Going Savage - Part 2
In the first part, I talked why I was looking out for a new system and my trials with DnD Next and True20. Has I said, I’m doing that to help those of you out there, that are not happy with the current RPG system they are currently using, and want to see other stuff.
Let’s recapitulate what I wanted in my new system and let’s sees if Savage Worlds is up for it:
- Setting Free or easy to adapt
- Suggested optional rules to adapt to given type of settings
- Not d20 based
- Possibility to roll multiple dices and have a better bell curve
- No hit points
- Some kinds of Action/Hero/Fate/Destiny point that allows player to re-roll, alter a scene or other uses
- Easy math
Savage Worlds (SW) is a system based on the old Deadland system. A system I played once and enjoyed, even if it was for a single evening. When I stumbled on it, the Deluxe Edition just came out, so I was able to play with the most up-to-date version of the system.
The Savage Worlds system sounded promising, since it was setting free, but there’s setting rules that are suggested at the end of the book. And Pinnacle Entertainment Group provides a whole bunch of settings and they are twice as much from third parties over the internet, so there’s a lot option available to get inspire by.
SW introduces the bennies, that pretty much does the same as the Hero Point in True20, it also uses wound system that are much, much simpler that True20. It does not uses d20 at all, and uses all other dice, in fact the dice type define your rank in a trait. The biggest the dice the better you are.
SW also brings something really nice to the table compare to good old d20. In d20 systems you always have different difficulty classes (DC) to the rolls with some circumstantial modifiers, and that have to scale with levels (you have whole table just for that in your DnD 4th DM’s screen). In SW, it’s always a target number (equivalent of DC) of 4 and only applies circumstantial modifiers.
That way, if you have a d4 on a trait, your not likely to succeed but if you have a d12 you’ll probably succeed in normal circumstances. In addition, for every 4 points you overcome the target number you get a raise. Raises are use to define degree of success. If you got a raise on an attack roll, you just hit a sensible part and add extra damage for example.
Each dice, except damages one, are exploding and if they end up on their biggest side get to be re-rolled and added together. So that way even with your d4 you can , and will, get crazy shots (Ex : We saw a 21 on a d4 roll). That coupled with the dice types that get bigger the more advance you are creates a nice felling. The more experienced you get, the less likely you’ll end up with surprise big success, creating some kind of beginners luck feeling.
In SW the player’s character are Wild Cards, basically heroic figure of some sort that are one step over the common men. That allows them to roll a d6, named wild die, in addition to their dice trait and take the best of those two. That gives a good chance to succeed with critical failure and critical successes becoming less predominant than in d20 based systems.
One more thing that Savage Worlds has that I was interested in, is the lack of classes. Character have traits (strength and the like), skills, edges (like feats) and hindrances. So just like True20 the character is more of a conceptual choice than playing a predefined option.
So did Savage Worlds meet every thing I was looking for :
- Setting Free or easy to adapt - Yup.
- Suggested optional rules to adapt to given type of settings - Yup
- Not d20 based - Yup.
- Possibility to roll multiple dices and have a better bell curve - Yup, with the Wild die�
- No hit points - Yup
- Some kinds of Action/Hero/Fate/Destiny point that allows player to re-roll, alter a scene or other uses - Yup (with the bennies)
- Easy math - Yup (with the fixed target number) In addition, Savage World offer the Explorer Edition, that is basically a poket format of the rules, that is sold for 10$. So that way I can encourage my player to get each a copy of it. In addition, Savage Worlds also have a bunch of really nice rules, like the Interlude, or the Chase one, that deserve to be look up on.
So I decided to go with Savage Worlds and I’ll never go back on that decision. And we, me and my group, have been playing with it for the past year and every one loves it. As the game master I was able to easily create a new campaign setting with very little time invested in customizing the rules since most of them are perfect out of the box.
The thing that got me the more surprised was how easy it was to game master Savage Worlds. No need for all the tables and every thing since most of the task are resolve with a Target Number of 4 and the appropriate trait. The combat rules are easy enough that I was able to control an encounter with more than 40 npcs at our first session and within an hour total, not bad for the first fight we ever played in SW. It’s really easy to create enemies on the fly, and with only two sessions I was confident that I could handle what ever the groups wanted to do.
In fact, I never got that confident in 3 years of game mastering DnD 4th .. and let alone creating balanced encounter on the spot … Changing to Savage Worlds I also saw a incredible change in the time needed to prep for the game. In DnD 4th I could easily took 2 hours before every session to balance out my encounters. And most of the times, the encounter was taking most of the session to be handled and wasn’t very much of a challenge.
So in conclusion, Savage Worlds is now my go to system and I’m really enjoying it and so are my players. I hope that reading this post, if you are in the same position than I was, it will help you in your big decision of what RPG should you try.
Groumy’s out.