Posts tagged savageworlds

So, what did we think of Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition? Well, after one session, it received more thumbs up than 4e D&D did after it’s first game, which is a good sign. 4e has been more of a slow burner for my group – now, at last, they like it, but Savage Worlds has won their hearts (mostly) right from the start.

The best line I can think of which explains Savage Worlds is this: If Toon, Classic Marvel RPG, Rolemaster and Mutants & Masterminds had an orgy, Savage Worlds would be the result. ¹

Let me explain……..

Like my much loved Rolemaster, it uses an open-ended dice mechanism meaning if you roll the maximum on your dice (4 on a d4, 6 on a d6, etc) you add and roll again. This works like Rolemaster’s add and roll if you get 96-00 on a d100 where it’s possible (but rare) to get a ridiculously high result, and be rewarded for it in kind. There’s no opposite-but-equal roll low and deduct mechanic, but Bad Things Do Happen if you roll a 1 on both your Trait and Wild Dice, which is kinda similar. Add in that you’re using multiple different dice and Savage Worlds must have a success probability curve to make a math geek faint with joy. I like.

Talking of multiple dice, Savage Worlds uses dice rather than attributes to rate a given Trait or Attribute. A character might have Strength d8, for example, or Gambling d10. One of my players nailed it when he said this is like Classic Marvel RPG where having an Attribute of d4 is Poor, d6 is Typical, d8 = Good, d10 = Excellent, etc. That’s an excellent comparison, and immediately hooked the rest of the players into how the game hangs together.

So, Savage Worlds is like Rolemaster mixed with Classic Marvel. But wait, there’s there’s more.

Nerd definition of an rpg alert! : The job of any role-playing system is to encourage and help adjudicate the behaviour of imaginary characters. At one end of the scale there’s Toon, the ultimate cartoon RPG where characters can do literally anything – well, anything imaginable in a cartoon, anyway. It’s a system which downright encourages players to think off the wall, coming up with crazy-ass (and fun!) things to pull out of their quantum backpockets and routinely break physics in weird and wacky ways.

At the other end of the scale there’s Fourth Edition D&D where the majority of a character’s actions are quantified, tabulated and listed right on the character sheet. That’s not to say you can’t freeform and play imaginitively with 4e D&D (you can!), but that the wealth of pre-calculated Powers means it’s less likely that players (and GMs) will do it. After all, why swing from a chandelier when you can just teleport there instead?

Savage Worlds is much, much closer to Toon that it is to 4e D&D. The character sheet is minimal with very few secondary calculations and derived stats – just Pace, Parry, Charisma and Toughness. It’s a system where you’re encouraged to think creatively and use your skills and abilities in clever ways. For example, in the Library scene one of the players threw books at the vampire while another one tried to topple over the large bookcases. That’s the kind of great use of the environment you just don’t see in 4e D&D with it’s pre-printed battlemat crappery.

And still, Savage Worlds is like Mutants & Masterminds. It’s a generic one-book system which genuinely does provide all you need to game in a single tome. Whilst M&M is a generic system cunningly disguised as a Superhero RPG, SWEX proudly proclaims it’s status as a Pulp Action Hero game – but it’s much, much more than that. This is a system I could happily use as…. well, as anything I wouldn’t use Mutants & Masterminds for. I’ve described it as M&M Lite before – it’s less crunchy, but just as adaptable to any genre, and just as fun to play.

But it’s not without faults.

The encumbrance rules are the harshest I’ve seen in any rpg, to the point where they’re downright unusable. Equip an average (Strength d6) character with Leather Armour, a Longsword, Backpack, Crowbar, Bedroll and nothing else and he’s encumbered (at -1 to all Strength and Agility-based checks) already! And he’s not even using that Longsword to full effectiveness either – to do that he needs Strength d8. Switch the Longsword out for a Shortsword & Crossbow and he’s way over the first threshold. So much for a light thief in leather armour. I’m either going to ignore the encumbrance rules altogether, or ignore the weight of weapons and armour in the calculation. Either would be an improvement.

