Dr. Checkmate's Ode to Savage Worlds

January 26, 2009 No comments

I can not with straight face and clear conscious call this a review. That word implies a certain objectivity that I lack.

First off, I am aware that the game has it’s flaws. Amongst the small group with whom I have such discussions the dice as traits thing is not well liked. For me it is a quaint and lovable rule, but also a little tedious behind the GM screen. I think if I was going to go back to rules hacking I would start with a “one die to rule them all” approach to Savage Worlds. This causes a whole bevy of problems of its own though and anything that reduces the Fast, Furious, Fun factor is apt to not pass muster.

When I was first exposed to it my thoughts were something along the lines of, “cool! finally a justification for all my dice,” but in practice, I really don’t need more than say three of each and I don’t need a d20 at all!*

And die pools are right out; plenty of good die pool systems I could run instead if I really wanted to.

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. No, I’ve no idea how to implement such a change, nor do I have much interest in doing so. More work means less FFF. See the pattern forming here?

Fixed difficulty of 4… except when you’re in melee. Annoying. I’ve thought about turning Parry into a modifier rather than target number, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

Lastly, I like me some laundry lists of skills. That would be my favorite thing about Palladium (a system I dislike) and Chaosium (a system to which I am merely indifferent): skills, skills, and more skills. This brings me to the exception to one of the praises I’ll get to in a moment: increasing the number of skills in the game is one of the few things you can do to upset the interlocking rules of this game. In a d20 game you change a rule here or there and it creates ripples that touch almost every other sub-system in the game. In SW this is much less so, but increasing the skill list messes with the character generation and the value of experience points. to me, that’s a big enough splash to make it, once again, not worth the effort to “fix.”

Now in praise of the system it has a really marvelous learning curve. Once everyone gets the hang of the wild die and all the exploding dice play moves along very quickly.

I always encounter a little resistance to the initiative system, but once people see it in play or draw their first joker the resistance fades.

The Common Knowledge rule gives me some mechanical leverage to encourage some detail in character backgrounds.

The system can withstand a lot of abuse. You can import rules and hack existing rules and it will still run smoothly. None of those “do these bonuses stack with these bonuses” sort of problems created by power creep expansions here. Maybe this can be boiled down to page count, maybe not. I had a perfect example of this in my head at one point, but I have completely forgotten it now.

One. Ten dollar. Core book. Enough said about that.

Unique and quirky settings available both from Pinnacle and licensees. Deadlands, RunePunk, Necropolis, The Ravaged Earth, & Daring Tales of Adventure just to name a few.

Marvelous fan support both on and off the official forums of Pinnacle and the previously mentioned licensees.

The system supports minis with out requiring them.

No pay to play online support.

I loves it. Bumps and all. Go buy it, please.

* I’ve multiplied the fear effect table by 5 for a d00 table instead of d20.