Going Savage - Part 1
After being a DnD 4th enthusiast for a long time, as in the day it was released, I got bored of it and my players too at some times in 2011. Some of them was nostalgic of good old DnD 3.5. Some of them was not combat players, so wasn’t very interested in Dnd 4th character options. Some of them, who recently joined the campaign, was overwhelmed by all the powers they had and never knew witch one does what.
Just to be clear, it’s not a Dnd 4th hater article, it’s just recollection of the events that brought me and my group to where we are and I do that to help other that may feel the same way as we did to find an alternative.
So by the end 2011 summer I start looking for alternative. I tried in the past Mutants and Masterminds and felled in love with Green Ronin’s product. So I figured that I could give a go with their’s True20 product line.
True20, as is name implies, use only a d20. You don’t need any other dice to play the game and you’ll need only a single d20 per player. It’s based on the d20 system, with skills, feats and tree classes (Warrior, Expert, Adept) that servers more as a template than actual classes. Every class abilities you are used to see in a d20 system are feats in True20, as racial abilities. So in fact your thief can, as he go up levels take a feat that grant him dark vision. One other major difference with True20 is that it does not uses HP, but Damage vs Toughness rolls that determines if you were barely hit or mortally wounded. And it comes with a Hero Point, something like Action Points of DnD 4th, but with more options to it.
Since it’s based on d20 I knew it will be much more interesting for my players that where nostalgic of Dnd 3.5 and the fact that there was no predefined classes just generic ones appealed to me and some of my players because it give them the power to create the character they want and where not limited to predefined stuff.
I know you can do that with any RPG system (even DnD 4th), but a system that is classless will force the player to approach the character creation process with the concept first and the rules set after. How many times did we saw a players about to create a new character look at the core rule book and pick a class from it as the first step and not ask them self what the character will do than look at the rule book to see how to make it happens ? If the answer is always like me you’ll understand my point.
One more point that got me interested in True20 was the setting free approach. In place of giving you rule sets that fit a specific setting and becomes hard to steer away from it (imagine playing DnD 4th edition in a home brew campaign world that as low magic in it, it will require massive rethinking and tinkering from the DM’s part). True20 offers basic rule set, and gives out optional rules that you can include in your world to flesh it out. A whole chapter is there to help you put together your own world and help you think about all the rules and thing you should use. I also loved the prices of the products and the fact that they offered a pocket format book aimed for the players that is sold for less than 10$ and is only missing the Game mastering chapter.
The campaign went well, but the player got confuse with the toughness saves of the True20 system, One almost died at the first encounter because he didn’t understand well enough how the game worked and put not enough toughness for his fighter. Also they never get over the idea that they didn’t need any other dice than a d20. In retrospective I should have run a test run with pre-generated characters so the player cold understand how the system worked and it would have helped them with making there actual characters.
We put that campaign on hold, seeing that the players weren’t very enthusiast with the system when the DnD Next play test started. We switch to the play test with the options of changing the campaign to that system if the players loved it. They do loved it, but I moved out of town, going to the suburbs and some player founded that to far and so we stopped both campaign (DnD Next play test and the True20 one).
DnD Next was promising, but had very limited options back then and I’m not the kind of GM that like to create a whole lot of home brew rules. So I continued to look out for alternative RPG system. I was searching something that was setting free like True20, if possible with wounds systems like True20 since I really enjoyed using it. And if possible, isn’t based on d20. After playing with only d20 in True20, I realized are “swingy” they can be, and you end up most of the time having great success or great failure and not very much of medium rolls.
That’s how I came to discover Savage Worlds, by Pinnacle Entertainment Group(PEG). Since this post is long enough, Savage Worlds will be explain in the next part.