I’m sure there’s more faults, but that’s the most glaring one we’ve found so far. We’ve another session (and a whole new one-shot sandbox campaign setting!) planned for a few weeks’ time. I’ll tell you more about that one though, another time.

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Scooby Doo is, I reckon, the greatest untapped role-playing game setting of all. It’s got the lot; fun characters, horror, a ready-made team setup, chases, comedy, great locations, awesome traps, episode-based design, investigation and geek sex appeal. Heck, it’s even got a talking dog. What more do you want?

When it came to picking a setting for my first Savage Worlds trial session, Scooby Doo was a no-brainer. After all, I didn’t want fantasy (that’s what 4e D&D is for), and didn’t want superheroes (Mutants & Masterminds!) – at least, not yet. I wanted a setting and genre that doesn’t invite comparison with either, but is still familiar enough that the players can dive right and and understand the tropes of the setting.

So, Scooby Doo.

I remember playing the Hi-Jinx mini-game from Polyhedron/Dungeon #158 back in the day. This followed a similar premise to Scooby Doo, but with the heroes as crime-fighting pop band. No, really. Damn, I loved those mini-games, but unfortunately my group was firmly in the minority and they eventually died a death. Shame, that.

I’m considering expanding this further to create an unholy mashup of Scooby Doo, Harry Potter and Torchwood where the heroes are Gifted schoolkids (and a talking dog) who defend Earth from Alien invasion, but that’s a little ambitious for a first scenario. More on that (and thanks and kudos to my twitter followers for ideas!) another time.

For this trial session, the characters are all starting Novices and are either human or highly intelligent pets. We’re just using Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition so winging it is the order of the day. I have a few pre-generated characters prepared, but they’ll be there more as a guideline of what I expect; I’d rather the players get a feel for chargen right from the start. It is, after all, extremely quick to do in Savage Worlds.

Here’s a couple of examples.

Kevin Schempp the Geeky clumsy bookworm
Agility d4, Smarts d8, Spirit d6, Strength d4, Vigor d6
Pace 6, Parry 4, Toughness 5, Charisma 0
Driving d4, Fighting d4, Investigation d8, KS:Occult Lore d8, KS:History d10, Notice d8, Stealth d4, Taunt d8
Luck, Bad Eyes:Minor, Quirk:Whistles, Delusional: Major (Believes in everything)

Tibbler the Talking Cat
Agility d12, Smarts d6, Spirit d6, Strength d4, Vigor d4
Pace 6, Parry 4, Toughness 3, Charisma 0
Climbing d8, Fighting d4, Guts d6, Notice d6, Stealth d8, Survival d6
Danger Sense, Quick, Small, Cautious, Quirk:Must Chase Mice

Matilda Vayne the gorgeous martial artist
Agility d8, Smarts d6, Spirit d6, Strength d6, Vigor d6
Pace 6, Parry 6, Toughness 5, Charisma 2
Driving d8, Fighting d8, Guts d6, Investigation d6, KS:Occult Lore d4, Persuasion d8, Swimming d6
Attractive, Doubting Thomas, Loyal, Overconfident

From a GM’s perspective, Scooby Doo has a ready-made adventure framework that looks something like this:

1. Arrival at weird location
2. Initial combat, discover clue
3. Chase (or be chased), new location
4. Second combat, villain’s escape, new clue
5. Preparation, final combat
6. Unmasking and resolution!

Tweak a little according to taste, but this is a tried-and-true plot framework. Don’t mess with the Doo unless you really have to!

Scooby Doo is full of weird locations: old fairgrounds, abandoned mines, creepy castles and shopping malls. Ok, I lied about the shopping malls. This session is going to be set in a crumbling US Civil War-era mansion and our heroes (proud franchisees of Mystery Inc.) have been invited to stay the night. It’s been said that no one has slept in the house since 1834 when the last surviving occupant – Colonel Alda Cur – disappeared. The current owner is Mary Cur, and she’s hoping to break the curse so she can finally sell the relic.

