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Four Reasons Why You Need to Get Savage With Savage Worlds

21/7/2016

12 Comments

 
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​Face it: we’re living in a Golden Age of RPG’s. There are systems to fit every genre, every group, and every personal preference; there are story-telling systems, rules-light systems, crunch-heavy systems, you name it, it’s probably available on Drive-Thru RPG.

But if you’re like me, you play with people who don’t have time to learn a new ruleset when they want to changes games. Sometimes you want to take a break from casting magic missile at kobolds and pilot a big, stompy robot on the battlefields of the 31st century (who am I kidding, we all want to pilot big stompy robots). But who wants to spend the $35 on books and hours of learning new mechanics?

I’m here to tell you, brothers and sisters, you don’t have to! There is another way, a way that incorporates flexibility as its core tenet, a way with a motto of “Fast! Furious! Fun!” It’s called Savage Worlds, and it is ready to be your lifelong friend.

Savage Worlds was originally intended to emulate 1930’s pulp action/adventure plots, and is designed from the ground up to be fast, furious and fun. One very reasonably priced rulebook, clocking in at 191 pages for the softcover (that’s including the index and templates) and some dice, and you’re ready to play anything. New players can be up to speed in a matter of minutes.

I’m resisting the temptation to preach at length about the mechanics and crunchy bits, but here are four aspects of Savage Worlds that really stand out:

1. True Adaptability
I remember playing GURPS back in the day, and had a lot of fun with it. But changing settings generally meant buying a splat book and learning new mechanics specific to that setting. Savage Worlds bypasses all that by presenting truly generic rules for character creation and play, without sacrificing flavor. Skills are generic: the Shooting skill, for example, can apply to a crossbow in a fantasy campaign, an AK-47 in a Weird Wars campaign, or a laser rifle in a space opera. The mechanics don’t really change, just how they’re applied. Powers and abilities like spells, psionics or super-powers, are all mechanically generic: the bolt power covers a wizard’s magic missile, a cleric’s smite or a Cyclops-style eye-blast. The base mechanics are the same. What differentiates them is the Trappings aspect. There are two pages of rules on how to add trappings to powers to make them stand out. Add the cold trapping to bolt and you have an Iceman superpower, or a winter-druid’s spell. Add the necromantic trapping, and it becomes a blast of withering, undead energy. It’s totally customizable, and it’s simple to mix and match to capture the flavor of whatever genre you are playing.

2. Scalability
One facet of Savage Worlds that is often overlooked is the simple sets of rules for minions and mass battles. In game terms, Wild Cards are player characters and named NPC’s. They have more abilities and are harder to take out. Extras are the rest of the world: civilians, henchmen, minions, hordes. They take a hit, they’re down. They don’t get to roll a Wild Die (I’ll get to that later. It’s awesome). They’re the fodder for your hero’s glory. And they’re streamlined so they don’t clog up the game-play. Say your heroes become leaders of the rebellion and set out to free the land of the tyrant king. Both sides square off for a pitched battle, thousands per side, armies and battalions and trebuchets.

In many systems, you’re stuck with four hours of dice-rolling, or breaking out a specially asbtracted rule-set for tactical combat. Not so in Savage Worlds:  it’s as simple as sticking your sword into a kobold. You figure out some modifiers based on the situation (who’s fighting whom, weather, being outnumbered, yadda yadda). The battle is then fought out basically in rounds, with the player’s characters using any applicable skills to add further modifiers. Player characters make an active, marked difference in how the battle plays out. The best part? The rules for mass battles are two pages, not two chapters.

3. EXPLODING DICE!
Remember the Wild Die I referred to above? It is reserved for PC’s and named NPC’s, and it reflects their importance to the story. Simply put, if my gunslinger has a d8 in the Shooting skill and I want to shoot the zombie that just shambled into town from Boot Hill, I roll a d8 and a d6 as my ‘Wild Die’ and take whichever is better. But if one of them ‘aces’ (rolls its max, in this case an 8 or a 6), I can take it and roll it again, adding the extra roll to the original roll. If, by some crazy chance, the second roll aces, I do it again. It’s basically a ‘critical hit on steroids’ mechanic, and it makes for legendary fights. In Savage Worlds, there’s always a chance…never say die…David and Goliath and all that.

