Savage Worlds

I want to get into SW, and feel like buying a nice looking base rule book.

This one is all my local store has, and seems to cover general sci-fi and fantasy, but what about my favorite genre, cyberpunk? Is there a base rule book that covers that? Is this one plus a couple house rules enough, or would I need some expansion?

Other urls found in this thread:

dropbox.com/s/pk9t29yrf0fm1mz/savage worlds (deluxe explorer's edition).pdf?dl=0
dropbox.com/s/5mzt5k0ym59n39j/Interface Zero 2.0 - Core Rulebook (Layers).pdf?dl=0
dropbox.com/s/u7hspbhft2nsgqj/1445741526004.pdf?dl=0
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

>but what about my favorite genre, cyberpunk?
Interface Zero 2.0

Hey I was just about to ask if anyone had any experience using this. Saw that Deadlands had adopted this as it's system and was thinking about running it for my roll20 group.
Anyone got any experience with the system they'd care to share with us?

Science fiction companion (2e I think) and Interface Zero 2.0.

SW Core
dropbox.com/s/pk9t29yrf0fm1mz/savage worlds (deluxe explorer's edition).pdf?dl=0

IZ Core
dropbox.com/s/5mzt5k0ym59n39j/Interface Zero 2.0 - Core Rulebook (Layers).pdf?dl=0

Editable sheet
dropbox.com/s/5mzt5k0ym59n39j/Interface Zero 2.0 - Core Rulebook (Layers).pdf?dl=0

Scifi
dropbox.com/s/u7hspbhft2nsgqj/1445741526004.pdf?dl=0

That should give you a lot to work with. Limit explosions somehow. Give 2 skill points for skill advances instead of normal rules. Give like 30k free for avatar stuff if you want to include cyberspace stuff.

Savage Worlds is one of the shittiest systems to receive acclaim in the past ten years. It has a nice pulpy tone, it feels like a "classic" RPG what with longswords dealing 1d8 damage, and the step-dice ability scores, but don't be seduced by how cute it looks. The game is riddled with flaws. The "bennie" system, for example, is the stupidest shit imaginable. You get three per session that are free reroll tokens. They are a prime example of why dissociated mechanics are bad. Characters will just play til they run out of bennies then call an end to the session. Or, they will turtle until the DM gets sick of it. Also the GM is meant to hand out as many of these bennies as possible for "good roleplaying" which by today's standards means any roleplay at all, so the characters basically never fail. That, and the PCs roll two dice for every check and take the highest roll, because they are oh-so-special. As a result, even a character with d4 (bare minimum proficiency) in a skill has a 62% chance of success. Add in bennies, and there's basically no way the characters can fail. And as soon as the players run out of bennies, they start preening and prawning to do rule-of-cool bullshit to earn more, and whine when you don't hand them out.

The combat system is decent and the only place the game really shines is at handling battles with large amounts of "mooks" due to there being no hit points, only a damage threshold to pass to kill an opponent. This is fun, and powerful monsters have higher Toughness so they last longer in battle, but with no step-reduction your attacks are either effective or ineffective due ot the game's autistic abstraction. Thus the game cannot handle single-monster combat, nor does the combat have the engaging depth of a game like D&D. Thus, fighting swarms of mooks is pretty much your only opportunity. Anything else will be devastated after a couple of rounds.

The guns rules are where Savage Worlds really shits the bed, though. Shotguns give a flat +2 bonus to hit, making them extremely overpowered. They have no armor piercing but thanks to exploding dice they deal almost twice as much damage. A flat bonus to hit with a shotgun is a nice abstraction, but even the excuse of "pulp" is not enough to justify this kind of blatant fellatio of a decent but not spectacular weapon. "Okay, okay," you say, "the developer has a boner for shotguns. So what?" Well, three-round burst does the same thing. A flat +2 bonus to hit, and no range reduction for damage... in fact, a +2 bonus to damage. All for firing three shots. That somehow makes you a god at hitting. The double tap mechanic also reflects a complete lack of understanding as to the method's purpose. And the gun damage itself is abominable: why does a Garand only deal 2d8, while an AK-47, with a shorter barrel and less-powerful cartridge, deal 2d8+1? Answer: the developers literally have no fucking clue how guns work yet insisted on filling their equipment page with gun porn. I won't even get into the armor that lets you consistently soak .50 caliber bullets. "Oh that's fine," you say, "Futuristic armor, right?" Nope. Modern day armor.

