After a couple of years as NAF President, and with less than 2 weeks to go, I thought it would be a good time to offer a few points about what the job involves, and what you can and can’t do, partly to inform the choice that people are making in the election, and to give some background to some of the questions that people are asking. I will use he throughout, as all past Presidents have been male as are the candidates. But I hope we will have a future female President!

The single most important point is that the President is part of a committee of 6 – 4 elected and 2 appointed members.  Therefore the decisions he can make by himself are quite few.  That said, he can appoint the Vice-President and Membership Director, thus giving half the votes on the committee, so the potential is there for a certain amount of control, but it is traditional that there is a certain amount of consensus, if not always 100% agreement.

Communication

The Committee communicate formally by email, through a dedicated forum, and by monthly meetings over Skype, along with personal communication between Committee members by whatever means.  Because they are individuals (y’know, with lives) the extent to which each member participates in each conversation changes, but substantial decisions are always taken in meetings.

The next level of communication is with wider NAF staff (NTCs/RTCs), and this is something I tried to do more often with emails, but never to the extent that I would have liked.  The NAF forum is little-used, but could perhaps be made busier if NAF staff wanted it that way.  With hindsight it would have been good to get more buy-in on decisions like Piling On, and hopefully this will happen with future Death Zone releases.

Then there is communication with NAF members and the wider BB community, through the newsletter and social media.  The newsletter is done through dotmailer, as it allows people to unsubscribe and so on, as well as being a useful way of putting the newsletter together.  While expensive, at around £100 per newsletter, newsletters from large organisations do need to be done professionally, and it is the most effective way of reaching the whole membership.  There would be options such as only sending to current members, but I always believed that reaching out to expired members would also be useful.

Social media is a tricky one, and I have probably conflated too much my roles as NAF President and an Admin of BB Community on Facebook, which future Presidents would be wise to avoid.  This was a hangover from my time as NAF Media Officer, so it would be wise for the incoming President to delegate if possible to a trusted Media Officer or get the Vice President to take on the role of replying to questions, or passing on information from the NAF Facebook page, for example.  I was always happy to do it, as it was a good way of communicating individually with members, but probably was not the most sensible role for the elected position.

In summary, communication has not been as good as I would have wanted, but basically, it’s very difficult!  People in the hobby are enthusiastic for news as soon as possible, but will also think of things that the committee has not considered, so on an ongoing basis the Committee will have to be prepared for any decision having its dissenters, even when you think a decision is fairly uncontroversial (e.g. the 3 game requirement for the 24 patches).

Games Workshop

I was going to include “communication with external bodies” in the section above, but the interaction with GW is important enough to warrant its own section.  I have always done my best to maintain open lines of communication with GW, but this has never been able to be public, due to GW’s policies of keeping development in-house, so it has not been possible for the NAF to have formal engagement, for example, in developing the rules.  As a result the NAF have to deal with whatever we are given, and the “power” will always inevitably lie with GW.  The NAF has an active membership of around 3,000 and an all-time membership of around 15,000, which is miniscule compared to the sales of the board game and even more so compared to Cyanide, so while our members may be extremely enthusiastic and knowledgeable, they don’t necessarily have the buying power to influence a corporation’s decisions.

Finally, on GW, there is a balance between accepting rules changes from GW and keeping the existing player base happy, from which the result is almost always that no-one is completely happy.  This is a recurring theme, in general, in any kind of politics, including NAF politics, and something that the NAF committee do have to accept.

The Website and Rankings

It was part of my election pledge to revamp the website, and I believe I have done so, but not in the way I expected.  Before I was elected I expected a whole new website on a voluntary basis, but this did not work out, so the committee took the decision to invest in the existing one, having investigated the cost of getting a new one developed commercially.  The new coach page and coach finder now provide functionality that I thought should always have existed, and when combined with the wordpress section on thenaf.net it does actually provide a lot of what a centralised hobby network should offer.  Not everything, by a long way, but a lot.

This ties into rankings, with a frequent refrain of decay being built in, so that rankings do not last forever if someone stops playing with a particular race.  As well as being a major change, about which the committee would have to be very certain, this would be an ongoing talking point.  I don’t feel strongly either way, but I think there is plenty for the NAF to be getting on with without it.

