SBRPG Redux?

SBRPG was so far ahead of its time. When we wrote this we sent a copy to the Library of Congress, so this book is in a place future generations can enjoy it. It is probably stashed away in some warehouse somewhere next to the Ark of the Covenant by now, but it is there. This is probably the only other copy in existence out there, since the few players I contacted said the book fell apart on them and they don't have a copy. I found four copies in a box in my garage, and that is all there is to this.

I am keeping a journal as I re-read these files and making notes of what could be improved and clarified. Would I ever release this "as is?" No way, the art sucks really that bad. A no-art version, maybe, but that will take a bit of work stripping all that out.

When we wrote this, we were looking for a system that played like we played, an almost kinetic, live-action, fast paced, mostly theater-of-the-mind, hard-hitting, action-movie simulator mixed with a JRPG. The threats got big, but you got even bigger. You could make ten attacks with a dagger with one die roll and clear a room of orcs in one turn.

It was that awesome.

We had power design, class design, and everything design. You did not need to cheat and multi-class since you just designed the class you wanted at the start of the game, and then we piled improvement points on you by the bucket-full so that you could go from cool to damn straight fantastic.

Balance?

Oh, the enemies leveled up with you. A level 14 rattlesnake could wipe the floor with you and poison everyone in the group a few times each, choke someone out with a constriction attack, and use mind control on someone else. All in one turn. With as few rolls as possible.

The d20 was a joke.

3d6 was our holy trinity. We made those dice work for a living.

This wasn't pedantic, war-game-style, "oh, my tactical combat," think about fairness, King's rules role-playing. This is like John Wick slapping the crap out of 5E and urinating on its corpse before walking out of the building and having it explode behind him.

Today's games are too concerned with being "rules for life" as written by the "privileged elite game designer class." The players who play modern games are looking for the nanny-game, a set of rules which they can use to beat others into a submissive class of servitude and obedience. Today's players buy a game they can use to use as a social stepping ladder to prove they are better than everyone else.

And today, games are a front on a larger war for ideas. They are conquered ground for ideologues. Part of me loves SBRPG since it was written in the "time before today" when we were not in a constant state of war, and stupid things are fought over as a litmus test.

And we gave this up for D&D 4E. It was a hard time in our lives, and we needed to crawl back into the "mommy's womb" of Wizards and be coddled for a few years, but we made it through. And Wizards tried to eliminate the OGL back in 4E too with the GSL, which is still a terrible license. You can't buy happiness, nor can you buy solutions to life's problems. We never made the jump to 5E since we saw how badly the ranger sucked in the 2014 books, and we knew that entire edition was going to be a disappointment.

The 2024 edition strips all the "soft role-playing" abilities out of the every class, like special ranger knowledge's that only a real DM could adjudicate, and substitutes everything for a mechanical bonus that an AI DM could use. If you are out there raging against AI art and still playing D&D, you need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask yourself what you are doing.

D&D 2024 is "AI D&D" and it sucks.

SBRPG was cool. It filled a time in our life from 2005-2015, the second greatest decade since the 1980s, where we needed one set of rules for that awesome, kinetic, live-action play we needed. Other games were too much "in the weeds" with maps and figures, and while SBRPG could be played that way, this was more slap-you-in-the-face awesome than all the other games we tried or played before. 

Oh, and it was written during the height of "bro-culture, extreme sports, butt rock, and monster energy" and that magical time in the world when our minds were still free and people could be honest without being looked down upon by our Internet social-score minders, the people in the cars yelling at their phones, the constant online judgment by bots and strangers, and overseas "departments of social warfare" running asymmetrical battles on our way of life by proxy and overseas tech firms pumping toxic ideas into social media every second of the day.

For us, this was the last game of that second golden age.

Gaming has been lost since then.