Savage Worlds: Three Do’s
Posted by Joshua on Sep 25, 2008
Some positive advice for Savage Worlds GMs:
- Do Encourage Tricks
- Do Be Generous with Bennies
- Do Be Descriptive With Combat Mechanics
Do Encourage Tricks
Tricks (and Tests of Will) are a great way to get role-playing into combat, so you want to be pretty lenient on what counts. In particular, since the exact mechanical effect of the Trick is precisely defined (-2 on Parry rolls until the next action), I advocate letting the players get fairly wild in their description of what they’re doing. Rolling barrels down the stairs at the oncoming villain, dumping a bucket of soapy water on his head, pulling the tapestry down over him, ducking between the giant’s legs…they’re all perfectly good tricks for a simple Agility or Smarts test, as long as you limit the effect to the -2 Parry. I’d also be inclined to allow things like kicking someone to force them back a step that’s not strictly covered in the rules by handling it as a trick, perhaps with a modifier.
Do Be Generous With Bennies
I know I said I’m not that fond of them, but they’re there and they’re an important part of Savage Worlds, so you want players to be spending them fairly freely. They’re also (as pointed out in the rules) one of the things you can hand out as rewards instead of xp, which is tightly limited. Giving Bennies for good RP and good descriptions of combat livens things up and discourages the hoarding impulse. Bennies also make the players more comfortable going for larger-than-life stunts that might carry significant penalties; in most Savage Worlds settings that’s probably something you want to encourage.
Do Be Descriptive With Combat Mechanics
Savage Worlds is a fairly abstract system, which is great for simplicity, but not so great for excitement. Against a tough opponent it’s entirely possible for several rounds to pass with no mechanical change at all; particularly for players who are conditioned to the D&D mechanic of doing at least some amount of damage against big foes each action even if it might take dozens of actions to finish the fight this can feel like “nothing’s happening.” To make matters worse, with a nasty bad-guy the GM will often spend a Bennie for a chance to negate the effect. It’s not good if the fights are shorter, but it feels like less is happening.
So to spice things up, you want to be descriptive and make the fight memorable. You still, IMO, want to match the description to the mechanics; it’s not like you can fool the players into thinking something significant happened by adding flavor text when the mechanics clearly tell them the situation is unchanged, but I think you can make the combat more interesting by adding story-telling elements. There are five events that almost always deserve narrative attention:
- When an attack is made: this is all potential, so as long as you stop before the result, it’s all good. Try to match the description of the attack with the style of the foe. “With an enormous overhand blow, the Minotaur swings his mighty axe at your head!” beats “The Minotaur attacks.” For a fencer you’d want something more like “His dancing blade slides past yours and leaps for your face!” Follow up with describing the hit or the miss. Try to keep the players the center of the action, and in a way that emphasizes their character’s traits: “You deftly step aside” for an agility-based character vs. “There’s a huge crash and it bounces uselessly off your shield” for a tank.
- To match a Trick or Test of Will. This is actually required by the rules, so not just “The Minotaur tries to Intimidate” by “The Minotaur lets loose a blood-curdling bellow that shakes the cavern.”
- When he’s Shaken. Not “He’s shaken”, but “He reels in pain, the blood dripping in his eyes temporarily blinding him.”
- Spending a Bennie, particularly on a soak. Ok, this one is a bit meta, but you need to save yourself from anti-climax here. The players might be all excited from scoring a good hit, and you go and take it away from them with a successful soak roll…talk about your buzz-kill. I think you can make it go down a bit easier by narrating it so “the event happened but…” instead of relegating it to “it never was.” “Your mighty blow catches him solidly in the belly, but the blade hits the buckle of his oversized belt and skitters to the left, leaving a bloody but shallow furrow.” The point is to emphasize how he lucked out in avoiding the damage, and how he won’t be so lucky next time (true…even the Wild Card NPCs will run out of bennies). Even if he blows the soak roll, I might do something like this, except making it a deep furrow despite the luck of having it hit the buckle, just to emphasize that he’s now down a Bennie besides being hurt.
- Being Wounded or Incapacitated. You don’t get many of these in a fight, and against a tough foe they can be a little while coming, so you want to make the most of them. When you take a Wound in SW you are really hurt: all your trait rolls are at a penalty for the rest of the fight. That deserves some narration as to how bloody and shakey the foe has become, perhaps with some froth at the lips or a hand stuffed in a wound, stanching the flow of blood.
