Savage Worlds System Newb Review

Savage Worlds is an old system, perhaps not as old as most but it’s been around for 7 years now and gone through a modest number of editions and no groundbreaking changes.  The core rules appear to have remained mostly intact throughout its current lifespan.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks going over the rules and running ‘test drive’ encounters where I run both sides of the combat and add in additional rules as I uncover them.   I plan on doing something with the system in the next month or so, something that starts off as Pulp Noir and descends into Supernatural Horror set in the roaring 20′s where there was no gun control, crime and corruption were rampant and the mafia was just hitting it’s stride along with union bosses.

The version I’m working off of is the Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition, Third Printing available for $9.95 from Amazon or some ridiculously low price like that.  I picked up a deck of cards and some Cthulhu tokens by Fantasy Flight Games for their Arkham Horror game to use as Bennies at the same time so I could get free shipping.  And as I have Arkham Horror I can use them for their intended things like Doom tracking for that game.   The book is the size of a large format paperback, not sure what the technical term is but about halfway between paperback and manuscript and is in full color and quite well done. A terrific value for the price and I’d recommend picking up a couple if you actually plan on running Savage Worlds.

I would like to reiterate, I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it, that I do NOT like cutesy page backgrounds in game manuals.  Ripped edges, stains, textured vellum, whatever the design, I just want plain black text on plain white paper.  If you absolutely must have nifty graphics then keep it on the periphery and not under the text.

After going through the rules and reading them in a casual kind of way, at this point I’d like to say that it could use some editing and proofing by people unfamiliar with the system.  I spotted a typo or two without going into copy edit mode which is more than acceptable for a blogger but in a printed product it comes off as a little sloppy.  But then any update is bound to include its own typos even when all the existing ones are fixed and I’m fully aware of that, I mention them here only in passing and wouldn’t downgrade them for it.

As far as the understandability of the rules as currently written, I’ve had to resort to searching the forums to get clarifications and all modesty aside, I have a fairly decent general knowledge skill on gaming systems.  Certain things simply aren’t clear in the wording of the edition I have or appear to be something that’s so basic to the system that the writer(s) didn’t even think it might not be known.

With that said I must say their forum and moderators are insanely good.  Every point of minutiae that I didn’t pick up from the core book I was able to find easily and quickly through their forum search.   Which leads me back to my comment about the book not being clear.  Every question I had, had already been asked time and time again on the forums.   Taking all those frequently asked questions and adding in the extremely clear and concise explanations by the moderator Clint would resolve every complaint I have about the rules as written.

I don’t want to give a bad impression of the system or the printing I have, for the most part it’s clear enough, there are just a few places where a simple example or an expanded example or another sentence or two would alleviate the few confusions or omissions.

The system itself purports to be Fast, Furious and Fun which is their slogan.  As a newcomer to the system I can see where this could be quite true.   Combats are both completely open and fairly simplistic.   The rules are few, elegant for the most part and at the same time keep a skies the limit option open.

Combat comes down to the Player deciding what their character is going to do and then breaking that down into separate actions with the caveat that each additional action over the first one adds a penalty to ALL the actions taken and that a character can only perform one action per ‘type’ per round with the exception that they can make two attacks if they have two weapons which includes bare knuckles.

For example: Biff Strange could on his turn say “I’m going to throw this chair at the thug fighting Nancy to give her a better chance to hit him as he ducks it, punch this guy in the throat,  reload my .45, double tap the third thug and scream insults at that guy to try and taunt him to come after me instead of ganging up on Nancy with the first guy while I run around the room like a Loon.”

This breaks down in game mechanics as an Agility Trick, Reload, Fighting, Shooting, Taunt, and a Run action.  That’s six actions though and that adds up to a -12 on EACH of them to succeed and an additional -2 on the off hand assuming the character doesn’t have some edges that allow them to attack with both hands without penalties.  With the exception of the Run, that action doesn’t require a roll, barring some unusual circumstance.

It’s open ended in that it encourages players to have their characters do things outside the box through the inclusion of Tricks and Will Tests, Ganging Up on someone, making a Wild Attack or taking Aim while giving them realistic gamist limits to prevent them from getting goofy like the above sequence of events would be.  Sure a player could try that but they’re going to fail 95% of the time to perform any of them much less all of them.

This also though limits the player, especially those coming from say 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons with all the specific powers those characters have.  Those powers in 4th are a bit of a straight jacket in their own right of course.   In Savage Worlds a player in combat, which is the biggest part of any mechanics because honestly mechanics to define roleplaying should be simple and behind the scenes for the most part, anyway in combat in a Savage World, a character can essentially Shoot someone, Fight (melee) them or Blast (spells/psychic/supernatural etc) them.   The system doesn’t have a lot of conditions, in fact it has only a couple, a character can be Normal, Shaken, Incapacitated.

Normal is obviously that, they can act normally.  Shaken means they can only walk slowly no other real actions allowed.  Incapacitated means just that, they’re unconscious.   There is no Dazed, Immobilized, Stunned, Restrained, Bloodied, Blind, Deaf, Ongoing Damage, etc and so on.

Wounded I suppose might be another condition but it only has one effect, the more wounds you have (up to a max of 3) the more penalties you take on all your rolls and movement.   Again a simple, elegant system.

