The Savage Worlds Adventure Deck

 

One of the optional accessories for Savage Worlds is the Adventure Deck. This is different from the Action Deck which is cards used for initiative. Pinnacle's description of the deck:

The Savage Worlds Adventure Deck has 54 high quality cards for use with the Savage Worlds roleplaying game to give your heroes a little more control of their fate.

Adventure Cards let you find romance, make enemies, eliminate or increase your damage, spot clues, and even betray your friends!

I resisted using this for a long time in my games as it looked like it would invoke some pretty dramatic shifts in the game and after using it in ten or so sessions now of my Necessary Evil campaign I can confirm that it is a whole lot of random stuff to drop into an ongoing game.

The rules for using it are pretty simple:

• Each player draws one card per experience level at the beginning of each session
• Each player can only play one of these cards per session
• Cards can be freely traded between players
• The cards do not carry over from session to session - they all go back into the deck at the end of the night

The italicized part is important because for this campaign the characters start at "Seasoned" which means they will be drawing 2 cards each. Considering I have 6-7 players most sessions that means there are 12-14 cards in play, with half them potentially getting used. It's a lot. Players will naturally look for optimal use of this resource as the game goes on so they can really change up a combat but it can impact the flow of almost any situation depending on the cards available. Now I am probably outside the baseline expectation with that many players but as I write this most of my crew has hit Veteran level which would be 3 cards each - that means they would have a third of the entire deck at their disposal. It's a lot.  

After living with it for a while now I would say you really have to determine your own tolerance as a gamemaster for having random sh*t dropped into the middle of the game on a player's whim - most of which has nothing to do with their character, backgrounds, or events in the campaign - it is completely random. 

If it was just a few random effects here and there it might not be as bad, but some of the cards let players manipulate the other cards. Let's take a look ...

This was played twice in the same session - in the same fight!

So this one was played during a dramatic fight between Hammer of Justice and his gang vs. the Omega Cell team. It's just a combat buff. The main variable is that "until the next Joker is dealt" which could be one round or could be five rounds - you won't know. The card is making it really tough for Hammer to land a decisive blow on MegaStrike. Mega has around a 31 total Toughness plus Forcefield and Hammer-O is striking with his hammer for a d12+2 + d10 + 3d6 so his average is well under the Radioactive Russian's total Toughness but a good roll could really hurt him. That many dice though tends to cluster more around that average number and even though Savage Worlds damage dice do explode on a max result pushing that level of toughness up 2 more has an impact. For almost anyone else in the party a +2 is not going to make much difference against Hammer's smackdown power when they only have a 10-15 Toughness and he's averaging 20+ but for the designated tank it helps - it's the perfect place to play it. Still, it's a temporary combat bonus and it's for defense so not a big deal, right?

This is how that happened

Well, one of the other players is holding this card and plays it as soon as someone draws a Joker. So now Last Stand is active again until another Joker is drawn. Considering we just reshuffled the odds are slim that's going to happen right away. So it was active for almost the entire fight.

(And yes, I did rule that playing this card to draw another card did allow the player to play that card if they wished despite that not being clear on the card. It's supposed to be one per player per session but it's almost useless if you play this card and draw a new one and ... then sit on it. The only way to use it would be to pass it to another player afterwards and let them play the new card which seems like a long way to go for one card.)

And this is just the power of a relatively small combat bonus - there are more potent cards in the deck.

Fun for the player whose character is about to drop but kinda takes the sting out of things

This is another combat modifier but it could really neuter a bad guy's attack that actually gets through on someone. Again, there are others with more potential impact but players already have the Wild Die in their favor over most of the opposition they will encounter AND they have Bennies to re-roll dice for almost anything and to soak the damage that does get through AND the +2 to everything bonus when they draw a Joker. A lot of these cards in play really drops the danger level present in the game. 

That said a lot of them are fun, like Folk Hero. It's not related to combat directly, it's not giving math, it's not upping anyone's power level dramatically, and it's something that could happen organically anyway but the card gives a player a chance to say "I want this to happen" in a definitive way. I'm cool with that. I like this style of card. There's another one called Love Interest that has an NPC fall in love with your character and leads to whatever complications that might incur. Again, it's something that could happen on its own but the card let's a player make it happen when and where and with who they want - or not!

Parley is a combat-related card but it's not a free action or a bonus of some kind - it's an interesting complication to what might have been a straight-up fight and it can strain the GM's brain sometimes to figure out why this particular group would "parley" with the PCs, but that's a fun kind of challenge and changes the nature of the fight on some level. 

So I like a lot of the cards that do something interesting without involving combat modifiers or free actions or additional card draws. I'd like to see more of an emphasis on the role play side of the game and less on the direct mechanics of the game with this deck.

Looking Ahead

To keep playing with the cards as-is I'm not going to have more than 2 Adventure Cards per player per session. It's already crazy with 10+ cards out, and it's only going to get sillier with more.  I'm still deciding whether I should finish out the campaign with them at all. We are approaching the finale and I may just leave things as they are. 

That said I am inclined to not use the deck in future campaigns. In a more grounded campaign it feels like it could get really strange and even in something like a Savage Rifts campaign it's a lot. I am just not a huge fan of the random stuff that has no connection to what's going on in the game. This isn't a roll on a random encounter table or a "dungeon dressing" table to fill out a room - it's more directly impactful than that and it's going to happen 5-7 times per game!

Cards like this one really make it stupid. Now imagine someone playing Desperate Times on this - and yes, my players would do exactly that given the chance.

Another option I might consider is a "curated deck" approach - take out all the cards I see as a problem (or just kind of boring), limit it to one card per player per session, and see if something good can come of it. I already took out the cards that were mechanically not compatible due to not using Arcane Backgrounds or Fear Levels or Manitou Bargaining but there is room for more "editing" here.

I also am thinking that eliminating the trading between players might smooth things out a bit - less optimization in play at least.

Wrapping up I do like the Adventure Deck concept - I just may need to tinker with it more to make it work for me.