Wik
First Post
Hey all. I know a lot of people have read Flynn's posts on Savage Worlds, and how the game works. It's been a real interesting read, and I figured I'd chime in with my own take on how the game worked out in actual play. I'm not sure if it's an endorsement yet, but maybe I can shed some light on the system for those who are interested, but not committed.
***
So, we played Savage Worlds for the first time today. I was really excited about getting a chance to run this, and not just because it was the first time my group was getting together in almost a month. I felt fairly confident with the system, so confident that I had been willing to run a new genre on the spot. If my players came in and said "Hey, I feel like playing in a Halo game", I would've run with it.
That in itself is a testament to the ease of the system - there's very little prepwork to be done.
When my group showed up, they figured basic fantasy was the way they wanted to go. They weren't really set on anything, so I ran one of the sample adventures on the SW website - a story about a small village being attacked by orcs. Fairly standard stuff.
One of the players (my brother) had read parts of the rulebook, and had been at my place last week when we ran a sample combat to figure out kinks in the rules. When we decided to create characters (no one really like the idea of using pregens), he grabbed the book and thumbed through it, with the goal of creating a dwarven fighter that was very intimidating.
So, I asked the other two what type of characters they wanted to play, and made characters from memory (it's pretty easy, especially if you know you're creating one shot characters). We wound up with a young mageling that was a horrible coward, and a zealot priest of battle.
The session started off with the PCs getting hired by a young duke who wanted the PCs to protect the tiny village of Roxbury from Orcs that are overrunning the Eastern Marches. The PCs agree to take on the task (the Mageling because he owes money to his school and is terrified of the things mages can do to him, the priest because he feels that God has assigned him this task, and the dwarf because, well, orcs).
After a few days of trudging through rain, and the players describing to me a very Lord of the Rings travel scene involving the priest marching forward fanatically, the dwarf rushing to keep up with this stubby legs, and the mage complaining about walking and falling behind, looking over his shoulder nervously, and then running to catch up.
And then there was the inevitable orc attack.
The PCs were charged by three orcs. I called for a notice roll, and only the mage was able to get a success (and a raise). We "rolled" initiative and dealt out the cards. The orcs charged, and weren't able to do much. In a panic with the orc right in front of him, the mageling let loose three maximized bolts (spending almost all of his power points right away, totally in character) in a panicked attack. The bolts all hit and inflicted wounds, turning the orc into burger.
In the first round, the mage ran like hell, before stopping and pulling off a shot with his crossbow before fleeing some more. The dwarf and cleric got into fights with their respective orcs. The cleric was shaken almost right off the bat.
The dwarf was able to knock out his orc in the second round or so, while the cleric had to keep making rolls to fight being shaken, and even had to spend a benny when an orc got lucky and and rolled a huge damage roll (luckily, he had an extra benny from his Luck edge, so when he made the soak roll, he still had the same number of bennies as everyone else)
The mage received an extra benny for getting us all to laugh as we played through the encounter.
After this quick little fight, the PCs found the poorly fortified village. The main priest of the town, Adelmar, apologized for never finishing the "palisade" (really a fence that had holes in it, and an iron gate that had rusted open), and the PCs freaked out - particularly the Coward. The Priest merely shrugged and said "if you die here, it's God's will".
The PCs made some quick defensive alterations, batching up the holes in the palisade with seats and beds from houses (when the dwarf suggested using church pews, the priest made some inappropriate comments). The mage blocked up the gate, and made sure everyone slept in the same town hall - and stayed as far away as possible from the door.
The PCs set up shifts, and it happened that Adelmar and a villager were on watch when the orcs approached the village. Adelmar set up an alarm, running to the church bells to wake people up. Of course, only the Mage heard any of this, and his first response was to shriek "Oh, God, the orcs are attacking!" and ran outside in a panic.
When the actual combat started, the mage and one of the villagers were running towards the gate in the scant moonlight, while the priest and the dwarf ran to the hole in the palisade.
The mage was shocked to discover an ogre at the gates, and bravely cast Deflection -scoring a raise- on his companion before saying "You attack it! I'll stay back here and protect you!". Meanwhile, the two PCs (one player insisted that bringing NPCs along was foolish, since it was "just orcs") were shocked to discover six orcs climbing the palisade.
In the very first round of combat, the ogre kicked down the gate and took a swing at the villager (but missed, thanks only to the deflection effect) the mage was dealt a joker, and when he cast his bolt (again, maximized) on the ogre, only one actually hit. But that bolt got a score of 21.
I spent all but one of my GM bennies trying to keep that ogre alive, but it wasn't going to happen, and it fell down dead.