Can you go overboard with this kind of thing? Well, sure… you’re not making things more exciting by stopping the flow of the game to declaim a paragraph with each sword-swing. But I think unless you’re a natural ham, there’s such a strong tendency to underplay it and regress to “he swings. Hit. Roll damage. That’s a raise.” that you have to deliberately aim for over-the-top before you can find a good balance.
Also, don’t neglect the Extras… they may be only a third or less as robust as the Wild Cards, but they are just as good opportunities for description if not better (since the events concerning them are more likely to be final). One suggestion (cribbed from the board) is that you let the players describe exactly what happens when they dispatch an Extra, and with the right group I think that’s a very good idea.
In fact, in general, I think you want to encourage the players to add their descriptive touches to the game. They’re pretty much required to for Tricks and Tests of Will, and they really ought to for Attacks as well. Whether they want to describe themselves being Shaken, Soaking a Wound, or Being Wounded or would rather the GM does it depends on the player (some might object to becoming the narrator when they’re trying to stay firmly in the mind of their character), but if they’re comfortable with it, I’d say go for it.
Savage Worlds: Three Don’ts
Posted by Joshua on Sep 25, 2008
Per Patrick’s request, here are three things that I think a Savage Worlds GM should avoid. (There’s also a good thread on the Savage Worlds Forum: What Every New Savage GM Should Know.) The key to SW is the mantra Fast! Furious! Fun! There’s lots and lots of places where you could add more detail and special cases to the rules and it would add something to the game–but the game is built around abstracting that stuff away to concentrate on moving play along. The biggest meta-rule, and the one that they’ll volunteer right off in the forum, is don’t change the rules until you’ve played it enough to have a good sense of the consequences; the rules are tightly knit. That doesn’t mean they’re right for your group, but it does mean that small changes might have big or numerous unforeseen effects.
But there’s more to F!F!F! than just don’t tinker until you know what the part does. Here are three things to get you in the swing of F!F!F!
- Don’t Worry About NPCs Being Valid
- Don’t Make Monsters Extras Unless They Outnumber the Players
- Don’t Look Up Rules While Playing
Don’t Worry About NPCs Being Valid
NPCs and PCs are different. The rules for character creation don’t apply to NPCs. In particular, don’t worry about Rank restrictions, advancement limits, or any of that; just write down the stats, a few key skills and Edges and go. In a similar vein, don’t worry too much about statting up the monsters. At the level of abstraction of SW the difference between a Dire Wolf and a Giant Weasel is maybe a die type in STR and an Edge. You don’t need a three-hundred page Monster Manual, you just need some creativity in special abilities (Edges) to give them flavor. So maybe they’re both statted just like Wolves from the core book, but a Giant Weasel is always treated as Prone for figuring out cover from Missile and Thrown Weapons, and has the Improved Frenzy and First Strike Edges but not Go For The Throat, while a Dire Wolf has Size +1 and its Bite is STR+d8.
Don’t Make Monsters Extras Unless They Outnumber The Players
A single Wild Card can handle two or three Extras (unless the WC just has no combat capability at all). A party of four or five adventurers will make mincemeat out of an equal or lesser number of Extras, unless those Extras have some really nasty special ability. They’ll still defeat one or two roughly equal Wild Cards handily, but at least they’ll run the risk of being wounded. It’s probably not a hard fight unless the Wild Card is significantly tougher than they are, there are roughly an equal number of Wild Cards enemies as party members, or they’re outnumbered 2-3 to one by Extras. For a more detailed analysis of balancing a party against opponents, check out the thread I pointed to earlier.
Don’t Look Up Rules While Playing
It just slows things down too much. Yes, that means the first couple of times you’ll make mistakes…and even longer for things that come up infrequently. That’s OK, as long as you keep things moving and keep them fun. Try to make a note of things that you’re unsure about, and look it up after the game. It can help to run a couple of combats solo, or just you and a friend instead of the whole group, to get the hang of things…and when you’re doing that take as much time to look up the relevant rules as you want, or discuss their interpretation with your friend. During the game, though, the emphasis should be on fast and furious action, not dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. You don’t have to fake knowing what you’re doing, btw; if you don’t know the rule off-hand just say so, and tell the players how you’ll handle it that session.
If later you found you botched something serious, so that e.g. you caused the death of a PC or something of similar dire import–retcon it.
Savage Worlds: Three Bad Things
Posted by Joshua on Sep 25, 2008
Since I posted about three of my favorite specific rules in the Savage Worlds system, it’s only fair that I post about three things that I’m less enamored with. I wouldn’t call them mistakes, but they’re things that I find don’t fit my gaming style very well.
