Hi
@AK81 I have been playing D&D for over 40 years and played 5e since it was released. My wider RPG tastes moved to genre-flexible systems like GUPRS in the 90s and these days Savage Worlds is my favourite system by far. So hopefully I can help you get an impression of how Savage Worlds feels in comparison to D&D. I'll talk about some of the mechanical differences first and then try to illustrate how they make the games feel different.
There are probably two big things which differentiate Savage Worlds from D&D. Both are aspects of the way that resources and attrition work. In D&D most of your resources are 'per long rest' though there are some of course that restock on short rests. The ones in my opinion with the most game impact are hit points and spell slots. HP are an ever growing pool in D&D, and spell slots let the characters have a significant impact on an encounter through dishing lots of damage, lots of healing or sometime just completely nullifying the challenge (like flying over a pit, for example).
With HP, only the last one really counts. Your character is basically fully capable whether they have 100/100 HP left or 1/100 HP. That means that until you get down to levels of remaining HP where the monsters could drop you to zero in one combat turn there isn't much real risk. And since your HP are intended to last you the whole adventure that means the early fights in an adventure are unlikely to be significant once you are beyond the first couple of levels. In contrast, the combination of exploding dice for damage in Savage Worlds and the Wound system make every hit potentially dangerous and so more meaningful. Being wounded and getting a penalty is also a big thing in Savage Worlds since small modifiers are still impactful.
Spell slots in D&D are high impact and can significantly affect encounters, and are mostly resourced on a daily model. This means when a caster comes to a fight fully fresh with all their slots they can have a huge impact. To manage that and make the later encounters more challenging the GM is encouraged to have lead-up encounters which will use up some of the characters' resources before they reach the 'climactic battle' that the GM wants them to experience as a tense, and so fun, encounter. Savage Worlds powers run (by default) on Power Points which regenerate on a per-hour basis when you are not engaged in strenous activity. Given that PP totals are in the 10 - 35 range overall and more likely to be around 15-20 for a primary caster over much of their adventuring career, and given that spell costs range from 1pt to maybe 5pts for a single target attach and 2 or 3 up to 6 (or higher) for an area effect spell, a caster's reserves are smaller but more alike to 'short rest' abilities than 'long rest' abilities in D&D terms. And as your levels of PP increase your ability to send them rapidly tends to as well, so it is possible to run low or out of PP in a tough fight no matter how high rank your character is in my experience.
These two factors work in opposition. In D&D, early fights present little to no risk since you have all your resources and are unlikely to run out. But those early fights are essential to whittle away resources and so make the last combats of an adventure challenging to the PCs without being overwhelming for the GM to run. In contrast, every fight is significant in Savage Worlds and it is potentially easier to recover your resources between fights but you have less of those resources in both damage that can be taken and spells that can be cast.
The practical impact of this is that Savage Worlds is built on the assumption of a smaller number of combats per adventure than D&D, but those combat encounters can all be significant with no 'speed bump' encounters needed. This has a profound effect on the way the game runs! In my group we tend to have adventures that are more like town or small dungeon combined with social and exploration challenges. When we run D&D games with a small number of combats we find that the GM has to throw outrageous challenges at us to challenge the party since we have not been worn-down by 8-10 level appropriate encounters or some other series of incidental challenges. If your group likes to run games with a smaller number of more challenging fights then Savage Worlds is great at supporting that style of play.
There is a corollary to this aspect of Savage Worlds - if you are running the full combat system then there are no 'filler fights' and a peasant with a pitchfork can kill your Legendary knight in plate mail with an unusually luck / unlucky (depending on your perspective) set of rolls. The designers are aware of this, however, and the 'Dangerous Quick Encounter' sub-system allows you to quickly resolve speed-bump combats where the outcome is basically assured and the question is more 'at what cost will success will be achieved'? Keep this tool in mind any can play through more traditional 'D&D numbers' of encounters without eating up lots of time and just looking out for those outlier rolls that have a big impact on the characters.
Savage Worlds has good sub systems for non-combat encouters. D&D has some of these too but I like Savage World's versions better personally. The Dramatic Task system is good for gaming out non-combat challenges in a mechanically satisfying way. You can run lots of different cool scenes this way, for example I used a dramatic task for how a party infiltrated a dockyard and stole a space ship in one campaign. Later on in that campaign I used the same mechanism to game out the rescue of a stranded group of asteroid miners. My players loved it, especially the player whose character concept was that he was a rescue-expert. And I didn't need to make up any special rules to support his character's non-combat focus; it was all there already in the rules. The rules for chases are great; I find very few systems handle this well but Savage Worlds does a great job in my opinion. There are also simple rules for information gathering, rules for influence that are not 'social combat' or 'mind control through skills', and rules for mass battles. The companion series of books add in more options to tailor the core system to specific genres and they all have rules of genre appropriate home bases, too.
Another key differentiation in feel between 5e and Savage Worlds is the flattening of the power spread. To me, it feels like Savage Worlds PCs cover the power level of about 3rd to 12th. They start off more capable and resilient that 1st level characters but don't tend to reach the heights that you can in the later stages of D&D. And many people seem to think this level range is a bit of a sweet spot for D&D so that is a good thing in my book. Note that you can dial the power and resilience both up or down quite easily with setting rules.
I could go on and on - Savage Worlds is my favourite system by a long way these days. If you have specific questions please feel free to ask!
