this whole board game lark (making production and so on much smoother), there is the whole Kickstarter thing. That has a couple of facets which make me very excitable, and neither of them are the money. At least, not directly.

The first thing is that (thanks to everyone’s support) I can get my vision for the game done much faster and probably better than would otherwise be the case. Me telling Ronnie that I want to do 4 boxes of DreadBall games sounds less silly if everyone is keen 🙂

Secondly, and probably more importantly for me, it creates an instant community. I don’t know about you, but I am often an early adopter of any game that isn’t one of the top 3. That means I am the one investing time, money and effort finding the game, learning it and then trying to persuade enough people locally to have a viable group. The internet is a bit of a game changer in many ways, but it still doesn’t get me local games. I’ve been reading a lot of forums lately, and have posted quite a bit myself. Talking to people, I’m getting a strong impression that whole groups are getting on board with DreadBall, and people are going out and persuading their friends that it’s looking like something to keep an eye on. And, of course, it is 😉

What all of this means is that instead of a shiny new box coming out and you being the first to get it, there will be a whole community of gamers on the day of release. And for a game like DreadBall which has so much entertainment value lurking in a set of league rules, this is really valuable. It’s a very different situation, and one made possible only by the enormous support the Kickstarter has had so far. Of course, the bigger it gets the bigger this community will be, which is a real win all round.

So thank you for your support, and for those who read this after it has closed, you missed a really exciting time 🙂

4 boxes?

Like I said, a natural size. At least in my head. I’ll talk about the 3rd (Ultimate DreadBall) and 4th (DreadBall Xtreme) tomorrow because I can already see that this is going to be a bit long. For now, let me focus on DreadBall and its immediate expansion: DreadBall Season 2.

DreadBall is a stand alone game, designed to be entirely self contained. There is no need for you to go and buy a bunch more stuff. Except that you will want to because it’s cool 😉

The DreadBall box includes complete rules for one off games and leagues, as well as 4 teams and 8 MVPs. It’s not half a product, because that’s not how I do things. It’s a whole game. Let’s be clear on that.

However, I often struggle to fit my whole idea into a single sane size of product. It’s usually bursting at the seams with ideas, then I have a few more and they have to go somewhere – hence an expansion. DreadBall Season 2 is an opportunity to add a little bit of chrome to the rules with some Coaching Staff, Cheerleaders (because everyone wants them – and why not), 4 more teams and as many MVPs as I can fit in. The core rules won’t change (they don’t need to), and the extra rules will be there purely to allow those additions. I’m very conscious of the cleanliness and sleekness of the system as it stands and don’t want to bury it under fiddly nonsense. Always have to keep a weather eye out for that.

Abilities are a good way to define the character or style of a team or MVP, so I’d expect to include a few of those. A lot can be done with stats, combinations of player roles and so on, but every now and again you need to stick in something new.

Which Teams?

Glad you asked.

This quartet of new teams has undergone a number of iterations so far, and this isn’t entirely final though I feel like we’re getting close.

1. Ladies First. Yes, the girls really ought to go in here. They are still humans, and will have human stats the same as the Trintek 29ers, but there is a spin or two I’d like to introduce to change their playing style a bit and make them a separate team in their own right. I think I can do this without adding any new rules too, which is a bonus. Needs more playtesting though. Of course, you could still use the miniatures to play as a 29ers sort of human team if you like.
2. It came from… who knows? It’s the ZZor, and they’re not telling. This is one of the Warpath races which hasn’t seen the light of day on those battlefields yet, but which we might get to see first on the DreadBall pitch. nasty, nasty bitey things, so lord knows how they got to be in teams. Maybe mind control devices and shock sticks, controlled breeding programmes, stunt doubles or some other cunning piece of showmanship. Perhaps their hive minds just like a bit of sport. I suspect their Guards might be quite mean.
3. Robots! Well it’s the far future, so it would be rude not to. I had a really cool (in my head, anyway) idea for this team, and have sort of dumped a production headache on Mantic. I want the team to be able to change roles as the game goes on. Not like Transformers visually, but a similar idea of mutability. The headache is how to do this as models. However it works it will probably be a bit more effort and cost to collect a robot team because you will need the extra models when they change role (as different player roles will look different). Still, none of the teams is a huge investment, and at Mantic prices I can’t see that people will grumble. Especially as the idea is so much fun. Need another Striker? Sure, I’ll just swap this one out. Should be crazy on the pitch.
4. Judwan. Who? Well they are made up aliens (it’s science fiction, remember). These were spawned by an MVP I was working on, whose race suggested a whole different play style, and that’s what you need for a really good new team. I’m going to try them out with only Strikers, and we’ll see if they work as see them in my head…

As you can see, it’s a varied bunch.

