User guide
OBBLM is a Blood Bowl league manager that works by coaches submitting match data after each played match in a tournament.
League commissioners (league admins) may create tournaments and include certain coaches' teams to participate in a tournament. When a tournament is created, the two coaches participating in any match may submit a match report to the system. The manager will thereby be able to update tournament stats and team details - including giving the team coach access to chose new player skills etc.
The order in which tournament matches are played/submitted does not matter, and if the need may arise, league commissioners are able to delete unplayed matches.
There are three types of users in OBBLM.
- Regular league coaches — these are allowed to submit match reports and create/manage teams in any league they have been assigned to.
- League commisioners (AKA league admins) — these are the same as regular coaches, but may also in the leagues that they commission, schedule matches, view the site log, post messages on the front page board and create new coaches.
- Global admins AKA global commisioners — these are league commissioners in all leagues and have access to otherwise protected administrator tools.
Also note the delete and retirement possibilities in Admin → Management: Coaches & teams
OBBLM is built as a portal software which can handle multiple independent leagues. Because of this teams are completely separated from each other between leagues and can therefore never compete against each other. This means that you (almost) always would want to create only one league which all teams are associated to.
Divisions are contained within leagues and serve as another "layer" between leagues and tournaments.
Divisions have the special property that teams may be tied to them. If division ties are enabled for a league then the divisions in the league behave like leagues in the sense that teams from different divisions (although in the same league) cannot play each other. When division ties are enabled for a league it applies to all the divisions of that league. Most users of OBBLM do not need to enable division ties for their league(s).
Tournaments are assigned to divisions and are simply a container for matches. There exist to tournament types: Round Robins and Free For All (FFA) tournaments. They are both explained in the "Scheduling matches" section.
Note that in order to create matches you must because of this structure first create a league, in which you then create a division, in which you can schedule a tournament with matches.
When scheduling matches please note that:
- You must first create a league with one or more divisions before being able to create tournaments (in which matches are scheduled).
- You are free to schedule multiple tournaments running concurrently.
- You are NOT restricted to playing matches in their scheduled order. In fact, any team may play any scheduled match at any time.
- If you have enabled division ties you may only schedule matches between teams from the same division in a given league. If not enabled you can schedule inter-division games. You can never schedule inter-league games.
In a RR tournament each contestant meets every other contestant in turn.
The entire set of matches in which all contestants meet each other once is called a bracket.
A bracket consists of multiple rounds in which each team plays only one match.
A bracket may be seeded more than once in a RR tournament.
When seeding the bracket multiple times the home—away pairings are swapped every second time.
If an uneven number of teams is selected each team will, in each seeded bracket, receive one bye (walkthrough) in a given round.
Free For All (FFA) scheduling:
The FFA tournament type allows scheduling matches on-demand.
You may either add the scheduled matches to a new tournament or add them to an existing FFA tournament.
If only two teams are selected the match is scheduled by setting the first selected team as the home team.
If multiple teams are selected the list of teams is shuffled, creating random matches with random home—away pairings.
Only an even number of teams may be selected.
The FFA tournament type may also be used to create Knock-Out tournaments and other tournament types by manually scheduling matches.
Q: Does OBBLM support matches of more than two teams?
A: No.
Q: Can regular league coaches schedule matches?
A: Yes, see the Matches → Schedule match page. Note that this kind of scheduling is only allowed in FFA tournaments and requires the FFA tournaments to be marked allowed for regular coach scheduling in the tournament management section Admin → Management: Leagues, divisions & tournaments.
Q: I want two teams from different leagues to play a match, how do I do this?
A: You can't. This is how leagues are defined in OBBLM. Use instead the divisions as "separators" and and remove division ties for the league — thereby allowing teams to play across divisions in the league.
Once a match has been played, you must let the system know by submitting the match data in the Matches → Tournaments section. This can under agreement be done by either team's coach. Only the two participating team coaches and league commissioners have edit access to the match reports.
Match report errors and re-saves
OBBLM is capable of handling re-saves to the same match report - even after subsequent matches have been played by the same teams. Therefore if you, for example, typed in an incorrect Δ treasury value or some wrong player field value, you can correct the errors by simply changing the fields to the wanted values and re-saving.
