My "Savage" Experience

[payn]

The problem with it is it carries over to a lot of, honestly, trash encounters that aren't that interesting. Mind you, they still serve some purpose because they remind people that their characters really are Big Damn Heroes (which can fail to happen with serious encounters where you're really having to work it for some people), but it also consumes time which doesn't necessarily do those adventure paths any favors in many cases.

Actually, I think it does the opposite. PF1 used a nuanced XP system and the APs shoehorned a milestone system into it. Which, is why you had tons of pointless boring encounters peppered in. PF2 was designed for milestone play and shoe horned an XP system into it, which is why its not satisfying to old school minded players.

(My personal opinion is that, even though I'm much more tolerant of modern design than older D&D design, from 3e on most versions of D&D and its offshoots like PF are not really well suited to older style dungeons because the advancement is too swift (this might be somewhat less true with D&D5e because of the way it tries to compress power level, but it was certainly true of 3e and 4e and bother versions of PF.)

I agree. The modern take is a move the game along on milestone/plot points position and not dwell on open exploration and episodic adventures one. PF1 does the latter better becasue it still leaned closer to that style of play. That shifted with PF2, making the latter much more difficult.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Actually, I think it does the opposite. PF1 used a nuanced XP system and the APs shoehorned a milestone system into it. Which, is why you had tons of pointless boring encounters peppered in. PF2 was designed for milestone play and shoe horned an XP system into it, which is why its not satisfying to old school minded players.

The problem is, any XP system that is actually doing the "XP for what you fought" thing is either going to produce a lot of junk encounters, or produce a faster advancement than some people want. In the end, levelling is going to be calculated on some value of expected encounters with such a system, and that's going to create problems for one set of expectations or another.

I agree. The modern take is a move the game along on milestone/plot points position and not dwell on open exploration and episodic adventures one. PF1 does the latter better becasue it still leaned closer to that style of play. That shifted with PF2, making the latter much more difficult.

Eh. I think by 3e it was already fighting the system, because the truth is, the system wanted people to actually be able to explore higher levels. That has much more to do with it than whether you were doing experience or milestones. OD&D had what was in some respects, glacially slow advancement, and its two direct successors and earlier offshoots mostly kept that. I don't think that was necessarily a virtue, but it did make it possible to do really extended dungeon crawls because characters were going to, at best, level once or twice by the time it was done. By the time of 3e, the only way that was going to happen was if the dungeon was very empty, so little experience was being yielded for most of it.

 

[Retreater]

In the day, we got around these limitations by just "jumping ahead" to play the adventures we wanted. So if we finished an adventure at 3rd level, why not just boost it to 4th to play the next adventure? It's a much more episodic experience but it allows you to hit the high notes.

 

[Staffan]

The PF2 XP system was basically designed to be X amount of encounters per level. Folks who like XP often complain about how simplified it is.

I am curious how that translates to the PF2 AP design? I have only played in Abomination Vaults and it was intended to be an old school dungeon crawler that didn't work out well, imo. Though, I dont think a nuanced XP system was the issue. It was more the +1/lvl system makes a sandbox dungeon not quite as workable as old school ones did, again, imo.

I've gone over this before, and it might be different in the newer APs, but:

