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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dbm" data-source="post: 9118688" data-attributes="member: 8014">I love Savage Worlds. It’s my system-of-choice personally. At its heart it is a pulp action game, and then you can layer on top different flavours of pulp action - sci-fi, fantasy, horror, supers and so on. Pulp action is the type of game I want to run and play, almost exclusively, so that is why SWADE resonates with me so strongly.It feels quite different to D&D-style games, especially in terms of resource management and damage. D&D largely has an attrition-based model where it is expected that your resources will be whittled down over multiple encounters and this means that the party will be suitably challenged in the climactic encounter. That’s cool, unless a group’s play style doesn’t match that assumption. In my group we don’t tend to have long sequences of encounters like a dungeon or raid and this can make it difficult for the GM to assess the ability of the party for any particular fight and so getting the challenge right is tricky. Since in SWADE any fight can be dangerous this frees us up to focus on ’just the important fights’ and not be thinking about how to siphon off resources. If circumstances do demand minor encounters then the rules give you tools to quickly address this (“quick encounters”) which also mitigates the possibility of a minor NPC killing a party members since, while a Wild Card (PC-level character) can die in a ”dangerous quick encounter“ the likelihood of this is massively reduced.* That is another great thing about SWADE - it gives you great tools for a range of encounters and activities beyond just regular combat. Dramatic Tasks are a great evolution of skill challenge encounters. There are rules for information gathering and social influence (but these are not ‘social combat’) and also mass battle rules in case you want to go really big on fights (SWADE handle big skirmishes great with the core combat rules - this is just for the really big stuff).Characters in SWADE come in two broad groups - Wild Cards and Extras. Wild Cards are PCs and major NPCs. Everyone else is an Extra. Wild Cards get to roll a second dice on trait checks (in Savage Worlds skills and stats are rated as dice from d4 to d12 and you usually roll against a target of 4) giving you much greater chance of success (each die is assessed separately - you don’t add them together for checks). Wild Cards can also take three wounds before being incapacitated where as Extras lack this buffer. This means that even starting PCs are pretty capable and tough, and the relatively flat (but meaningful) progression means they never reach the heights that you might in D&D. I kind of think of it as matching roughly the spread of levels 3-12 in D&D terms. In my experience it works pretty well for campaigns of at least a year - we have run several of that length but we rotate GM duties so campaigns of any kind don’t tend to last longer than that for us.I spent decades looking for a genre-flexible game that genuinely supported pulp action rather than just claiming that in the product description. With Savage Worlds and SWADE in particular I finally feel my search is complete.* Fun fact - quick encounters were created when the lead designer Shane was invited to demo Savage Worlds at a convention in Europe (Spain IIRC) and while he was expecting a fairly typical 4 hour slot to do this with, when he arrived he was told that slots were only 30 minutes long… Rather than gut the adventure he created quick encounters on the spot and these have subsequently been refined into a cool tool.</blockquote>

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