Minecraft: SBRPG Server, Season 1 Begins

Watch your step.

George and I have been playing Minecraft recently, and you're welcome to join us, I put the server link in the sidebar. We are hosting a mess-around public server so you can play with us, come create things, and generally play around with your favorite game developers. It's Season 1 of our experiment, and we'll be highlighting things and creations as we go along, along with posting pictures for people to enjoy.

Yes, SBRPG is still in development, we have focused our ideas, and we are still working on the beta release. SBRPG will be the ultimate sandbox pen-and-paper RPG as it always has been, and you'll get a very cool package of stuff to play with soon. Just to mention, SBRPG is not Minecraft, nor are we affiliated with them in any way; nor will SBRPG2 be anything like Minecraft, though that would be funny and cool. It fascinates us because of the sandbox nature of the game where you are given basic abilities and tools, and you make your own experience. Sound familiar? Yeah, that was us back in the day with our original pen-and-paper game.

Minecraft is a great game, totally sandbox, and just a blast. It is an awesome do-what-you-want, build-what-you-want sort of experience, totally modifiable, and just really cool. If you haven't checked it out, please do, it is an insane level of addictive fun, especially with the new 1.72 patch. Below is our starting castle, hard fought, and really silly looking. Hey, when you're surviving, looks are the last thing you worry about, plus I'm in the middle of my tower design experiments. We needed food, so you can see George's garden and our little fishing pond there in the middle. The first pic has my spiraling staircase down, we built our original dirt fort on top of a hill near the spawn point, and I had to dig straight down in order to safely mine stone for the castle. George also built a silly 40-story dirt tower we had to use for navigation you'll see at the end of the post, with no way to harvest trees, we were constantly getting lost. It helped, but that's getting torn down some day, when I figure how to take it down without falling to my death.

Don't jump on George's plants.

Okay, game design time. We set our server to adventure mode and hard difficulty - one step of difficulty below the "die and you're banned for the season" hardcore mode. In adventure mode, you need the correct tool to mine the type of resource you want, or you cannot mine. Note in adventure mode, you do not start with any tools, you need to lure the explosive creepers near trees and hope that wood drops so you can build an axe. Otherwise, you run around trying to avoid dying. It is ultra hard difficulty until you get started, and on hard mode, starting out is near impossible (for us newbs lol). Note only do you need to worry about defenses, you need to play the food game pretty aggressively.

Now, we got some criticism from some Minecraft players for starting a hard difficulty game on adventure mode, without loading a pre-compiled 'adventure map' where there is a dungeon laid out and things given to you by the map-maker. There is a less challenging 'survival mode' in the game that is more free about tool use (and also intended for open starts like ours), where you can mine most things with your bare fists, making the game vastly easier. We didn't go that route for a reason, we like challenges, surviving without a chance, and getting that feeling of accomplishment for a hard earned victory. We died a lot of times building that castle, so it means something to us, more than something we didn't really care about and just built out of easily gathered materials.

Hard-adventure mode games fit our philosophy better than easy games where everything is given to you, victory is assured, and the pen-and-paper RPG acts as a babysitter for your fantasy enjoyment. This is closer to  old-school pen-and-paper difficulty, and we wish ourselves finding the game harder in some ways, and with more depth and danger. Maybe in Season 2 of our experiment, we will add some more mods, crank up the difficulty, wipe the world, and change things up. For now, the experiment begins with vanilla hard-adventure Minecraft, and please feel free to drop by and play if you would like. 

Zombies break down doors on Hard? Yeah, meet the trapdoor, creeps.

If you play, feel free to drop by our castle, or try what we did and try starting with no tools, and resisting the urge to borrow things to make life easier. What will your hard-fought castle look like? What will happen to your character on that first scary night with zombies and creepers lurking about, and there's no safe place to hide? Carve out a little place in our world using that philosophy, and then come back and see how you feel about your creation. Do you remember how hard it was? Did all those sacrifices and tough times make your castle feel more special to you? Where did you start, and what compromises did you make because of a lack of materials? Did you want to give up, steal, or cheat? It's a cool experiment, and it tells you a lot about yourself and your survival and tactical instincts.

That said, the next SBRPG will be a a difficult game, but those victories and achievements will feel good when they are won in a hard-fought battle. Yes, you can tone things down and play in easy mode if you want; but for us at least personally, we love the challenge, we love the danger and feeling of survival and adventure, and we love getting our hands dirty and challenging the impossible. And now, George's dirt tower of navigation, which you can see live on the server today, while it lasts:

Silly, but effective.