Savage Worlds

Yeah, it was me. Happy to hear you liked it!

I've received fairly few responses, but I'm trudging on. I'm adding new places, connections and items as time allows - as for now I have prepared six zones (each with 5-10 locations) out of fourteen as well as the overlying mechanics.

Honestly, by the time I'm done this'll be a rather hefty module.

>a shit system that tries too hard to reinvent the wheel.
Isn't that Dungeon World?

I usually give heavy armor to creatures like dragons and other fuck huge threats, and treat great weapons, siege weapons, and parts of the terrain like boulders, trees, giant chandeliers, and so on as heavy damage weapons.

For huge or large bosses typical in a metroidvania game I also break the boss into pieces, usually six (two arms, two legs, torso, and head) and treat each part as a wild card with 3 hit points and varying toughness.

Had a fight in a sci-fi setting where the players opted to distract a kaiju by driving through the streets of 1930s new york long enough for the mad scientist of the party to climb up the things back and plant a bomb on its head. It was fun.

It's virt. to him everything is trying too hard if it isn't pathfinder or 3.X

>It's virt.
>Only one person on the WHOLE WORLD dislikes his pet game
Grow a pair.

I'm guessing you haven't read virts "review" of sw then.

Most people don't care enough to hate on sw. Virt goes out of his way to make it seem like multiple people despise sw.

I'd guess he got kicked out of a deadlands game or something as a kid and it's left him bitter.

>to make it seem like multiple people despise sw
His multiple personalities, yeah. The man's whacko, what do you think it's happening on his mind?

I don't really want to know what's happening in his head.

How many players are you planning for?

Follow me here, OP.

Savage worlds can totally work for this. But you have to be unafraid to homebrew the SHIT out of this system, and make it your bitch. If you're gonna do dungeon crawls, don't be afraid to limit explosions.

There's about three different ways I see handling explosions that work.

1) Rank-based limitation: A person's dice can only explode a number of times per rank. IE: A seasoned character can have their d6 explode twice, but if the second explosion is a 6 again nothing happens and it stops there. Novice would get one, veteran 3, and so on. This allows for players to still feel like they can take on stronger stuff, and gives you an actual range of numbers to work with.

2) Die-based limitation: Each die can only explode based on it's die type. a d4 could explode once, d6 twice, d8 three times, d10 four times, and d12 five times. This is another way of helping with pesky numbers and makes a more concrete limit on what your players can do.

3) No Explosions: Just fuckin' remove them. Fuck it. Straight remove explosions from Savage Worlds. The math without explosions is perfectly fine. The system takes on a different feel too. Keep soaking and bennies in if you do this, it will be the edge people will NEED. I'd suggest doing things like making edges that somehow give explosions back. Like one that gives you 1 explosion on a certain skill or attribute. Or allowing players to spend a benny to take whatever die they just rolled, roll it again and add that to the total.

Attached is a free fan supplement that basically has a randomly generated megadungeon. Use this, and use the Scifi Companion, Fantasy Companion, and Necessary Evil to make enemies. Do not feel afraid to use scifi stats and re-fluff them as something fantasy. It's hard to tell a lot of the times in combat, and you can give the enemies a magitek feel.

Also PLEASE PLEASE give enemies who are supposed to be dramatic more wounds. Do NOT feel guilty about soaking either.

TBC

>Individual monster kills don't give XP, so my players ended up avoiding all conflicts when possible.
This is pretty much how (really) old school D&D worked. You got most of your XP from gold, and combat was risky. It kind of makes sense story-wise too. The characters are there to get loot, and gain little from the fights, themselves.

>Gold and gear upgrades mean jack shit to Savage Worlds characters as there is very little difference between damage and gear stats.
In the beginning, D&D wasn't nearly as Monty Hall as it became. Magical treasure tended to be relatively rare, so you were mainly in it for the gold. And honestly, the amount of gold you got quickly outstripped your need for it. Other than XP, you often found yourself with very few uses for the gold you got, at least until you reached high enough level to get a keep. But honestly, that was a highly artificial mechanic, and many people ignored it, as they weren't looking for a fief-management campaign.

Games like Barbarians of Lemuria award you XP for wasting gold, so maybe you could do something like that. Maybe you're wasting it on booze and women, or maybe you're spending it on training or acquiring mystic scrolls to enable your advancement. But if you tie advancement entirely (or at least largely) to treasure, it suddenly becomes more valuable.

I've used different ways of giving enemies more wounds, but it comes in a few usual ways.

The first way is I just slap three extra wounds on the enemy. The first two wounds are -1 wound penalty, the third and fourth are -2 wound penalty, and the fifth and sixth are -3 wound penalty.

