In third year the Slytherin match is changed due to Draco's injured arm, but why wasn't the Gryffindor match changed in first year when Harry was in the Hospital Wing? Also any fanfic's that have the match not being changed?

 

Maybe getting fixture changes is seen as not being terribly sportsman-like.

 

My god that sounds like the most noting set up to a fanfic ever.

 

Because Draco's a twat and to prove he is, he pulls dick moves like forcing matches to be scheduled around him.

 

To what end? Why would that be an important divergence point for a story? The Dementors would probably enter the pitch and lead Harry to fall regardless of whether he was playing against Hufflepuff or Slytherin.

 

Harry finally lost a Quiditch match, and it's against Slytherin too!

If men learns from defeat, then Harry never learned about Quiditch.

 

Pretty sure they lost to Hufflepuff, cause Diggory caught the snitch. He even tried to get the match replayed.

 

Hmm, perhaps Malfoy gets Kissed, making Lucius kill Fudge and become Minister. Or he almost gets Kissed and has a change of heart, leading to a falling out with his father and leading the mini-Death Eaters away from Voldemort. Or, since canonically Malfoy can't play, he sabotages the match somehow and gets/nearly gets someone killed leading to the same result.

In other words OP, it sounds like you have some potential sequence of events in mind, so why don't you give writing it a shot? Scratch your own itch and all that.

 

That first year match was at the end of the season/a final? They would be a lot harder to schedule than one that happened during the start, when adjustments can be made without significant dramas.

 

Thought this thread was going to be about rule changes in Quidditch to make the sport a bit more sensible. >_>

Like, making the positions of Chaser and Keeper actually matter in a game, which they don't really do, unless one side is, to put it as Jim Butcher did, Mike Tyson and the other a sick, blind 9 year old girl.

Would have liked a Quidditch themed fanfic with new rules along the spirit of Eyeshield 21 or so...

Edit: Always loved this article about it.

 

Depends on how hard the snitch is to catch.

Presumably there is a length of quidditch match which gives enough time for the chasers and keeper to be important while maintaining the importance of the seeker. That time will vary depending on the relative skills of the players though.

 

Weren't there reports of matches lasting days or weeks? Even if those were embellished, the implication in canon seemed to be that Seeking was hard enough / the snitch is evasive enough to justify the existence of the other players, who might be able to offset a hundred and fifty points with their Chasers.

 

That's hard to do when it's pretty apparent that the entire game was invented for Harry. A sensible sport doesn't have 85% of the players on the field often end up being utterly irrelevant to the final W/L. Like, I have no idea how to turn it into an actual sport.

 

If you wanted to make Seeking less essential, perhaps increasing the value of scoring with the quaffle past ten, or lowering the value of the Snitch to one hundred would suffice?

 

The entire concept of the seeker is just crap though. A decent enough comparison I found elsewhere:

Why would anyone be trying to score goals? It's the same with Quidditch. As far as I know, there's no rule saying that they can't have everyone looking for the snitch as far as I know, just that the 150 points only count if the Seeker catches it. It's even worse that catching the, 99% of the time, deciding fucking ball, ends the game. The only reason the entire team isn't looking for it is because they can't assume the other team will which I suppose is a decent argument.

It's just that the other parts of the sport just sound badass. Pseudo-basketball on brooms while going 150+ mph and having to dodge metal balls hit by psychos with bats. But the seeker just makes the rest of the game irrelevant. If it was up to me, I'd just cap it at 90 minutes and the team whose chasers score the most points wins.

 

Or the Snitch is only worth 30 or 50 points or something.

Or have both, like, a timelimit and a snitch of reduced worth and whichever comes first.

 

When the Weasley twins made the bet with Ludo Bagman about the ending of the World Cup, that was parlay. The unlikelihood of the Weasley's bet wasn't that the snitch-capturing team rarely loses the game, but that they were giving two stipulations to the deal.

Honestly, comparing Harry's experiences with Quidditch and extrapolating those to the professional level is like comparing Varsity football at your local high school to the NFL. It's just stupid.

Games are far faster due to the Firebolts, players are all on standardized brooms so there is only skill involved in handling, beaters are far more aggressive, chasers are more coordinated and... well, you get the picture. The world cup was shockingly quick because it had to be, not because it was the norm. JKR wasn't going to spend five chapters going over the ins and outs of a three week Quidditch World Cup, for fuck's sake.

Quidditch would likely play a lot like basketball, except for with five times the amount per score and a single player who can pop out fifteen times that amount to end the game. The four digits wouldn't be unlikely in some games...

 

I'm actually working on a fic with something like this as a premise. But rather than just 1 snitch, multiple snitches of varying point values and a timed game rather than "it ends when the snitch is caught."

 

Harry's game was supposed to be at the very end of the year, there might not have been enough time to reschedule the match, or mostly the Gryffindors weren't assholes able to get Snape to bully the other teachers into postponing the match.

The only example of an actual high level quidditch match that we see has the seekers/kepper win the game for Ireland, and Krum massively outplaying the Irish seeker was irrelevant. Just because Harry's matches were usually decided by the snitch doesn't mean that all matches are.

Percy mentioned in GoF that the last world cup final lasted almost a week, I believe.

For a real life example let's use Rugby. It's not that uncommon for no tries to be scored in a match, and for all of the points to be scored by the team's respective kickers. Does this make the other 28 players on the pitch irrelevant.

 

No matter what the fixed amount for a Snitch, two limits break canon Quidditch with respect to the Seeker position: Catch the Snitch too early and the game is over before any real competition, with the Snitch having a lopsided effect on the game. Let the game go on for too long, and then the points for catching the Snitch (and the Seekers in general) become irrelevant. Either makes for a badly designed game.

To fix this, have the Snitch be worth a fraction, say 30%, of the sum total of points scored to that point. The score is 10-20? Okay, a Snitch is only worth 9 points, probably not worth even going after at that point in the game for either side; consequently, the Seekers are off doing something else (see below). The score is 120-180? Now it's worthwhile--a Snitch catch is 90 points, enough to decide the game, so both Seekers are likely to be engaged in hunting for it. The score is 550-350? It's worth 270 points, still enough to swing the game, though the team with the lead might opt to have their Seeker stay in, helping with scoring to build a bigger lead.

With such an arrangement, Snitches aren't sought after until one side has built up a sizable enough lead to warrant hunting for it or until both sides have put up a bunch of points. This fixes the first limit above. This is balanced by allowing the Seeker position, when not searching for the Snitch, to be played like a Chaser who can defend and pass, but who can't shoot on goal. If your team's Seeker goes off to look for the Snitch and the other team's Seeker stays, then you'll be forced to play at a numerical disadvantage. This makes the game a bit more fluid and makes the Seeker position important late in the game, fixing the second limit.