Savage Worlds is a nice idea but it's so full of literal mistakes it's better to throw out the game entirely and play a competently-designed system like GURPS.

Thanks user, great delivering. Although you reposted the IZ Core under your Editable Sheet link.

Still, thanks a lot.

Autism: The post

For those of you without diseased brains, Savage Worlds is a fairly solid if light rules system that's great for cinematic play rather than simulationist play. There is the presence of bennies, which are a spendable asset players can use to reroll or boost rolls. However, significant NPCs can receive these as well.

Is this pasta fresh?

Is this some kind of false flag to get people to hate GURPS?

I'm disappointed to hear that, but will naturally still have a look at it.

That being said, what I'm mostly looking for is a crunch-light system, something rather simple that allows players to um, I guess improvise a bit more or something. We haven't played for years and want just some fun for the few weekends that we occasionaly manage to meet.

GURPS is being thrown around a lot here, what's the design focus behind that stuff? Crunch light/ heavy? What are its features as compared to DnD?

Ignore that user, he's either a false flagger or someone who gives GURPS a bad name. Savage Worlds is a fine system, myself and my group have been playing it for years and half of us have been in the hobby for 15+ years. Savage Worlds is a great middle ground between fluff and crunch, though if you want to go even lighter and even more malleable, check out FUDGE, aka the game FATE was made from and never properly credits.

GURPS is also great, but it is the definition of crunch. While most of it is optional, even the baseline stuff is pretty dense.

As someone with only a passing familiarity with GURPS, it's a fairly powerful toolbox but you really need to tweak it a lot to suit your campaign. You're meant to pick and choose what mechanics you want to have in your game, from complexity of combat to the skills. Conversely, this puts a lot of weight on the GM as you have to figure out what knobs you want to fiddle with.
In play, the system is fairly simple, but it all boils down to what options you choose to have in your game. The majority of the crunch lies in character/NPC creation and prep.

I will admit, I've come to dislike the benny system after GM'ing a Savage Worlds game. I don't like how it's a meta-mechanic divorced from the game itself, I'd prefer if it worked more like Fate points where you're invoking a characteristic of element of the scene. Obviously you can request that PCs come up with a way to translate the use of a benny to in-game fluff, but there's no requirement by the rules and my players never bothered anyways. Having to refresh them at the start of each session is annoying too, since there's plenty of times where we have to cut a session abruptly and then everyone's meta-resource is back with no in-game logic behind it. I eventually ruled that bennies would be handed out based on dramatic scenes rather than sessions.

Also, having to remember to hand them out gets annoying. Just in general had trouble remembering I'm supposed to give them out for good RP/whatever and then needing to distinguish what quality of RP/whatever would be worthy of a benny or not.

GURPS is a basically simple system with tons of sim rules you can add on. If you want improvised gameplay, SW is probably a lot better. GURPS is more in the style of Runequest or Hero system, detailed hit locatuion and injury rules, cascading adds and minuses in a contested skill system, etc.

How do people seriously have trouble with fate points?

Who knows. I think they have some sort of problem with metanarrative currency, as real life doesn't have bennies, or something?

>However, significant NPCs can receive these as well.

How the fuck does that make the problems I outlined with the system any better?

>For those of you without diseased brains, Savage Worlds is a fairly solid if light rules system that's great for cinematic play rather than simulationist play.

Not an argument. And Savage Worlds is far from rules-light.

>Autism: The post

Also not an argument. But then, there really isn't any counterpoint to what I said, seeing as I outlined objective facts about the game. It is up to OP whether he wants to wade through the shitmess of the game to derive some faint sort of enjoyment from it.

