The Gridball Story
Current game date: December 1952
What on earth is the story?: This is an ongoing alternate universe story of a scenario where a glamourous high profile professional women's sports league emerges out of World War Two.
What is Gridball?: The sport is fictional [explained in more detail below for anyone that really wants to know]
Geraldine Gaunt studies her 1952 Supergrid Winners Brooch
What's the point?: What's the point of any fiction? There's no deeper meaning. This is just a bit of fun that hopefully some people may enjoy following. Imagine Dungeons and Dragons, but instead of wizards and Dwarves, we have glamourous sports stars.
How does it work?: Gridball is a combination of fantasy, history, sport, glamour, fiction, dabbling in AI and using random number generation [with a load of background rules too boring to explain] to decide the fate of the teams and the players [characters] within it.
What would a Gridball game look like?: Played indoors on a court 40 metres long and 20 metres wide. Two teams of seven players face off in a match. Six are armed with a bat resembling a table tennis or pickleball bat and their objective is to get the ball up the court, or Grid and score in their opponents goal, defended by a heavily padded netminder. The game lasts four quarters of fifteen minutes each.
​The concept: Gridball is an unfolding story that, not even the author knows in advance. The teams have been created using statistics of the era to try and imagine what cities would have been invited based on population and women's sport in that country. Team names are researched into what might have been representative of the city while venues are also researched as to where might have been available, until poetic licence allows teams to build their own fictional arenas on the back of their own success. Team colours are random. a primary colour picked for each team and the style based off a real sports team from their city at the time.
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Every aspect of the players, teams and results is determined by using random number generation. Each team gets the chance to recruit youth players every season and each player is allocated a playing position based on the team need, which remains their position through their career. As a 14/15 year old youth player, their rating is 0, but events throughout their career sees their rating grow over time. Random Number generation also determines background factors that can shape the player's career too.
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The teams with the highest rated players naturally grow to be the strongest, these team ratings determining the result of each game, though the opportunity for shock results is built in. Good form over the season improves morale and good morale improves performances and results too.
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Random Number Generation calculations are far too many to explain in detail here, other than to say the result of each game is the result of up to a dozen different probability and chance factors being fed in. This means that even the author doesn't know what's going to happen until it does.