The Candidates

A quick word on the candidates, both of whom I have a great deal of respect for.  I encouraged Gaixo to stand as he has been an impressive TD, getting on with the day-to-day job as well as having an eye on the wider development of the NAF on a global basis, and being appropriately accessible to members and responsive to other committee members as well as wider NAF staff.  Driesfield was involved in a very successful Eurobowl in Belgium and is very well-known and popular among the European community, and has always seemed sensible.  Neither is likely to reverse the result of the referendum, and neither is likely to tell GW where to stick their new rules, so hopefully the NAF will be in safe hands.

The NAF

One of the items I believe should be in the new President’s inbox is the structure of the NAF in general – I started this early in my term, but for various reasons had to put it to one side.  There are ways that the NAF works that should be transparent, so that any member can see what is going on, but it is difficult sometimes to document these.  It would be a very useful exercise, however.

That leads to an important point.  The Treasurer, Tournament Director, League Director and Membership Director all have specific jobs that take up a fair amount of time, whereas the President and VP have more flexibility with their time and what projects they choose to pursue, and this is in my opinion the big opportunity that the incoming President has – he will not actually have a daily “to-do list” that is his responsibility alone.  I got involved in resetting passwords and things like that, but this should all be delegated.  The President should have a vision as to what they can do to make the NAF better, and then be prepared to push for it and devote time to it.

So my question to the candidates – what one thing will be different about the NAF in 2 years as a result of your Presidency?

Finally however, the important point is that the NAF lives and dies on its members.  If a NAF member would like the NAF to do something, the NAF has a certain amount of financial resources and support available to make it happen.  But if you care enough to complain about something not happening, ideally you would care enough to make it happen.  The Tournament Series badges were a great example of this – they didn’t exist, someone thought it would be a good idea, put it to the NAF, and now they exist.  If you care enough to complain that something should change, get involved so that you can influence change. 

I am very glad that these two excellent people have put their names forward to be NAF President.  Read the Q&A, ask questions, spread the word, make a decision, then vote.

This post brings me no pleasure to write, and I put off doing it as long as possible, but there have been a number of factual inaccuracies floating around following the Foul Bowl tournament situation, and I believe the reputational damage to the NAF and to me means that I do need to state my understanding of the facts.  Then people can at least make their own minds up in full knowledge.  I have not included screenshots and citations of conversations, as it would have taken a while…

I have posted this here rather than on the NAF site as this is not meant to be “the NAF v Frogboy” or even “Sann v Frogboy”, but me trying to protect the community and the organisation that I have spent at least five years trying to make better.

Foul Bowl is a one-day Blood Bowl tournament in Firestorm Games in Cardiff, run by Frogboy.  I didn’t make it to the first year, but took a car-full (six people) to the second year, and ran Score as well as playing.  It was lots of fun, in a brilliant venue, and I had Foul Bowl 3 on my calendar.  As soon as it was announced I also offered to run Score again, and we discussed the possibility of using the website a bit better before the tournament and on the day.

On October 7th Frogboy posted on the (little-read) NAF forum that he was considering the App races for Foulbowl.  These are 4 races published on the BB App (Savage Orc, Nobles, and Skaven and Dwarf variants).   I immediately posted that I thought this was a bad idea.  He Private Messaged me asking why, and I tried to explain that it muddies the water around the introduction of Khorne and Bretonnians (K/B), and which are sensible and not sensible teams to use in tournaments.  It was a bit tricky to explain so I thought I would be able to talk to him in person about it at Exebowl (on 14th Oct).

Before Exebowl, Frogboy went more widely public with his plans, on Twitter, Facebook and TFF.  He got involved in a somewhat heated discussion on Twitter with Joemanji and JBone, among others, and as it was on Twitter there were quite a few crossed wires .  

At Exebowl, I explained to Frogboy about my concern – that conflating the app teams with K/B was equivalent to saying that the NAF are letting in a whole load of bonkers teams, and as I was planning to be very involved in Foulbowl I would rather he did not include the App teams.

We also talked about NAF sanctioning.  Frogboy had previously put the tournament on the NAF site, which is equivalent to asking for sanctioning, but possibly not everyone realises this.  Gaixo (Tournament Director) approved it, as is standard for returning tournaments as it is often assumed that the rules are basically staying the same.  Frogboy could not remember putting the tournament on the site, but i got him to log in and it showed the tournament on his list – the only way that this happens is if you have entered the tournament in the first place.