• APs are traditionally designed to cover 20 levels in 6 parts. Often lately you instead get 10 levels in 3 parts, but the effect is much the same.
• That means that over the course of a 6-part AP, you get two parts each covering 4 levels and four parts each covering 3 levels. For a 3-parter, that's one and two parts.
• While an AP book is normally 96 pages long, only about 2/3 of that is adventure content and the rest are new monsters, magic items, articles, and so on. Subtract some more for adventure synopsis, table of content, and so on, and you get about 60 pages of adventure content per book. It is not practically feasible to have more adventure content at the rate they are being published.
• So in a 4-level AP book, you need to put in enough encounters for four levels in about 60 pages, which is 15 pages per level. One level is about 10-12 encounters depending on how difficult they are. You may be able to "cheat" a little with story XP, but apparently some players object to this and say "I paid for enough encounters for X levels and you're only giving me 80% of that!"
• In practice, this often leads to one moderately-sized dungeon (or one level of a dungeon) that gets you through an entire level, and strongly encouraging you to fight/kill every thing within that dungeon (because otherwise you'll be short on XP). Putting in more engaging things will likely eat too much of the Holy Page Count – an encounter where you need to persuade a city official to let you put your circus tent up can eat up a whole page, while an encounter with two Dire Wolves can be simplified to "Dire Wolves (2), 50 hp, see Bestiary page 334"

Also, in D&D and D&D-derived games like Pathfinder (both 1 and 2), adventure design is usually based around attrition. 3e (and thus Pathfinder 1) had the whole thing about an "adventuring day" being 4 encounters that each ate about 20-25% of your nebulous resources (mostly hp and spells) so only the last encounter would really be dangerous on account of you running on fumes. PF2 works on a similar model, though it's not as spelled out (I've seen one of the designers say that casters are intended to use 1, maybe 2, of their top two level spells per serious encounter, and make do with cantrips and focus spells for Moderate and lower – but that's not spelled out in the books). But Savage Worlds doesn't do that kind of attrition. You only have three Wounds before being Incapacitated, and you can lose them all in one attack with a bit of bad luck. A single fight per day is perfectly fine, both because the system doesn't expect attrition and because you don't get XP from fights.

 

[Retreater]

My (limited) experience with Savage points to a system that doesn't base challenge on a gauntlet of encounters that deplete your resources throughout an adventuring day, like D&D and Pathfinder. It's a very swingy system where a hero can drop to a lucky strike from a mook.
It just seems antithetical to use adventures from systems designed for attrition gameplay.

 

[Reynard]

My (limited) experience with Savage points to a system that doesn't base challenge on a gauntlet of encounters that deplete your resources throughout an adventuring day, like D&D and Pathfinder. It's a very swingy system where a hero can drop to a lucky strike from a mook.
It just seems antithetical to use adventures from systems designed for attrition gameplay.

Yeah, the only real dwindling resource in SWADE is power points and you can do without them.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, the only real dwindling resource in SWADE is power points and you can do without them.

And there's ways to recover some of them, far as that goes.

 

[dbm]

I think Savage Worlds supports the ‘5 room dungeon’ model quite well since that isn’t usually about a grind. But more involved ‘dungeons’ than that are tricky. Quick Encounters are definitely something to lean into when wanting to have lots of encounters.

If I am running a dungeon-style experience then my tendency is to zoom in and out like you might see in an action movie. In that context you wouldn’t spend lots of time on moving through tunnels and general exploration, and skirmishes might be resolved very quickly, until you get to a meaty ‘scene’ that might be a big combat or some kind of challenge.

It’s a quite different way of looking at adventure design and session management.

Interesting anecdote - the quick encounter system was invented on the fly by Shane Hennessy after he was invited to run demo games at an Italian (IIRC) games convention. He arrived expecting a US-typical 4 hour slot but discovered the format was 30 minute sessions. Rather than scrap the adventure and just run a single encounter he thought up the quick encounter mechanic to move through the whole adventure with every 30 minute group.

 

[AttentionHorse]

I don't remember much from our Deadlands Savage Worlds campaign 2 years ago, but I remember this - we kinda hated the system (not the setting, it's fine), it played extremely slow during combat. No way we're playing another Savage Worlds game ever again, if we'll go back to Deadlands it would have to be in some other system, like Year Zero (Tales of the Old West) or something.

 

[Reynard]

I don't remember much from our Deadlands Savage Worlds campaign 2 years ago, but I remember this - we kinda hated the system (not the setting, it's fine), it played extremely slow during combat.

You were doing something wrong.