Jeremy, that looks right. I'm glad to see this in the rulebook. I never understood that you could perform a suicide play and still stay alive (not really a suicide then, is it?) but if your toe slipped over the line while throwing someone out you were out regardless of whether you hit them or not.

I just realized one of my nicknames can be abbreviated DP. Nice

-Dustpan

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The Paradigm Shift

We're trying to stick to NDL (National Dodgeball League) rules as close as possible, but there are a couple of exceptions. The suicide rule is on of them. The NDL uses the suicide rule "with survival if opponent hit" to speed up play and make the game more dynamic and exciting. In our opinion, players already benefit from the neutral zone to get in close enough to hit an elusive target. Plus, what sense does a "suicide" make if you survive it when successful? Finally, suicides in other unnamed dodgeball forums tended to be used much too often by aggressive guys against unarmed girls, and sometimes resulted in injury.

Word!

The rules are designed to keep play going by incenting players to play. Waiting and camping should not be a solid foundation to winning a game. You should be incented to playing aggressively. Suicides is a great way to keep a team with the upper hand aggressive by giving them a way to utilize their numbers advantage. If players use the rules in unpopular or "douchy" ways, there isnt much we can do about that aspect of a rule, so long as the rule is regularly applied and the intended results occur, again in most situations.

Suiciding on happless and unarmed girls may not be needed. In other forums in the past, sometimes suicides were the only effective way to get a player out, given the distances a thrower had to throw a ball. With the neutral zone, the throwing distance isnt the primary cause for a suicide.

Suicides in our ruleset are what they should be. "We just have to get out player X, so player Y on our team will suicide on them to guarantee this happens." In our game, it should not be about one player. It should be about teamwork and how you utilize the talent you have on your team. Not just give Mr Big Arm the ball and the rest of us spend our time keeping our end line clear of any dust that might happen to settle. If you guys ever played Stratego, a Suicide is dodgeball's version of the Spy...use it against the Field Marshal on the other side. Now the next question is, how do you protect your Field Marshal from the spy...

There is no unsavory suicide. Do what you need to do, in order to win the game. ...but let's keep it safe.

I like the Stratego reference there Mike. It made me think of when you know you have an advantage in Stratego and you try and sacrifice equal pieces of high strength. For example, attacking a colonel with a colonel is a bigger loss for the opponent when they don't have any generals or marshalls left.

In dodgeball say team A has 1 good player left and 2 average players, then team B has 2 good players and 2 average players, so B already has an advantage. Would it be a smart move for team B to sacrifice 1 of its good players to get the good player on team A, leaving the two average players against team A's remaining good player and 2 average players? Or would it be better to eliminate the 2 average players on team A first and then worry about the good player? What do you guys think? Did that make any sense at all? Was my lunch break over 5 minutes ago?