What’s Normal in Savage Worlds?
Posted by Joshua on Jan 29, 2009
Since this is never explicitly spelled-out in the core rulebooks as far as I can see, it’s probably worth a post. (I originally worked this out in a comment thread that I doubt anybody but Russell is reading by now…)
The default assumption in Savage Worlds is that typical Joe or Jane Citizen characters have a d6 in each Attribute, and a d6 in each skill that’s relevant to their profession and daily life. Character generation gives you enough points for a d6 in every stat, and you shouldn’t put a d4 in one unless you intend that your character be wimpier than an average adult at it. You shouldn’t start with a d4 in a Skill unless it’s something the character hasn’t had much practice at up until now.
In the SW:Explorer’s Edition rulebook, the evidence for this is slim, but it’s there: the Youth Hindrance and the Elderly Hindrance both represent less-than-physically fit adult specimens, and neither drops any Attribute below a d4. An 8 year-old girl has a Strength at minimum of a d4, as does a 90 year-old grandmother; they could be stronger… even a lot stronger, but they can’t be weaker by the core rules. There are Hindrances that can give you an effective die-roll even worse (e.g. Anemic, which subtracts 2 from many Vigor rolls), but d4 is the rock-bottom for an Attribute.
The Toolkits add more direct evidence: the “Typical Citizens” entries in both the Science Fiction and Fantasy toolkits have a d6 in each Attribute. The Pulp toolkit doesn’t have a citizen entry, but has a fair number of everyday sort of archetypes such as Snitches, Typical Mechanics, Nosy Reporters (as distinct from Plucky Reporters) and they all fit the pattern of at least a d6 in every Attribute, with only notably stupid characters such as Thugs having a d4 Smarts, or notably young characters such as Wise-Ass Kid having a d4 Strength and Vigor. Even Professors are assumed to have a d6 Strength and Vigor.
The Toolkits also provide the only real evidence of the assumptions about what’s a typical Skill level. The SW:Ex core has few examples of normal people, and orcs and cannibal islanders are just different enough that while they might represent typical opposition to the heroes they aren’t necessarily indicative of what the random soda-jerk, janitor, or dung-spattered peasant is capable of. Basically, Citizens in the SF and Fantasy Toolkits have at least a d6 in every skill that’s relevant to their daily lives, and a d4 in either Fighting or Shooting depending on the typical weapon of their culture (and Guts, if the setting uses it). What they don’t have is very many skills: Notice, some Knowledge Skill representing their trade, and either Driving or Stealth, plus the aforementioned combat and Guts, and that’s it.
While the point-buy system encourages PCs to dabble in a lot of skills (adding a new Skill at d4 after character creation is as expensive as raising two other skills by a die type), it seems pretty clear from the supplementary material in the Toolkits that having merely a d4 in a Skill isn’t intended to represent a competent practitioner. A random NPC that you meet who has that skill as his trade will likely have a d6 in it. Now, because PCs are Wild Cards, their chance of success on a d4 plus the Wild Die is significantly better than the random Extra’s chance of success on a d6 (62% vs. 50%), but my interpretation would be that represents something like raw talent or luck, not training.
Neat Minis
Posted by Joshua on Jan 28, 2009
I use LEGOs for minis, when we use minis, but these GAFDOZ and Hydra minis would be perfect for Elves & Espers. I’m too cheap to buy them, but I find them inspiring to look at.
Hat tip: Hero Press
RPG Systems and Granularity
Posted by Joshua on Jan 26, 2009
Dr. Checkmate, guest blogging over at Uncle Bears, writes:
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Dr. Checkmate’s Ode to Savage Worlds | UncleBear
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On a related note, d4 to d12 (or d4-2 to d12+2) doesn’t allow for a whole lot of granularity. You’re basically talking about all traits being on a scale of 1 to 5. Even some how making it a scale of 1 to 10 would be an improvement.
