A Deliberate Embrace of Savage Worlds

An obvious choice

One of the major issues with RPGs is that it can take a lot of time to play one. Most of my campaigns have run on a weekly to biweekly schedule with roughly six hour sessions as the plan. This worked well enough until 4E became the main game and it became tough to get through more than 2 combat encounters in a session. Now in general it's worth it if you want a very tactical flavor to your combat but it definitely slows down what you can do in each session if you're used to things moving somewhat faster. This also ruled it out as weeknight game as even a 6-10pm session is really only going to allow for one to two fights maybe, at least the way we played.

Now with jobs and kids a weeknight game is hard to do anyway so this wasn't a huge loss but when the kids want to play something on a weeknight, well, 4E is probably not my first choice. Pathfinder is faster, but I'm already running that and with the suspended 4E campaign lurking in the background I'm not sure how much more dungeony-stuff we all need. M&M does alright, and ICONS does things even more quickly but we haven't been in as much of a superhero mood lately.  ICONS is great for one-off runs so I'm sure it will return but at the moment it's not really on the radar.

Think I can sell this one to them but we will see

What does play fast, has enough crunch to satisfy us all, and is very well supported, is Savage Worlds. With a variety of settings, fairly simple rules, interesting mechanics, and some nicely done small adventures and plot point campaigns it's tailor-made for running a "smaller" game. I think the campaigns could be as epic as anything else we've done but they seem to fit into the available chunks much easier than a lot of games.

So we're going to try it.

Now I've been a fan of the game for a long time and I've run a fair amount of it but most of it has been scattered across the years with a session or two here and there. This time I have talked to the apprentices and we'll be making a conscious effort to use it for our home games, especially on the weeknights.  

A one-sentence description drew a lot of interest in this one

So far I've been asked for Deadlands, "Pirates", and "that Van Helsing Monster Hunter game" (Rippers)  so there is definite interest in the options. With Red heading off to college in a few weeks things are going to be different around here but I'm sure he will come back occasionally.

Note: This is totally NOT 40K

So as we break out the cards and dice I'll post the results up here. Hopefully one of them takes hold enough to turn into an ongoing campaign but I'm not going to force anything just yet. I'm going to see what they ask to play once we have a few sessions under our belts and go with the flow. Deadlands is first on the list and then we will work our way into some others.

...and this is totally NOT Conan