So You're Just Not "Feeling It" for 5e - What ARE you excited about?

[Olaf the Stout]

I'm excited about 5E, but I'm also excited that Tact-Tiles are coming back and that Feng Shui secon edition will have a Kickstarter in the next couple of months.

 

[innerdude]

I got interested in Savage Worlds primarily out of a desire to find a good system with which to run sci-fi campaigns. I really hadn't looked too closely at Savage Worlds prior to that. I knew it had a vocal fanbase but I told myself "not buying another system" and "multi-genre never really seems to pan out in the long term".

Boy, was I wrong!

Reasons for liking Savage Worlds:

1. It lives up to its tagline of "Fast, Furious, Fun". I ran a trial session for a group of players whose only prior RPG experience was Pathfinder and they were relative newbies to PF as well. They picked up the mechanics within minutes. The gameplay is very fluid. Mechanics are simple to understand. You don't waste a lot of time looking up rules in the middle of dramatic scenes. Exploding dice are always exciting and once players realize that tactics matter and exploding dice can swing the tide of battle, the players' excitement and enthusiasm increases as well. To use a poor sports analogy, imagine the intensity difference watching a hockey game in overtime vs. a baseball game in extra innings. Both are fun. Both have moments of excitement but with the hockey game the intensity is almost constant. Savage Worlds can be like that.

2. It embraces Player imagination. I've heard Savage Worlds described as a "Yes, try it" rather than a "No, not without X" system. Want to aim for the zombie's head? Go for it. Want to try and pull a stunt to roll past the enemy and come up behind him? Go for it. Want to intimidate you foe to throw down his arms? Go for it. While you can do those things in other games, they're typically handled as very difficult, requiring a subsystem, or they're optional or bolted-on rules to address something the rules never intended. In Savage Worlds, it's all slight tweaks of the target number and easy to GM on the fly.

3. Bennies. My players love this and we've incorporated it into our Pathfinder session. Bennies are a concept for granting the players some control over the story. Other games have mechanics like Hero Points and such but they're optional or add-ons. Bennies are ingrained in the SW game and its cool to see the PCs weighing when to spend and when to hold onto a bennie. Also, the GM gets bennies too!

4. Heroes from the start; Legends at the pinnacle. Savage World starting characters tend to be able to support fully-realized concepts even at the "Novice" tier. That is, PCs are more capable than your traditional low-level PC where you have to pay your "level dues" to start to realize the character concept you envisioned. Conversely, as they gain experience, even when they reach the "Legendary" tier, while they're butt-kicking bad-a$$es, they're not invincible. Unless you're playing a Supers game, you're not doing the zero-to-demi-god progression. The progression is more like you would see in a novel, a movie, or TV show. You're skilled, you're tough, and you're powerful but if you don't use tactics and think nothing can touch you a single gunshot or a goblin with a dagger can still be a real threat. That "sweet-spot" style of play most people think about when talking fantasy RPGs? That lasts through the entire campaign. You don't "Level out" of earlier threats and don't need to "Level into" more powerful ones.

5. Easy to mod In my experience, the downfall of most multi-genre games is that it takes a lot of GM work to tailor it to a homemade setting or adapt a licensed property that you want to set you game in. It's very easy to do this in Savage Worlds and a quick Internet search will show you an incredibly impressive list of adaptations of settings to Savage Worlds. As a test run, I created characters from a bevy of different video games of different genres just to see how hard it would be. It was very easy and I was floored at how closely one could represent the spirit of the character and have mechanics that felt true to the game abilities. (Dragon Age characters, Halo aliens, Cole McGrath from infamous, and Nathan Drake) I've never found a single RPG that could cover that range without making some serious trade-offs in the adaptation or required the characters to be ridiculously high-powered.

For the first time in 30 years of playing RPGs, developing a home-grown Sci-Fi setting doesn't involve a ton of work. The mechanics are easy to adapt, especially with the recently-released Sci-Fi companion and I've got mechanics that support the setting and adventure elements I'm developing.

6. Much easier to embrace the strange character concept. A lot of Savage Worlds' customization comes in the form of "Trappings". Mechanically, an arcane attack may differ little from a weapon or other spell -- until you apply trappings. Now, while 2 characters may both have the Bolt spell, trappings apply additional mechanical nuances that differentiate a Fire Bolt from a Shock Bolt or a Necromantic Bolt. This can be applied at the character level as well. Want to run a game of mixed standard fantasy races but some players want to be a "monster" race? That's a whole lot easier to pull off in Savage Worlds than in a D&D-style game where you can't play the monster because now your power level is out of whack with the power level of the non-monster characters.

