TL;DR RPG: Savage Worlds

Savage Worlds

Author: Shane Lacy Hensley

Publisher: Pinnacle Entertainment

Price: Free “test drive” rules, $9.99 in PDF and print.

Genre: Generic, Setting Neutral

A generic setting that aims to be fast, furious and fun.

Best for action-heavy games of any genre or setting. Fantasy and science fiction work especially well.

Material Requirements

Character sheets, full set of polyhedral dice and extra d6s, core rulebook, deck of playing cards, tokens to serve as “bennies.” Miniatures and maps are suggested but not required.

Characters

Characters are composed of Attributes, Skills, Edges, Hindrances, and other derived Traits. Attributes and Skills are measured in dice types (i.e. Strength d6). Edges and Hindrances define the characters through mechanical bonuses or penalties, or roleplaying requirements. Some characters will have Powers that are an extension of an Arcane Background Edge.

Creation is through a point-buy system. Character advancement is through points awarded for completing the objective of a session.

Magic and superpowers use a power-point system in the core rules, but many supplements tweek these rules to afford for different styles of play.

Task Resolution

Actions will be connected to a relevant Skill or Attribute, which is defined by a dice type. The player will roll the appropriate type of dice, along with a six-sided “wild die,” succeeding if one of the dice scores 4 or better. Dice that land on their maximum face value “explode,” are rolled again with all the scores added together. The higher the final score is over the target number, the more successful the action.

Combat

Combat is similar to normal task resolution, but the target numbers are based on the defender’s Parry and Toughness trait, rather than a static 4. An attack roll must beat the Parry target number and the resulting damage roll must beat the Toughness target number.

Rather than Hit Points, all player characters are allowed to receive three “Wounds,” which are essentially hits that pierce through their defenses. The fourth Wound will incapacitate the character.

Expansions and Supplements

Due to Pinnacle's very lenient licensing rules, there is a ton of published and DIY material for Savage Worlds. This includes full settings, campaigns, genre companions and adventures. None of these materials are required to "keep up" with the game and are purely optional.

Other Comments

Savage Worlds is full of game mechanics that are just fun to play, including an initiative system based on playing cards and a “bennies” system that allows players to re-roll actions and absorb Wounds.

NPC and enemy creation is based on what “feels right” for a given character. This may kill GMs who are obsessed with balance, but it allows for quick and easy preparation.

Rules Weight: 3/5

The rules are relatively easy but some take getting use to, such as the Shaken/Wounds system. Because many of the mechanics are fun and interesting, they are easy to learn, especially since players will want to keep an eye out for ways the rules will benefit them the most.

Fluff Weight: 1/5

The core game is purely setting neutral. Any fluff will come from a homebrew setting or third-party expansion.

Links

Savage Worlds on RPGNow.com

Official Website

On the Weaponization of Notice

This weekend I ran my first game in an episodic cyberpunk campaign with just a few people in attendance. We system is Savage Worlds and one of the three players had any experience with the system. I gave the most rudimentary of rules explanations and jumped into the story, believing it best to learn Savage Worlds as we go.

At the beginning of the game, one of my players asked what the Notice skill does. I explained that it helps the character pick up on things that are out of the ordinary. This player would go on to use Notice in a way I didn't anticipate. He made it a weapon.

Most of the time, Notice checks are a way for the GM to reveal information to player, such as finding a clue or seeing the danger in the shadows. It's typically the GM who says when the Notice skill should be used. That wasn't the case with this player. Instead, he interpreted the skill to apply to Krav Maga-style combat situation awareness. And because I am of the opinion that no successful roll should be wasted, he would find something to his advantage each time he used Notice in combat, typically resulting in a bonus or other advantage in the following round.

Although this isn't how Notice is supposed to work, and it can result in some serious metagaming, I'm going to allow it. When a player suggests a dramatic detail for a situation and can back it up with the roll of the dice, who am I to prevent it? Anything that engages a player in active storytelling shouldn't be discouraged.

Wild Card Creator 1.0 Released

Journeyman Games has released the first full version of its Savage Worlds character making software, Wild Card Creator. I'm especially happy for the release as I am beginning a massive Savage Worlds campaign and any time saved managing characters is greatly appreciated.

Wild Card Creator is still not a perfect piece of software, but it's definitely getting there. At this point you are best using the software to run vanilla games or use one of the currently supported settings. If you are going to create a custom setting, which is probably unavoidable for most GMs running Savage Worlds, I highly suggest that you keep your rules changes to a minimum or simply use the vanilla rules and edit the character sheet after export to best fit your setting.

