How do you like (or don't like) the Savage Worlds rpg?

[dbm]

An extra with 5 wounds seems to be kinda defeating the purpose.

The point is that it is incorrect to say that there is no graduation in the resilience of NPCs without resorting to house rules.

 

[MGibster]

An extra with 5 wounds seems to be kinda defeating the purpose.

An Extra with 5 wounds would typically be a very large creature of some sort. Well, gargantuan by the game rules.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

An extra with 5 wounds seems to be kinda defeating the purpose.

The point is that it is incorrect to say that there is no graduation in the resilience of NPCs without resorting to house rules.

Right. And an Extra with an additional wound is still an extra. They don't get the Wild Die.

 

[Greg K]

For those that think Savage Worlds can be too lethal, here are the Incapacitation dials Clint Black, the Savage Worlds Brand Manager, had posted on the PEG forums for the Explorer/Deluxe edition before the site update. I pulled them of the Savagepedia site since the archived threads (including my "Clint's Insight" collection stickied thread) from before the update no longer work (Note: I think these have been included the Adventurer's Edition).
(Edit: the copy that I made and printed of the original thread had Superheroic Incapacitation (see below) listed as Cartoon Incapacitation)

• Heroic Incapacitation – Ignore Wound Modifiers on any Incapacitation roll. Hard to Kill instead provides a +2 bonus to Incapacitation rolls. Instant death is much more unlikely, but still a possibility for some concern.
• Cinematic Incapacitation (version 2) – All results on the Incapacitation table are moved down one category. So a critical failure acts as a Failure, a failure acts as a Success, and a success provides the same effect as a Raise. This makes death and permanent injuries almost non-existent, and a Wild Card is either going to be knocked out or stay in the fight with a minor injury.
• Harsh Incapacitation – All results on the Incapacitation table are moved up one category. Instant death now occurs on any failure. A success acts as a Failure, a raise acts as a Success, and the Raise result is either dropped or requires two raises to achieve. Aftermath for Extras works similarly where a raise is required to be alive but Incapacitated and anything lower means death. Surviving Incapacitation in this game is a rare event and those that do will often have the permanent injuries to show for it.
• Superheroic Incapacitation – All damage is treated as nonlethal. It may look deadly, but no one is ever killed just knocked unconscious for a period of time. [Hard to Kill may be renamed Hard to Take Down.]

In addition, a decision may be made to apply these rules to NPC Wild Cards or not ("It's Good to Be a Hero")
(from Clint Black on the Savage Worlds Forums)

 

[schneeland]

My first try with Savage Worlds dates back a few years - basically in between D&D 3.5 and 5.0. Didn't go really well I have to say as a) I didn't really have a solid grasp of the system after reading the Deluxe Edition rules and b) I ran - or rather: tried to run - Hellfrost, and I still think classic fantasy is not a great fit for Savage Worlds. Compared to something like D&D it seemed to lack flavour. Also, none of us was really a big fan of the exploding dice at that time.

The second try is going on now with the Adventure Edition. This time, it's a much smoother experience, which IMO stems from multiple factors:

1. I'm playing with people who are deeply familiar with the system (and thus I'm also "just" a player this time)
2. the Adventure Edition feels a bit cleaner than the Deluxe Edition
3. we're not running a classic fantasy game, but instead are playing old Shadowrun 2e/3e adventures using Sprawlrunners

While Savage Worlds is still a bit crunchier than I prefer (in many ways, it feels like a stratified version of D&D 3.x to me) and has some properties that I have mixed feelings about, I'm happy to see the current game continue and would in fact recommend SWAE + Sprawlrunners as a means to run Shadowrun adventures in a cinematic/action-heavy style.

 

[aramis erak]

That's entirely a fair cop. The question is whether one considers stability from round to round a virtue (and if one does, one still considers randomness in it at all a virtue; as you note in passing there are games that have, effectively, "fixed" initiative where dice are only rolled for ties (Hero and Fragged Empire come to mind).