There's a ton more but those are my top-of-mind differences. Savage Worlds has really changed the way that I look at RPGs, in general, and in setting design and character concepts in particular. It's becoming my go-to game of choice.

Also, if I were introducing new players to RPGs, Savage Worlds is now the only RPG I would consider for that entry-point. When you can go from "here's a set of dice" to "While Rorik is fighting the beast, I'm going to try and aim for its eyes" in 20-30 minutes, it's tough to wade through a D&D-style intro to RPGs.

Can we just permanently sticky this post, forever, for why Savage Worlds is so awesome?

Oh, and somebody XP @Azgulor for me.

It's interesting to me how much love HERO has been getting lately around these parts. I've never tried it myself. A friend of mine at work GM'd it for years, but he told me recently he's completely sworn it off. From what he said, it's similar to GURPS, which I have played because another good friend was running it, but it totally left me cold. To paraphrase Luke Skywalker, if there's a bright center to the RPG universe, GURPS is on the planet it's farthest from. GURPS is pretty much everything I would never choose to include in my preferred RPG playstyle shoehorned into a single system.

So what differentiates HERO from GURPS?

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Middle Earth, yes, specifically set in the period between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. The initial rules set and expansions covered the Wilderlands, the area around Mirkwood, although the next expansion is supposed to be Rivendell and it's environs.

Thanks for the info, Bluenose. Does the game assume that the PCs are the unmentioned 'background heroes' in canon, or is it a "Here's how Middle Earth (and possibly the War of the Ring) might have looked like with different protagonists..." situation?

I don't have a particular preference either way, just curious.

 

[Bluenose]

Thanks for the info, Bluenose. Does the game assume that the PCs are the unmentioned 'background heroes' in canon, or is it a "Here's how Middle Earth (and possibly the War of the Ring) might have looked like with different protagonists..." situation?

I don't have a particular preference either way, just curious.

Background heroes. I've tried to avoid spoilers from the supplements since I'm playing in a PbP, but the current area covered is away from the area where the WotR was detailed. You may be the people who ensure Laketown/Dale/the Beornings have a good chance to prosper and survive the War, but as far as I've seen so far you aren't going to be one of the Nine Walkers or heavily involved with the fighting in Rohan and Gondor. That may of course change as more areas get coverage, I imagine Rohirrim or Gondorian characters could be leaders at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, but then again they may not. So far it's hard to say.

 

[Tinker Gnome]

The homebrew system I have been tinkering around with when I am bored.

 

[Obryn]

I'm excited as all get-out about continuing my 4e Zeitgeist game. We just started on Digging for Lies, and my players are really involved.

I'm sure we'll give Next a shot, but I'm also excited about trying out 13th Age or Fate Core with them. We enjoyed Savage Wolrds well enough, so may look at that a bit more, but I dunno.

I'd love to run more Dungeon World, too. But for right now, Zeitgeist 4e has my full attention.

And HOLY COW. I cannot wait for Feng Shui 2 to get ... well, kickstarted or released, whichever is going to happen here. (I suspect the former!) We playtested it and had a blast, and I can't wait for an even cleaner action hero system for either one-shots or short campaigns.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

It's interesting to me how much love HERO has been getting lately around these parts. I've never tried it myself. A friend of mine at work GM'd it for years, but he told me recently he's completely sworn it off. From what he said, it's similar to GURPS, which I have played because another good friend was running it, but it totally left me cold. To paraphrase Luke Skywalker, if there's a bright center to the RPG universe, GURPS is on the planet it's farthest from. GURPS is pretty much everything I would never choose to include in my preferred RPG playstyle shoehorned into a single system.

So what differentiates HERO from GURPS?

While everyone's mileage will vary, I have aged both HERO and GURPS a fair bit, and have to both agree with your assessment of GURPS, but add that, for me, HERO was even more so. If you hate GURPS, You are unlikely to find much love for HERO, I think.

 

[pickin_grinnin]

While everyone's mileage will vary, I have aged both HERO and GURPS a fair bit, and have to both agree with your assessment of GURPS, but add that, for me, HERO was even more so. If you hate GURPS, You are unlikely to find much love for HERO, I think.

I always wanted to like GURPS, but it just didn't do it for me. It's not a bad system - it's just not a style I enjoy.

I like HERO much more, but Savage Worlds wins out, for me.

 

[Morlock]

I'm interested. What's this HERO thing all about?



Erm, no. This system is more traditional. I tried reading into DW, and couldn't even grasp it since they kept treating the word "fiction" as though it meant "story" or "narrative."

It's not half as interesting as the system I found, which does everything perfectly.

 

[Atmo]

OVA - Open Versatile Anime Revised is coming probably this year and I am crazy to drop everything I've learnt from Fate to play/gm OVA.