Now I haven't gotten in an actual game with Savage Worlds. For the most part I built some characters and goofed around with fighting some monsters and gold-fishing some scenarios. At it's base its a very easy to learn game. As a generic game parts of it are nebulous because it depends on what you're running but as a whole it's solid enough to be able to go from campaign to campaign and generally know what you're doing.
Your Character
The setup is simple. Main stats go from 1d4 to 1d12 and can't go higher (until they do if you're running a game where super strength is a thing.) You get points to set them. Then there are points for skills that have a similar dice limit that have associated stats which dictate how many points it takes to raise them past a certain die. For example if you have a stat that is a d8 then the associated skill will take one point to raise it to a d8 but two points to raise it to a d10 and so on. You also have some derived stats which are your ability to dodge and resist damage. You get Pace (land speed) set at 6 and Charisma set at 0.
From there you get three 'Hindrances' (Two minor, one major). Hindrances are reverse feats that are basically character flaws that are mechanically relevant. Technically you don't NEED to take any they just count towards points to get some extra stuff at character creation but if you want to start at what's essentially level one with nothing but skills and stats then you want to take them. The extra stuff you get are points to spend on more skills, bigger stats, starting money or 'Edges'. An Edge, to use Pathfinder terms, is a feat. Aside from getting better stats and skills these are the main things taht define your character, granting them abilities and rules exceptions that make them one thing or another. This includes super powers and magic but I'll get to that later.
You can default as a human which grants you an extra edge (What's with humans and bonus feats?) but you also have the option of being whatever race is allowed in the campaign which have some extra abilities. There's a guide to making your own races.
And there you have it. You can punch out a character in about ten minutes but if that's too slow for you there are predefined archetypes that tell you what to put in where. There are only a handful in the book but online I've seen a number ranging across different settings. There's even one site where the core D&D/Pathfinder classes are defined as archetypes.
Advancement is expressed in experience points with about one to three given in a session. As you get them you achieve different tiers of ranks that are qualifiers for different edges and every five experience points you get a new edge, a stat boost, two skill boosts that are lower than their associated stat, one skill boost regardless of the associated stat, or get a new skill. Even though the ranks have a set limit the amount of XP you get is open ended so theoretically you could have a character with a million XP with the only restriction being that after 80 experience points you get your advancements every 10 XP instead of 5.
One thing to note is that minmaxing is considerably less useful here. About every attribute is painful to dump in an extreme way and even at the highest dice value the dice can be pretty swingy. So while character creation is about as easy as choosing an archetype, any player that chooses to optimize heavily can slow character creation considerably.
Playing The Game
Busting out a character is easy enough but gameplay is a bit trickier.
Combat sets initiative by drawing playing cards. Jokers sets off some abilities and resets initiative and you don't have any changes to initiative unless you have an edge for it. You get to act and move and that's it. You can perform multiple actions but they can't be the same action (or hand in the case of attacking with weapons) and it grants a culmulative penalty on each action. There are exceptions like automatic weapons and stuff like that but its mostly just move and act. There are a number of non-attack actions but they aren't really relevant...
...until you get you butt kicked. Then all of a sudden the extra combat options really matter because of how combat works and how being a generic game affects things. You see fighting, shooting and throwing are separate skills that go after the dodge statistic, 'Parry' or target the number 4 to hit. if you hit you roll damage and if it goes past the statistic to mitigate damage, 'Toughness' then that thing gets 'Shaken'. Shaken is a stun that you can roll to shake off but if you take damage when you're stunned or the damage is really high then you take a wound. Take four or more wounds and you're out (dead or knocked out depending on setting rules.). This means that stunning is very important and sometimes toughness is very high so it takes some teamwork to get through. Also attacking isn't the only way to apply the shaken condition. For the most part you're going to take out weaker enemies really quick, especially if they're regular mooks because it only takes one wound to kill them, but if something tough comes along you have to pull out all stops to take it down and things go hard core tactical all of a sudden. So even if you're a boring melee combatant and you're just running up to swing at monsters you're actually missing out on a lot of things you can do to make winning easier.
Adding to all this the setting makes power levels very uneven. A shotgun is definitely more useful than a bow and if you're using rules from the super power handbook you can functionally build Superman if you wanted to making shotguns completely useless very early. So a Heroic tier dude from Montana is overpowered or useless compared to similar tier guys based on the context of the campaign. Because of this enemies are all over the place and don't have a set criteria or rating for how tough they are, meaning that its possible to find out that you're in way over your head with an enemy when you're halfway dead.
Also pretty much every dice explodes indefinitely (on a dice per dice basis they can crit by hitting the highest number on the die which lets you add another dice to it.) so if it rolls enough fours in a row a chump monster dealing 1d4 damage can murder you in one hit. This is incredibly unlikely but the fact that its possible for anyone to get a lucky shot in means that you can't afford to mess around in combat.
Skills on the other hand are easier to work with. The target for success is almost always 4 with plusses and minuses depending on what's going on.
Bennies and Wild Dice
The game has a token system called 'Bennies', slang for Benefits. These are your hero/fate points that can be spent on rerolls and to take away the shaken condition. In general you get them for going something cool or otherwise amusing the table or GM, which seems like an added complication to the game but after reading the Horror Handbook it opens up bennies get rewarded for whatever you want. In the horror handbook you can award bennies for partaking in a 'vice' like drinking and premarital sex (anything that makes Jason Voorhees kill you faster.) in order to lure the players into horror tropes. My wife wanted to use Savage Worlds to play out her Sailor Moon Campaign and decided to award bennies to people who inspired love and hope to lure players into getting involved with magical girl tropes. Bennies are described one way in the core book but easily turn into plot carrots, positive reinforcement for playing out the way the GM wants. This is a pretty great tool for enforcing a genre or luring players into tropes of whatever they're playing.