Another way is that I use a formula similar to how parry is calculated to find wounds. Vigor/2 + 2. This allows enemy health to scale based on how tough they really should be.With uneven amounts of wounds, make it so -3 has the least amount of presence because wounds really hurt in this system. You could also use Vigor/2 + 4 if you REALLY want to make something tough.

Don't be afraid to make extras have more wounds either, not every super tough thing needs to have a wild die. But extras with two/three wounds won't break the game either.

With all of this your players might get a little jealous and want to have extra wounds themselves. This isn't unreasonable either. Limit extra wounds to one per rank if you're going to do that, and make it an edge. I'd give personal opinions on what the requirements would be but every GM seems to differ on that. I'd make vigor part of the requirement though.

The attached PDF has some templates that come in handy too, like the boss template and the ancient template. You can throw these on enemies that are getting boring to make a quick boss fight, or improv something on the spot.

I feel like you're missing the most obvious one: a die can only explode once.

As a further tweak, you can say that a max roll on the second (exploded) die indicates 0, That eliminates the doughnut hole where it's better to be rolling a die one size smaller when you have to get the maximum value on your die to succeed.

As an avid DM and player of Savage Worlds, I do have to agree that it's simply not for dungeon crawling.

I tend to be a very story driven DM and Savage Worlds is perfect for having just enough rules for structure but not enough crunch to bog everyone down and have them focus on builds 100% of the time
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Very avid fan here. I houserule all the time, as well as use fan supplements. Your gripe seems extremely anecdotal. If anything my players blow bennies on re-rolls and only soak or use them narratively when prompted.

OP, if you really have to do it, though I recommend using Savage Armory for unique weapons.

I like to further simplify SW when possible, which may be a good thing for your mega dungeon, depending on how complex you want the characters.

I like to fuse Vigor and Strength, and then key all damage bonus off of STR (yes, even ranged one, after all, you can carry and aim heavier weapons better/throw with more force/pull the string harder if you are stronger) and all attack rolls off of agility (since that's what precision is), and require to actually hit the parry of the target, not just 4.

Forget skills, and just roll the relevant stat when a skill would be rolled. Edges that modify skills remain, they apply when you'd be rolling the relevant skill.

Finally, use Savage Armory for weapons so you don't get katana dualwielding.

>I'm working on a megadungeon crawl in vein of Castlevanias
Rippers is perfect for this.

Doesn't Virt love SW though?

The one place Savage Worlds shines is in it's combat I think, in my groups it goes faster than any other system and people have plenty of options. Smarts tricks and agility tricks, combined with taunts and intimidate. Those alone are powerful tools. Add in things like wild attack and called shots, and every single player has a powerful array of tools in their hands.

If your players don't use these rules, use them against the players until they feel threatened enough to use them back. Having enemies taunt or smarts trick while others run up at them and wild attack with a called shot to the head can be deadly, but just as much so to a player as to an enemy.

But something it makes really easy is environmental hazards, in the form of quick trait checks. The book Hellfrost has some good environmental hazards, as well as the Scifi Companion. But most of these should come from you, custom made for each situation. Strength checks or forced movement/being knocked prone, Vigor rolls or fatigue, agility/strength rolls for maneuvering around an area, and so on and so forth. Battles with gimmick like these seem to be the most memorable for my games.

Like the game where I had players fighting at the top a cave system, on platforms built around stalactites. Players had to make leaping checks to move between them, or go across shaky bridges. Shaking people and using the bash maneuver allowed them to quickly dispatch people by dropping them off the edge, which gave me plenty of story reasons to bring them back in. That little section of that shitty 5-session game is one people still talk about because of the options the area around them gave. Use your environment wisely.

YOU KNOW WHAT, YOU'RE TOTALLY RIGHT. That's a super solid alternate, just having one explosion. That makes a firm limit you can work with. About the max roll thing, that works too if such a math quirk bugs you. It's not too much to me.

Nope. He like some parts of the system. He despises the core mechanics. And don't get him started on the shotgun. or Bennies. or Chase rules.

I *think* he changed his mind and decided to hate it, instead--though I could be thinking of something else.

YES. Savage Armory is such a good tool. If you don't have a specialized melee weapon, this can fix it for you. I would also highly recommend his Supernaturalis book. It introduces a high-magic/super power system based purely off of edge advancement. A good way of spoon feeding players strong powers without having to worry about much. Advancement is slower than the erratic pace of Necessary Evil/Super Power Companion.

Virt's angry SW review is secretly sucking SW's dick at the end. He's a fan.