- Order-Dependent Chargen
- Bennies
- Lack of Transparency in Probabilities
Order-Dependent Chargen
Because Attributes have an effect on the cost of Skills, and because Hindrances change the number of points you have available for either Skills or Attributes, it makes a difference what order you spend your points. Moreover, the order laid out in the section on character generation makes it more likely you’ll have to go back and recalculate. If you’re starting out with experienced characters, the problem is compounded because of the limits on how many advancements you’re allowed to spend on certain kinds of improvements per Rank, the minimum rank for certain Edges, and the fact that skill costs change when you’re paying with advancements instead of initial points. Starting out with experienced characters isn’t necessarily that rare; in fact the rules recommend that if a PC dies you replace it with one with half the dead PC’s XP.
The correct order to generate a character with a minimum of back-and-forth is:
- Decide on Race
- Take Hindrances to see how many points you have to spend
- Set your starting Attributes
- Take your starting Edges. Make sure you take Background Edges now.
- Buy up any skills that you need to meet the Edge requirements for starting Edges.
- Spend your remaining initial skill points, spreading them across all the skills you want to take particularly for skills required by future Edges you want (the first d4 costs more after creation)
- Spend the rest of your points from initial Hindrances (if any) on Skills
- If it’s an experienced character, take all the Attribute level-ups you intend to (max 1 per rank)
- If it’s an experienced character, take any Edges that you intend to that have Rank minimums
- Spend the rest of your advances on Skills or Edges (technically you should actually be doing one advance at a time to make sure that you’re never spending an advance on something you don’t yet have the Rank or Attribute level for…bleah. I’m insufficiently anal as a GM to require that.)
This doesn’t guarantee you won’t have to fiddle a bit, as you find out the character you envision is more expensive than you can afford, but I think should save you any realization that if only you’d put more into raising that stat, all those skills would have been cheaper, so that advance could have been spend on this Edge instead…Ultimately you probably want your initial Attributes as high as possible, and to take the one Attribute raise you’re allowed per Rank each Rank you advance. For combat-capable melee characters I suspect that you want your Fighting as high as you can afford before you spend advances on Combat Edges. Or at least, an extra die in Fighting is a +1 average to-hit and a +1 Parry while most Edges give you one or the other.
My ideal point-buy Char-Gen system would generate characters that are valid and optimal for that set of abilities no matter what order you spent the points in. Differing Pre- and Post- creation rules and things that affect the price of other things screw that up. Savage Worlds chargen isn’t as bad as some (GURPS in particular) in that regard, and there aren’t that many options, but it could be better.
Bennies
Bennies are SW’s Plot Points…meta-game resources that you can spend to get a re-roll or automatically perform certain actions (getting rid of the Shaken condition, for instance).
“But Bennies are so integral to the whole system, how can you like SW and dislike Bennies?” I hear you cry. As a GM I’m fine with them, but as a player I don’t like having meta-game resources to track, because I seldom have any idea of how I’m supposed to think of them in-character and I tend to prefer games where I can think in-character as much as possible. So what I tend to do is hoard them, and use them only at pre-defined points, e.g. if the character is about to die and spending a Plot Point would fix that, spend the Plot Point. Or if the character would desperately want X to succeed, spend a Plot Point. What I prefer to avoid is the meta-game thinking along the lines of well, I have 4 PP left, so I can probably spend 2 on this combat and still have enough for the battle if we manage to catch up to their boss… And unfortunately, Bennies work a lot like that, since they don’t carry over from session to session and they can be used at almost anything the character attempts.
Still, they’re not as bad as they could be; since they can only be used for certain well-defined game-effects such as making a soak roll, removing the Shaken condition, or getting a reroll on some kinds of rolls they do lend themselves to a slightly more in-character way of thinking (along the lines of how desperate the character is to succeed) rather than having to keep considering whether I the player want to exert narrative control and, e.g. make the bad-guy’s horse throw a shoe so the party can catch up. Moreover, there is a clearly optimal way of spending them on soak rolls (always spend as soon as you take 1 Wound, before you have penalties) which helps further reduce the meta-game.
I wouldn’t try to remove them, because I think that would seriously break the system, but if I had been the designer I’d have tried to build it without them.
Lack of Transparency in Probabilities
Quick, what’s the chance of succeeding on a d8 Trait Test for an Extra? What if you’re a Wild Card? What’s your chance of getting at least one Raise?