Combat and especially the wounding/incapacitation rules overall, while a bit slippery to get your head around at the first read through is pretty Fast.  The Furious and the Fun part are too GM/Player dependent to say it’s always going to be that way but Fast definitely fits the bill.

Much like old school 1st and 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons was Fast.

oDnD: “I roll to hit with my sword.  I hit?  I roll damage.”

SW: “I roll to shoot with my gun. I hit?  I roll damage.”

That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all, nor is it necessarily a good thing at all, it just is what it is.

After playing some trial combats I can see though where the combats can lend themselves to more narrative/story style easier than something like 4th Edition.  But the proof of that will indeed be in the pudding and obviously is fairly group dependent.  But I believe that it might lead those that tend to go, “I use Righteous Brand on him.” to be a little more descriptive in their actions because by their very nature the actions in SW are very generic.

The magic system which can be used for everything from fireball casting wizards to mind blasting psychics to ego blasting super heroes is much like everything else with the system, simple and broad in scope.   It uses Power Points that the player spends to use each power with subsequent effects.  The basic core rules in the Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition are fairly… well basic.  They include things like the Armour and Blast and Telekinesis and is a pretty similar list to other universal systems.

Savage Worlds has an Extra’s and Wild Cards system, much like 4th Edition has Minions and Elites to make it as close an approximation.  Extra’s/Minions go down once they take damage regardless of the amount.  Whether you call them Extra’s, Minions, Mooks or Redshirts, they’re there for cinematic effect to make the players feel powerful as they mow down the thugs to get to the boss.

But where there’s a difference is that in Savage Worlds, dice can ‘ace’ or ‘explode’.  If you roll the highest number on a die, you get to keep that number and roll again and add it to the first.  You can in theory continue to do this for infinity but odds are you won’t do it more than a once or twice most times, odds being what they are.   This means that unlike 4th Edition, in Savage Worlds its quite possible for an Extra to take down a healthy Wild card (Minion kill a PC) in one attack.    Which is inherently impossible in 4th edition.  Now it has a low percentage chance to happen.  But the risk is there and something to be considered.

As an offset to making bad dice rolls or one shotted by an Extra players and GM’s both have Bennies that they can use to reroll or buy a roll to avoid that one shot.  Similar to Luck points,  Fate chips, Destiny perks and the like they allow the player and GM to dial the difficulty of an encounter one way or another.  If the GM has misjudged the relative toughness of an encounter he can spend Bennies to save his bad guys or give them a Mulligan on that big attack roll.  If he’s kicking the group’s ass then he can hand out some extra Bennies for good roleplay, playing in character, making a joke or whatever and ease the players troubles.

Savage Worlds has a ton of campaign settings although I’ve not looked at them all that much.  I’d have to be really interested before I bought one.  But you can get all kinds of things that a lot of people really seem to like a lot.   Zombies, Apocalyptic, Supers, Victorian Age, World Wars, Westerns,  Steam Punk, InterDimensional, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Modern Day, all kinds of source books are out there and because they all use the same core rules you can mix and match them as you want for the most part.

Savage worlds uses a unique, at least to my knowledge, system for dice.  Typically a game system seems to use one basic die for skill checks or combat tasks  with the variable dice pool being used to denote different degrees of damage probability.   A Savage Worlds character might have a d4 in Strength and a d10 for Smarts and a d8 for Fighting.  And those are the dice you roll to see if you succeed or fail at something.

In a way I don’t like this system as it’s a slow way to roll and determine things.  Player/GM has to check what die they need to roll, pick it out of the pile, roll it and read it, determine if they succeed or not and then roll any axillary dice as needed.   One of the simple things that really helped out with 4th Edition for us in terms of combat speed was the player only needs one die, a d20.  They do average damage on regular hits and max damage on critical hits.  No digging out and rolling 3d8 or 2d12+1d6+2d8  for damage.   It seems like a little thing but it really adds up over the length of a combat.   Especially for the GM who might be rolling 5, 10, 20 attacks and for each successful attack another 2 to 4 dice rolls to roll, count up and add bonuses to on their turn depending on how many bad guys there are.

But everyone who plays it and proselytizes says it’s Fast Furious Fun so we’ll see. Once I present it to a group of players and have them doing things with it I’ll report back.  Actually you’ll be able to listen to it first hand as I’ll most likely be podcasting it just like the 4th Edition sessions.

Like other universal systems Savage Worlds can handle any genre but unlike most it does it with simplicity and sleekness of rules rather than needing a Hero Builder or coming up with an archaic formula in a spreadsheet cell to compute things.  It’s simple enough and cheap enough and in my opinion elegant enough that any GM should at least give it a look.  If you don’t want to spend the $10 on the printed copy you can pick up the Test Drive rules, a subset that allows for decent experience of the system for free.  Hard to argue with that kind of pricing.

I will offer though that you really do need to read the system before you scoff and toss it aside.  I know at first glance, and second for that matter, I didn’t give it a real chance to catch my attention, the wacky dice set up, the simplicity of it, the overall broad scope didn’t catch my interest.  Indeed it is only with my 4E campaign going on hiatus for the summer that I picked it up again to give it a serious read through as I was looking for a new system that I’ve not used before.

Time will tell if it’s right for me and my group and I’ll post an update once we get to the dice rolling.

Until next time, as they’re so fond of saying, Stay Savage….

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