My nigga. OP, he's totally right you know. I'd highly recommend that along with the Castle Farkinwad book I posted earlier for a tight castlevania feel that you can even re-use.

Forgot to post Supernaturalis.

>One shot a dragon
When will this meme end? Just give important bosses heavy armor and you are good. And many systems include metacurrency of some sort. You don't see people railing on Shadowrun, WoD ect. because of their metacurrency systems that let you cheat death. While GURPS may be the better generic system, when it comes down to just beating up monsters with straightforward mechanics, Savage Worlds certainly has its niche.

I saw someone one-shot an angel with a 78 damage attack with a wild shot called attack to the head. I think the problem here is non-restricted explosions. The system doesn't benefit too much from it, and changing how they work is for the better. I totally agree about it being good for beating up monsters though, it's my favorite system because I love the combat. It's fun for me to play as a GM.

I don't think I've ever had a single die explode more than 4 times.

More fair distribution of bennies rather than the rulebook's "Once per session" recommendation could also help. For example give them their bennies for one floor of a dungeon or for the whole dungeon, and then refill them after they have completed a certain segment, regardless of how many sessions that segment took.

It certainly helps that Savage World was originally designed for wargaming. The templates are one of the many indicators of that.

Probably three to four.

I like the rank-based limitation idea. Dice would still have the potential of doing something unexpected without turning into that "I killed Typhus with a brick" screencap. Also, thanks for all posts.

I'll give it a look.

I considered giving them bennies for unexpected feats of heroism in face of impeding doom, as well as for getting into nonsensical banter (YOUR WORDS ARE AS EMPTY AS YOUR SOUL) with Figures.

It's unfortunately not as rare for me when I run the game. I just think home-brewing new things for enemies in savage worlds is good though.

YES. This. Not refilling bennies every session is a good idea, because the game can stretch out like any tabletop. Objective based bennies, and bennies based off of Hindrance roleplaying and such should be where people get them from.

Yeah, I want to try the original Deadlands sometimes. Seems fun.
I just want to post more PDFs. Have more useful Savage Worlds tools. This is a Dark Souls-esque setting that I really like. The big thing here I like is Heroic Paths, which adds extra rewards for reaching a new rank, based on a destiny you choose for the character.

No problem!

Have this. It's useful.

>I just think home-brewing new things for enemies in savage worlds is good though.
Absolutely, I was just commenting on how absurd your groups explosions are.

I need to get a group together to run Midnight, looks awesome.

Agreeing with this. I tend to treat a characters "starting" bennies as a full pool. The only way to refill that pool is proper roleplaying, and I'm, to quote my wife, jewish as fuck with them regardless.

What I like to do, is whenever I spend a benny to Soak, I give the player I soaked a benny. That spreads them around more.

And yeah, Savage Midnight is really awesome. It seems like a lot of effort went into making it.

Have Evernight, a similar setting.

I usually tend to spend them to unshake mooks as needed. That's about it.

> YOUR WORDS ARE AS EMPTY AS YOUR SOUL

WHAT IS A MAN

Really? How does that make things play out? I usually never even spend bennies on unshaking even if I fail, I focus on the non-shaken ones. Maybe I should change that.

Eldritch Weapons! Makes Soul Calibur/Edge tier weapons, or minor magic items. Good for boss loot or plot points.

It annoys the crap out of my players, that's for sure. It allows me to better maneuver around them and provide a tactical challenge to them.

Most of the time they just one shot minions, but if the rare cases they don't it's a good way to shake things up.

I should try that too, but I already spend lots of bennies fast anyways.

I'm really picky about spending mine. But give it a shot and let us know how it goes.

lol... I'm being quoted now? That's my exact flame on Savage Worlds a couple weeks ago.

Why are you even running SW at this point? Those changes eliminate a majority of what makes SW its own system. Might as well run something OSR-related at that point.

Or they can just make those simple changes and play savage worlds. Freedom of choice and what not.

archive.is/xzeH9

>I don't think I've ever had a single die explode more than 4 times.

nigga you are rolling 2 to 3 dice for pretty much every damage roll. I've had shotguns EASILY pouring out 20 or 30 damage and absolutely wrecking the PCs' shit.

That doesn't really make sense to me. Even altered, it's still completely unrelated to OSR games. I don't run this for fantasy most of the time, I run it for pulp scifi and cyberpunk stuff, or modern horror.

OSR games aren't meant for that. I still prefer homebrew savage worlds. And if I wanna make do fantasy, I can't.

SHOTGUNS NEED TO LEAVE. Changing the +1 to spread from +2 helps. BUT DAMN.

