As my 4th edition DnD campaign is drawing to a season finale for the summer I’ve been looking around at other systems. One that I’ve had a vague interest in trying is Savage Worlds. This system, if by some odd chance you’re not familiar with it, is a sandbox system, much like Champions/Hero System, GURPS and Mutants and Masterminds (to some extent) to name a few.
These systems are set up to handle a lot of genre although superheroes is the prevalent one along with most eras with various degrees of success and typically include an assload of additional settings books that add specifics that are related to an genre/era to round them out that in general cover a pretty wide gamut. Cyberpunk, Fantasy, Wild West, Swashbucklers and Post Apocalyptic etc. are typically published over the years after the initial release of the base system.
One thing and off topic, after dealing with the simplicity that is DnD 4th Edition from a Player and GM point of view (especially since the only dice we use is a d20), other systems feel anitquated. I forsee new gaming systems taking some of the 4th features and expanding them into other genres including a sandbox mode.
Anyway, so I’ve been looking at Savage Worlds, it’s one of the few I’ve not looked at very heavily or used which has a draw in and of itself for that reason. It’s not as complicated as the other sandboxes, at first glance, which is a plus as I’m too old for complicated for the sake of being simulationist. As part of my ‘looking’ I looked around for gameplay podcasts using Savage Worlds and found one over at rpgmp3.com on their rss feed called Savage Worlds – Rippers. The Rippers part references the setting the group is using which is Victorian England from the sound of it circa late 1800′s with a bit of supernatural and of course featuring the most infamous Jack. Other than Burton of course.
As they’re going through their character design (see I do get to the point eventually) it strikes me how much a sandbox system can force players to make characters where-as a class based system allows players to make characters. And by make a character I mean give it a personality rather than a list of powers and numbers.
So I toss my mind back over the decades of GM’ing I’ve done and it’s easy to see this repeated. Game systems that hand a player a character ‘off the shelf’ as in “here, you’re a fighter, you get to do this” make it…. easy(?) for the player to simply accept that and for the… lazy? detached? gamist? player, that’s enough. Off the shelf characters focus on the What, and the Who is at the players discretion without any natural pressure to define that. And in may cases the What is all that’s of any concern.
Let me interject here that I’m not saying one or the other is bad or better or right or wrong, I’m merely pointing out observed human behavior and some thoughts on underlying causality.
Game systems where the player has to literally build their character from a essentially unlimited collection of parts seems to force them to have a character rather than a collection of numbers. The Who is forced to be considered even as the What is created. “Well Miss Angela is a doctor so she should have this medicine knowledge thing and be smart. And she studied fencing in college so I guess she should have some skill in fighting.”
As opposed to, “I guess I’ll play the cleric.”
To make a construction analogy, when someone builds a house, they’re involved with it from the ground up, they make changes to the floorplan, add arches and decorative bits to the strcuture, put in that big bay window where they can sit and read while enjoying the sun and the view.
When they buy a house, they may put on a new coat of paint or they may not.
Both people could and in many cases eventually do end up with the same ‘house’. But it’s more likely that the person who bought the house is going to settle for things the way they are when they bought it.
To bring this analogy back to the ‘real world’, as a GM you can help with their paint choices. There are “10 minute questionnaires” out there that you can pass on to your players, regardless of game system with questions like “How has your character earned a living up to this point?” “Are there any people, groups or societies that the character is a part of or involved with now or in the past?” “Where did you grow up?”. These kinds of things can help the player get a handle on the character before they get to the numbers whether their choice is as simple as which class to play or as diverse as does their weapon have the armour piercing advantage and deal extra knockback…
So as you bring out your class based games and get your players going with new alternate lives, remember to encourage them with word, question and setting to make those characters theirs and not fighter_0001 or blaster_003. Your game play will be the better for it.
