Simulating play by play would actually be a better way to do it, it's just more complicated. With play by play, I could post live play updates, instead of just live score updates.

I've done some play by play simulation in the past, but it never accounted for team offensive and defensive strengths, which is something that's very important in the GSL for league parity.

Do you simulate play by play, factoring in team strengths? I'm interested in how you've done your simulations.

Dan O'Mac wrote:

Veras' simulation was different. For the regular season, he did a more generic method based on ratings.

When it came to his championship, it wasn't so much as by play as it was by time. He'd roll to determine the time of the score, using a couple dice. From there, he'd determine what type of score it is and build the story. So he determined it by the time of the score, not every play.

That's helpful to know, and it's given me some ideas.

I think I will be able to break down any score into parts, using some simplified rules. In essence, in football, the most point you can score at once is 8 points (I include extra points in with the touchdown score, because it is an untimed down). Any score greater than 8 points can be broken down in a finite number of ways, so from there, it's down to randomly selecting which individual scores add up to the final score. Since I'm automating this with code, once the rules are written once, I can always run the code to split the scores.

The next problem to solve is assigning scores to a game time. Each game is 3600 game seconds. I can randomly select a second, and assign an individual score to that second. But, the score can only be assigned to that second, if it meets another set of simple rules. For instance, a certain amount of time must pass between field goal scores (because rarely will you see a team score a field goal in less than a minute after gaining possession of the ball). So rules that account for things like that, and also when in the game a score occurs. 

Once I've assigned each individual game score to a game second, I can assign a game second to a real time second. In the simplest form, if a game lasts 3 hours, each second of game time takes 3 seconds of real time, if I divide real time evenly by game time. I'd like to add in a half time, and some variability. To do that, each game second can take a variable amount of real time seconds, but I will only allow for a minimum and maximum amount of time to pass in real time for each quarter. This will make sure that every game finishes at a different time.

This is the simplest way I can think to do this, and it's not without flaws, but it allows me to keep my actual simulation the same, and split the scores into individual scores at individual game times, and map them to real time.