At this point I was getting somewhat frustrated and pointed out that it was also likely to be him as he had spelt “tournament” as “tournement”, as I had seen him do this before (and he did it the next morning).  This may have been perceived as an insult, which it was not meant to be. 

He then posted the next day that he was withdrawing from NAF sanctioning, in a long post about the NAF.  I posted that some of the items he has said were not helpful and/or not true, and he called me a bully, along with other unpleasantness.

At the beginning of November Frogboy posted that he was considering making random pairings each round (rather than Swiss).

By November 4th there had been a number of withdrawals from the tournament, and Frogboy posted that he was cancelling the tournament.  This led to a number of posts on TFF and in various places on Facebook that were factually inaccurate and thus drawing wrong conclusions, which led me to writing this.

So, in summary:

• The tournament rules with the App teams were never submitted to the NAF for sanctioning;
• Non-sanctioned teams are allowed in NAF tournaments, with games involving those races not being counted in the database.  Tournaments that have rule packs including non-sanctioned teams are discussed on an individual basis with the Tournament Director.

In October 2017 I was lucky enough to represent Scotland at Eurobowl in Portugal – here’s a quick summary of the Blood Bowl and social experience…

The Scottish team is a combination of the elected Captain, the top three finishers in the Scottish tournament series, and 4 of the Captain’s picks.  With 3 caps under my belt and a handful of tournament wins, I made the wild card selection and was given Skaven to play as I said I would use any race.  After a few vaguely unsuccesful tournaments, and when our Undead player asked to switch races, I switched to Undead and managed to win Exebowl (3 game one-dayer) before heading to Portugal.

I took 4 ghouls (2 block), 2 mummies (both guard), 2 wights (MB and Tackle), 2 zombies and 2 skeletons, 3 RR, 1 FF, 1 AC, 1CL.  Or at least I planned to, but I failed to count my miniatures before coming and my adorable children had taken a ghoul and a skeleton out of my miniature box!  Luckily Skuld from Team Sweden came to the rescue, so my already miscellaneous team (the 2007 TFF Legacy) became even more so.

We travelled on the same flight as the Welsh, and on arrival headed to a riverside restaurant for the local speciality – the Franceshina sandwich.  Amazing stuff.  Accompanied of course with a bottle of port.  The Holiday Inn was then available for check-in, so we headed to the bar and I walloped Loki a few times at chess – good warmup!

The food at the hotel was plentiful if a bit odd at times, which might just have been a cultural thing.  The beer was good, and they were very accommodating with people drinking their own, which was excellent after we discovered a local establishment doing 5 euro bottles of port.

The draw was Friday night, and the vaguely Scottish Norwegian captain Zulu drew us to face Norway in round 1.  It was great to catch up with BB players from around Europe, including the Swedish contingent who were a lot more relaxed than in 2016 when they were hosting.  The socialising and drinking went on late in to the night, so I didn’t feel especially fresh Saturday morning, but I’d decided not to start drinking during Round 1 so that my game did not go completely to rats (because I was playing Undead).

I had Endalos with Wood Elves first game, who did brilliantly last year, and when he had Fame +1 and we rolled Pitch Invasion I was a bit worried!  I was really pleased with my drive though, playing sensibly in the first few turns on offence with both wights stunned, and then manoeuvring around the mummies to stop the tackle wardance doing his thing (the other was frenzy).  Oh yes, and I killed his tree in one of the first few turns.  That was a bonus.  I scored in turn 8, and his one turn score didn’t come off, so I was able to my amazing head coach model facing forward on the brilliant plinth.

His drive was a rollercoaster start, with a short kick and blitz result (sorry Garrick, “defensive blitz”).  I got a ghoul in a cage under the ball, but he dropped it and the ball came out.  He recovered it, but then snake eyed on the dodge out, and after that it was game over as I was able to pick it up and again offer up no more than an uphill block on the ball carrier.  I scored in turn 5 of the second half, and he got a one-turner in order to give enough turns to equalise, but I closed out the game successfully.

Games 2 and 3 were marked by a slight tactical failure on my side (with hindsight), as I allowed Norse and then Orcs (Kithor and the Hungary coach) to score against me in turn 3 or 4, hoping to score back.  Both kicks to me were deep, and I didn’t have enough time to score back (and in fact Kithor went 2-0 up, oops).  The match against the Germans turned into a 4-0 rout as I chased the game, and I got away with a draw against Hungary after I scored in my turn 4 of the second half in order to chase the win.

