Turanil said:
Thread title says it all: anything you can say about the Savage Worlds game...
I hear it's rule lite: so is it too lite? Is it really fast to play? What about characters: is there character classes, levels, special abilities? How does magic work? How many rulebooks and supplements published? How does it compare to d20? What about Savage World with fantasy, with modern, and with sci-fi? ETC.
Thanks.
It is very rules light.
It is very fast to play.
There are no character classes, character creation is point based.
Stats start at d4 and you have 5 point to raise them. Each point increase the die type by 1. d4->d6, d6->d8, etc.
You have 15 points for skills, each die type costs 1 point up to the die type of the controlling attribute. EX. say your Agility is d8, any agility based skills cost 1pt/die type up to d8, taking that skill to d10 will cost you 2 points.
Then there are Edges and Hindrances, you start with 1 free Edge if your human [IIRC]. You can take Hindrances for points, up to 1 Major and 2 Minor. With the points you can buy extra Edges or up a stat/skill.
Edges are like Feats in that some of them allow you to bend the rules or ignore penalties, others are basically powers or allow access to powers [magic, psi, super].
Magic requires an Edge to get access to. You take the Arcane Background (Magic), this gives you 10 power points [to power your spells] and you can pick 3 powers [spells]. You get extra powers buy picking an Edge when you "level up". Casting is a skill roll [Spellcasting {Smarts}]. If your casting a Bolt spell [like a fre ball] you roll the skill the same as you would to attack. The roll is not to cast the spell but to see how well it worked or if it hit the target.
As to Rule books, there is only the one. There a number of supplements, mostly settings or multi-adventure books. Some included new Edges and Hindrances for their setting.
It is very fast, both in character gen and in play, but it is very random. You roll your skill + a "wild" die [d6] both of which explode if they max out, roll a 6 on a d6 re-roll and add until you stop rolling 6s. The dice do not add to each other, you simply take the one with the highest total. Lets say you are rolling a d8 and your wild die a d6. the d8 rolls a 7, but the d6 rolls a 6 and the you re-roll and get a 3 for a total of 9. Your total for the roll is 9.
Some people seem to love the system, but it never worked out for my group. You see when you roll, your rolling against a target number. For every 4 point over that you get what's called a "raise" it's sort of like a success level. Where my group ran into trouble was in combat. Especially ranged combat. The target number is 4 on ranged attacks, modified by range [short +0, Medium -2, Long -4 to roll]. Most combats took part at short range, so no modifier for rnage. It was not unusual for my players to roll in the teens and twenties on their rolls. Well that meant with a roll of say 12 they hit with 2 raises, wich added +2 damage per raise [+4 total]. Then they would roll damage [2d6+1 AP1 {ignores 1 pt of armor} for a Colt Peacemaker]. On damage it was not uncommon for them to roll in the twenties because of the exploding dice. Lets say they rolled a 18 on their damage, +4 for the raises on the to hit roll, so 22 damage total. A Toughness [kinda like DR, you have to roll above toughness to do damage] of 7 or 8 is quite high. So 22 - 8 = 14, they beat the targets Toughness by 14. Well divide that by 4 and you get 3 raises worth of damage, that's enough to take a character from healthy to almost dead. There are ways to reduce that, but like I said my group had a way of rolling high. it was not uncommon for them to get 4 or 5 raises on damage.
Which means that they killed damn near anything I threw at them. This lead to a false sense of power and invincibility. The first time an enemy did as well on a roll as they did they were shocked and cried foul.
EDIT: I was using the first printing, the second printing added in a lot erranta and changed some of the rules, so it my have fixed the problem I experienced in play.
