Tag: Savage Worlds

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.

1. Order-Dependent Chargen
2. Bennies
3. 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.

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:

1. The Wounds System
2. Tricks and Tests of Will
3. 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.

I’ve always had a sneaking fondness for lifepath systems*, ever since back in the days of Traveller. I thought, and still think, there’s something cool about a system that was so hard-core you could actually die during character generation, and I whiled away many an hour in study-hall rolling up Traveller characters and joining the various services. Back then I wasn’t experienced enough, or parsimonious enough with my time, to even use all those characters as NPCs. Nope, I was purely rolling them for the fun of rolling them. It was almost like a slot machine: maybe this would finally be the one who could muster out with a suit of powered armor!

Much later on, I glommed onto a copy of Paul Jennell Jaquays’ Central Casting: Heroes of Legend (still got it around here somewhere), which was a non-system specific set of tables for coming up with a character history for a fantasy setting. I liked that idea so much that I went to the trouble of coding my own version of it in Python as part of an open-source generic table-roller program I wrote. The web version of that is still running here, though I don’t think anyone but the robot spiders ever hits it.

So I picked up the Savage Worlds Fantasy Character Generator Toolkit, and it’s probably no surprise that I like it, even though I doubt any of my players would want to use it. While it’s nowhere near as detailed (or as wacky) as the 180 or so pages of Heroes of Legend, it does a really good job of producing a playable Savage Worlds character with a background meaty enough to sink your roleplaying teeth into. You start out with a d4 in each of your attributes, and no skills, edges, or hindrances, and you go through the tables step-by-step, sometimes being directed to sub-tables or to roll a certain number of times on a specific table in a later step. Each entry in one of the tables tells you more about the character, and alters your attributes up or down, or assigns you extra dice in traits or specific edges or hindrances. Some of the time you have a choice as to how to split the dice or whether to roll, but it’s mostly mechanical. So far, none of the characters I’ve tried rolling have wound up as complete scrubs, and a couple have been well beyond what a Novice character could afford by the normal point-buy system. In fact, I’d say that on the whole the system is weighted to give you slightly better than normal characters as a compensation for the randomness of it all. On the other hand, the characters are decidedly not optimized for their roles; a mage is pretty much as likely to end up Burly, or a fighter to be Anemic, as anybody else, though everybody should end up with a fair degree of competence for a Novice in their profession.

As written, you don’t really have much of a choice as to what that profession is. You roll randomly for your family background, which might assign you a starting profession or the option of one; if not, then you roll randomly for your starting profession. Depending on your character’s age, you have a certain number of rolls to make on the specific chart for that profession; if you don’t like your profession after each roll you can roll again on the starting profession chart and if you prefer that one switch at the cost of one of your allowed rolls.

One obvious change to make if your players don’t mind a certain amount of random chargen but draw the line at being forced into a profession would be to just let them pick their starting profession. The tables aren’t so delicately balanced that forcing that one result throws things out of kilter.

Also, as written it requires a lot of rolling on tables…thirty or more rolls, and a lot of the rolls having to do with your family have no mechanical effect. A completist might want to roll for the birth order, current status and attitude towards you of each of your up to eight+1d3 siblings, but I’d say that most of the time you can write down the number and move on. If you want to know your own particular birth order, just roll a single 1dN (where n is the number of siblings including yourself). Depending on the kind of campaign you might also elect to skip things like determining the reason your family originally emigrated to the land of your birth.

If you like lifepath systems, and play Savage Worlds in a fantasy setting, I can whole-heartedly endorse this PDF (take it to Staples or someplace and get it spiral bound, though…loose pages are a pain in the butt to work with when you have to do a lot of flipping). I suspect that doesn’t describe all that many people, which is too bad, because it really is pretty well done. You’ll have to excuse me now, though…I’ve got to get back to seeing if I can roll up a character who starts with a nifty magic sword…

update: Cool!  You can actually die during character creation in the FCGT, too!

* RPG character generation systems that took you through the early life of the character, from circumstances of birth up through career training prior to the start of the game.