Savage Worlds vs DnD 5e

AK81

Explorer
Hi I am a sometimes poster and usual lurker on these forums. And I want some help understanding how Savage Worlds feel to play compared to 5e.

I am a somewhat new TTRPG'er who have DMed one full campaign of official DnD 5e (level 1-14), and am DMing my second campaign in Star Wars 5e now (level 8 so far).

So my experience is all 5e, except a one-shot of Dungeon World. Which I really liked, and some solo play in Ironsworn and Tiny Dungeon.

I really like traditional RPGs like DnD and Savage Worlds. And I have read and have a pretty good grasp on the rules of Savage Worlds. What I don't know is how it feels to play.

So if anyone with experience in Savage Worlds can help me out by describing how it feels to play. And if you can compare it to 5e, it would be a bonus 🙂
Any info would be much appreciated 🙂
 

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dbm

Savage!
Supporter
Hi @AK81 I have been playing D&D for over 40 years and played 5e since it was released. My wider RPG tastes moved to genre-flexible systems like GUPRS in the 90s and these days Savage Worlds is my favourite system by far. So hopefully I can help you get an impression of how Savage Worlds feels in comparison to D&D. I'll talk about some of the mechanical differences first and then try to illustrate how they make the games feel different.

There are probably two big things which differentiate Savage Worlds from D&D. Both are aspects of the way that resources and attrition work. In D&D most of your resources are 'per long rest' though there are some of course that restock on short rests. The ones in my opinion with the most game impact are hit points and spell slots. HP are an ever growing pool in D&D, and spell slots let the characters have a significant impact on an encounter through dishing lots of damage, lots of healing or sometime just completely nullifying the challenge (like flying over a pit, for example).

With HP, only the last one really counts. Your character is basically fully capable whether they have 100/100 HP left or 1/100 HP. That means that until you get down to levels of remaining HP where the monsters could drop you to zero in one combat turn there isn't much real risk. And since your HP are intended to last you the whole adventure that means the early fights in an adventure are unlikely to be significant once you are beyond the first couple of levels. In contrast, the combination of exploding dice for damage in Savage Worlds and the Wound system make every hit potentially dangerous and so more meaningful. Being wounded and getting a penalty is also a big thing in Savage Worlds since small modifiers are still impactful.

Spell slots in D&D are high impact and can significantly affect encounters, and are mostly resourced on a daily model. This means when a caster comes to a fight fully fresh with all their slots they can have a huge impact. To manage that and make the later encounters more challenging the GM is encouraged to have lead-up encounters which will use up some of the characters' resources before they reach the 'climactic battle' that the GM wants them to experience as a tense, and so fun, encounter. Savage Worlds powers run (by default) on Power Points which regenerate on a per-hour basis when you are not engaged in strenous activity. Given that PP totals are in the 10 - 35 range overall and more likely to be around 15-20 for a primary caster over much of their adventuring career, and given that spell costs range from 1pt to maybe 5pts for a single target attach and 2 or 3 up to 6 (or higher) for an area effect spell, a caster's reserves are smaller but more alike to 'short rest' abilities than 'long rest' abilities in D&D terms. And as your levels of PP increase your ability to send them rapidly tends to as well, so it is possible to run low or out of PP in a tough fight no matter how high rank your character is in my experience.

These two factors work in opposition. In D&D, early fights present little to no risk since you have all your resources and are unlikely to run out. But those early fights are essential to whittle away resources and so make the last combats of an adventure challenging to the PCs without being overwhelming for the GM to run. In contrast, every fight is significant in Savage Worlds and it is potentially easier to recover your resources between fights but you have less of those resources in both damage that can be taken and spells that can be cast.

The practical impact of this is that Savage Worlds is built on the assumption of a smaller number of combats per adventure than D&D, but those combat encounters can all be significant with no 'speed bump' encounters needed. This has a profound effect on the way the game runs! In my group we tend to have adventures that are more like town or small dungeon combined with social and exploration challenges. When we run D&D games with a small number of combats we find that the GM has to throw outrageous challenges at us to challenge the party since we have not been worn-down by 8-10 level appropriate encounters or some other series of incidental challenges. If your group likes to run games with a smaller number of more challenging fights then Savage Worlds is great at supporting that style of play.

