Grade the Savage Worlds System

[Aldarc]

The core mechanic of SW is pretty light, but I find the game to be anything but light. It's a pretty crunchy game IMHO, especially when you start having to wade through the Hinderances, Edges, etc. I have also found the game suffers from "equipment porn." I'm not sure why I need this many details for weapons and equipment for a "fast action-packed game!" When I played, these features tended to slow the game down. Although Savage Worlds is not a d20 system game, it still feels heavily rooted in the '90s and '00s - especially the d20 era - in terms of its design priorities. It may have been tolerable then, but it shows its age IMHO now.

 

[Committed Hero]

As a math nerd I dislike the exploding dice more than I should.

I bought Tour of Darkness sight unseen when it dropped. It's an almost perfect balance of campaign and setting, and the other books tend to be as good.

 

[Retreater]

Here's how I see it. Anytime you play a game that's a lighter than something like PF2, the rules don't have the complexity needed to feel really different.
Crack open the 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual (or heck, even the 5e one). Look to see how many monsters have essentially the same numbers. A goblin is a kobold, a lizardman is an orc, etc. Maybe with the difference of a single number. What about a lightning bolt vs. a fireball, you're looking at flavor description and the shape of the area.
So when you say "the powers all look the same," most other games have the same issue - they just have "sealed" their coat of paint. Unless you're looking at a very complex system, it doesn't really matter.
And when you buy 5 different monster books for the same system, you're essentially getting the same numbers reprinted with different fluff and art.

 

[schneeland]

Although Savage Worlds is not a d20 system game, it still feels heavily rooted in the '90s and '00s - especially the d20 era - in terms of its design priorities. It may have been tolerable then, but it shows its age IMHO now.

I personally don't mind it too much (though I'm generally not a fan of advantage/disadvantage systems for character creation anymore), but it does indeed feel a bit like a cleaned up version of d20 when you read it (at least I felt reminded of D&D3e more than once while I was reading the rules).

 

[mamba]

I would say it definitely does. In literary circles

yeah, but I am talking about people in general. I assume for those the literary circles have a worse connotation than pulp… much of our modern entertainment derives from pulp

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

The core mechanic of SW is pretty light, but I find the game to be anything but light. It's a pretty crunchy game IMHO, especially when you start having to wade through the Hinderances, Edges, etc. I have also found the game suffers from "equipment porn." I'm not sure why I need this many details for weapons and equipment for a "fast action-packed game!" When I played, these features tended to slow the game down. Although Savage Worlds is not a d20 system game, it still feels heavily rooted in the '90s and '00s - especially the d20 era - in terms of its design priorities. It may have been tolerable then, but it shows its age IMHO now.

Maybe it's because I'm an old guy, but the old roots you refer to is pretty transparent to me, even if it is a traditionalist game. I don't really see the equipment porn either, compared to games of comparable crunch. If you play cyberpunk, you add stuff and stuff complexity, if you do a dagger-sword-pistol-rifle kind of game you remove it - I see it as implied in the modularity and flexibility of SW.

And as to crunch - yes, it is a mid crunch game. But the crunch is systematic and, imho, easy to learn, remember and ad hoc. And as I've written earlier, the game is very low crunch on the GM prep and improvisation side, which is a big difference to say D&D 3.x.

I find the character creation to be very good, but it's not made for OSR style 60-seconds-and-done. My players enjoy both constructing chars from thought out concepts and using the hindrances and edges as tools to develop interesting characters. But then again, we mostly play long campaigns where taking 15 minutes to create a character isn't a problem and making interesting characters with concept longevity is important for our fun.

We all want different things from games, but for me and my greyed table of players SW is excellent.

 

[CleverNickName]

I've only done three of these so far (might do another one after the weekend...any requests?) but this one is currently our valedictorian, with a GPA of 3.0. Nearly everyone who has played it either liked it or loved it!

 

[schneeland]

I've only done three of these so far (might do another one after the weekend...any requests?) ...

Since they seem to see a fair amount of play, maybe you could do Dungeon Crawl Classics, Call of Cthulhu or Shadowrun.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

I don't want to prolong the pulp discussion, but I find it interesting that someone is nerdy enough to find this forum and create an account, while don't knowing the pop cultural meaning/genre/style of pulp, as it's used in gamer culture.

This is not meant as something negative, but that it challenge my own notion of what is common pop culture knowledge among forum users - maybe because many of us are older with a (somewhat groggy) common knowledge base.

 

[Retreater]

This is not meant as something negative, but that it challenge my own notion of what is common pop culture knowledge among forum users - maybe because many of us are older with a (somewhat groggy) common knowledge base.

In Savage Worlds parlance, my Common Knowledge skill die is d8. Unfortunately, I'm an Extra, so I don't get a Wild Die.