Getting to ties in hero is rare- Since dex and speed have to be equal before even going to dice.

I like some random - but noting that the fastest systems I've run have had popcorn initiative... Especially Sentinel Comics and Talisman Adventures, as well as two 2d20 flavors. I also have been using fixed slots but swappable ownership of them... 3 year zero engine games...

Stable and totally static aren't synonyms... Players making tactical decisions to swap cards due to different threats is a fun element of YZE games... but actually reshuffling and redealing them would be way too much hassle factor.

Likewise, D&D initiative is static - it doesn't change in any given fight without special situations (Held Actions and/or taking an action to reset it in more recent editions).

Any of those were faster than J's use of Savage Worlds - and the sessions I watched were him after several months running it. They were having fun... but it wasn't fast. And he was dealing face up. Not everyone can process multiple comparisons readily.

The one slowest for me is one I like conceptually, but hate in play: WEG Star Wars d6 1E... where everyone declares, then everyone rolls the actions simultaneously, then they're resolved in descending order of success rolls...

I do like several of the setting books... but just can't overcome the math issues (a very minor issue due to how open ending is handled), the every round card draws (especially since I like stable slots with tradable use as a GM), and the whiffyness of the combat rules... But I know a secret... the game is ratings compatible with Cortex Prime...

 

[Thomas Shey]

Getting to ties in hero is rare- Since dex and speed have to be equal before even going to dice.

Not in the old days it wasn't, when Dex breakpoints were so attractive. You could easily see multiple characters in a group with some combination of Dex 20 or 23 and Speed 5 or 6. Far as that goes, for about half the round Speed 5 and 6 people would be potentially in ties anyway (they all shared phases 8, 10 and 12).

Even in heroic scale games, the 14 or 18 Dex and either 3 or 4 Speed pattern was pretty common.

But of course in practice most groups just broke out the Dex breakpoints when they set up the action chart for a combat and then moved on.

I might have more issues with the card play myself if I wasn't using an automated tool for running it and rarely had to do more than go down a list.

(I know there were some of my players who could be really irritable when, say, an opponent ended up getting two actions before they got one because the opponent drew a low card on one round and a high one on the next round. I'm sure they'd have had the same reaction to initiative rolled every round, but we've very rarely played those over the years (I can't say I'd find the overhead on it worthwhile).

 

[Campbell]

My personal experiences with popcorn initiative show it can be fun, but also substantially slows down play as players waffle about who's on first. It also gets pretty messy in any situation where players do not share a single unified purpose or there are more than 2 distinct sides. I like to know exactly whose turn it is if we're keeping track of turns.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, I understand the attractions to popcorn initiative, but I wasn't super enthused about it in the one campaign I ran that used it.

 

[Vaslov]

I got into SW years ago. I ran an Accursed campaign and came to really enjoy the rule set. Very easy to pick up and tweak. Others at my table liked the rules and they ran a SciFi homebrew setting, Deadlands and The Day After Ragnarok. All have been well received.

Some of the things that read poorly actually work out fine at the table. If coming from D&D while there is a great fan made Eberron option and the new Pathfinder option I would suggest leaving fantasy and doing something else. It helped everyone at my table get out of the D&D rules mindset and learn the new system. Also look up the Combat Survival Guide. It's a one page summary that is helpful for new players to sort out the basics of combat.

As for the discussion above on cards for initiative while it might read poorly it does work well. Some of the edges in the system do very interesting things with the cards (e.g. get multiple cards, tweaking you teams cards, etc.). Not to mention the happy table sounds when a joker is pulled and bennies are passed out. From my own experience the biggest challenge was due to the extra long table my group plays on. Dealing and card collecting was a bit awkward. Was solved by moving our seating around to more centrally locate the dealer and table help in collecting cards as each player finished up their turn. As with most games give it a try at an actual game before tweaking it. You might miss something special about the system hard to see when just reading rules.