NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6604945" data-attributes="member: 85870">That's a very interesting comparison with Oriental Adventures. And no, that playstyle is definitely not in 3e, at least not any campaign I've been a part of. It's interesting, because I kept wondering after switching to Savage Worlds, "What has happened to my game sessions?" (meaning it in a good way). Yeah, Savage Worlds was less complex than Pathfinder, and much, much easier to prep for GM-ing (seriously, it's so easy). But there was something going on in the character dynamics as well. The players' character choices were naturally pushing them into their roles in the fiction. To the point that one player said, "You know, I totally had this idea in mind that my character was pretty much going to be a power-tripping 'Monte Haul' type. But every time we play, it's like he has a mind of his own to go in a different direction."The choices of skills, edges, hindrances, and even gear were creating these really obvious, yet really fun and easy-to-embrace "spaces" in the fiction--and when the players "played up" to those spaces, their enjoyment and effectiveness increased.Something else interesting happened too, and I was going to actually ask you out of curiosity if you've seen this in 4e play as well. One of the characters specifically set up his character to sort of be the "anti-hero" rogue, the socially misanthropic, always-drunk-and-penniless guy. And yet, over and over, simply by playing to this character's "role" in the fiction, he ended up creating some of the most meaningful stories / fun hijinx----and yet STILL ended up being "the hero" in so many different situations. I suppose this might be "bad" if the player didn't actually want it to end up that way; if he or she really did want to be the anti-social, misanthrope non-hero. But my player loved it.  Ah, sorry, I'll clarify. By "screwy" I mean, "Having no immediately obvious, universally applicable narrative resolution that will, under scrutiny, completely satisfy all aspects of both process sim and fantasy/heroic genre tropes." And honestly, until working through it in my own mind in this thread, I actually did think "soaking" was a bit....off for me. I could never completely wrap my head around why the designers went with it. Understanding that "soaking with hero pool points" and healing surges were actually two sides of the same coin actually increased my regard for the nature of the mechanic significantly. Not because it feels better emotionally, per se, but because I could at least see the "why," and understand that it allowed for specific "down range" side effects and mechanics to work with it in parallel. From a certain perspective Savage Worlds has a "hit point mechanic" like any other RPG, it's just that A) player characters and NPCs never have more than 3 hit points (marks on the wound/fatigue track), B) tend to be lost in increments of 1, 2, or 3 rather than 10/20/40, etc., and C) any hit point loss is ALWAYS considered real injury. "Bennies"/hero pool points are a totally separate thing, and aren't considered "hit points"----they're player-activated narrative resolution control. They might prevent hit point loss, but aren't themselves hit points. Take away the option of "soaking" wounds through player narrative control, and Savage Worlds becomes deadly---not quite up to the level with Runequest or GURPS, but definitely in the same ballpark.</blockquote>

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