COMING SOON! -- The Awfully Cheerful Engine on Kickstarter! An action comedy RPG inspired by cheerful tabletop games of the 80s! With a foreword by Sandy 'Ghostbusters' Petersen, and VTT support!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 8176102" data-attributes="member: 85870">The thing about Savage Worlds is that it captures a very specific feel.I'll call out a few of the individual bits/mechanics in a minute, but really, the overall vibe at the table is the biggest thing for me.It very much captures a feeling of heightened adventure, with the ability to do fast, easy adjudication of "off-the-cuff" action. It supports a very fun, freewheeling style of play. On a general play level, it was very freeing to me to both play and GM the game in a way that just "made sense" to me. There's enough rules there to give both the GM and players an accurate view of the general boundaries of what's possible, while not being so rules heavy that it locked down every possible action behind a specific set of gated mechanics (i.e., "You must have feats A, B, and C to even consider attempting action X").I've often said that it captured the general feel of some of the best experiences I had playing BECMI. It's purposefully lighter and looser than D&D.The thing you have to do as a GM is train the players to stop thinking in D&D terms. It's one of the problems I'm having right now with one of my players. He's played D&D 3.5 for so long, that everything he does is through the lens of those mechanics. You have to be willing to come to terms with what Savage Worlds is doing, how its inner workings are built differently than D&D.The thing about the system is that it can be polarizing. For example, most of the things [USER=42040]@Retreater[/USER] listed above as negatives, I'd count as positives.He finds the initiative system of using playing cards to be slow and unwieldy. I find it to be intuitive, fun, and giving a breath of fresh air to combat. He thinks the fiddly bits of tokens, cards, etc. are a drag on gameplay. Our group finds them to be a fun aspect that actually adds to the sense of shared game experience. Players actively talk about, laugh, banter, using bennies effectively.90% of the time, I think the toughess + wounds, plus "death spiral" mechanic are actually more fun, and make combat have greater stakes and significance. There's a small percentage of the time where toughness modifiers go too high, and then the combat can turn into a slog. There are ways to mitigate this, but it has been a "thing" on a few occasions.I do agree that the "Fast and Furious" aspect of the tagline can be somewhat overblown. There are, as [USER=42040]@Retreater[/USER] noted, lots of potential modifiers to specific combat rolls. Calculating damage against base toughness + armor, then calculating increments of 4 damage over that, can seem to give some people pause. We've been playing for 8 years now, and there are still moments when one of my longtime players will pause and say, "How many wounds is that exactly?" And we'll have to calculate it out --- "So 19 damage, means they took one wound at 11 damage, two wounds at 15 damage, and a third wound at 19 damage."It can be very swingy. But again, for me, that's a feature, not a bug. Most of the time, the swinginess is in favor of the players. They can often end conflicts way sooner than you might otherwise expect.The fun, freewheeling style does require a strong commitment from the GM to be willing to improvise. Savage Worlds is very good at doing very light, to almost no-prep games. But as a result, you have to be prepared to improvise when your players do fun/unexpected things. But the core of the system is strong enough to give a solid foundation for helping you mentally be in the right headspace.</blockquote>

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