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I know what he means about granularity, but my experience is that more than about five doesn’t actually make much of a psychological impact. Too fine a gradation, even if statistically significant, tends to get lost in people’s mental model of how things work. Despite D&D 3+ grading attributes on a 3-18 scale, what actually matters is the -2 to +4 that usable characters tend to end up with. Similarly, even though each Skill rank in D&D “matters”, the difference between 7 or 8 ranks in a Skill tends not to get noticed. Even in systems like Hero and GURPS, which have you rolling 3d6 against a stat, the bell-shaped curve means that some points are more equal than others. In my own home-brew before I switched to Savage Worlds I used a 1 to 10 scale for both Attributes and Skills, but realistically PCs had about 3-8 in anything the actually did (except for some combat monsters that I actually kind of wish weren’t so crocked). Having a smaller spread in the general stuff but extra Disadvantages/Advantages actually seems to help players think of the characters as having distinct strengths and weaknesses, as well as opening up more actually playable characters. E.g. middling Dexterity stat but Fumble-Fingers Disad giving a minus to fine manipulation is more memorable and easier to work with than an rock-bottom Dexterity score, which in many systems is a death-sentence.
I sometimes wonder if something like the seven-plus-or-minus-two rule is at work here. If a player can’t distinctly visualize all the steps at once, do they just chunk it until they can?
Not Everything Can Be Near
Posted by Joshua on Jan 22, 2009
…because where would you put it?
In the previous post, I talked about Near and Far thinking in RPGs, and recommended that the GM try to make as much as possible in the game amenable to Near thinking. As much as possible doesn’t mean everything, though; there are situations where it’s either not possible, or not desirable.
- If the GM and the players don’t know (and can’t be expected to learn) enough details. E.g. open-heart surgery, or starship hyperdrive repair. In the former case it’s conceivable (barely) that in a game that’s about being a surgeon it would be worthwhile to learn enough about surgery to not only provide accurate description, but enough real choices of the sort that surgeons face to make Near thinking possible; in the latter, the details just don’t exist, and while the GM could certainly make them up and try to teach them to the players, the amount of effort involved to get the kind of free-wheeling thinking of fully grasping the problem-space as when a player thinks about searching an ordinary desk doesn’t seem like it would pay off, even in a campaign about starship engineers.
- If the situation is about performance, not decisions. When the task at hand is something like playing the cello, it doesn’t really matter exactly what the GM or the player knows about cellos, or even music in general, because it’s the character’s physical skill that’s called on. Now, if you were to search a cello… Note that this is often going to be true of the physical activity of combat. The strategy and tactics are decisions that can be carried out by the player, the physical activity of shooting the bow or swinging the sword is all the performance of the character.
- If it’s about the character’s skill at making certain kinds of decisions. Even if the GM and the player both understand what’s involved enough that they could go into detail, sometimes it’s about what the character can think or understand, not the player. It’s often the case that the character is supposed to be better at thinking about certain situations than the player (sometimes the other way around). In these cases it’s possible to use a skill roll to backstop or supplement the decisions that the player makes, but much of the time you should just substitute Far thinking. Even if the GM and the player both know how to play chess, actually playing out the match between the character and Death isn’t likely to be a satisfying way of resolving it.
- For pacing reasons. There’s only so much time in a session, so sometimes even if the characters would have time to go through all the gory details the game is better off if you hand-wave it. You don’t want to do too much of this, though. It’s easy to imagine that you’re getting more done in the game when you fly by everything at 30,000 feet, using Far thinking all the way, when actually you’re just leeching out all the color and vibrancy and eliminating potential decision points. You should only use this as an excuse when spending the time in Near mode is going to freeze out the other players for too long, or you know that they find that particular activity boring to think about in detail, or it lets you get to a different and more interesting Near mode episode immediately.
Near vs. Far Thinking in RPGs
Posted by Joshua on Jan 21, 2009
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Overcoming Bias: Abstract/Distant Future Bias
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The latest Science has a psych article saying we think of distant stuff more abstractly, and vice versa. “The brain is hierarchically organized with higher points in the cortical hierarchy representing increasingly more abstract aspects of stimuli”; activating a region makes nearby activations more likely. This has stunning implications for our biases about the future.
All of these bring each other more to mind: here, now, me, us; trend-deviating likely real local events; concrete, context-dependent, unstructured, detailed, goal-irrelevant incidental features; feasible safe acts; secondary local concerns; socially close folks with unstable traits.
Conversely, all these bring each other more to mind: there, then, them; trend-following unlikely hypothetical global events; abstract, schematic, context-freer, core, coarse, goal-related features; desirable risk-taking acts, central global symbolic concerns, confident predictions, polarized evaluations, socially distant people with stable traits.
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Robin Hanson wasn’t thinking about roleplaying games when he wrote this, of course, but if he and the Science article are right about how minds work–and I think they are–then it has implications for how we play these games. For one thing, it means that providing detail and concreteness isn’t just a matter of atmosphere and aesthetics, it literally changes the way we think about events in the game.
