Review of SAS RPG (The Short-and-Sweet Roleplaying Game)

By Erik A. Dewey

Who are you calling short?
The premise behind SAS (not to be confused with Guardians of Order’s Silver Age Sentinels) is to build a rules-light substitute for Dungeons & Dragons. The author of the work spends significant time discussing why he created the game and where he feels that Dungeons & Dragons fails. Clearly he feels that there are too many rules and arbitrary constraints built into Dungeons and Dragons, the question is does SAS address these issues in an entertaining way?

The book is a 93 page PDF laid out in a single column style. The art is minimal clip art (mostly abstract designs) but fits well with the overall feel of the book. The book itself is laid out well and is very easy on both the eyes and the ink cartridge. There is a list of tables and an index, although no character sheet or summary sheet of the various tables in the book; both would be nice to have. The writing style is informal, actually a little too informal, and has some grammar issues that occasionally make understanding a little difficult, but overall it has decent flow and there are a good number of examples in the text.

Who are you calling sweet?
There is one overall “class” in the game and as characters gain levels, they gain skills and attributes. Characters are differentiated by their skill choice, although a jack-of-all-trades could easily be made as all skills are available to all characters. Characters get a random talent at creation that gives them some kind of special benefit. This can be a little jarring as the rest of character creation is very open. For example, in creating a standard fighter rolling a 6 on 3d6 would net a +1 to Spell Attack; hardly useful. None of the abilities (except for the “roll twice” at the top of the table) are especially powerful so it may be better to just pick a talent rather than leaving it to the dice. Oddly enough for a fantasy ruleset, races are never even discussed. Either everyone is the same race or there are no significant differences between the races.

Amazingly, combat takes up a grand total of three pages, and most of those are options such as attacking multiple opponents. The character rolls the appropriate number of dice, adds any modifiers, subtracts the opponent’s defense and scores that much damage. There is a little talk of different modifiers to the roll, but they are all very open-ended descriptions.

Spell casting is done in an equally open-ended fashion. Rather than having a list of spells, the game breaks magic into different Realms that the spellcaster needs to have skill ranks in. To cast a spell, the character declares what he wants to happen, rolls the dice, applies modifiers, and receives a result on a table from Trivial to Epic. The Judge then determines what exactly happens with the spell. There are some examples on what a Moderate result in the Creation realm does, for instance, but it still requires a lot of Judge interpretation for the final result. The open-endedness of the system is nice, but it requires a significant amount of work for both the player and Judge to see satisfactory results.

Like spells, magic items and monsters are also not listed anywhere. It is up to the Judge to create these based on the guidelines in the rulebook. This gives the game flexibility, but it is at the cost of significant prep time by the Judge. While the book discusses how easy it is to create a monster “on the fly,” it would seem more prudent to create them before a session rather than during.

Who are you calling SASssy?
Overall the game works, although there is a strange dichotomy between the relatively rules-heavy side of character creation and the rules-light side of actual game play. Be assured this is a game that requires considerable creativity and front end work from the Judge and any players of spell casting characters. This is a game for a group more interested in story telling than gaining levels.

While the game itself is consistent and, for the most part, accomplishes what it set out to do, there are a number of other games that do the same as well for the same audience (D&D players looking for more story and less rules). The price of the PDF is high compared to other PDF games and it is being sold on EnWorld, which is known as the d20 website to go to, so getting converts may be a little tricky.