The rest of the fight turned into an attack against the orcs, with the PCs calling upon the villagers a bit later on to help them out. Much of the fighting was to the west of the village, but the mage had rounded up a small party of villagers and was fighting two orcs who had attempted to sneak up behind the main party.
There was a lot of dice-rolling and a lot of misses, mostly because it was dark, and because we forgot to use the ganging up rules.
Eventually the orcs fell (after they reduced the dwarf to 4 wounds, incapacitating him and really screwing up his arm). We had only been playing for two hours, but my girlfriend got home, and the game sort of broke up.
***
When I talked to my group about it, I was surprised how much they liked the system. Not that the game went poorly, but more because of the length of time involved in the second fight, and because of the number of misses involved. The NPC allies, for example, seemed to be more or less useless (well, with a d4 fighting...)
They were pretty excited about the game, in their cool way, and pointed out a few things about the system that they loved that we don't see in D&D. The player of the priest really loved the fact that the power curve isn't exponential as it is in D&D - the Ogre would have been tough, but it's not like in D&D where an ogre is murder against 1st level PCs, and not really a threat against 5th or 6th level PCs. They also liked the lack of bookkeeping, and controlling allies was good for them, too.
They weren't a fan of the fact that enemies would get shaken, make their vigour roll almost immediately, and it was as if nothing happened. And the priest didn't really like how the healing spell and healing skill seem to do almost the same thing (in fact, when he healed the dwarf, it was the healing skill that did the lion's share of the healing). He mentioned how he'd like to see the healing skill be limited somehow, to favour magical healing.
The dwarf's player was a bit upset, because after his dwarf had been laid low, he slapped his head and said "I forgot to add my armour bonus to my toughness!" - instead of the toughness 8 he had been using (the same as the orcs the group was fighting), he should've had a toughness of around 11 or 12. Which would've been more than enough to keep his dwarf in the fight.
In fact, many of the complaints were more about us learning a new system, and not really problems with the system itself. The penalties for darkness (-2 on all attack rolls) are HUGE in this game, and it was that penalty that really made the combat drag out. Also, we found that bennies can deplete rapidly - even in the first fight, something like three bennies were spent. It's very easy for your character to get hit, and spend all his bennies to prevent his wounds.
And, of course, once you're wounded, it's only going to get worse. The next time I run things, I plan on giving the PCs healing potions, or something similar.
We're running this again next week, hopefully getting a chance to try out another fight against a big baddie, and I'm hoping to see if I can run a fight against a wild card. I also want to run a converted adventure, and since I just got Pathfinder #6 in the mail, it's a possibility that I might run a Converted Rise of the Runelords adventure.
***
So, we played Savage Worlds for the first time today. I was really excited about getting a chance to run this, and not just because it was the first time my group was getting together in almost a month. I felt fairly confident with the system, so confident that I had been willing to run a new genre on the spot. If my players came in and said "Hey, I feel like playing in a Halo game", I would've run with it.
That in itself is a testament to the ease of the system - there's very little prepwork to be done.
When my group showed up, they figured basic fantasy was the way they wanted to go. They weren't really set on anything, so I ran one of the sample adventures on the SW website - a story about a small village being attacked by orcs. Fairly standard stuff.
One of the players (my brother) had read parts of the rulebook, and had been at my place last week when we ran a sample combat to figure out kinks in the rules. When we decided to create characters (no one really like the idea of using pregens), he grabbed the book and thumbed through it, with the goal of creating a dwarven fighter that was very intimidating.
So, I asked the other two what type of characters they wanted to play, and made characters from memory (it's pretty easy, especially if you know you're creating one shot characters). We wound up with a young mageling that was a horrible coward, and a zealot priest of battle.
The session started off with the PCs getting hired by a young duke who wanted the PCs to protect the tiny village of Roxbury from Orcs that are overrunning the Eastern Marches. The PCs agree to take on the task (the Mageling because he owes money to his school and is terrified of the things mages can do to him, the priest because he feels that God has assigned him this task, and the dwarf because, well, orcs).
After a few days of trudging through rain, and the players describing to me a very Lord of the Rings travel scene involving the priest marching forward fanatically, the dwarf rushing to keep up with this stubby legs, and the mage complaining about walking and falling behind, looking over his shoulder nervously, and then running to catch up.
And then there was the inevitable orc attack.
The PCs were charged by three orcs. I called for a notice roll, and only the mage was able to get a success (and a raise). We "rolled" initiative and dealt out the cards. The orcs charged, and weren't able to do much. In a panic with the orc right in front of him, the mageling let loose three maximized bolts (spending almost all of his power points right away, totally in character) in a panicked attack. The bolts all hit and inflicted wounds, turning the orc into burger.
In the first round, the mage ran like hell, before stopping and pulling off a shot with his crossbow before fleeing some more. The dwarf and cleric got into fights with their respective orcs. The cleric was shaken almost right off the bat.
