Why did we abandon SBRPG? The first posts in this blog should offer a clue. We went hardcore D&D 4E. It was a tough time in our lives; our careers were getting off the ground, and we had to rebuild our lives. D&D 4E gave us regular releases to buy, consume, and wait for the next one while we ran our campaign.
It felt good to "check out" and just play another game. We ran SBRPG as our home system from 2005 to 2015, and it served us well during that time. The system was super fast and very theater-of-the-mind friendly. As a referee, I could throw down a bunch of leveled enemies, assume a few ability score modifiers, pick a few designed powers from the list, give them a fighting style, and go.
Many games ran fantasy well, but SBRPG ran everything well. The challenge scaled since enemies scaled in power, you could have a "high-level area" where the monsters were more potent than what you got in a typical bestiary. Even if that jackrabbit has one hit/level, a level 10 jackrabbit is going to have a level 10 ability to dodge predators and escape hunters, along with a pretty high ability score modifier to boost that RFX roll, along with the AP to pull off some pretty cool stunts.
And that jackrabbit could dodge rifle bullets or arrows effectively.
The entire monster and enemy system was so cool, and it had a lot of classic NES and SNES JRPG feeling to it. There were "high-level areas" in the world with "high-level threats." Even enemies above or below your power level could still be a threat. This was one of the few games where we could play a "Final Fantasy" pen-and-paper game and have the high-level foes totally outclass level-one newbies.
Of course, that rabbit was high level! All the low-level ones in the area died off.
D&D does that, too, right? Well, in D&D, all the monsters are fixed in their challenge level. In SBRPG, everything can be scaled. Level 1 rabbits could be normal, while level 8 rabbits could be "lava rabbits" with immunities to several hazard levels of fire, flame breath, and jumping at you like a rocket launcher to explode on impact. The enemies in this game, how we played it, were terrific.
And since we had class design, you never really knew what to expect with NPCs. This new NPC? A necro-paladin. Yeah. That works. The only one in the world. Whole class and power design, baby. That is the necro-paladin, who raises enemies from the dead to be a walking holy army and then sends their souls to Heaven after the crusade is finished.
We had one customer who played post-apocalyptic werewolves and vampires, with full magic and guns. That must have been a hell of a game. The best thing we did was open up the game's core to the world, allowing everyone to create whatever they could imagine. This was not d20! You were not being forced to buy books for classes, and you were not being put over a barrel by game companies.
You've just created the class you could only dream of. Holy Gunner? Sure, give them a heavy machine gun and holy powers to enchant their ammo, along with heavy armor use. Give them a force shield to activate, so they can fire past it. Done. A simple class to design. Merge that with a few cleric powers, let them bless the group's ammunition, and you are good.
One die roll could handle every to-hit for their turn.
We are done. Next?
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