It’s not the end of the world, and it’s not nearly as bad as some dice-pool systems where your odds of botching went up as your character got “better”, but all else being equal I prefer systems where you can eyeball it and say a +1 is 10% more likely to succeed. That’s not something you could ever hope to change about SW, and there’s this handy chart to help when you’re trying to figure out how much worse it would be to give a monster an 8 Toughness than a 7, but it definitely puts the dice mechanic on the short list of things I like Savage Worlds despite and not because of. On the plus side, players definitely enjoy the “exploding” open-ended dice rolls, much as they enjoy rolling Crits in other systems.
Savage Worlds: Three Good Things
Posted by Joshua on Sep 25, 2008
Since Savage Worlds is my current favorite system, I thought I’d post about things that I like about the specifics of the SW rules. After all, there are lots of generic systems, lots of relatively simple systems (not actually “rules light”, but still on the simple end of things), lots of systems with good support and an active fan-base…so why Savage Worlds in particular? There are lots of little bits I like, so I arbitrarily decided to talk about just my three favorites:
- The Wounds System
- Tricks and Tests of Will
- The Shaken Mechanic
The Wounds System
SW’s handling of damage is based on the simple idea of replacing frequent small steps with rarer larger ones. When you take damage that exceeds your Toughness by 4, or you take damage that at least matches your Toughness and you’re already Shaken, you take a Wound. PCs and significant NPCs can take 3 Wounds before they’re incapacitated, non-significant NPCs can take 1.
It’s far from the first system to go that route, but to my mind it’s one of the simplest and most elegant. While there’s a downside in that players can feel that they’re not “making progress” against a difficult (hard to hit or hard to damage) opponent, there’s a huge upside in reducing book-keeping and making combat feel less like an exercise in accounting. Plus, the nuances of the combat system give the players strong tactical options to directly deal with the part of hurting the opponent they’re having difficulty with, which I find much more interesting to play out than a straight attrition race.
Tricks and Tests of Will
Tricks are opposed Agility or Smarts rolls to impose a -2 Parry on an opponent, Tests of Will are a Intimidate or Taunt skill roll against Spirit or Smarts to gain a +2 on your next action against that opponent; all require that you describe in RP terms what you’re doing that justifies the test. Because of the nuances of the system, the two aren’t completely equivalent; in particular Tricks are much better when you want to help somebody else against that opponent.
I really like how these give non-combat optimized characters a chance to make significant contributions in combat. Yes, regardless of the system the GM can always allow players to come up with ad hoc ways of doing that, but I think the point of a system is to streamline and regularize things to reduce the need for multiple ad hoc rulings every combat. With Tricks and Tests of Will SW has two simple, flexible, yet significant ways non-combatants can aid in combat through role-play, not just dispensing buffs or healing.
The Shaken Mechanic
Shaken is a morale-related status-effect that occurs when you’ve taken damage, but not enough to wound you, or your focus is lost because of something like fear, intimidation, taunting, or being tricked. When you’re shaken you’re easier to wound, and you can’t take any action except to move and try to get your composure back. Frankly, I think this is brilliant. It does have the downside of having the flavor of a compulsory personality mechanic, and some players just can’t stand those, but the SW gives you a number of different ways to beef your character up against being Shaken or to recover more quickly if your character conception is that you’re unflappable, with nerves of steel and ice-water in your veins. Also, it doesn’t completely remove the character from your control; it just limits your options. The upside is that not only is it both more realistic (fighting to the death is really rare in the real-world, even in warfare) and more true to most adventure genres (where heroes do dive for cover when bullets fly, or get temporarily dazed by a good punch or nearby explosion) while opening the possibility for things to be more creepy when they are relentless murder machines instead of having that be the norm (SW has various ways of representing that, depending on whether they are merely immune to fear but can be shaken by damage, whether being shaken doesn’t make them easier to wound, if they recover faster, etc.) but it makes for a much more tactically interesting battle. A lot of SW tactics revolve around trying to shake opponents or take advantage of their shaken condition, or preventing opponents from taking advantage of your being shaken until you recover. It’s also nice and simple, not requiring the GM to litter the battle mat or his notes with sticky notes and annotations about what status effects are on which characters and what round they’ll wear off. For a small extra complication it gives a lot of bang for the buck.
There’s lots more to like about Savage Worlds, but those three are the things that stand out enough that I’d probably steal them to apply to my home-brew if I (or my players) get tired of Savage Worlds.