Saturday night was the Captain’s meeting that I attended to take minutes and because as NAF Pres I felt it was a good idea to know what was going on.  The minutes will appear in time, but it was well chaired by Tripleskull on behalf of the Eurobowl committee, and some important decisions were made as regards getting a proper direction document for future Eurobowls.

Not as heavy a night in the bar after the meeting finished at 1030, but still some good chat about the BB issues of the day.  A few crazies hit Porto at midnight, but that’s never particularly been my style.

Sunday morning brought Pidpad’s Necro, and a fistful of casualties for me (7), starting with his wolf doing a one-die block on my mummy for the attempted surf, and managing skull, reroll, skull, dead, fail regen.  He also made a 4+ dodge to one-die surf my ball carrier, but with a sense of deja vu failed the block on that one too.  Going into his offence at 1-0 up and only facing a sevens side was a bonus, and the game went to bad to worse for him when he was forced to foul with his ball carrier (snake eyes, naturally).

This was our first loss as a team, after two draws and a narrow win yesterdays, so we dropped down from table 3 to table 6 and faced Wales, which meant a mirror match for me against 20phoenix – the only difference being his Guard Wight instead of MB.  One of the big sequence of rolls in this game was his mummy staying in the KO box for 3 kick-offs in a row, and after a bit of forward and backward I managed a 2-1 win, following (one set of) captain’s orders to push for the win after a nailed-on draw.  Unfortunately we got walloped as a team (5.5 – 2.5), so dropped down again to face Finland in round 6, as we did last year.  We were half a point ahead of Poland in terms of hosting rights, so just needed to do better than them in round 6 to bring the Euros to Scotland in 2020.

I faced Jopotzuki’s Necro, as I had last year, and was pleased with my performance after a tiring weekend, putting enough pressure on him to force a sequence of dodgy dice rolls from him.  They came off, and I played for the draw on my drive, but it was really interesting because we both caused so many casualties.  He rerolled a skull to a pow on my blodging ball carrier, which was slight disappointing, but again I was able to recover for the draw.  Finland also had the best swag of the weekend, giving a miniature of their drunkest player from last year (BeerBeer) to each opponent.  Will make an excellent Mighty Zug!

At this point I was told that Poland had scored the same in the last round, so we were mightily pleased, but then it was corrected to them getting half a point more, so we had equalised, and then we had to wait until the prizegiving for the confirmation that they had a better strength of schedule record, which was the tiebreaker, so we’ll have to wait another year to win hosting rights.  Unfortunately Malta will be fighting for it as well next year, and they came 6th this year, so it will be another challenge.

Many congratulations to all the winners, which included champions England, best defence from Gorgoroth, best individual JimJimany, and an amazing performance by the Scottish Europen team.  I put in my best display at Eurobowl on 321, and finished 3rd in most casualties with 19, and around 40th overall out of 170.  You can find the full results on the website.

All I can say now is bring on Wales next year.  After finishing 2nd Scot I would be hoping to make a wildcard choice again, and will be entering the Sann Clan as a team of 3 into the Europen, which is open to all.  It is going to be immense, and we will be trying our best to bring the Euros to Scotland in 2021 after the World Cup in 2019 and Poland in 2020.

Hope to see you at all of those!

While most people (sweeping generalisation ahoy) use Score for their Blood Bowl tournaments, there are a significant minority who don’t, and for these lovely people I’ve produced a new spreadsheet.  If you put the coaches with their NAF names and races in one sheet, and the games in another, then press the magic button, it will generate for you the xml file that will allow you to upload the games without having to do it manually.

I’ve used it myself, but these things do sometimes break when put in the hands of others!  Have a go, and feedback welcome.