Wild dice are a mechanic that I still think is an added complication. For any stat or skill roll you make you roll a d6 and can take that number instead of your trait roll. This only applies to 'Wild Cards' which are PCs and enemies that need more than one wound to die. It makes it more likely to roll well and makes you less likely to flub with 1s on a d12. But it also introduces critical failures, a 1 on both dice which are catastrophic enough for you to potentially cut your own dick off. so it's give and take. I know I think it's an added complication but I wouldn't take it away because of a tiny glitch in how probability works with exploding dice. Basically its slightly easier to meet a target number one step higher than the dice you're using. However the lower the dice the more likely you're going to roll double 1s and be that much closer to cutting your dick off so the game is balanced I guess.
Powers
Powers are supernatural abilities that you can access with edges. There are plenty of flavors of this that get introduced in the genre handbooks but the base game puts them at arcane magic, divine magic, psionics, super powers, and gadgetry. The flavors of these work differently but the end result is basically the same. Each power cost power points and has an effect. There aren't that many powers and they're pretty basic effects. You also attack 'Trappings' to them to more define them. Trappings are descriptors for what they are and what they look like, for example; a 'bolt' can be a 'fire''bolt' and so on. Same effect different cosmetics. Despite mostly being cosmetic there is a list of mechanical benefits for elemental/energy trappings which makes everything WAY more interesting. I'd say that the game as a whole needs more trappings with mechanical benefits. Each one exponentially creates new powers without having to fiddle with the powers list. But just with the core book its enough to get you going for quite a bit. Otherwise its up to the players and GM to spice up powers with flavor.
At their base Powers do things that you normally can't do but aren't drastically powerful. Using just the main rulebook everything is pretty gritty/low level no matter their rank but my comparison board is Pathfinder so that means a little less. Setting rules drastically change how useful each power is due to technological or magical equipment, as well as super powers working differently when you use the Super Power Companion.
Speaking of Super Powers, the Super Powers Companion has a weird sense of balance too. Technically you can make Batman and Superman with the same rank and number of points but the two are obviously not equals, or at least not in the same way. I appreciate this but it boggles my mind how this will work out in play. Also you really don't want to mix the genre companions if you want to keep balance. Its the equivalent of bringing a knife to a Death Star fight.
Conclusion
Everything else about the rules are simple and are either very concise or easily extrapolated based on how similar things work. Its flexibility is there at it's core so its not very hard to jump from one kind of setting to another without much of a fuss, although I think the individual genre companions will work out better due to their genre specific house rules. There are a few kinks in the road and there are some bits that seem counter intuitive but it functions well enough. With combat being the crunchiest part of the game by far, the game is easily action first but this doesn't mean that its useless to invest in non combat options unless you're just doing break down the door dungeon crawls. With that in mind its kind of a rules-medium kind of system where there's quite a bit of situational rules but they are pretty easy to resolve and starting the game in the first place is pretty fast and easy.
I think a highest and lowest point of the game is that usefulness and power are extremely relative and contextual. futuristic armor and weapons are just flat out better than medieval ones, super power rules make obscenely overpowered characters and its easy to make a modern nobody that can't hold up to pretty much anything. On one hand this is in no way balanced to each other making genre mixing kind of a balancing act. On the other hand this makes all kinds of sense and to be honest Superman and Indiana Jones being on the same team is narratively very weak. This also means that playing different genres is very possible at it's core.
Another downside is that combat being so crunchy but posed to be fast and easy means that people will make the mistake of just running in and swinging to hit things which is a bad idea because at it's base players are pretty squishy so fighting blind is not always an option. Although to be fair, if the GM is just playing beatable monsters with low tactics everything is fine.
Despite being able to pull off high fantasy like D&D, Pathfinder and 13th Age it doesn't really have to ability to go overboard. Even if you're at the highest rank there's a slim possibility that an errant arrow from a goblin can turn things sideways and while you can realistically take on some epic level monster but its going to take a lot more forethought than typical Pathfinder characters. Basically fantasy Savage Worlds its pretty low gritty fantasy by comparison.
As a whole I think it tackles the kind of action adventures that I have trouble replicating with Pathfinder and D&D and without getting too abstract it has about the same range as GURPS without the complications and fiddly bits. Best of all is that after getting the three genre companions you're pretty much set to do basically whatever you want. In fact if anyone asked me to describe this in fewer words I would call it 'GURPS-lite'
On a personal note, I quickly fell in love with the system. It supports the genres I want to play in without too much hassle between genres and in a few books. Its easy to understand so I don't have to handhold the way I do in Pathfinder or even Fifth Edition D&D. Its the right consistency of crunchy and abstract to make for fun adventure games. It has plenty of really spectacular settings to support it and houseruling for worldbuilding is simple and pretty intuitive. I'm not giving it a rating because this isn't really a review but if I did i would give it a full five out of five.
What this means for this blog is that I'm going to be talking about Savage Worlds here now. I'll still talk about Pathfinder, and when I get around to my 5e overview I'll talk about that too. (Also Fate and Ryutama are on the menu.)
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