The dwarf was able to knock out his orc in the second round or so, while the cleric had to keep making rolls to fight being shaken, and even had to spend a benny when an orc got lucky and and rolled a huge damage roll (luckily, he had an extra benny from his Luck edge, so when he made the soak roll, he still had the same number of bennies as everyone else)
The mage received an extra benny for getting us all to laugh as we played through the encounter.
After this quick little fight, the PCs found the poorly fortified village. The main priest of the town, Adelmar, apologized for never finishing the "palisade" (really a fence that had holes in it, and an iron gate that had rusted open), and the PCs freaked out - particularly the Coward. The Priest merely shrugged and said "if you die here, it's God's will".
The PCs made some quick defensive alterations, batching up the holes in the palisade with seats and beds from houses (when the dwarf suggested using church pews, the priest made some inappropriate comments). The mage blocked up the gate, and made sure everyone slept in the same town hall - and stayed as far away as possible from the door.
The PCs set up shifts, and it happened that Adelmar and a villager were on watch when the orcs approached the village. Adelmar set up an alarm, running to the church bells to wake people up. Of course, only the Mage heard any of this, and his first response was to shriek "Oh, God, the orcs are attacking!" and ran outside in a panic.
When the actual combat started, the mage and one of the villagers were running towards the gate in the scant moonlight, while the priest and the dwarf ran to the hole in the palisade.
The mage was shocked to discover an ogre at the gates, and bravely cast Deflection -scoring a raise- on his companion before saying "You attack it! I'll stay back here and protect you!". Meanwhile, the two PCs (one player insisted that bringing NPCs along was foolish, since it was "just orcs") were shocked to discover six orcs climbing the palisade.
In the very first round of combat, the ogre kicked down the gate and took a swing at the villager (but missed, thanks only to the deflection effect) the mage was dealt a joker, and when he cast his bolt (again, maximized) on the ogre, only one actually hit. But that bolt got a score of 21.
I spent all but one of my GM bennies trying to keep that ogre alive, but it wasn't going to happen, and it fell down dead.
The rest of the fight turned into an attack against the orcs, with the PCs calling upon the villagers a bit later on to help them out. Much of the fighting was to the west of the village, but the mage had rounded up a small party of villagers and was fighting two orcs who had attempted to sneak up behind the main party.
There was a lot of dice-rolling and a lot of misses, mostly because it was dark, and because we forgot to use the ganging up rules.
Eventually the orcs fell (after they reduced the dwarf to 4 wounds, incapacitating him and really screwing up his arm). We had only been playing for two hours, but my girlfriend got home, and the game sort of broke up.
***
When I talked to my group about it, I was surprised how much they liked the system. Not that the game went poorly, but more because of the length of time involved in the second fight, and because of the number of misses involved. The NPC allies, for example, seemed to be more or less useless (well, with a d4 fighting...)
They were pretty excited about the game, in their cool way, and pointed out a few things about the system that they loved that we don't see in D&D. The player of the priest really loved the fact that the power curve isn't exponential as it is in D&D - the Ogre would have been tough, but it's not like in D&D where an ogre is murder against 1st level PCs, and not really a threat against 5th or 6th level PCs. They also liked the lack of bookkeeping, and controlling allies was good for them, too.
They weren't a fan of the fact that enemies would get shaken, make their vigour roll almost immediately, and it was as if nothing happened. And the priest didn't really like how the healing spell and healing skill seem to do almost the same thing (in fact, when he healed the dwarf, it was the healing skill that did the lion's share of the healing). He mentioned how he'd like to see the healing skill be limited somehow, to favour magical healing.
The dwarf's player was a bit upset, because after his dwarf had been laid low, he slapped his head and said "I forgot to add my armour bonus to my toughness!" - instead of the toughness 8 he had been using (the same as the orcs the group was fighting), he should've had a toughness of around 11 or 12. Which would've been more than enough to keep his dwarf in the fight.
In fact, many of the complaints were more about us learning a new system, and not really problems with the system itself. The penalties for darkness (-2 on all attack rolls) are HUGE in this game, and it was that penalty that really made the combat drag out. Also, we found that bennies can deplete rapidly - even in the first fight, something like three bennies were spent. It's very easy for your character to get hit, and spend all his bennies to prevent his wounds.
And, of course, once you're wounded, it's only going to get worse. The next time I run things, I plan on giving the PCs healing potions, or something similar.
We're running this again next week, hopefully getting a chance to try out another fight against a big baddie, and I'm hoping to see if I can run a fight against a wild card. I also want to run a converted adventure, and since I just got Pathfinder #6 in the mail, it's a possibility that I might run a Converted Rise of the Runelords adventure.