Extra stats
OBBLM supports the submission of a wide range of different player stats. The commonly recorded player match stats are submitted via. the primary match report along with general match information whilst the extra stats are submitted on a separate submission page - follow the below extra stats link on the primary report page. Please note that you must submit the primary report before submitting the extra player stats.
Game information fields
The purpose of these fields is merely to store general match information. They have therefore nothing to do with team incomes or any other team related stats.
Sportsmanship points
Yelling, screaming, cursing at the dice, disturbing the opponent in his turn and not turning up on gaming night may be punished by giving negative sportsmanship points. Acting like a gentleman and taking a defeat with a smile may be embraced by giving positive sportsmanship points. If your league on the other hand makes the needle on the evil-o-meter jump into the red area constantly, it may be more natural applying the sportsmanship points system the other way around - embracing bad manners with positive sportsmanship points.
Casualties in general
OBBLM can keep track of team casualties, which is the sum of the individual player casualties, opponent self-inflicted injuries, die on a fumble in sprints and crowd killings (and possibly other things of your leagues' choice). Regarding individual player casualties OBBLM can also keep track of the different types of injuries inflicted (bh, si and ki), so please use this possibility instead of adding casualties made by a player as kills.
Player skills
When you roll 2D6 for player improvements remember to record the results in the IR fields. Then, once the match report has been submitted, OBBLM will allow you to pick new player skills from the team pages - if enough SPPs have been gained.
If the improvement roll fields are consistently left as 0 the player in question may select among all skills whenever enough SPP is gained.
Player injuries
If a player sustains multiple injuries simply utilize the second and third injury columns "ageing 1" and "ageing 2". The only difference between the ordinary "inj" column and the ageing columns is that injuries recorded as ageing injuries do not imply a MNG.
Incomes
A team's income must be calculate manually to represent the full change of the team's treasury over the game. OBBLM does not do income calculations for you. If you spended more than you made in a match then simply prefix - (minus).
Remember these factors when you calculate:
- Spiraling expenses
- Treasury spend on inducements
- Hiring costs of star players and mercenaries
- Team winnings
- Tournament winnings, if the game was a final
- Sponsorship deal from Bloodweiser
Q: Can I delete old matches/tournaments which are finished?
A: Do not ever delete matches unless they were mistakenly submitted. Deleting played matches will changed player, team and coach stats and will destroy the data integrity.
When you have received a password from a league commissioner, and you have logged on, your personal coach corner will be activated in the menu bar.
At your coach corner you will be able to create new teams, and change your password, e-mail and your coach name.
You are free to make a testing team for yourself. Teams are deletable as long as they are not scheduled to play any matches or have already played.
Please notice:
- For the sake of keeping league statistics intact you are NOT allowed to delete teams or coaches which have played matches.
- For the same reason it is NOT possible to transfer a team to another coach or transfer a team to another league.
At your team page you may manage your team.
This includes buying and selling players, choosing player skills when your player has the required amount of SPP, and buying other goods for your team.
At your team page you will be presented with your team roster. To view player details select the "toggle roster view"-link below the roster.
As a league commissioner you have extended privileges and may e.g. undo certain team actions (buying players, team goods etc.), which are otherwise not allowed by the owning coach due to security/cheating reasons.
League commissioners may also give players extra skills, SPP and value:
- Extra value — Adding an extra value to a player makes the effective value of the player become Value = Real value + Δextra, where the added extra value, Δextra, can be both positive and negative.
- Extra SPP — Same principle as for extra value.
- Extra skills — Awards players a skill without it counting towards the player value. If you want it to count towards the player value add an extra value to the player which matches the skill.
There exists no "clear player injuries" button. However, an exactly similar result can be acheived by opening the team's latest match report and chaning player injuries to ageing injuries. As stated above in the "Submitting match data" section, the only difference between ordinary injuries and ageing injuries is that ageing injuries do not imply a MNG.
Q: I have scheduled a tournament for N teams, but there are no entries in the statistics tables for the coaches/teams/players, why?
A: The entries in the statistics tables are compiled statistics and are not generated for a coach/team/player until a match is played for that coach/team/player.