There is a corollary to this aspect of Savage Worlds - if you are running the full combat system then there are no 'filler fights' and a peasant with a pitchfork can kill your Legendary knight in plate mail with an unusually luck / unlucky (depending on your perspective) set of rolls. The designers are aware of this, however, and the 'Dangerous Quick Encounter' sub-system allows you to quickly resolve speed-bump combats where the outcome is basically assured and the question is more 'at what cost will success will be achieved'? Keep this tool in mind any can play through more traditional 'D&D numbers' of encounters without eating up lots of time and just looking out for those outlier rolls that have a big impact on the characters.

Savage Worlds has good sub systems for non-combat encouters. D&D has some of these too but I like Savage World's versions better personally. The Dramatic Task system is good for gaming out non-combat challenges in a mechanically satisfying way. You can run lots of different cool scenes this way, for example I used a dramatic task for how a party infiltrated a dockyard and stole a space ship in one campaign. Later on in that campaign I used the same mechanism to game out the rescue of a stranded group of asteroid miners. My players loved it, especially the player whose character concept was that he was a rescue-expert. And I didn't need to make up any special rules to support his character's non-combat focus; it was all there already in the rules. The rules for chases are great; I find very few systems handle this well but Savage Worlds does a great job in my opinion. There are also simple rules for information gathering, rules for influence that are not 'social combat' or 'mind control through skills', and rules for mass battles. The companion series of books add in more options to tailor the core system to specific genres and they all have rules of genre appropriate home bases, too.

Another key differentiation in feel between 5e and Savage Worlds is the flattening of the power spread. To me, it feels like Savage Worlds PCs cover the power level of about 3rd to 12th. They start off more capable and resilient that 1st level characters but don't tend to reach the heights that you can in the later stages of D&D. And many people seem to think this level range is a bit of a sweet spot for D&D so that is a good thing in my book. Note that you can dial the power and resilience both up or down quite easily with setting rules.

I could go on and on - Savage Worlds is my favourite system by a long way these days. If you have specific questions please feel free to ask!
 
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aramis erak

Legend
From my point of view...
D&D tends to be miss heavy, with cumulation of damage having no effect until it drops you.
Savage Worlds, you hit more often, but it's often not doing actual damage; with only 3 HP for heroes and big bads, and 1 for everyone else, it's rocket tag; first one to penetrate the defenses wins. Players can mow lots of mooks with impunity; competent big bads can kill PCs without warning, thanks to the "exploding" dice.

Both have a level based progression of characters, but there are no Classes in Savage Worlds. And SW characters get to pick what each improvement, whereas D&D advancement is strongly tied to class.

Savage Worlds skill list is a touch broader, and it has advantages and disadvantages, as well, making for a wider range of initial concept matching than D&D.

One thing that's different from current trends in D&D: species affects attributes strongly.

The Card based initiative is fast, simple, and because of not revealing until your initiative, can result in surprises in play.

The card based encounter rules are straightforward...
 

AK81

Explorer
This is exactly the kind of information that I'm looking for. Thanks a lot for such a thorough answer.

I am sure I will have a lot of questions for you if you don't mind answering.

The flatter power curve is definitely a big plus in my book. I like competent heroes, but I don't want to deal with powers that can just nullify entire challenges at almost no cost.

Another thing that bothers me a bit in 5e is how long the combats feel sometimes. How would you say combat length in a Savage Worlds encounter is compared to 5e.

How does mosters feel to run compared to 5e?
 

Retreater

Legend
How does mosters feel to run compared to 5e?
I think there's a big span. You have Extras - which are really simple (think Minions) and then you can have Wildcards which are as complex as Player Characters with potential spells, feats, and special equipment.
Another added complication is the death spiral, tracking wounds and remembering to apply penalties to die rolls and speed. And then you have a damage reduction style defense that you have to add Toughness and Armor, but deduct the armor piercing of the weapon, then divide the amount by four to see how many Wounds are actually applied. Then you can make Soak rolls to negate Wounds.
For my group, combats proved longer and more complicated than 5e.
Savage Worlds isn't a bad system, but it's certainly not (IMO) "fast" or "furious." As a system, it's at least as rules complex as 5E - perhaps moreso because of the optional setting dials and knobs.
 

dbm

Savage!
Supporter
The system is definitely comparable in overall ‘crunch’ to 5e, however I personally feel that it makes better use of that crunch. It’s a quite permissive system and you can bring in elements of narrative permission without moving too far from being a ‘traditional’ role-playing game.

