Can you tell me about the combat in SW, how is it tactical and how bennies are used, if they are?
Also, the whiff factor is really an issue?
Thanks
Sorry, it's taken me a while to jump back in to this thread. Lots of tangents and interesting responses.
I'll try to answer this as succinctly as possible. Don't want to derail the other trains of thought on the thread, but thought I'd take a minute to try and respond.
Savage Worlds' tactical combat components play out similarly in some respects to D&D 3.x/Pathfinder.
Minis and grids are the assumed defaults (though we've had some tremendously fun combats without them). Positioning matters. Flanking and "gang up" coordination matters. Because of the way wounds/damage modeling are handled, ranged combat can be deadly, and ranged combat tactics really MATTER (range, getting under cover). Engaging/disengaging from melee has consequences.
Many of what would be seen as "fighter only" feats in D&D are baked into the system as general combat options.
In general, if you're a fan of the kinds of combats that D&D 3 and Pathfinder produce, you'll like Savage Worlds' tactical combat.
The most *controversial thing about Savage Worlds is by far its wound/damage rules, which does play into your other question about "whiff factor."
(*in the sense that opponents of the system are very vocal about it)
In D&D, you get used to the idea that every hit does
something. Even if it's just 1 lowly hit point subtracted from a foe, it's still
something.
Savage Worlds is not like this. In order to meaningfully damage a foe, you have to do enough damage to exceed their base toughness plus any armor reduction.
So, for example, if a foe's damage threshold is 8 total (6 base toughness + 2 armor reduction), any damage rolls of seven or less simply have no effect. Damage rolls from 8-11 would cause a Shaken condition, Damage rolls 12+ would cause one or more wounds.
On some very rare occasions, I have seen this become a source of frustration, and it's happened to me on both sides as a GM and player. Every once in while --- maybe 1 combat in 25 --- the dice just aren't playing nice with the players, and the combat feels like things get mired in a slog. Usually this is a case where players are rolling well enough to hit an enemy but never doing enough damage to exceed the foe's wound threshold.
(The other criticism often leveled at Savage Worlds is that players get stuck in a Shaken "stun lock" loop where they keep losing their actions across multiple turns. This has largely been eliminated with rules changes.)
Now about "bennies" --- the easiest way to think about them is to just call them "hero points" instead, because they serve to allow characters to re-roll actions they've attempted previously, as well as to "soak" a damage roll that would normally cause wounds, but if successfully "soaked", it's as if the wound had never happened.
In D&D terms, you can think of a hero point "soak" check to be the equivalent of a fighter immediately regaining hitpoints in the middle of a fight, or if you're okay with a more "narrative" concept, it's as if the hero did something dramatic at the very last second to "turn away" the attack so it didn't cause a wound in the first place, or caused a less severe wound than it might have otherwise. It's very much a "Saving Throw Against Damage" kind of a check.
It's basically the reverse of the D&D 4/D&D 5 "short rest" healing rules, where instead of saying, "Well, after a short rest, you spend X hit dice to regain Y hit points," you're basically saying, "In that extreme moment of combat, your heroism and luck allowed you to avoid the damage that you'd later have to heal."
If you can think of "bennies" in this light --- as hero points that function as an amalgamation of of D&D 5 hit dice, "short rest healing in reverse," combat-narrative-insta-retcon-to-avoid-damage PLUS the ability to re-roll critical skill checks and damage rolls, then Savage Worlds will immediately feel completely natural and remarkably fun.
All that said, there are a lot of D&D players that just seem to really struggle with accepting these general conceits when they're used to the standard hit point / healing / rest model.
For me, it wasn't even a hurdle at all. In essence, I was trading away the inconsistencies of the hit point model for something different and ultimately better.
For example, in the hit point model, you have to ask questions like, why is cure light wounds massively more effective on a level 1 character than a level 9 character? Why can a character take a "short rest" for 15-30 minutes and suddenly regain a bulk of hit points? Weren't those hit points modeling actual physical injury? And if they weren't modeling actual physical injury, how do I represent what's happening in the fiction? Why can a level 9 fighter jump off a 100-foot cliff and, by rules-as-written, survive the fall in better shape than when (s)he fought a wyvern the day before?
The thing about "hero points"/"bennies" being used as soak/damage ablation, is that it does take a minute to sort of figure out in the fiction what happened when the character avoided that massive damage attack. But the cool thing is, once you cross that hurdle, the actual wound/damage/fatigue model produces much more generally plausible results. When an actual wound takes place, there's absolutely zero question of what it's modeling within the game fiction---your character is hurt, it's making them less effective within the fiction, and if it's serious enough, short-term healing attempts are of limited effect. The "hero point"/damage ablation model removes the mental gymnastics of having to figure out just what those 97 hit points actually mean, how hit point healing works, etc.
For me, despite the fact that "hero points + soak rolls" does have a meta-game component to it, the end result of Savage Worlds' wound and fatigue tracks make it more realistic in the end.
It's definitely a trade-off, in a sense, to shift paradigms from hit points/healing to "hero point"/damage soak, and there is the rare "whiff" factor combat to contend with. But overall I VASTLY prefer the Savage Worlds paradigm for a host of reasons.
Having played Savage Worlds for seven or eight years now, the very thought of reverting to a d20 system of any kind makes me cringe on the inside. To me, going back to d20 after Savage Worlds feels like going backward three or four steps in overall game design functionality, elegance, and playability.
That said, there are some things that D&D can do better. Savage Worlds is utterly fantastic when combats are modeled around generally human-scale participants. It's a little less good at modeling human-versus-gigantic-monstrous-foe combats. So if your bread-and-butter combats are the "The party versus a single, large CR foe," then D&D 5 might be slightly more effective. But if your combats are more along the lines of, "The party faces off against 6 goblins, 2 goblin wolfriders, a cave troll and an orc chieftain," and you want that combat to be fun, dynamic, and tactical, then Savage Worlds is awesome.