Of course, the downside is that if you roll snake eyes (1’s on both your normal die and your Wild Die), you incur a critical failure, and your GM gets to take out all his frustration on your poor character.

4. The People. Seriously.
Savage Worlds has an amazing community. The publisher’s website offers tons of free resources and their message boards are lively and helpful. Google has a thriving community of Savage Worlds fans on Google+ and Facebook is just as active. Savage Worlds makes great use of its licensing: you can make whatever you want, and, as long as you don’t charge for it and will slap the ‘Savage Worlds FAN!’ logo on the front, you can put it out to the world.

And, let me tell you, Savage Worlds fans are a creative and talented bunch. You can get fan-made Star Wars adaptations, BattleTech, Borderlands, you name it, and the quality of these labors of love often rivals professionally published material. The adaptable nature of the rules really encourages tweaking and tailoring the game to whatever you want, from existing fandoms and IPs to crazy original settings and everything in between. 
​
Savage Worlds is a no-lose proposition. You can download quick-start rules from the publisher for free, and be playing in no time. Third party publishing is a strong market, with tons of creative material to explore, and the fan community is an inexhaustible source for ideas and materials. You literally have nothing to lose, and you might find yourself a convert to the fast, furious and fun world of Savage Worlds.
​

Jack Benner is the head bottle-washer and sole roustabout at Stick in the Mud Press http://stickinthemudgames.blogspot.com/
 
 


Savage Worlds: Fast, Furious, and Fun! - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
12 Comments
Brian link
26/7/2016 10:00:55 am

My main hesitation about Savage Worlds is the part where (per the name's suggestion), most of the storylines are very grim and feature easy / frequent character death. That's the one aspect I'm not so enthusiastic about. Otherwise it seems pretty good.

It would be interesting to go back in time 5 years and introduce my former self to Savage Worlds, I've heard lots of good things about it from my fans, so it seems there's alot of overlap between Savage Worlds and Open Legend (http://www.openlegendrpg.com). Alas, I only knew of Original Deadlands, and didn't realize the current state of things with Savage Worlds.

I'd love for folks to check out Open Legend specifically because it checks all 4 of the same boxes but is very different. Open Legend is more built for telling epic stories. GM's can use some optional rules to "turn on" grim / gritty mode but it generally is at the heroic end of the spectrum rather than the dark / grim / against-all-odds one.

Reply
Tim Davis
27/7/2016 09:02:22 am

This issue you're describing is a GM issue. A game can be hard and gritty, but I've never lost a player character and all my players so far have had a blast playing in something I've run. (I do not go out of my way to kill characters. It's not fun for me or the player)

One of my pet pev's is for a GM to run their game with such a hopelessness that after anything you do you really start to say.. what's the fracking point! Oh!, well got a cool transport... and it got stolen by or before the next session. Oh!!! there's a caravan under attack... and before we can do anything their all dead. And do not even get me started why it seems like your character is constantly being targeted nearly every session as if the Gm is purposely trying to kill you.

The Gm's role is to run the game so it's fun for the players but he/ she influences the feeling of the game by Their actions. If its nothing but harshness and death... who want to play that. You can do a horror game and it can be fun. But if there is no awesomeness in the actions the players can do and anything the players do gets essentially crapped on then it's just not fun.

Reply
Sean Patrick Fannon link
26/7/2016 10:11:20 am

Brian, I gotta tell you, Savage Worlds does not, in fact, lean "very grim and feature easy / frequent character death" as much as you believe.

Sure, you can run it that way, and there are Setting Rules that support that approach, but there's just as many Setting Rules that support over-the-top gonzo heroics.

Reply
Glenn Green
3/12/2016 05:37:17 am

I have played in one of Sean Fannon's games at Con of the Cob a couple years ago.

You question over the top, this is a true story.

I was playing a Brinchie (cat/human) with a pregen for stealth and information gathering.

In the main battle, I remained hidden for 2 rounds moving around quietly while the main battle took place. Then I made my move.

In Savage Worlds you can take as many actions as you like however every action adds a cumulative -1 to all your rolls in your actions.

