Bretonnian Teams in Blood Bowl: Design Decisions
[The Team] [Why These Bretonnians?] [Design Decisions] [Star Players] [Gallery + Cyanide] [Playbook] [Criticism]

Over the years there has been so much heated debate about how to design a Bretonnian team, that I can safely say, that every different angle has been argued from both sides. There is simply no way to create a Bretonnian team, which will please everyone - so what I can do here is simply to shed some light on why the team looks the way it does.

Niche
Every Blood Bowl team should have a niche, a design goal, which makes it unique. The Bretonnian team is designed to be a bashy running team, but the Bretonnian team is not particularly strong or durable, so it will be at a disadvantage if the coach decides to play a 15 turn 2-1 grind style - the preferred style of bashy running teams. To compensate, the team does have impressive speed, which should help the coach overcome this weakness and open up lots of other tactical options.

General Design Principles

  1. These are athletes, not soldiers: A Bretonnian team has to reflect the fluff of the Bretonnian nation - not the Bretonnian army. These are professional Blood Bowl players rather than military personnel stumbling onto a Blood Bowl pitch in full plate armor. Therefore porting unit types from the warhammer army straight to Blood Bowl makes absolutely no sense. Peasant archers do not make obvious throwers in Blood Bowl, and grail knights would never play Blood Bowl.
     

  2. Bretonnia is a feudal hierarchy: So what is the fluff of the Bretonnian nation then? Well, it's a harsh feudal society with an arrogant nobility at the top and desperate downtrodden peasants at the bottom - not a nice Arthurian place. Just check out these quotes from GW's Bretonnia website: "On paper, their wage is quite generous, far exceeding anything a peasant could otherwise legally earn, but what the militiamen actually receive is but a mere fraction of this total – if indeed they receive anything at all. Every conceivable expense is deducted from this salary, from their food and accommodation through to each and every equipment loss and breakage – some miserly lords will even levy a charge for any funeral expenses incurred!"
    and
    "All men-at-arms dream of one day becoming a yeoman, possibly because of the folk stories that tell of yeomen being raised to knighthood after performing a great service or some brave deed. The truth is that it is almost unheard of for a peasant to be elevated in this way - the nobility have no wish to sully their ranks with low-born commoners."
     

  3. No weird stuff: Special rules are a turn off. If special rules were required to make the team feel "Bretonnian", then the team would need to be redesigned. Same goes for homemade new skills. Finally, proxy skills are a turn off as well. Horns might be a good way to simulate a knight's charge, and No Hands might be a neat way to keep the peasant linemen away from the ball - but it's just gonna make coaches seeing the team go "What?".

Specific Statlines

  1. Linemen: The linemen of the team are peasant levy from Bretonnia's many all-peasant clubs. You might ask why the Bretonnian nobles don't use better linemen? My answer is part fluff, part balance: a) It helps emphasizes the feudal element in the team, and there are simply some tasks that the arrogant Bretonnian nobles wouldn't stoop to waste time or manpower doing. b) From a balance point of view, that's just the way Blood Bowl works: Why do Undead use skeleton linemen instead of wights, and why do human teams use linemen instead of blitzers? They just do.

    When it comes to the statline, the peasant linemen are supposed to be truly terrible, when it comes to the finesse part of the game. We've considered 6337 with no hands, with loner or with no access to general skills. But in the end, it was just too awkward. AG2 makes them bad at everything elegant, and Fend is a great way of showing their cowering nature.
     
  2. Yeomen: Yeomen are supposed to be decent positionals, but no more than that. Their lieges certainly wouldn't want them to steal all the glory. So they're vanilla 6338 - with a skill. In the past, we had 2 kinds: A bashy kind and a throwing kind, but the division wasn't all that well recieved, and especially the throwers were unpopular with critics. Some felt that since Bretonnian nobility don't fire missile weapons, then they shouldn't be good at throwing either. Others felt that it would weaken the team's focus on running. And still others just didn't like that every Bretonnian team would have a yeoman as it's Leader.

    In the end, we merged the 2, and chose a skill and a skill-access, that would let them help both the bashier blitzers and the more ball oriented ones. Wrestle helps them clear the way for their masters, and access to S-skills lets them pick the number one support skill Guard, but also the ball oriented Strong Arm.
     
  3. Blitzers: Blitzers are the Bretonnian nobility - the knights if you will - and they're what the team is all about. Picking their statline was tough, but it had to stay within human limits. After playtesting lots of different versions, we ended up with a player, that is really a hybrid between the human blitzer and the human catcher. Able to awe the crowd with bone crunching blitzes and dazzle the chicks with impressive touchdowns. 8338 is the base statline of this player. We did try 7339, but not only was the AV9 a bit, well, orcish, but it also defeated the idea that the team had to be too fragile to 2-1 grind.

    As for skill selection, Block is the obvious choice for a blitzer type player, but other than that there are several chivalrious skills available: Nerves of Steel, Stand Firm, Juggernaut, Dauntless, even Leader all fit the bill. Dauntless ended up being both useful and widely accepted, and instead of picking a 2nd chivalrious skill to go with it, we gave it Catch. Catch helps underscore the bitzer-catcher hybrid idea - not to mention that these guys are selfish glory-hogs, who like nothing better than to have the ball handed to them and run in the game winner.