So, that’s the setup. I’ll let you know how we get on. Here’s the Write-up!

Did I mention the geek sex appeal?

UPDATE: Just to prove that all great ideas have already been thought at least once before: here’s the Savage Worlds stats for Scooby, Shaggy and the gang!

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My very own copy of Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition plopped through the mailbox today. This is a game that I’ve played once or twice, read Vulcan Stev‘s and Uncle Bear‘s posts about the game with interested curiosity (or should that be curious interest?), read the Test Drive and soaked up as much information as one body can possibly take without actually owning the game.

And now its mine! Bwahahahaha, etc.

These are my first impressions of the game, looking at it with a completely clean “new book” mind.

It’s so small!
It’s half the size of the 4e D&D Player’s Handbook in every way. If you could fold the PHB in half top-to-bottom, you’ve got the dimensions of the SWEE, and it weighs in at just 160 pages. That’s about a squillionth the size of the D&D Core Books put together. True.

It’s so big!
Despite the lack of stature, it’s also feature complete. This one teeny tiny bookette includes character generation, combat, special abilities (magic, super-powers, psionics), mass combat, GM information and even an adventure. Phew!

What’s more, none of it feels rushed or crowded. The layout is superb, especially if you’re an…. ahhhh…. older gamer whose eyesight is starting to fail. Big font, clean layout, and a wide variety of images from various genres. I like.

It might be complete, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s comprehensive. As a superhero RPG fan, the super-powers section was one of the first I turned to, and there’s more than enough abilities to tickle the imagination, but Mutants & Masterminds this ain’t.

I’d say it compares very well to both GURPS 4e and d20 Modern, and could easily replace both as either a solid generic engine and/or as a modern-day game for episodic action. That’s my first impression anyhow. I’ll let you know how that translates right at the game table.

Novice means just that
When I’ve played before, we used pre-generated Seasoned characters, so creating my first Novice baseline guy was a bit of an eye-opener. Your starting character in SWEE is very, very low-powered, to the point where I actually feel constrained by the character generation rules. That’s not a Good Thing, imho. In M&M terms, this feels roughly on a par with Power Level 3, but with just 30 points to play with. Or, to put it another way, take a 4e D&D character, remove all the powers and deduct 5 from all the stats.

I know the Wild Dice mechanic makes a big difference between your heroes and the rest of the world in play, but that doesn’t help at chargen where what you want to be able to do is create a character with options right there on the sheet.

Do people actually play at Novice level? Even the Pregenerated Characters from Pinnacle’s Downloads section are all Seasoned or higher.

Hopefully, that feeling is something which will go as I learn my way around the system some more. Any help or advice appreciated!

With that in mind, here’s my first SWEE character, just for y’all to pick apart.

Damn this image turned out dark. Ah well. Let’s call it ‘moody’.

Brett is a Chicago homicide detective with a chequered past (don’t they all?). His refusal to help the local Mafia led to his wife’s murder, and he’s more than a little obsessed with finding her killer once and for all. He’s convinced that his bosses know more than they let on, and his curious nature has got him into trouble more than once. He’s not the brightest ‘dick on the force, but he’s the one you want by your side when bullets and fists start flying.

Detective Brett Gudrun
Agility d4, Smarts d6, Spirit d8, Strength d6, Vigor d8
Pace 6, Parry 5, Tough 9 (Kevlar Vest), Cha 0

Driving d4, Fighting d6, Guts d6, Investigation d6, KS:Law d4, Notice d6, Shooting d8, Stealth d4, Streetwise d6
Brawny, Curious, Deathwish (Find wife’s killer), Delusional (Minor:Convinced superiors know more than they let on)
Glock, Kevlar Vest

Now….. what would you do differently?

Thanks!

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