Originally this post was supposed to have been a brief section about the Bretonnian race in a review of Bloodbowl 2 but it has grown into a long rant so I’ve made it a separate post. I might or might not post the review that it was originally going to be part of…
So what is the aforementioned Bretonnian roster like? It is the unofficial Bretonnian roster from the Plasmoids website. It’s not too bad if you look at it purely on the basis of the stats and skills – they are completely different from any other team out there whilst not being at all overpowered. There are peasant linemen with AG2 and Fend supporting Blockers with Wrestle and MA7 Blitzers with Block, Catch and Dauntless. All that Fend and Wrestle can make them frustrating opponents when they are defending. The Blitzers don’t have access to Strength skills though so they will struggle to build effective killer players.
The problem with the Bretonnians however is that the players just don’t make any sense. The Blitzers are knights in full plate armour. If anyone should be AV9 it is these guys. The peasants are even more nonsensical. The Fend skill according to the rulebook is supposed to be for very skilled players who can hold off their opponents but peasant linemen are supposed to be badly trained and cowardly. AG2 is fair enough as a way to show that they are badly trained but Fend as a proxy for a player cowering away from anyone attacking him is simply stupid – like a slavering minotaur would stop attacking someone just because they were cowering. To add insult to injury, if you read the article on the Plasmoids site about the design of the team, the guidelines that the author claims he used specifically forbade the use of proxy skills as they don’t make sense yet that is exactly what he has done. The Blockers then appear to have just been thrown into the team because the roster would have been useless without them. A team of Oriental warrior monks full of Wrestle and Fend skills might make sense. For medieval knights and peasants it doesn’t.
It’s a shame really that the team wasn’t closer to the original Blood Bowl knights and peasants team, the Albion Wanderers, from the first edition of the boardgame. In that team we had heavily armoured knights which could possibly have been something akin to Chaos Warriors but without mutation skills. They were supported by peasants who were not allowed to pass the ball to other peasants, they had to pass it to their masters and the knights would only pass to other knights. Some new skills would have been necessary, e.g. something similar to the Animosity skill to restrict the peasants from passing to other lowly peasants, and maybe a Chivalry skill that prevents the noble knights from getting involved in fouling. We could have had a fun team that did a far better job of representing a feudal society than the frankly bizarre team that Plasmoids has given us.