Savage Worlds Combat

 

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 ...

As an example of the impact this approach has on play I typically had 5-6 players per session in the Deadlands campaign I just finished. One started off with the Level-Headed edge, then pretty soon another one had it, and by the end one had the basic edge while two had the improved version and one of them had Quick as well. This means on a combat round with only 5 of them I am dealing out 10 cards for the players, plus (typically) 1-3 for the opposition, with one player possibly re-drawing several more cards. Jokers are an important card in Savage Worlds and this approach let my players mill the action deck by 10-15 cards per round from a 54 card deck. This is double what a normal party would be doing and it meant those Jokers popped up very quickly. Every Joker drawn is a package of "go first", "+2 for all actions that round", and a bennie for everyone on top of that! Towards the end there were combats where both Jokers were drawn in the same round - and that was not a good round for the bad guys. The existence of these mechanics opens up an interesting set of options for a player to explore that you don't see in other games. 

Damage in Savage Worlds is the other "rough spot" I see - mainly because it's not like D&D and does not use hit points. There is not a direct "wearing down over time mechanic" like that really. A deliberate design goal was that combatants would be up, down, or off of the table with no tracking of hit points or health. Most opponents are taken out by a single wound. Only Wild Cards, a status reserved for the PC's and major opponents, can take up to 3 wounds and still be standing. There is a "Shaken" status to indicate some kind of degraded status and there are optional rules for an intermediate type of opponent that can take multiple wounds but is not a wild card but that's it. 

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. 

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.