My "Savage" Experience

[Thomas Shey]

That explains the missing +1. Thanks!

To be fair, I don't remember seeing that explicitly stated in the rules when it's explaining how to compute Toughness.
There are these little things about SW that I'm having a hard time figuring out.

Its listed in the opponent rules at least, and I think in the "build a nonhuman race" rules.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Here's my issue with bennies.
My group isn't the most proactive. They tend to argue, plan, and discuss actions a lot. I want to give bennies when they do something in character, fun, action-oriented, risky, etc. Not just argue about plans out of character.
I give them bennies when they earn bennies. If I just give bennies all the time for no reason, then it's basically - just leave a bag of bennies on the table and let them take them whenever they want.
Do you get what I'm saying?
If it's mechanically necessary for the game to function properly, I feel like I need some sort of guidance on how many I should hand out.

I'm trying to remember, but I used to give out bennies when players drew a Joker I think; its not doing much in the way of using the social engineering capacity of bennie awards, but I'm not a big fan of that sort of thing, honestly, and it made sure at least some flowed in regularly (which, if I left it to my doing it manually might not have happened).

 

[TheHand]

I used SW to run a 2-year “Gamma World” campaign (cribbing a lot from the SW Darwin’s World and Broken Earth books). One house rule I did, that helped with some of the lack of damage progress in combat, was have armor be ablative.

Since it was the wasteland and everything was junky and prone to breakage, the ablative armor fit the theme. The way it worked was every time someone took a Shaken or higher result, your Armor lost a point, essentially causing Toughness to drop. The players could later use downtime and scrapped parts to make repair checks on their armor.

 

[thullgrim]

Also I thought of it earlier but forgot to mention. It’s easy to forget AP so don’t do it.

 

[dbm]

Some people want to hand them out like water, some want to make them more rare to keep a serious tone.

One of the nice things about the system, for me, is that the flow of bennies is a mechanism for influencing how pulp / gritty the game feels in play, and you can do it on the fly. You can set a feel for a particular campaign by being more or less generous as a baseline, then up that if the players are up against it, adding some narrative flair when you do.

 

[aramis erak]

... I've watched one player in my 13th Age game get beat like a drum because the D20 just decided on my end it wasn't going to roll anything less than a 16 for about six successive rolls. If you run for a while with a D20 game (or a percentile game, far as that goes), you'll just get that sort of thing.

Dice will NEVER solve that issue.
Dice have no memory effect.

Cards are the easiest solution to that...
at one deck per person.
Funniest thing I had happen in SavW was KH getting low cards 90% of the time... He finally draws a queen... and the other cards at the table were both jokers, 3 kings, and QS & QH... to his QC....

 

[Thomas Shey]

Dice will NEVER solve that issue.
Dice have no memory effect.

Solve? No.

That doesn't mean that it becomes progressively more unlikely with some resolution systems, simply because the higher results were less likely in the first place.

 

[Retreater]

I'm curious how much longer to let it go?
How long should it take for players to understand how Savage Worlds works?
How long to stick with Deadlands: Lost Colony when the players don't like (or don't understand) the sci-fi? (Like, "that's not how space travel would work" or "that's not the right scientific terminology for this phenomenon?")

 

[Reynard]

I'm curious how much longer to let it go?
How long should it take for players to understand how Savage Worlds works?
How long to stick with Deadlands: Lost Colony when the players don't like (or don't understand) the sci-fi? (Like, "that's not how space travel would work" or "that's not the right scientific terminology for this phenomenon?")

Honestly, I would drop Lost Colony before I dropped SWADE in general. Again, I don't own it, but it sounds like that particular product is not really up to snuff. I don't usually run premade scenarios with SWADE, but I did have success with Horror on Headstone Hill for Deadlands. There are a bunch of smaller/cheap adventures for various genres on DriveThru.

But I also understand not wanting to start all over again. I have found that there are a lot of useful cheat sheets online that can help players keep their options available. And I would power up the PCs a little with better gear, and maybe debuff the enemies generally.

But it is also possible that it isn't a good fit. That happens sometimes, and you might have to decide when to pull the plug. That doesn't mean it is a bad game, or you are a bad GM, or the players are bad. It just doesn't fit.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Reynard has the right of this; though SWADE could just--not work--for the group, its also possible there's enough missteps in the Lost Colony material that its less the system per se, than that particular expression of it. I'll certainly say a situation where they put people with 2D6 weapons against targets with 10 TOU is not--encouraging.