For example, for my cyberpunk setting I wanted to create an Arcane Background for Netrunning (hacking in cyberspace), but for the life of me I could not make the custom AB work. As a solution I am simply using Weird Science, house ruling the differences in the program and then renaming the AB on the character sheet. It's a bit more work than I would like, but programming these ABs are obviously tricky and SW characters aren't that hard to manage on paper anyway.

Another tip: use a custom setting if you are using any Knowledge skills. WCC only supports Knowledge skills that are explicitly mentioned in supported settings, which means that they are impossible in a vanilla game. You will need to create a skill for each Knowledge skill in a custom setting to give a character any skill that's not on the menu. I expect this to be fixed very shortly as it is probably the one feature that is missing regarding running a game only using the core rules.

So, should you get WCC? If you are running a game only using the core rules or one of the supported settings, definitely. It's a real time saver and will have you spitting out characters in minutes. However, you may want to hold off if you are into making custom settings with new Edges, Hindrances, Skills, etc.

Daring Tales of the Sprawl: Good, Simple Cyberpunk Rules for Savage Worlds

I've been looking for good rules for a classic cyberpunk game and things weren't going too well. I'm pretty set on running the game in Savage Worlds, but Interface Zero, the most popular cyberpunk setting for SW isn't really my cup of tea. The rules for hacking and cybernetics seem overly complicated and the setting doesn't have the run-down, lo-fi feeling I want from cyberpunk.

I contemplated checking out Cyberpunk 2020, but I don't have the time to learn a whole new system. It does, however, seem to have the best definition of cyberpunk out there.

My search is over now that I've come across Daring Tales of the Sprawl by Triple Ace Games. You can download their cyberpunk rules for free on their site. At only 13 pages, their rules are much easier to digest than Interface Zero. Triple Ace also takes a more freeform approach to cybernetics, which is much in line with what I was drafting, right done to the abstract monetary cost for installing cyberware. The rules are also free of any setting details, which make the great for any flavor of cyberpunk.

Wealth as a Trait in Savage Worlds

I am currently planning a cyberpunk campaign and would love to put some serious stress on players concerning their finances and their extremely expensive augmentation. However, I hate the accounting that goes into keeping track of currency, especially when futuristic inflation is involved. My solution will be to add a Wealth Trait to characters.*

In order to procure an item or service, the player will need to roll a Wealth check. Hitting the Target Number of 4 results in a successful purchase, but there are some complications.

For every successful purchase, the character gains a point of Financial Stress, which accounts for dwindling cash reserves. Each point of Financial Stress results in a -1 penalty to the Wealth check. Financial Stress scores can be lowered over time or when players come into a certain amount of cash. If the player receives a windfall, they can actually receive negative Financial Stress, which would instead be a bonus to their next Wealth check.

Each Raise on a Wealth check prevents a point of Financial Stress. Two or more raises actually removes Financial Stress.

Rather than having a specific monetary value, every item and service will have a cost rating. This cost rating translates into another penalty to the Wealth check.

0 - Normal living expenses, cheap consumer goods.
1 - Expensive items, weaponry, mid-range consumer electronics.
2 - Very expensive items, basic augmentations, high-end electronics and weapons.
3 - Military grade hardware, complex augmentations, top-of-the-line electronics and gear.
4 - Highly experimental or secretive services, cutting edge augmentations and electronics.

Player's start with a d4 as their Wealth trait die. This die can be adjusted by choosing Edges and Hindrances.

Poverty - d4-2
Normal - d4
Rich - d6
Filthy Rich - d8

If a player fails a Wealth check, they can spend a bennie to turn the failure into a success. However, they will immediately gain the In Debt hindrance. This hindrance will act much like the Enemy hindrance until the player is able to appease their creditor. This appeasement is at the GM's discretion. Possible applications would be a semi-permanent level of Financial Stress until the debt is paid or running dangerous missions.

Hopefully this will make my players think twice about what items they purchase, will prevent them from loading their character's up with augmentations and will potentially cause some drama should they find themselves in Debt.

*I was able to find a similar idea on the Pinnacle forum, but it's a little more complicated than I'd like.

Funky Dice and Savage Worlds

My recent purchase of several "funky dice" was to facilitate a shot at running Dungeon Crawl Classics, but I immediately started thinking about how they could apply to my favorite generic system, Savage Worlds.

One of the beautiful things about Savage Worlds is that almost everything about a character is measured in in dice types. For example, a character with unremarkable intellect would have a Smarts score of d4, while a genius would have a score of d12. This system facilitates extremely easy and fast rulings.