I declared 5 actions which is a -5 to everything I do. First I rush out of cover running up the face of this rino guard thing using an agility trick to put him off balance, that trick if successful would allow me to grab the birdwoman flying above raining death with archery by the feet and tarzan swinging to the other birdman casting spells putting me in a nearby tree where I then go all cat like and run branch to branch and tree to tree only problem is their is an enemy in the way that must be dispatched to continue and to end it all I still to have to jump beyond my characters ability the distance to close to the big evil bad guy mocking our paladin buddy kicking him in the helmet with the intent or tricking him.

Here are the actions in order.

Agility trick as the setup
Balance (agility test) for swinging birdwoman to bird man to tree
Running along trees
Kill or subdue mook in tree
Jump to Big evil bad guy and trick him

This was declared too cool to fail and I was given an addition benny to try, and I needed it.

I used all but 1 benny I had (started with 3 + 1) to reroll. In the end I was successful with just about everything and my character was able to dispose of the mook with a raise (additional damage), the big evil bad guy was able to pass an opposed check and kept his balance, however the paladin was able to dispatch him the next round with my help (gang up bonus).

That game still is one of my most memorable games that I have ever had the pleasure of taking part in.

Reply
Sean Patrick Fannon link
26/7/2016 10:11:45 am

Brian, I gotta tell you, Savage Worlds does not, in fact, lean "very grim and feature easy / frequent character death" as much as you believe.

Sure, you can run it that way, and there are Setting Rules that support that approach, but there's just as many Setting Rules that support over-the-top gonzo heroics.

Reply
Brian link
26/7/2016 10:38:41 am

Cool, thanks for weighing in Sean!

For the record, my perception on that comes from a few people who are avid players. But yeah, everyone will obviously skew a game to their own default inclinations in terms of storytelling :)

Reply
Reno
26/7/2016 01:56:02 pm

Brian, I can confirm what Sean said. Savage Worlds is a generic system, so there is no setting/theme by default. Like you said, it all depends on the type of game people are playing.

I'm currently running a Star Trek (original series) game with Savage Worlds rules. It is very far away from grim.

I've run a few one-shots as well, and I've never come close to having a character death. Most of my games are more story driven than combat driven, though.

John Steve
26/7/2016 02:24:03 pm

The other mechanic that makes dying a lot harder is called Bennies. These allow you to re-roll almost any roll you like...unless you've already burned through them:-)

Reply
A.P. Klosky link
2/12/2016 11:32:53 am

I don't know that I've ever actually permanently killed a PC while GMing Savage Worlds. Closest I came was squishing one of the characters with a Mojave Rattler in Deadlands, but she ended up coming back as a Harrowed...

While I love the system, I find that it tends to work best for high-action/pulp settings best; while it's capable of running a horror game, it requires some significant house-ruling. For me, I'd just as soon use a system built for horror for such a game.

That said, Savage Worlds is a phenomenal system with a great community behind it. If you see Shane Lacy Hensley or Clint and Jodi Black at a con, be sure to say hi! They're great people!

Reply
Other Mike
2/12/2016 07:31:32 pm

Interesting. I find that Savage Worlds is very good at high-action/pulp settings, as you say, but it's very good at Horror as well. Granted, generally not so much "the player characters are helpless in the face of the horror" sort of setting ... but I don't care for playing/running that sort of game anyway.

Reply
Other Mike
2/12/2016 07:24:08 pm

Have to agree with Sean. Savage Worlds _can_ be grim and deadly if you want, but that's _far_ from the default. I've been running Savage Worlds at numerous cons (and Savage Sunday's) for over eight years now, and have had two player character deaths. Note: As a GM, almost all my rolls are in the open, so no fudging here.

In campaigns with my local gaming group, there is yet to be a death ... though plenty of injuries. One of the neat things about Savage Worlds is that wound have real in-game effect ... but you can use bennies to soak/avoid those wounds. Even when you do get incapacitated, death is not automatic ... you have to roll 1 or less to die (wounds apply as penalties to this Vigor roll). And if you still have bennies left, you can re-roll that check if it results in death.

I have a friend who's main criticism of Savage Worlds is that it's too hard for player characters to die.

Reply
David Brideau
31/7/2017 10:29:36 am

I've had PCs mow down an entire room full of bad guys without taking so much as a scratch in one scene, followed by another scene three PCs get incapacitated (4+ wounds) in one hit with a lucky Blast power in the first round. The damage rolls kept Acing.

The lethality in Savage Worlds is hit-or-miss. (Pun not intended.)

Reply



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