More MVPs

I want to draw from a few sources for this. There will be some weird aliens, some more for the existing races, plus specific MVPs for the new teams. I’d also like to include a few jokes and you might find homages to some real world sporting legends. Just because I can 😉

Season 2

Overall, Season 2 will add greater breadth to an already tactically deep game, and this in turn will add even more depth to the tactics and counter-tactics (especially for leagues). With more teams and more MVPs the  combinations of possibilities for really interesting matches just gets even bigger.

I look forward to the debates about which team is best 🙂

A couple of people have asked about this, so I’ll take it from the top. Firstly, how it looks in the “real” game that I have in my head, then in the board game.

Scoring Strikes in the Real Game

In DreadBall, a scoring Throw is called a Strike. This term lends its name to several other game terms, notably the type of player who scores the most: a Striker.

A real DreadBall pitch is divided into hexagons, several of which are grouped together in coloured areas to form a total of 6 Strike Zones, 3 on each side of the pitch. Within each Strike Zone is a Strike Hex (at one end) and a Bonus Hex (at the other). In the Strike Hex is the Strike Target.

Only Jacks and Strikers can score Strikes. Guards (and Keepers) may not.

In order to score, a player must be standing inside a Strike Zone and Throw the ball to hit a Strike Target in the Strike Hex that belongs to that same Strike Zone. You might want to re-read that last sentence slowly. Note that the ball must be Thrown, and that carrying the ball onto the Strike Hex does nothing.

Visually, the Strike Target is a small circle at about head height for an average human. The target is less than twice the width of the ball, and so is very hard to hit. When playing Street DreadBall with your mates, this target might be as simple as a bucket on a stick. In most professional arenas the Strike Target will be a holographic image, projected above the Strike Hex only when a player enters the Strike Zone carrying the ball (and so becomes legally able to score). The trajectory of the ball is constantly tracked and a Throw’s success or failure is calculated by computer.

The moment a Strike is made the ball is removed from play and a new ball is launched across the centreline. This removal is either by the mediporter (normally used to remove injured or dead players) or by using the inbuilt anti-grav system to make the ball go straight up.

The actual number of points awarded depends on which Strike Target the ball hits, and where it is Thrown from. Each side may score in any of the 3 Strike Zones in the opposing team’s half of the pitch. The closer two are worth 1 point per Strike; the farther one is worth 3. If you score a Strike when you are standing in the Bonus Hex (which is further away and therefore a harder Throw) you get an extra point, so the Strikes are worth either 2 or 4 points.

Scoring Strikes in the Board Game

This works exactly the same way as in the real game, with the board being a faithful representation of the moderately high-tech professional arena.

The action required to score is called a Throw. I’ll cover this in more detail in the actions article. Basically though, it does what you’d expect – longer throws are harder as is making accurate Throws when an opposing player is in your face. You can pass the ball to friends, and you can also use it as a weapon to throw at opposition players if you really want to.

Losing control of the ball ends your Rush unless you are flukey enough to catch the scattering ball. Scoring a Strike always ends your Rush.

The rules give you a nice clear distinction between different player roles, which all helps to form a clear plan in your head. Guards cannot score, so they (and you) can focus on their job of damaging people. Strikers are the best at it, so when you can you’ll be wanting to get the ball to them. Of course, your opponent knows this too, so they’ll be breaking the legs of the Strikers first, just as you will be to them. For those teams that do not have Strikers, they need to use their Jacks to score, and their inherently lower skill means that they need to adapt their team’s tactics to suit.

Having a number of Strike Zones, and making them worth different points depending on which one you use and where you throw from, all gives the pitch far more tactical “texture” than a field where you can only score at either end. You constantly have to balance risk against reward, working out how many actions a plan will cost and how likely its success.

DreadBall, like most games, involved a large number of people in its production. I’m happy to say that many of them are now floating round the net answering questions and explaining how things work, and while I am the designer I am not the only person who can deal with detailed queries. I had two playtest leads, and loads of playtesters, among others, and many are very active posters. Hopefully this means that you’ll be able to find answers to your questions here or elsewhere, but just in case you can’t I wanted to explicitly ask what you’d like to know more about. Some people are shy about speaking up, and I’d much rather they just asked. So…

I’ll do an FAQ to cover any gameplay issues once the game comes out. What I’m asking here is for topics you’d like to see me discuss in these Design Notes articles. I’ve got several planned already: scoring system, winning the game, board development and leagues, for example. There may be more I’ve missed.

What I’d like to hear is any areas of the rules that you’re curious about. Do you want to know how something works? Are you more interested in why things work this way?

Ask away.

And feel free to post this link and this question wherever you like. Whilst my flying monkeys patrol the skies over most of the net we can’t be everywhere at once. I always check this site daily, so if you ask here you can rely on getting an answer.

Looking forward to filling in the gaps in your DreadBall knowledge 🙂