Savage Pathfinder - More of a Slog Than PF1?

Retreater said:

Options I took in my playtest that I thought could've been meaningful, but ultimately weren't.

Rogue getting the drop on an enemy to sneak attack.
Cleric forgoing attacks to heal an injured ally.
Wizard increasing power points spent in hopes of doing extra damage. Wizard spending bennies to recharge power point pools.
Fighter trying to take out the enemy spellcaster.

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Only one of those I wouldn't expect to be useful was the third one (because unlike some D&Doids, there's no reason for a SW spellcaster to be any easier to take out than a fighting specialist; the trade off with them in terms of their effectiveness is limited loiter-time, not brittleness). If none of the others were useful, I have to conclude your dice betrayed you.

Retreater said:

One thing that happened: Enemy spellcaster lowered the Strength trait of the Fighter so he couldn't do big damage. Fighter couldn't shake it. Enemy spellcasters were able to heal each other.

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The first is what I refer to above. As to the second--why shouldn't they have been able to? They were trading off a round of doing damage to do that. And most versions of SW healing aren't doing more than a Wound level most of the time, so its an even choice.

It sounds like Savage Worlds just doesn't click with you (due to stylistic differences, or bad dice luck, or you potentially not understanding well enough how to run/play the system). I will agree that it usually requires a bit more tactics that D&D 5E does (which usually just boils down to "what's my biggest stat stick, swing that until things stop moving"), but I wouldn't put it anywhere near the number crunching of PF2 (which I also play and enjoy) or the zone control of D&D 4E. My SW players are definitely not the super tactical types, but they were able to learn over time and enjoy it just fine. I find new players have an easier time than D&D players, since they bring a lot less assumptions of how the game is "supposed to work" with them.

I managed to play SW fine and I barely understand the combat rules???

Retreater said:

Just so I'm clear, my experience is with myself playing the game by myself. I haven't brought Savage Pathfinder to my group yet.
I was just trying to run a basic combat with basic characters using basic tactics like a casual, new player might. And it took over an hour and was terrible.

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I got'cha, and I want to be clear I'm not trying to put your group down in any way. I have looked at my games and decided I wouldn't try to introduce it to them either because of the rules or the type of game it was.

When I introduce new players to a game, I often times provide helpful hints. Not telling the play what to do, but giving them options. "You could attack that goblin. But the one to your left is Shaken, so if you get another shaken result on him it counts as a Wound and he's out of the fight." That kind of thing can help new players get used to the rules and how to use them.

MichaelSomething said:

I managed to play SW fine and I barely understand the combat rules???

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Are you in my Sunday group?

mamba said:

is this about the adventure design / encounters or a more general issue with PF4SW class / feat / … design?

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More about adventure/encounter design. D&D in its various iterations is fundamentally built around a model of attrition. 3e made it explicit that the typical adventuring day would have ~4 encounters which would each sap the party of about 20-25% of its resources (primarily hp and spells) in order to make the day's last combat actually dangerous. And while Pathfinder 1 doesn't make that explicit IIRC (because that part wasn't in the SRD), its adventures are still built along those lines. And that's something that can work in a system where you have a fairly large hp pool, a reasonable amount of spell slots (at least once you have a few levels under your belt), and a low-variance combat system.

But in Savage Worlds, PCs can take three wounds. A fourth knocks them out and might cause them to die and/or get lasting negative effects. Defenses in SW tend to be more stochastic: higher Parry, higher Toughness due to armor and possibly Edges and/or raised Vigor, maybe things that increase Ranged TN; whereas the primary defense in D&D are your hit points which are attritional. A melee-focused SW character that goes from Novice to Seasoned might increase their Parry from 6 to 8 (by increasing Fighting from d8 to d10 and taking the Block edge) and their Toughness from 9 to 10 (by getting Heavy armor instead of Medium), whereas a D&D fighter who goes from level 3 to level 7 mainly goes from 25-30 hp to 50-60. Both have in some sense become "tougher", but it's much easier to predict how long a D&D fighter will last in combat and thus design adventures around that. The D&D fighter is probably not going to be one-shot in the day's first round of combat by some orc who managed a lucky shot, but the SW warrior very well might. Moreover, the SW warrior's effectiveness is not likely to be much lower in the day's third or fourth battle, unlike the D&D fighter who has lost a bunch of hit points (and possibly had them restored at the cost of his allies' spells).

So, D&D fights (particularly in 3e) tend not to be particularly dangerous on their own – their job is to sap the party's resources. But every fight in Savage Worlds is. Even a mere goblin can get a lucky roll and hit you for 3 wounds out of nowhere, and at that point you better hope you have a Bennie or two to spare for Soaking. This means you don't need a large dungeon full of encounters to drain the PCs before they get to the boss fight. We don't see Luke Skywalker fighting his way through increasingly large number of Stormtroopers before he gets to the Emperor's throne room on the second Death Star – he just shows up and tells the guards he wants to talk to daddy, and they bring him there.

Hey guys,

I owe an apology to a few of you for causing unnecessary consternation.

Upthread I referred to extras "soaking" damage. I used the wrong terminology. I should have said Toughness. My bad.

But thanks for taking the time to respond.

I'm finding the thread very interesting.

Oh and the adventure I'm playing is a homebrew.

Retreater said:

For what I'd like - I would expect a "fast, furious" combat for a beginning level group facing the most basic creatures in a fantasy game to take 30 minutes or less. Especially if we aren't stopping to look up rules or having analysis paralysis. Not over an hour like this is D&D 4E or Draw Steel.

To me, the experience was just "gross." Honestly, after playing more modern games, having turns around a table that do no damage, contribute nothing to the fiction, change nothing, matter not at all, AND having those turns take 15 minutes or more - it's inexcusably poor design.

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If they're contributing nothing, that's a failure on the GM and players' part. NARRATE THE «BLEEP» OUT OF THOSE MISSES!!! Every attack, success or failure, should have some narrative effect.

That's as true in SavW as it is in FFG Star Wars, D&D 5e, and Og! Unearthed.

As for fast... it only runs fast if

• players are on the ball with initiative counts
• players are ready for their turn when they get it
• the GM isn't needing to reference rules in play
• there are sufficient dice.

I've seen slow play with my own players in DLR, and in JJS' campaign in the 00's which I just watched 2 sessions of. I don't find it particularly slow, nor particularly fast, but I do find it needs more GM color narration per round than D&D to feel right. And both need far more than does FFG SW or L5R - those require less because of the advantage/opportunity spend mechanics...

As for bennies: I generally gave a benny for any good one-liner or cool attempt, or for a good player description of their own failure. Plus the obligatory one at Joker.

I enjoyed DLR+SWEX...

I want to use it for robotech soon.

@Retreater
As with any RPG, note the oddities in play you didn't like and begin to slowly house rule solutions. For instance, non-important monsters don't get Shaken - they just die. Or if you don't want to go that far, non-important monsters can only be Shaken once; if they recover, the next time they'd be shaken, they die.

Another frustration seems to be no progress. Borrow 13th Age's Escalation Die mechanic. Get your largest die ( I have a squishy d6) and after the first round of combat, set in on "1". All die-rolls now have a +1 bonus. Next round set to "2". All die rolls now have a + 2 bonus, etc. This might be too fast, so modify in a way that feels right to you.