A d6 has a 1 in 7776 chance to explode more than 4 times. It can happen, but it's pretty fucking rare.

...

>ever had a SINGLE DIE explode more than 4 times

reading comprehension mate.

4 times is the most I have ever seen a single die explode in a decade of play.

the largest number of simultaneous explosions I've seen is 3.

I stand corrected: he loves it in his own special way.

I didn't mean that to come off as hostile.
Savage Worlds is not a good system for everything.
It has flaws, well known ones. Some are more easy to work around than others. If OP is going to run an exploration in a haunted castle/corrupted environ with big bad bosses, it won't be the same as one would construct with D&D. Different games, different specific concerns.
Apologies if that came off poorly.

Multi segmenting is an idea I'll play with in my next games. I've had them as extras before, but not wild cards. Most recently I played around with shadows of the Colossus's weak point is hard to get to idea. It has had generally positive results.

I do love some pulp era kaiju antics. Sounds fun. Did you alter the chase rules at all?

No I just took into account that a kaiju chasing a small car through a dense city was likely to destroy buildings and infrastructure. This monster in particular was on the small side, only about six stories tall.

Rightio, any mishaps involving flying masonry?

Yeah I saved your post.

Nigger I read what you fucking said, the point is that there is more than one die being rolled that can explode, I dont' give a fuck about a single die because that is very rarely being rolled.

You need to learn how to actually figure out what someone is saying without looking for the first low-effort snarky post you can make you retarded fuckwit.

You should see his GURPS and WRM reviews.

A few. They took a cut through a construction site rather than take the car into a tunnel. I-beams went flying everywhere, some stray bricks smashed the windshield. Scientist character was lucky he was on the back of the thing when it went storming through.

You seem mad mate. Try to relax a bit, it's better for you and everyone else.

Also if you're not going to make an effort to clearly communicate your message, and instead depend on others to correctly interpret you, you're better off not talking at all.

> 1-shot a dragon
If it's good enough for Tolkien then it's good enough for all of us.

Tolkien is the king of anticlimax. He rarely misses an opportunity to pan away from an exciting battle so he can describe a tree for like three pages.

Simplest solution I found was simply subtracting 1 to the aced roll.

e.g. A roll of 6 on a D6 followed by 3 is a total of 8 and not 9.

You can still continue to ace but you over all odd are still better with a bigger die.

Personally I'm fine with a the occasional D4 exploding and doing 800 points of damage. The game is not built around battles of attrition like a lot of dungeon crawlers are designed for.

Combat supposed be if not realistic but still brutal and realistically unpredictable. Every attack is potentially fatal it just depends on in whoms favour.

...tell me more about this tree.

>...tell me more about this tree.
We'll get to that in a minute. Right now I need to pan away to describe the walls of a city for a few pages. After that, it's time to sing a song. But then I'll talk some about the leaves on the tree before discussing smoke rings or elf hair for a while.

>one-shot a dragon using his fist

this just sounds like a cool, ridiculous thing that happened and you werent a good enough DM to explain it/fluff it

Remember exploding damage goes both ways.

Even the most tankest of tank PCs is in danger of being unceremoniously one shot by a low level minion with a particularly extraordinarily (un)lucky roll.

You simply can't treat mobs as XP grind farms.

God, I hope you wouldn't regardless of the system. Mob grinds are boring as shit and terrible game design.

> Small child throws a pebble from the protesting crowd toward the non-Wild Card police mech unit.
> A hit!
> Rolls damage.
> Ace, Ace, Ace!
> GM has to explain how a pebble just did that.

I'm not saying this situation is common, but the fact that it very well could happen is just plain retarded. And the mantra of the SW community is "Well if the GM can't explain how that happens, then he's a bad GM".

Naw, son... that's just bad game design.

Except the police mech unit, and any officer in power armor, would have heavy armor. Which would ignore any and all damage by SALW's. So a pebble would do jack shit.

Unless you as the GM houseruled heavy armor out of the game, in which case just houserule damage from a pebble out of the game, or at least that particular incident.

It was an exaggerated example. Nice cherry picking though. I bet their delicious when they're of your own creation.

>"I'm not saying this situation is common, but the fact that it very well could happen is just plain retarded."

Except the very situation you described isn't possible, so you lied as a result of your ignorance. Trying to pass that off by saying "I was exaggerating!" is no better than saying "I was only pretending to be retarded!"

Why waste yours and everyone's time by not presenting a proper scenario and decent argument from the start? Just so you can be snippy?

>This fake exaggerated possibility is why game is bad!

You're fucking retarded mate.

*they're or they are delicious