Tag: Savage Worlds

Patrick over at RPG Diehard just had a post on Rations and record-keeping (basically asking whether it was a good idea or not to make the players track things like food), which set me to thinking.

One of the neat insights in Savage Worlds, which I’ve mentioned before, is that you can sometimes replace frequent small events with rarer more significant ones to accomplish the same goals.  That’s most evident in the way damage is handled, but appears in other places in the rules as well, such as the way ammo is handled for the PCs allies.  Savage Worlds is intended to allow the players to control bunches of NPCs as allies, but keeping track of ammo for them whether it’s bullets or arrows, would be a big bookkeeping hassle.  So they abstract it into the allies having four possible ammo levels: Very High, High (they start at this level unless you take special effort to equip them), Low, and Out.  Every combat where the allies are heavily involved in fighting, they drop a level; if during combat they are dealt a 2 as their init card, they drop a level after that round. There’s no game effect until they hit Out.  When they’re Out, they’re all out.  So it’s simple to keep track of, allows for the possibility that they run out during combat, and makes it so you have to pay at least some attention to keeping them supplied.

It seems to me that a similar mechanic could work very well for things like rations and torches, even for PCs.  Give them 4 levels of the significant groups of consumable (e.g. I’d do food and water together, but light sources as a seperate track).  Then have the level drop if some event occurs.

For instance, in an overland adventure, you’d almost always be rolling at least once a day for either weather or encounters.  It would be simple at the same time to roll to see if rations dropped.  You could either put it as an “event” on the encounter table, or (and I kind of favor this) you roll the best character’s Survival die, and on a 1, the party and all its allies drop a ration level.  Once the level drops, it can only go back up if the party touches base at some relatively settled area such as a village or farm (depending on the size of the group), or if the party spends a day foraging and gets a raise on the Survival skill.  If they ever reach Out, they start to suffer the effects of Hunger as per the core rules.

While it has the drawback that bad luck could result in running out of food quickly after leaving the settled areas, you could explain that as something specific happening (a bear getting into the supplies, the food turning moldy, etc)  I think that adds a nice bit of flavor that is otherwise pretty unlikely to crop up in a game that isn’t obsessively detailed, and the upside of requiring almost no bookkeeping besides a couple of tick-marks while making sure the players at least occassionally consider where their supplies are coming from is quite high.  And if you’re running a fantasy campaign, it finally makes spells like Create Food and Water or those pouches of neverending food something the adventurers will be quite pleased to have.

Some positive advice for Savage Worlds GMs:

1. Do Encourage Tricks
2. Do Be Generous with Bennies
3. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.”
3. When he’s Shaken.  Not “He’s shaken”, but “He reels in pain, the blood dripping in his eyes temporarily blinding him.”
4. 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.
5. 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.

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!

1. Don’t Worry About NPCs Being Valid
2. Don’t Make Monsters Extras Unless They Outnumber the Players
3. 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.