Take an example near and dear to my heart, the act of searching in-game:
Near
The GM determines there is a desk with three side drawers and a middle drawer, and taped to the underside of the middle drawer is a key. The desk otherwise contains papers from old cases, none of them relevant, a gun in the top right-hand drawer and a bottle of rye in the bottom right hand drawer.
Player: I search the desk.
GM: How?
Player: I look in all the drawers.
GM: You find a gun in the top right hand drawer, a bottle of Rye in the bottom right hand drawer, and a bunch of papers. They seem to be old case files.
Player: I flip through them and see if any seem relevant.
GM: Based on a casual flip through, none seem particularly interesting.
Because the player didn’t specify any action that would have uncovered the key, it’s not discovered.
or
GM: How?
Player: I look in all the drawers, then I take them out one by one. I check the bottoms, and I look for false bottoms, and I check the holes, reaching around if necessary.
GM: That will take about fifteen minutes.
Player: I’ve got time.
GM: Ok, taped to the bottom of the middle drawer you find a key. You also find a gun in the top right-hand drawer, and a bottle of rye in the bottom right-hand drawer. There’s also a bunch of papers, that seem to be old case files, none particularly relevant.
Not as Near
GM determines the same set-up as before.
Player: I search the desk, looking in all the drawers.
Because the player didn’t specify actions that would uncover the key, the GM rolls the Player’s Search skill as a “save”, and gets a success.
GM: You find a gun, and a bottle of rye, plus some old case files. On an impulse, you check under the drawers, and find a key taped to the bottom of the middle drawer.
Even Less Near
Same set up as before.
Player: I search the desk.
GM rolls vs the character’s Search Skill, and succeeds.
GM: You find a key taped to the bottom of the middle drawer, a gun in the top right-hand drawer, a bottle of rye in the bottom right-hand drawer, and some old case files.
If he had rolled a failure, the Player would still have found the gun, the files, and the booze, but not the key.
Far
The GM determines that the desk contains a gun, and a hidden key. He doesn’t bother to think about where.
Player: I search the desk.
GM rolls, and the character fails.
GM: You find a the gun, but nothing else of interest.
Even Farther
The GM determines that the desk contains a gun, and a key. He doesn’t bother to think about what the desk looks like, where the items are or whether they’re hidden.
Player: I search the desk.
GM rolls, and the character fails.
GM: You find nothing.
Really Far
The GM doesn’t bother to determine anything about the desk.
Player: I search the desk.
GM rolls, and the character succeeds.
GM: You’ve got 1 success. You need 2 more before you get 1 failure.
Just Plain Wrong
The GM determines the details as in the near cases.
Player: I look in all the drawers, then I take them out one by one. I check the bottoms, and I look for false bottoms, and I check the holes, reaching around if necessary.
GM rolls, and the character fails.
GM: You find nothing.
Also Wrong
The GM doesn’t determine any details, but does determine the desk contains a gun and a key.
Player: I look in all the drawers, then I take them out one by one. I check the bottoms, and I look for false bottoms, and I check the holes, reaching around if necessary.
GM rolls, and the character fails.
GM: You find nothing.
The thing about Near vs. Far is that it’s (probably) not a continuum, where you gradually lose detail and concreteness as you dial up the abstraction: at some point there is a modal shift in the kind of cognition you do. I think that wherever possible, you want to keep things in the game world as Near as possible, so that the players remain grounded in the situation. This lets them reason about the game world, and not just about the rules. It also provides more specific details to make the story more vivid, because it’s more like what we do when we’re faced with such situations in the real world. Using Far abstractions is like having a scene cut to a placard that says “They search the room” and then cut back to show what they discovered. If the GM doesn’t provide enough details that they could reason concretely (even if he backstops them with abstract game mechanics), then the players just move through a sort of fog of abstraction. Everything their characters do seems to them to be more distant in space and time, and they’re more likely to group things mentally into larger, coarser categories, which can make it harder to keep their interest and attention since more stuff will be regarded as “the same old same old.”
Providing enough detail to make Near thinking possible in an RPG is more work for a GM, but I think it’s really important work, and pays off in making the experience much richer for everyone concerned. When budgeting your effort in preparation, try to spend it on the details that the players will actually interact with to make the setting more concrete, and less on figuring out the broad strokes of distant event and times that shaped the game world. A list of ten things that they can find in the desk beats 10,000 words on the lost empires of the Hyperborean Age.