The second week of the Blood Bowl league I'm playing in has finished up. My dwarves are 1-1 thanks to snowballing in both games. The first one saw my chaos opponent get the early hitting lead and it ended up with him getting 5 casualties to my 0 and barely winning the game 2-1. The second game featured my undead opponent making a 2 die block on the line on the first turn, having to reroll it, and still falling down. He was badly hurt. He didn't regenerate. So already, before I even took an action, I'd got more casualties than in my first game. The turnover from falling down coupled with a kick close to the line let me pick up the ball on his turn to receive, and him being down a man right away meant I was able to use my numbers to keep hitting his guys. The end result was a 5-0 casualty swing the other way and a 2-0 victory.
I was pretty frustrated after the first game because the dice just weren't going my way. Even with his early numbers disadvantage I was still able to set up way more advantageous attacks than he was. I threw 128 block dice to his 89, and knocked him down 32 times to his 29. But I only pierced his armour 8 times to his 15 and didn't get a 10+ on any of the injury rolls. When looking at 10+ rolls he had 15 of his 44 2d6 rolls as 10+ while I had 4 of my 40. So I felt really unlucky and was getting frustrated. I tried to keep from going on tilt but a little more luck my way and I think I could/should have had a draw.
On the flip side the second game was tilted in my favour. I threw 180 block dice to his 63. I knocked him down 63 times to his 12. I pierced his armour 28 times to his 2. He was 2 for 14 rolling 10+, I was 13 for 91. Which, actually, still is below average. The big difference this time, it looks like, is I rolled a lot of 9s and undead have low armour. Also it actually helped a lot that my whole team starts with block since we both rolled a lot of 'both down' results which helped me and hurt him. Like the turnover on the opening drive.
I could tell from his voice that he was getting frustrated similar to the way I was in the first game. I watched some guys play earlier today and the one who fell behind (by rolling a lot of 1s) got really frustrated as well. In this case he actually rolled a lower than expected number of 1s, he just rolled a lot of dice dodging/leaping/going for it and failed a few times as a result. I mean, he did fail 13 dodge rolls which is a lot of failed dodges, but he tried to dodge 34 times. That's a lot of dodging. There was one play in particular that he was frustrated about failing where he rolled blood lust, dodge, dodge, reroll dodge, leap, dodge, reroll dodge, dodge. He finally fell down on that last dodge. Now, this guy did have 5 agility but some of those dodges were into 2 tackle zones. The probability calculator in BBM indicates he had about a 65% chance to pull it off. Not terrible odds by any stretch but failing isn't that unexpected. But he was already on tilt and this seemed to throw him over the edge.
I don't really know that I have a point in here at all. It seems like the game has small numbers of dice and it's very easy to fail things, especially when throwing a lot of dice. On the flip side it's also pretty easy to go a whole game without any catastrophes at all. My second game I was ending halves with 3 rerolls left because I never had to use them. When your bad game lines up with your opponent's good game it's so easy to get frustrated and get tilted. Which itself will cause bad decisions to happen and let things spiral out of control.
I also get really attached to my guys. None have suffered a serious injury thus far in the league but I'm dreading when it will happen. Because it will happen, eventually. I take such glee in watching other people's guys die (especially when spectating a game) so I think I need to relax a little and cheer my own deaths too. And approach each turn as a new puzzle to solve instead of dwelling on the dice that caused a given puzzle to arise. Easier said than done, though.
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