I'm pretty happy with Savage Worlds as a system and I am glad that it seems to be more popular than ever now. One area I do see people questioning online is combat - particularly initiative and the damage system. Typically these people are coming over from D&D and don't really grasp that there are other ways of doing things but let's talk about these two things:
Initiative is done in Savage Worlds with cards. The GM deals out a card to each player and the high cards go before the low cards. This is a holdover from original Deadlands and Rail Wars but it just works. It's a physical reminder of when you go - once you go you toss in your card. Want to delay? Just hold onto it until you want to go. The game supports this mechanically through related edges - want to be faster? There's an edge that lets you take 2 or even 3 cards when initiative is dealt and you keep the best. For a level-headed character you can take an edge that lets you trade in your card if it's below a certain value.And yes, initiative is dealt every round. No it's not a big delay and yes, we played D&D for at least 20 years this way until 3E changed it to static initiative so it's not some radical new idea.
Finally the cards are another physical object that can help enforce the genre for your game. I've posted about it before but there is almost always some kind of card deck out there that is thematically related to whatever your running - pirates, cowboys, soldiers, superheroes, well-known space setting IP's ...
Attacks involve a hit roll which, if successful, will generate a damage roll - so far just like D&D right? The next step though is to compare that roll to the target's Toughness. Meeting it or exceeding it = Shaken, exceeding it by 4 or more = a Wound for each increment of 4. It's that second part that really throws people at first. There are some nuances to it but it's really not -that- complicated.
However this sometimes freaks people out as they bang away on an opponent and seemingly do nothing for several rounds. You might Shake them, or inflict some kind of condition with a power, but it bothers some people that there's no counter ticking down with every hit. This despite the truth that in D&D those hit points flying off have no impact on most NPCs or Monsters either - until the last one. In Savage Worlds if you are fighting an opponent who can take multiple wounds then each one of those will inflict a penalty on actions that creature takes. There are edges to offset these penalties, and powers that can do the same thing -"Numb" was a regular player in our campaign - but again that's another way to flavor a character or monster.
However this sometimes freaks people out as they bang away on an opponent and seemingly do nothing for several rounds. You might Shake them, or inflict some kind of condition with a power, but it bothers some people that there's no counter ticking down with every hit. This despite the truth that in D&D those hit points flying off have no impact on most NPCs or Monsters either - until the last one. In Savage Worlds if you are fighting an opponent who can take multiple wounds then each one of those will inflict a penalty on actions that creature takes. There are edges to offset these penalties, and powers that can do the same thing -"Numb" was a regular player in our campaign - but again that's another way to flavor a character or monster.
The closest thing to hit points in a Savage Worlds game are bennies. When someone takes damage they can spend a bennie to try and soak the damage - it's not a sure thing - and the supply of bennies is limited. Over the course of this campaign I was reminded again and again that the GM's bennies are effectively the big bad's supply of hit points as once those ran out the bad guys tended to drop fairly quickly. There is always the temptation to use them as "rage bennies" to reroll an attack or damage roll, but most of the time you want to keep your opposition around for another round of troubling the party.
This just seems to be a hard thing for people coming in from D&D in particular to get over. Shadowrun and Mutants & Masterminds have some similarities to this approach where you are comparing damage to another number and then generating results based on the comparison. It's different from D&D for sure but it works just fine and is a lot of fun.
So in my opinion combat in Savage Worlds does live up to the Fast, Furious, and Fun tagline.
- I don't think I had a fight last more than 7 rounds in my entire campaign and once players have a little bit of experience the pace of those rounds is pretty quick. D&D 3E and Pathfinder in particular tended to have long combats made up of long rounds where players might get bored waiting for their next chance to act. That was never a problem here. Also, in spite of this faster flow, combat is still rewarding as many different approaches and tactics can be tried - it's not a static regimen of "hitting for X damage" round after round as you whittle away at the dragon.
- Furious comes into it when characters are doing things every round - there's not a lot of need for multi-round actions. Also, the rules allow for multiple actions beyond the basic move + act as much as a player wants to push things by imposing a -2 cumulative penalty to additional actions with no actual cap on how much one can try.
- Fun is a factor with interesting abilities from Edges and Powers plus mechanical things like manipulating the cards and facing tough choices on how to spend those bennies when things hit the fan. Also, exploding dice - particularly damage dice - add some excitement and occasionally some despair, depending on which side of the roll you are on.
It's just a really strong system that runs smoothly and is fun to play. I've run it many times over the years and I expect I will be running it again fairly soon.
4 comments:
Augh. You are getting me interested in Savage Worlds again. One of the reasons I set it down previously was that, just from reading it, it really felt like a small scale miniature war game with some minor RPG elements bolted in the side. In all your hours of actual play, how was the balance between combat and not combat and did the players enjoy the balance?
I love the SW initiative rules. Simple and elegant, but with lots of options.
I think the wound system can be tricky to understand for some because SW hasn't always explained it well. It's been different in every edition/printing, and while it's been better explained each iteration, it was still fiddly in the most recent version I have (SWDEE). I understand it's been improved since and makes more sense in the most recent printing.
Griffin - with combat not lasting that long once you get the hang of things it means you have more time to attend to everything else. One of the high points of our run was the posse supervising an election in a small town. While there was at least one individual gunfight, and a barroom brawl, and a shootout with some disgruntled losers at the end, the focus was on keeping the peace, figuring out what dirty tricks one of the participants was working on, and figuring out how to verify citizenship, among other things. It's an unusual thing for a wild west adventure to include but it was a blast.
With the broad skill list of Savage Worlds one of the "tricks" in running it is to find a way to make a variety of skills relevant to the task at hand. Sure, we used Notice a lot, and Stealth, but Persuasion was also used a whole lot. Gambling, Performance, and Intimidation were all regular factors too. So it is possible to make a character who contributes in a way beyond Fighting or Shooting skill. So I would say it handles non-combat action as well as any other system with a similar approach.
My players are happy with it and this is their third SW campaign in the last 5 years so I'd say it holds up. The Mad Scientist was not a combat monster and neither was the Indian character - well until the end, anyway.
Kelvin - one of the major adjustments a while back was to Shaken status and it did make a difference. If a character is shaken the first thing they have to do on their turn is try to Un-shake.
It's a simple Spirit roll so 4+ but the original version was success = Un-shaken but it still cost your turn while Success and a Raise = you could act this round.
The change was to make simple success = act this round while failure still means you have lost your turn. It makes for far fewer lost turns so combat keeps moving. Shaken still matters but it's not the anchor on a character that it used to be. As a GM it means my critters get more chances to have some impact in a fight too and that makes it more fun for me as well.
They are bending over backwards now to explain the whole shaken/wounds - damage vs. toughness thing now and it does help I think. Really, one session of play and seeing how it works clears up a lot of the potential confusion. That said, it is different enough from a lot of games that I don't know that it will ever stop being a "speed bump" for people new to the game.
Post a Comment