Unfortunately, this system breaks down once a character achieves a power level over the d12. I've yet to look into the relevant supplements, but I imagine this is considerably common in games with superheroes. Because the next highest die type in a standard RPG set is the d20, the Savage Worlds rules begin to add a flat bonus for any rank higher than the d12 (e.g. d12+2, followed by d12+4).

I've never liked this system because adding the flat bonuses makes failure too unlikely, especially since I'm not the sort of GM who likes to add a bunch of penalties to any rolls. At the rank of d12+2, the player can only fail by rolling either a 1 or 2 on both the skill/attribute die and the wild die. This is extremely unlikely. Failing on a d12+4 is essentially impossible unless there is a significant penalty involved.

But what if the rank of d12+2 was replaced by a d14? This would allow for less math and a failure/success rate that is in line with all of the ranks below it. The broken system is fixed by adding a missing part. With the use of funky dice, the ranks in Savage Worlds can run from d4 to d24, all using 2-side increments. At a d24, the character is incredibly powerful but still has to worry about rolling a 1, 2, or 3. Using the old system, the rank would be rendered as 12+10.

I've considered how this could be applied to unskilled rolls, which are normally a d4-2. It's possible that this could be done with a d2 as the skill die and a d4 as the wild die, but the likelihood of exploding the dice increases as the number of sides goes down. Using the alternate dice could actually result in more successes than failures. This may require some actually experimentation.

Gen Con: Day 4 Report

My last day at Gen Con was dominated by a single, very long RPG that had a lot of promise. It was a Doctor Who/Firefly mash-up run in Savage Worlds. I know, right?

This was probably the game I was most excited about playing in since I first saw the listing months ago. Titled "The Great T.A.R.D.I.S. Robbery," this game was going to put together two of my favorite sci-fi franchises, both of which should compliment each other nicely. A real chocolate and peanut butter situation.

There were three other players at the table and all three immediately grabbed up Doctor Who characters. There was the tenth Doctor, River Song and Captain Jack. Immediately our fan fiction switches were flipped. Since I didn't want Firefly to be unrepresented in the game, I grabbed the sheet for Captain Mal. It would appear that one Serenity crew member wasn't enough for the GM, so he had me also play as another Firefly character. I naturally picked Zoe but I was wary of playing two characters at the same time.

(I'd like to point out that the player who grabbed the Doctor only did so when prompted by the GM. The Doctor has to be the single hardest established character to role player, simply because he knows the very things about every situation that only a GM should know. No one should be forced to play the Doctor. I can't see how it could be fun for anyone.)

The adventure started out well enough. Mal and Zoe agreed to help the Doctor and companions get their TARDIS back from the local magical repairman (with intentions of selling them out to get free repairs) but the plan quickly changed when Inara was captured by crazed cultists. Our inevitable betrayal had to be put on hold.

It seemed like the GM was weaving in a lot of different elements and was withholding information from players based on their series of origin. This was pretty cool until I figured out where all the weird confusing stuff was coming from: Classic Battlestar Galactica.

You know that peanut butter and chocolate analogy I used earlier? It still applies, but now some fresh dog shit has been mixed in. Now nothing tastes good in the slightest.

Yeah, characters and technology from the old Battlestar Galactica started popping up and I'm pretty sure that only the GM was having fun with it. The other players were just confused. I was just frustrated because I had no idea what to do with this shit. We ran into two crew members of some battlestar and they proceeded to do pretty much everything important in the story while we just hatched schemes that the GM wouldn't acknowledge. The GM actually started acting bored with everything we were doing and would not allow us to progress the plot. Might I add that I paid $8 for this?

Here's the weird part about all the Battlestar crap that was added: it was both pointless and the only stuff that mattered. If you were to remove all of it, we would have had the same story since the players had no idea how to actually use or care about anything not from Who or Firefly. At the same time, the GM ignored any solutions we offered and instead let the douchebags from the wrong franchise swoop in an solve every problem.

This was pretty much the textbook case of how not to run a con game and it left a very bad taste in my mouth. By the time the climax came around, I couldn't even feel good about victory. Once it was clear that the game was done, I got up and booked it to the exhibit hall. I bought some more weird dice and got the hell out of Indy.

Wild Card Creator Public Beta Released

Almost one year ago a young man walked up to me as I waited to get a seat in a game during Gen Con 2012's Savage Saturday Night and handed me a business card. The card directed me to a Kickstarter campaign for a Savage Worlds character creator that would take all of the heavy lifting out of generating a character. Although it isn't exactly a nightmare to create a character in SW, I immediately thought of all the time I could save when creating characters for a new campaign, with new players. I backed the project as soon as I got home.

