How is it now a days? Are you playing it? Should I?
Absolutely.
IMO, if there is a game that deserves to be on the shelf next to everyone's D&D books its Savage Worlds (SW). Easy to learn, unique mechanics, mid-crunch, incredibly modular, and little overlap with the stories most other major franchises aim to tell.
Which is important to touch on. SW works best with fast, swingy, and chaotic adventures. Think
Starship Troopers or
Game of Thrones. Adventurers begin competent and ready to go, and do get to advance (mostly laterally), but are always a die roll away from a bad time. This makes it great for one-shots and improv games. Long campaign style games are certainly doable, but GM will have to decide how PC death will be handled and let the players know. Thankfully, just rotating in brand new characters isn't an issue, so that's what I do.
I have run quite a few settings with it over the years, but my favorite was Tyrnador, by GRAmel. One of the best "OSR like" sandboxes on the market IMO and really shows off what SW is capable of.
Okay, enough cheerleading, there is ONE major problem I can think of, and that's combat swinging wildly in the
non-deadly direction. Either between terrible dice rolls or just facing off against a creature with high stats, the "all or nothing" mechanic sometimes can be a slog. Recommend house ruling an escalation mechanic of some sort (13th Age-ish) to keep things tense!
