Test Driving Savage Worlds
Posted by Joshua on Sep 4, 2008
Russell and I spent a bit of time playing around with Savage Worlds this weekend, both to entertain ourselves and to see how it would work as a replacement system for the D&D 3.5 campaign he ran last time he was in town (now that he’s seen it he has no desire to move to 4e, but 3.5 has a bunch of flaws that annoy him but he doesn’t feel like trying to fix now that it’s orphaned).
So we rolled up some characters (in a couple cases literally, using the SW:Fantasy Character Generator, the rest we just made up using the usual point-buy) and I ran him and Elyssa through most of a level of Under Xylarthen’s Tower. Overall it went fairly well. A couple of observations:
- Chargen is not as fast as OD&D, naturally, but probably faster than 3e…and was getting faster as we got more used to it. Most of the same sorts of decisions are there, but there are fewer options and modifiers.
- For a dungeon crawl, monsters should be treated as Wild Cards unless they significantly outnumber the PCs. I was running them as Extras (so one wound disposed of them and they didn’t get the Wild Die), and the party of 5 PCs was just running rough-shod over them. As an experiment afterwards we went back and Russell and I reran the encounter with the two Giant Weasels, making the Weasels Wild Cards, and while the PCs still won handily, it took more than a round and they had to expend some effort; with better rolls, or if I had used more GM bennies the weasels might even have inflicted one or two wounds.
- Even with the monsters as WCs, Novice Savage Worlds characters are more robust than OD&D 1st level; that’s probably a feature, not a bug.
There are a couple of rules I got wrong as we went, though nothing that really changed the outcome. Still, it’s worth recording some of the stuff that I looked up in the FAQ afterward so I can use this post as a reminder:
- When casting multiple Bolts, each Bolt gets 1 skill die, which counts as both the spellcasting and the to-hit die. A Wild Card also gets a wild die, but only one for the set, and it can only substitute for one of the skill dice.
- When firing into melee, a 1 on the skill die only counts as hitting an ally if the shot would miss; if you can turn the shot into a hit using the wild die, the fact you rolled a 1 doesn’t matter.
- You only suffer a free attack against you for exiting melee if you were actually in melee (you’d made a Fighting roll against an adjacent opponent or vice-versa), not just for passing through a square that is “threatened.” It really is different from Attacks of Opportunity.
- You can move both before and after attacking, as long as you don’t exceed your Pace (or are willing to take the -2 penalty for performing an action on a turn when you ran). That might trigger a free attack for withdrawing from melee, but again it’s different from Move then Attack in D&D. This didn’t come up, but it makes popping out from cover, firing, and popping back a good strategy.
Since the dungeon crawl went reasonably well, we spent some time on Tuesday converting everybody’s characters from D&D 3.5 to Savage Worlds. Mostly this was to see if we could do them justice without a lot of house rules; it’s no guarantee that Russell will actually elect to use Savage Worlds if we continue the campaign past the end of the current adventure. Still, it was pretty easy to convert them using a couple of mechanical rules of thumb we came up with, paying no attention to the costs or prerequisites. We took another pass, this time just making them up from scratch using the point-buy system, and actually was more satifactory, IMO. Making decisions about what the character should have based on what seemed essential and useful to the concept, even if it wasn’t a one-for-one “he spent ranks in skill x, so he should have this die-size” just produced better, more distinctive and coherent, characters.
They Ramble Again!
Posted by Joshua on Sep 4, 2008
In honor of Brian showing up for the first time in ages, and Dan forgetting his notebooks, the Rambling Bumblers rambled again! And they didn’t even bumble!
When last we left our intrepid adventurers, they were exploring the Ice Caverns of the Moth-People (TM). They had accidentally destroyed the crystal array that produced the shaft of blue light that powered the whole underground Moth-people city when Jacob (Doug) had killed the guardian dragon, which then crashed into the crystal array at the bottom of the shaft the city was poised above. Seeking to ameliorate the damage, they were exploring the lower reaches of the shaft, right above the broken crystal array, where they had found a room with three mysterious empty crystal sarcophagi, four doors (behind one of which they could sense unspeakable evil), and a swirly mesmerizing pattern on the floor. The party was trying to find out how to open the door into the unspeakable evil. That’s where we broke off, three (?) or so years ago.
The intervening years having granted them wisdom, they were now puzzled as to why it seemed so important back then to open the evil doors, and why they had been so reluctant to mess with the blue crystals themselves, other than Merath/Wendy’s paranoia about the blue light being incompatible with her own Pink Light Power(TM). After messing around with the sarcophagi, including both Merath and Bastriel (Paul) attempting to analyze the magic of them, they concluded that
- the crystals were controlled by the sarcophagi
- they sarcophagi were being interfered with by evil spells emanating from behind the evil doors and warding off the two other doors
So they set out to break the bonds between the spells from the Evil Door (an arched double-door composed of greenish marble and swirling iron tracery) and the sarcophagi, and then power up the crystal array. Since this involved actually climbing into the goo in the crystal sarcophagi and allowing it to bond with them, there was a decent amount of bravery involved. This they succeeded in doing, though the damage to the crystal array caused it to short-circuit and spew destructive energy around, melting one of the overhead bridges and crispy-frying the dragon’s corpse before they could shut it down. This prompted a further bout of analysis and brainstorming, during which they ascertained
- they couldn’t repair the blue crystals, but they might be able to replace them with Pink Light Power (TM)
- it would be insanely dangerous to the Rose Kingdom to do so unless they completely eliminated the evil influence from beyond the Evil Door
So now that they had an actual reason to explore beyond the Evil Door, they warded Jacob against any form of compulsion (see! Wisdom!) and he hacked the doors open. A nauseous miasma of evil puffed out of the room beyond, starting to fill the sarcophagus chamber. Merath threw up a Pink Light Power(TM) bubble around herself and found it warded off the miasma, so she expanded it to encompass the rest of the party.
Just then, a huge shadowy figure shambled out of the Evil Room. Despite heavy flavor text from the GM, they held off attacking it until it was revealed that this was, as the players expected, Dan’s new PC…a giant-sized member of The Pack (the wolfman race). Dan’s character (forget the name at the moment) had been exploring a ruin in a far off area near the Wildlands, and accidentally stepped across a Nephari spiral that took him into the Evil Room, where he was nearly overwhelmed by the evil miasma.
Proceeding into the Evil Room, warding of the miasma with Pink Light Power, they found a network of spell lines coming through the Nephari spiral in the center of the room. They succeeded mightily in the attempt to break the curse lines and the evil influence was banished. There was some talk about whether they could destroy the spiral completely, but they were reluctant to mess with it too much (more Wisdom!).
They returned to the other room, and then to the outer bridge over the shaft, where Merath used the Pink Light Power to eliminate the corpse of the dragon…which she managed to do without vaporizing the entirety of the bottom of the shaft, exhibiting more control over the destructive aspects of the Pink Light Power than she had been able to previously. They still had no way to regrow the blue crystals, so they decided to attempt to replace them with pink…something…to share the power of the Rose Kingdom with the Moth kingdom. Against all odds, this succeeded without apparent complications, and now the bottom of the shaft is covered with the stylized rose symbol of the Rose Kingdom, worked out in crystal, and a shaft of Pink Light Power springs forth, illuminating the cavern, powering the devices of the Moth city and, incidentally, annexing the Moth Kingdom to the Rose Kingdom. The new political realities of the situation have yet to be conveyed either to Queen Moth-Ra or to the Rose Princess, but the RB congratulate themselves on a job well done! And you know, for them it totally was. They saved the people they intended to save, thwarted evil, and there was no collateral damage this session at all.