I've come to the conclusion that somewhere, deep in my past, I did something to anger a dice producer. I'm not certain whether I once caused the death of the parents of the CEO of Chessex, leading him to dedicate his life to a continuous quest for vengeance against me and causing him to don the apparel of a night predator to haunt my dreams, or perhaps my apartment complex is built on a forgotten Indian Burial ground and, rather than the typical Poltergeist method of persecuting me, they've elected to make it so I can't roll anything higher than a 2 when I need to, but somehow or another I just can't roll for shit. Seriously.
So the Waaagh started the season out auspiciously, with four games in a row of dice ass preventing me from picking up the ball successfully, scoring a single touchdown, or even scratching my ass without wasting a re-roll. I went through the first five weeks recording an average of one stat point per game for a single character. The only reason the entire season didn't end up in the shitter as a result of this was the league rule which allowed me to assign my MVP to a specific player rather than randomly giving it out at the end of the game. This, at least, ensured that I had a player acquiring a skill-up at the end of every game. However, the speed with which other teams advanced put the Waaagh! in a hole from the beginning which, I would discover, I could not recover from.
The turn-around came partway through the year when I got a win and followed it up with a bye the next week, resulting in all three of my black orcs having Block from that point on, an attribute that ended up being huge in the mid-stages of the league. One thing I became aware of during all of this was this realization that it's almost like certain skills have variable value as the season goes on, where Mighty Blow is huge for the early parts of a league for its ability to help you farm SPPs on your people but maybe doesn't help as much later on, whereas Guard just gradually becomes more and more important as things go along. I ended up taking tackle on a couple of my blitzers, which ended up being somewhat variable value given that a large number of the teams in the league never even looked at the dodge skill, making it an empty slot. Dauntless or some more guard for the team may have been better choices in the end.
I've never been a huge fan of Orc throwers in a starting roster, not because I have anything against them so much as the fact that Orcs have so many early advantages with the ability to stack 4 blitzers and 4 black orcs right out of the gate, and sometimes its necessary to make cuts just to have enough cash to survive. In retrospect, given the team's early abilities to acquire the ball, that sure-hands equipped player would have been invaluable if only to help me save re-rolls for later in the halves. Ultimately, the team ended up feeling a little lost on offense, which I wasn't entirely expecting given that the Orcs have a very obvious offensive play style (the cage) that the team is very much geared towards and, indeed, helped to define in the first place. However, I think the biggest issue was just the fact that the team was playing from behind in development all season long and so, perhaps not unexpectedly, when they ran into another, tougher team, the game plan fell apart and there wasn't a plan B to fall back on.
Consequently, the last three games of the season I played another Orc team that was, more or less, what my team would have been if it had started out on fire, a Norse team that had grown so far along as to protect itself from its fragility issues and could match me blow for blow, and finally the same Orc team again during the first round of the playoffs, all three resulted in losses and cursing at my relative inability to acquire and move the ball. Ultimately, it became a matter of where a few bad rolls early on causes you to get behind in a game, leading to more need for desperate risk taking, leading to more failures.
Ultimately, this team was playing from behind from the word go. There was misfortune. There was my lack of experience with them (how many squares do trolls move?), and there was some mis-building from me from the beginning. Ultimately, I'm happy to have learned what I did with them, but the Waagh's probably going to be taking some time off while I do some other things.
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