For example, during dramatic tasks there is great latitude in how you use your skills. As an example, we are playing a campaign inspired by Descent in to Avernus ( inspired by in the sense that the GM has taken the premise of devils loose in the Realms and seemingly tossed 90% of everything else). We have been on a sub-quest in support of freeing dwarves slaves from Gracklstugh and through a deal with some rogue houses we had brought chaos to the city, allowing them to take over. In payment they had dumped about 500 dwarven slaves at the docks, where we had put some plans in place to ship them out in boats. But we had to get them on the ships before the authorities could gather themselves and come after us. The GM ran this as a Dramatic task. The dwarven priest used his magic to command the captains we had already paid to get to loading, even though they were expecting slaves in irons, not freed slaves. The fighter surveyed the group and identified stragglers, helping those most in need of it. The elven wizard jumped up on a high point and spoke to the crowd, telling them their freedom was at hand and to board as quickly and smoothly as they could. And promptly rolled a 23 on his performance check, earning over half the successes the group needed with that one act. A few more rounds of coordination were needed but our character had used their skills to save the group and it was a great scene in the adventure. The best bit is that the dwarven cleric and elven mage have a real grudge relationship but it was the elf who saved the day. The dwarf may never hear the end of it! :D

None of those things were using written ‘abilities’ of the skills and powers our character had, rather we described something plausible our characters were attempting and then the GM said what skill we should roll. It’s a really flexible system and can generate great moments of drama, tension and heroic successes (or failures). And the character abilities all interact with that system in a consistent way. You still use the cards for initiative, and having an edge that lets you draw more initiative cards to pick from works as it should and is super useful in dramatic tasks since drawing a club for your initiative means a complication which can put the whole task at risk.

We find combat comparable to 5e in duration on average, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. But keep in mind that every fight we have is meaningful, none of it is filler. And the monsters are more intricate than 5e monsters but that is a positive from our perspective because 5e monsters were stripped way, way, back from what they could do in earlier editions and we find most of them a bit dull to run as the GM to be honest. Most monsters should be extras, almost by definition, and they are just up, shaken or incapacitated so managing mobs of them is really easy. Much easier than tracking 15HP for five or six otherwise identical monsters. For Wildcard enemies having tokens makes it much easier to track their status. We have the original box set with wound tokens and they make a big difference. The token set also has ones for shaken, distracted, vulnerable and so on. Savage Worlds is a system where having the play aids makes a big difference if you are playing on the table top. If you are using a VTT then many of them have really solid rules implementations which will help track those things for you, too.

We certainly enjoy combat in Savage Worlds much more than 5e combat, and the balance between martial and magic wielding characters is much better in our experience.
 

I don’t find the Death Spiral mentioned that complicated, either in person or via vtt. In a vtt it’s applied automatically and in person we use token to keep track.

One of the better components of the combat system is that non-combat characters can still be useful via Tests rather than outright attacks. It’s possible to play a character with no fighting or shooting and still be able to effect the outcomes of a fight in a positive way for your side.
 

Retreater

Legend
Yeah, I guess I forget that other DMs don't run tests in 5e (whether you call them tests, skill challenges, victory points, quick encounters, etc). I've essentially been using them in every system since 4e. (If you're running a system that doesn't have an abstract, skill-based subsystem for resolving challenges, you need to get one from somewhere.)
For me, Savage Worlds puts all the crunch into stuff I don't care about: a billion different weapon rules, tracking wound penalties, advantages/ disadvantage systems (a la GURPS), Armor Piercing ratings, burst fire machine gun penalties, Toughness damage reductions, addition/subtraction/multiplication/division all to figure out how much damage you did, a surprisingly slower Initiative system than D&D, tactical combat and use of grids that don't really matter.
When the rules are in that direction, it makes a medium complexity game feel convoluted and nit picky.
 

dbm

Savage!
Supporter
a surprisingly slower Initiative system than D&D, tactical combat and use of grids that don't really matter.
We find the initiative system a positive. It makes combat more unpredictable which we like. And having the cards visible makes it pretty easy to see who is going next which my group always seems to struggle with in D&D initiative unless we have some clear visual record.

Savage Worlds doesn’t use a grid. Ganging up counts but it’s basically a comparison of superior numbers in an individual fight. Movement is stated table inches or multiple by 2 yards order inch if you are using threats of the mind.
 
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