One year later Wild Card Creator has been released as a public beta. I've been a part of the closed beta for a while but now anyone can jump in. The cost of the beta (and the finished product once it is done) is currently $20.

Wild Card Creator is a very simple program that runs in Java and has builds for Mac, Windows and Linux. The no-frills approach provides an easy to use interface. Once you've created a few characters, you'll find yourself breezing through the process in less than a minute. After you've created the character, it can be exported to a setting-specific character sheet or a basic, clean print-out. The character can also be saved for easy advancement later.

For all its simplistic beauty, I'm hesitant to praise Wild Card Creator too highly. Currently there are several key features that are missing, such as creating custom Arcane backgrounds and Knowledge skills. While I can get around the Arcane Background problem, I believe that the Knowledge skills are a key way of making a character unique on the fly. To get around this you will need to create a homebrew campaign and manually create these custom skills, which is a lot of work for something that is designed to be easy. 

One of the selling points for Wild Card Creator is the ability to import all of the special character rules from various published settings, just by owning the PDF. This is the feature that really sold me on the program since my SW PDF collection is only growing day-by-day. Several PDFs are already supported, such as Realms of Cthulhu and the Fantasy Companion, but I expect the inclusion of additional settings to be very slow coming. The promise of this product makes being patient very difficult. Wild Card Creator is the work of one man, which means that updates are few and far between.

All things considered, Wild Card Creator is shaping up to be a fine product. If you're committed to running Savage Worlds in many different genres, it's definitely worth checking out. Just don't expect it to be a perfect product any time soon.

Planet Motherfucker Character Template: Black Metal Berzerker

Black Metal Berserker

PURE FUCKING EVIL!!! With the unholy strength of Satan (or cruel pagan gods, if you prefer) you shall burn a demonic path through the wastes of Planet Motherfucker, with all those left in your wake thoroughly impressed by your grim coldness. 

Attributes: Agility d8, Smarts d4, Spirit d6, Strength d6, Vigor d6
Skills: Fighting d8, Lockpicking d4, Shooting d4, Stealth d6, Investigation d4, Notice d4, Survival d4, Intimidation d6, Faith d8
Charisma 0; Pace 6; Parry 5; Toughness 6
Hindrances: Bloodthirsty (+2), Quirk (must convince other of his pure evilness) (+1)
Edges: Arcane Background (Miracles), Berserk
Gear: Spiked Mace (damage: d6+d8, +2 vs. rigid armor, Parry –1, 2 hands), Black leather armor (+1), $50 in trade goods (toilet paper and beer)
Spells: Fear, Smite
Power Points: 10

The Mad Daddy, a Villain for Planet Motherfucker

The Mad Daddy, Apocalypse Warlord (Wildcard)

"Russia's bombs did a damn good job destroying Murica. Let's see if I can't do better.

Attributes: Agility d8, Smarts d10, Spirit d6, Strength d6, Vigor d6
Skills: Driving d6, Fighting d8, Gambling d6, Intimidation d6, Notice d8, Persuasion d6, Repair d4, Shooting d8, Streetwise d6, Survival d6, Taunt d8, Weird Science d8
Charisma: 0; Pace: 6; Parry: 6; Toughness: 5
Hindrances: Big Mouth, Greedy (Major)
Edges: Arcane Background (Weird Science), Command, No Mercy
Powers: Havoc (Emitted from Chaos Crown device)
Gear: Laser Pistol (Range 15/30/60, 1-3d6, Shots 24, Semi-Auto), Leather (+1, Covers torso, arms, legs), Switchblade (Str+d4, –2 to be Noticed if hidden), $240 in barter goods (beer and toilet paper).

Planet Motherfucker Character Template: The Human Fly

The Human Fly

I'm a human fly and I don't know why. I got ninety six-tears in my ninety-six eyes.

Attributes: Agility d8, Smarts d6, Spirit d4, Strength d6, Vigor d6
Skills: Acid d4, Climbing d6, Fighting d6, Intimidation d4, Notice d6, Piloting d6, Stealth d4, Survival d6, Tracking d6
Charisma: -4; Pace: 6; Parry: 5; Toughness: 5
Hindrances: Outsider, Ugly
Edges: Alertness, Arcane Background (Super Powers)
Powers: Acid (Range: Touch; deals 2d6 damage and 1d6 damage every turn for 1d4 rounds)
Gear: Flak Jacket (+2/+4, Covers torso), Glock (9mm) (Range 12/24/48, 2d6, Shots 17, AP 1, Semi-Auto), Survival knife (Str+d4, Contains supplies that add +1 to Survival rolls), $170 in barter goods (Beer and Toilet Paper)