My "Savage" Experience

If I'm being honest, I shouldn't have run the game. I wasn't in a headspace to do a good job. We had just travelled 5 hours round-trip to attend the visitation of a family friend and barely made it back in time to host the game, much less look over the adventure and rules. My wife desperately wanted to play after the tragic week she had, so I agreed to run the game.

I just need to think how to turn this into a good experience. Maybe I scrap a lot from the Plot Point campaign and make it my own? With reasonable enemy stats?
 

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The Rate-of-Fire question. I think we had a character who had a RoF 2 weapon. The confusion came from "I can take two shooting actions" or "I can fire twice with a RoF" - either way, it's a -2 penalty. Why does this matter?
If you are just firing two shots then a multi-action is better as it uses less ammo that RoF2 and you would get your wild die twice. Where RoF 2 helps is with suppression and also you could make six shots if you multi-actioned as well, though you would need to have uber stats to pull that off.
I just need to think how to turn this into a good experience. Maybe I scrap a lot from the Plot Point campaign and make it my own? With reasonable enemy stats?
The plot point campaign is quite rail-road in some ways. You can mitigate that by having more player-led actions between the plot-point milestones.

Being mentally fresh enough to get a good result at the table is always key, especially with a group that leans on the GM to run pretty much all of the rules and you haven’t yet had the chance to fully internalise them.

The setup for Lost Colony is basically Firefly plus horror in the form of undead and demons - it’s got great gaming potential if you just look at it like that.
 

The plot point campaign is quite rail-road in some ways. You can mitigate that by having more player-led actions between the plot-point milestones.
I think a lot of people don't realize that a plot point campaign is an outline, not a full campaign length adventure like Curse of Strahd or Enemy Within. The players aren't meant to rocket from one "point" to the next. Rather, those are (as you said) milestones in the overall plot. Some are more open than others, of course, and the good ones feel like a open world adventure game, rather than a rail shooter or a complete sandbox.
 

SW is my goto system and I only have good and fun experiences. But:
  • I'm almost silly generous with Bennies, mostly because my players doesn't hoard them for combat but use them for fun/stupid/creative stuff.
  • I usually home-brew campaigns in most systems. So when we started with the system I kept the power level of the opposition low and gradually raised it, to allow both me and my players to get a sense of how SW works at different opposition levels, and they learned that they actually had to be smart, employ tactics and non-head-on-solutions for some encounters.
  • Having read up a bit on the system before we started, I really nagged on my players for a dozen sessions about the need for them to engage with the full system, and that simply bonking bags of hp with a stick like in for example 5e wasn't gonna work.

Regarding the last, the way I'd normally phrase it is that while SW isn't routinely complicated (some specific parts can be) it does kind of demand engagement with the rules; its not OD&D.
 

Some are more open than others, of course, and the good ones feel like an open world adventure game, rather than a rail shooter or a complete sandbox.
Lost Colony was the very first add-on for SWADE and I think it shows. It is definitely one of their less refined offerings. But still better than many other first-party items in my opinion.

It kind of suffers from the prime-movers being factions within the world, rather than the PCs. This makes sense in context (which I won’t spoil) but it’s more like a cyberpunk adventure where everyone is out to make an angle and sees the PCs as useful tools than other types of campaign where the PCs are the big movers in the game world.

But if the players understand that, it can still be really good fun. My players are only just realising this dynamic about half-way through the campaign…
 

As an aside of how SW can go off the rails without it being obvious until you get there:

There's an actually pretty interesting and genuinely well-done post-apocalypse third party setting/plot point game for SW, now updated to SWADE (though its not out yet I believe) called Broken Earth. Broken Earth was apparently originally done as something to be run with 5e (because it always goes well to try and use a D&D derivative for things far outside its bailiwick) and at one point the PCs can get some high-quality armor. Most likely in the D&D5e version, this was relatively high AC--but it was till dealing with the D&D style combat system, the swings in D20s were likely still producing fairly regular hits after the PCs got that.

When the author, who wasn't, as far as I can tell, exceptionally familiar with SW converted it to that, he made the armor into Combat Armor. That's way off what you expect to get any traction on with a mixture of primitive weapons, black powder, and an occasional hunting rifle and the like; and unlike various ballistic cloth armors, its still full value against melee weapons. The net effect was that once it got to that point in the campaign, the PCs were semi-invulnerable to most attacks, with a negative impact on the rest of the campaign, all because of a simple error in design.

(I pointed out the problem to the author and the new version will have ballistic armor instead, which will serve the same purpose in the campaign while not being excessive).
 
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Hardened Armor can be a useful tool to emulate nigh-invulnerable beings, but not have to give them such high toughness scores that nothing will hurt them. In the right circumstances, it can work well for "puzzle monsters" or to force the players to come up with alternate solutions (the suffocating an otherwise unkillable person trope, for example).
 

The group wanted sci-fi, but I thought Rifts would be too much. So Lost Colony was the middle ground.
(We had previously played through Holler about a year ago.)
 


It’s a good stepping stone. Rifts would be drinking from the fire hose…

Even after 8+ years of almost nothing but Savage Worlds GM-ing and play, even I looked at Rifts and went, "Whoah. Heavy."

But some of that may also be the idea of Rifts as a setting has never appealed to me in the slightest, so . . . there's that too. :p
 

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