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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 8403932" data-attributes="member: 85870">Context: From 2013 until the spring of 2021, Savage Worlds received 95% of our group's total play time, typically playing twice a month for 4-5 hours. With the occasional off-week and cancellation, we typically would play 20-24 sessions a year. I was the GM 60% of the time (100+ sessions), and a player for another 75+ sessions.When done right, and played with the right mindset, Savage Worlds is an excellent, terrifically fun game if your preferences lean toward traditional/"neo trad" style of games, and are willing to work with the system to understand its strengths and weaknesses. The biggest hurdle you will face with Savage Worlds is how character skill scales against the damage/toughness output and damage/toughness resistance of your NPCs/enemies. This will largely depend on how intricately your players delve into the rules and are focused on optimization. If your players lean towards strong optimization, the problem will come to the forefront quicker. What ends up happening is within 4-5 "advances" (an advance in Savage Worlds is roughly equivalent to a 1/3 - 1/2 level gain in D&D), if your players are solely optimizing for combat effectiveness, is you will quickly discover that a typical "mook" enemy no longer poses a threat to the players barring some exceptional lucky/unlucky dice rolling. By the time a player has a D12 in fighting, high armor reduction, plus Edges (read: Feats), it's not unusual for their baseline toughness to be 11 or 12 total (physical toughness + armor + Edges), with a parry of 9 or 10 as well.So even though attack and damage "explodes" (you roll dice again any time you get the max number), and it's still theoretically possible for low-level enemies to pose a threat, they don't last long enough in combat to really maximize it. A typical mook enemy is rarely going to hit, and has to basically roll double-6's on 2d6 damage to have any possible effect. So what ends up happening as a GM, is within 9-10 sessions, the scaling of enemy effectiveness has to go up significantly. And because of the way damage scaling works with exploding dice, it's much, much harder to scale up to a "challenging fight" without also dramatically increasing the probability of character death.If your players aren't on board with knowing that keeping fights "fair" and "interesting" also means they're putting their characters at significantly more risk, they probably won't enjoy it. It's very, very hard to thread the needle on making fights "meaningful but manageable," much harder than any D20 system. They are, as mentioned by others, "swingy." Combats often end up looking tough at the beginning but quickly turn into a breezy cakewalk, or they end up looking "manageable" but quickly scale toward brutal and deadly.From my experience this is actually a feature, not a bug, as it keeps players on their toes, but it is something to be aware of. And when the players and GM are in sync with the combat system, and invested in the happenings at the table, it can truly produce roleplaying magic. My biggest recommendation to lengthen out the "sweet spot" for combat is to tell your players that at Level 0 / 0 XP, nothing on their character sheet can be higher than a D8, period, end of sentence. This forces them to build more broadly competent characters and avoid min-maxing right out of the gate. As a side effect, it also means that for the first 2-3 advances, their characters aren't going to be as radically differentiated from each other as you'd see in D&D, but I can promise you with absolute certainty that their character concept as they envisioned it will work out as imagined in the end.Also, just my personal opinion, those complaining about using playing cards for initiative have it wrong. Everyone I've ever introduced playing card initiative to has commented later, "Man, this is way more fun, interesting, and tactical than just rolling a D20 and writing down a turn order."Also, and this is going to go a bit against public opinion, but I'm not totally convinced that the Adventure Edition rules (or SWADE) was an improvement over the prior edition (Savage Worlds Deluxe). In some ways, the little rules changes of SWADE seem to give the appearance of more balance and interesting choices in play, but for me as a GM, there was just some small but measurable bit of magic lost between the transition from SWDeluxe to SWADE.On paper, SWADE rules-as-written seems like a better system, but my heart would choose Deluxe. The small bits of additional overhead (especially in combat) introduced in SWADE don't seem to meaningfully add to the fun.Either way, though, it's a very good system, and absolutely worth trying out. Give me the choice between Savage Worlds and anything D20 based, and I'll choose Savage Worlds every time without a second thought.  Also be aware that the energy/synergy that Savage Worlds brings to your sessions is significantly muted in an online/remote setting. The physical/tactile component of rolling dice when they explode, handing out the playing cards for initiative, the physical interaction with the minis on the map gets lost in an online setting. And yes, you should plan on using minis and battle mats for Savage Worlds. If the thought of doing that doesn't appeal to you, get out now. Don't waste your time trying to shoehorn Savage Worlds into theater of the mind; it just won't work, and you'll end up disappointed and frustrated.Side note --- The reason we've stopped playing Savage Worlds is that I personally was ready for a change, and pushed the group to try out some more narrative driven games, Ironsworn and Genesys in particular. Apropos of nothing, I have to give a massive plug to Ironsworn. It's freaking awesome, and if you have any interest at all in trying out something Powered by the Apocalypse / Forged in the Dark adjacent, you can't go wrong with Ironsworn. And considering that the core book is the price of free, there's no reason to not at least try it out.</blockquote>

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