[Rules] What are NAF Resurrection Tournaments?

[Coach]

For those new to the game, or perhaps just used to playing with a closed group of people, you may not be familiar with the NAF and/or Resurrection tournaments.

Please read through this first so you have an idea on what this section is for and the format of how games are played.

What is the NAF?

The NAF (www.thenaf.net) is the world wide organisation of Blood Bowl coaches. It launched in 2002 and I believe it to be the largest fan based group of any of the Games Workshop games. At the time of writing (Jan 2011) I believe there are just over 17,000 members.

There is a yearly membership cost though it isn't much. You also get a set of coloured Block dice (different colours every year) as part of your membership. Perhaps the main aspect of the site is the sanctioning of official NAF table top tournaments and world wide player rankings. There are other features on the site as well, including a forum, coach locator, league listings and some team management functions.

What are Blood Bowl Resurrection Tournaments?
If you are familiar with Blood Bowl then you may have played in a league or tournament at some point using all the progression rules for advancing your players and improving your team. Typically these would involve some sort of knock out format, a traditional league table, or perhaps some kind of ladder system.

Those systems can be a lot of fun and work well for local groups or playing online. As coaches got together for a weekend of playing Blood Bowl these had their drawbacks.

Firstly not all the coaches would play the same number of games unless you perhaps used a mini league group stage. Though that could mean someone who faces easier teams gets an advantage or you again have a knock out system.

Using the standard team progression and injury rules could also mean that someone who got unlucky with injuries in their early matches is playing the rest of the tournament with a crippled team. Neither of these situations are great for people travelling to get to a tournament, especially if it is a long way and costs a lot of money!

The Resurrection Format:
To get around the issue of a team getting crippled, in a Resurrection Tournament your team roster gets reset and none of the injuries carry over onto the next round. In essence your players are all "Resurrected" which is how the name Resurrection came to be. To go along with that it is common to ignore the standard SPP progression as well. This helps maintain more of an even playing field and also speeds games up as you don't have to track individual player performance and development.

Various different methods have been used with regards to how teams develop, the most common historically being that teams can allocate one normal skill to a player after each game. It is also standard that a single player can't get more than one skill throughout the tournament. Some tournaments may let you take a double skill after a certain round. Some may let you take a few skills at the start of the day and add more on the next day. Others let you take all the skills at the start and you play with the exact same team in every round. It is the development rules and also how much money you get to spend on the team that various from event to event.

The last part to a NAF Resurrection tournament is that they typcially will use a Swiss System for matching opponents up. The first round matches are often randomised and then points are awarded for how well you did during your match. Then in further rounds the teams are paired off with 1st place playing 2nd, 3rd playing 4th etc. Usually you can't play the same player twice in the tournament as well. This ensures that everyone at the event gets to play the same number of games and as the rounds progress you face other teams and coaches who have been performing at a similar level as yourself.

Point systems can vary from tournament to tournament and some will perhaps make the winner of the top two in the last round the tournament champion. Other events play every round and the one with the most points (which gives more players a chance in the last round to win) becomes the overall champion. There are also other variations on this, tournaments that last one day and even team based events where a combined score of more than one coach decides a winning team.

Using this section of the forum:
If you are creating a thread, please make sure you include all the rules for the tournament. Please actually put them in your post and don't just use a link to the rules, you will likely get more responses that way. Include how much you have to spend on your team. The rules for skill allocation is also important. More and more tournaments now will give boosts to the traditionally weaker races at the Team Value that is going to be used. If you don't include that information then you are likely to get poorer advice.

This section is for any tournament or event that uses Resurrection style rules where you keep a fairly consistent roster and you get injuries reset. For tournaments that use the standard team development rules, then please post in the league section of the forum.

Resurrection events can be a lot of fun and if there is one happening near you that you could attend, I highly recommend doing so!

To see upcoming tournaments please visit http://thenaf.net/index.php?module=NAF&type=tournaments

[Darkson]

Originally Posted by Coach

At the time of writing (Jan 2011) I believe there are just over 17,000 members.

Just one small correction.

17,000 people have been member at one time or another, there aren't currently 17,000 NAF members (if you don't renew, you're not a member).

I think there's currently somewhere between 10-12,000 (paid up) members, which is still damn impressive for what is, as far as GW is concerned, a sideline and "dead" game.