You’ll need Excel rather than OpenOffice to use it, as it runs on VBA.  You’ll also have to enable macros, naturally.  There has been a recent security update to Office as well I think which means you will have to download it, open it, close it, then open again to get the macros to work.  I should probably pay some money for https…

Enough already!  Here’s the file: Upload-Generator-v4

Having run Score for FoulBowl yesterday (40 coaches), I’m recording a few learning points for posterity:

• Putting the draw online worked smoothly, despite Frogboy not letting me do one post per round!
• I didn’t put the team names in, and then adjusted the Score output so that it just showed NAF names, tables and races.  In future I will do the same, and use the team name as follows:
• With lots of prizes (best Junior, stunty cup, others?) you need a way of keeping track, especially with over around 30 players.  If you make a note in the team name (Stunty, Junior), you can easily keep track of these teams.  This is particularly important with Stunty Underworld, Stunty Lizards, as it may not be obvious whether these teams are going for the Stunty Cup.
• Also, If you include the team names in the results, then this can build the excitement as you go along as well!  This is slightly affected by the fact that I missed one of the entrants to the Stunty Cup, who happened to win it.
• Printing the match sheets is really helpful, but more so if you are not playing – playing and administrating was hard work!

Given how many tournaments have been run, there is a slight lack of practical tips around (we have some on the NAF website obviously, but more welcome). Has anyone else got good ones?

Entertainingly, Frogboy has asked me to run the computer for him this weekend at Foulbowl, so will be making all the draws available on here (and hopefully it won’t crash, with all of the 40 people trying to get to it at the same time!).

This is a great dry run for running Cakebowl last year, so as a Father’s Day treat to myself while the kids are about I have been playing with the Score output files.

In the “templates” folder I edited to the text of “do draw.htm” so that it says this:

<html>
<head>
<title>@tournamentname@ – Draw for round @round@</title>
</head>
<b>@tournamentname@ – Draw for round @round@</b><br><br>
@record@
Table @nr@ – @coach1@ (@race1@) v @coach2@ (@race2@)<br>
@end@
</html>

Which is a lot shorter than the whole table stuff that was there before.  It produces the draw looking a bit like the following, which should be easier to read online, hopefully (the names are the ones from Cakebowl).  Might stick it back in a table though to make it easier for the second person to find their name.  Though hopefully people can use the find function on their phones!

FoulBowl – Draw for round 6

Table 1 – hawca (lizardman) v Frogboy (Orc)
Table 2 – Wulfyn (lizardman) v Rubick (Amazon)
Table 3 – Ceetee (Orc) v Landrover (Norse)
Table 4 – Heff (chaos) v Maverick (khemri)
Table 5 – Gutrot81 (Chaos Dwarf) v dreamscreator (Chaos Dwarf)
Table 6 – Hobnail (Orc) v Besters (chaos)
Table 7 – Gorgoroth (Orc) v Morbo89 (Skaven)
Table 8 – YogiBedlamBear (dark Elf) v Be4ch (Orc)
Table 9 – Glowworm (necromantic Undead) v Angry Hobbit (Chaos Dwarf)
Table 10 – Eski (Orc) v Wotfudboy (Dwarf)

I then tried to update the match sheets, to add in bonus points for fouling (hence the name), but bizarrely using Word to update the rtf file made it all go pear-shaped.  A quick Google and install of OpenOffice later however, and I was able to produce this file, which puts the coach name on instead of the team name and doesn’t waste too much paper.  Save it into the “templates” folder.

Part of my reason for producing ExScore was that Score cannot automatically produce a score when the Tournament Organiser wants to reward a team win, so if your team of 4 achieves 3 wins and a draw, they should be awarded 3.5 points, for example.

This was the case for Eurobowl 2014, in Belgium, and the way that I suggested the organisers use was to enter all the results for a team at the same time (which is often done anyway), and use the Settings to award Team Points each round.

Say that you award 1 for an  individual win, 0.5 for an individual draw, then 1 for an overall team win , so a team that wins 5-3 gets 6 points in total, each player on that team would gets 6000 bonus points.  As an individual score is in the units or tens, it will never overcome the team score, so will only be used for the individual Swiss.  The team will then have been awarded 48000 team points (e.g. 6000 x 8 players), but this does not affect the actual standings as each team’s points are just multiplied by eight.

Hope that all makes sense, do comment if not!

After a request for info, seemed like a good idea to have streaming advice in one place.

So, here’s what I use:

• A Logitech C920 USB Camera
• A microphone stand, slightly adapted to hold the camera
• Sometimes an extension lead for the camera, though the 20m one caused the camera to cut out.  The 5m one worked fine, and I’ve just bought a 10m one to test.
• A Twitch account for live streaming and YouTube for uploading videos
• OBS software

When I’m doing commentary I use a USB microphone or headset – the former causes popping, so TheSage says I should use a pop filter.  I did make a homemade one at some point, but it seemed to be taking the whole thing a bit seriously to use it!