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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 5799446" data-attributes="member: 99">Been away from ENWorld the last few days but saw that Henry mentioned me in this thread.  A lot of ground has already been covered but I'll chime in on the issue of SW doing Fantasy well.  I feel like I have something to say about it since I wrapped up the big finale of my year-long Savage Worlds Gothic Horror Fantasy game on Wednesday night.I came away feeling like it was the best campaign I've ever run and I've been GMing for 30 years now.I do think SW has a certain "feel" to it that is supported well by the rules.  I think "cinematic" is a reasonable word to describe it.  I might also call it "mid-fantasy" when applying it specifically to that genre.  And for a different job then I might use a different tool.For example (and this is just one of many I'm sure), I'd tend to use 4e D&D if I wanted "high-fantasy" and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for "low-fantasy" (what we often call "grim & gritty").  But for that middle road I think Savage Worlds does great.It has a much flatter curve than D&D does, which I really like.  The numbers get bigger as you move up through the ranks.  But they don't get 4 or 5 times bigger over the course of a campaign.  This also has the benefit of eliminating one of my least favorite things about D&D, which is the "magic item treadmill".  The few (total of 6 or 7 over the course of a year) magic items that the PC's accumulated in the game I just ran were very heavy on flavor and very light on mechanics.Also I really love the spell system.  I love the fact that it gives you generic spells and expects you to supply the flavor.  It doesn't give you a default flavor that you can then re-skin.  It forces some creativity and ownership of your trappings.  And it's amazing how you can use a relatively generic spell to get tons of flavor.  I totally want to brag about one example from my campaign...So one guy shows up when they're making characters and says, "Gothic Horror Fantasy, huh?  Can I make a Werewolf?"  So I thought about it for a minute and said, "Sure!  Here's how..."  Basically he just took the Boost/Lower Trait spell with some modifications.  In exchange for it only raising a trait, only certain traits and only being able to be cast on himself, I let it have a longer duration.  So basically any time he wanted to "wolf out" he would wolf out in specific ways.  He might raise his Strength or Fighting.  He might raise his Vigor and therefore Toughness.  Or he might simply wolf out and raise his Notice, explained by his keen Werewolf senses.That was all we had to do to get this really cool character concept implemented was give him a single spell.  As the campaign went on he picked up a couple other spells like Quickness and Healing, again with the limitation that he could only use them on himself due to his "Werewolf Trappings".  But it took something incredibly generic and flexible and made it amazingly evocative because of just adding that bit of flavor.Mostly I just love that it has such lean mechanics.  It's a very tight game, generally with one fairly obvious way to adjudicate most situations.  That makes it very easy to run with little or no preparation or to adapt when your players take the game in unexpected directions.  The fairly rough "granularity" of monster stats also makes them very easy to make up on the fly or to run without flipping open any rulebooks.It's funny that I'm posting about this today because I've been cleaning out my gaming stuff and trying to purge or give away games that I don't need anymore.  I have a stack of Rolemaster books eighteen inches high thanks to the fact that that system has a rule for everything.  And yet I ran a year's worth of awesome SW games with two small books (Explorer's Handbook and Fantasy Companion).  I dig that level of efficient fun.</blockquote>

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