The Zenith of Professional Basketball Careers (FBPB/FBCB)

[Young Drachma]

I'm not even sure this will go far, but we'll try.

The thing that FBPB3 does really well is give you the ability to sim quickly and import from the college game. I don't really care much about the underlying engine, the speedy number generator mostly works for my purposes with enough suspension of disbelief that it makes things fun.

One of the things I like doing is activating a bunch of leagues in the pro game, increasing the size of the draft class pools over time and after simming a lot of years, start to follow the trajectories of players. It's a lot of fun (for me) to see what happens to that fringe college star that you believed if he just got into the right system would be able to make the NBA but never does, and you have to look up how his career went down the road.

With just the NBA and D-League (which the game does not model well enough) those dudes mostly go away, especially when you limit the size of the draft pool in-game, but HR back in the day expanded it so it was possible for you to bring every eligible player from FBCB into the game meaning it would improve the size of the pool (if you're like me and juice the talent pool) and also it allows me to follow those dudes careers.

So we're operating in a rebooted universe that started in the late 1930s and all of the players in the game are from my college save that I ran separately (that league is in 2060 and I'm waiting things out) and in the pro game right now, I have leagues active in these countries:

NBA
Spain
Italy
China
Greece
Australia
Germany
Puerto Rico
Canada

I then added two levels of pro/rel to the NBA called NBA2 and NBA3. This is a new development that only began in 1991 then because of a snafu didn't come back until 2000. The NBA drops its worse team to NBA2, the winner of NBA2 comes back up, the worst two teams in NBA2 get relegated while 2 from the 3-league get moved up.

The way I constrain the talent of these leagues is through salary caps that ensure that the best players hang in the NBA if they have the talent. That list above generally rates the leagues based on talent level how I've structured it, but of course it's permable and guys do go from place to place. For the 2 and 3 leagues, those leagues are 10% of the NBA cap in NBA2 and 1% of the league cap in NBA3. The game doesn't break up teams when they get relegated so guys hang out over the cap, if I'm paying attention I'll do my own trade/disperal so that guys get moved and prospect style players replace them, but otherwise, the yo-yo thing will probably happen and I'm not super worried about it.

The storyline here isn't one yet. I'm mostly posting this to see if I find one. I think my goal is to create a team in the NBA (we're at 34 teams) eventually, never switch and just watch the trajectory of the franchise over time as we work hard not to get relegated.

The B-plot is probably looking at the careers of dudes that interest me, and sharing storylines from the league. The other wrinkle to this is that Dalle-3 is abnormally good at generating logos, which makes it more fun from an immersion perspective to dig into creating clubs, I don't think it'll matter much -- I've already figured out what team I'll manage when I do finally expand to 36 -- but it's worth mentioning as we get further into this.

[Young Drachma]

Since I started writing, I've simmed through to 2025 and added a bevy of leagues, bolstered by the ability to make ChatGPT generate new league structures for me, which lets me extend my universe dramatically and creates whole new career pathways for the legions of FBCB rescruits that I release annually into the pool like a madman.

I think my ideal goal is to eventually get into the game and start following slowly the happenings, looking at individual careers from the college game and seeing how their trajectories evolve around the global universe.

Per usual with my dynasties, I'm not sure where I want to start and once I start, what I want to write about lol. But I'm still just simming along the landscape and frankly, adding lots of leagues akin to an OOTP save because it's been a lot of fun to finally add places that I've never had leagues before like Egypt, Korea and the Phillippines.