They're not Fate points you retarded fuck. FATE points at least require you have something bad happen to you to earn them back. They are metacurrency, but they are integral to the game's most basic mechanics, and Fate is a narrative game besides. FATE's points are much more restricted and also are required to be used just to make use of your character's basic abilities.

The problem with metacurrency is that your characters are usually unaware of them, thus making decisions based on them is dissociated and weird. Your fighter doesn't know he only has one daily use of Twin Blade Strike or whatever the fuck 4e names its powers, and your Savage Worlds character doesn't know he only has one benny left. By using this knowledge to affect your character's decisions, you are no longer roleplaying, you are storytelling. You are taking yourself outside of your character, and affecting something else of the game world.

Which is fine, normally, but the way Savage Worlds does it is fucking retarded. Bennies have literally no reason to exist besides as feel-good bullshit to prevent characters from ever having to fail at anything, because they can just call the session whenever they run out. Because they have knowledge that their characters do not.

Does this happen much in practice? Not really. But three bennies is plenty, and what with the wild die it is pretty much impossible for a character to actually fail a roll unless they want to, or unless it's something minor and inconsequential that isn't worth dropping a benny on.

Oh and if you run games that are heavy on RP in Savage Worlds, prepare to have this problem exacerbated even further, as the single combat you have per session will be irrelevant because the PCs have all three bennies to throw against it and literally can't die, or in the case of a skill challenge will be pretty much guaranteed to succeed.

And don't even get me started on the awful fucking chase / vehicle rules.

>Ignore that user, he's either a false flagger or someone who gives GURPS a bad name.

No I unironically like GURPS. Characters also succeed a lot in GURPS, but that's because of actual competence, not meta-narrative plot-armor bullshit.

>Savage Worlds is a fine system, myself and my group have been playing it for years and half of us have been in the hobby for 15+ years. Savage Worlds is a great middle ground between fluff and crunch

Savage Worlds does nothing well that GURPS doesn't also do well, and also without the stupid fucking bennies and broken-ass bonuses to hit from shotguns. Ironically, GURPS shotguns also give a bonus to hit, but it doesn't make an untrained retard have a 75% chance of hitting like it does in Savage Worlds.

>I'd prefer if it worked more like Fate points where you're invoking a characteristic of element of the scene.

I'd prefer to cut out the bennies entirely. They are stupid. There is no purpose for them to exist other than to reduce lethality in the case of soaking wounds, and to avoid failure, in which case why bother rolling? It's like playing D&D, but every time you roll the dice you ignore what it says and pretend you got a natural 20. Fucking pointless. You're just using the game "rules" to wank yourself while cheating.

>Also, having to remember to hand them out gets annoying. Just in general had trouble remembering I'm supposed to give them out for good RP/whatever and then needing to distinguish what quality of RP/whatever would be worthy of a benny or not.

Yes and it gives the wrong motivation to roleplay. Characters should roleplay because they want to, not because they want to beg and preen for a reroll point like a fucking dog.

>And don't even get me started on the awful fucking chase / vehicle rules.
Get started on them. I wanna hear.

The out-of-control rules make no sense, there are no rules for building vehicles, the rules suck ass for ship combat, the ship combat rules for fucking D&D 3.5 are better, and after five years of playing the game I still cannot find where the hell it says a vehicle takes four wounds. Also the four-wound system makes vehicle combat slow as fuck.

If there's one thing I agree with on the SW to GURPS comparison, is that bennies give you a lot of leverage on a session by session basis. Everyone in our group would just hoard the bennies on a possible KO/Death, or maybe on something suspicious. Unless you get a ton of 1s on those 6 rerolls that's a lot of mulligans per session.

Meanwhile after a GURPS combat 3/4 people are injured (One at -HP), with the only thing to save us being HT rolls and passing defense checks. When a sword swipe can take half your HP easy, things can get tense.

You know, you don't even need to use the bennies system.

When I ran SW, I didn't use bennies at all. The system still works just fine without.

>The out-of-control rules make no sense
Elaborate.

>there are no rules for building vehicles
4e vehicles when?

>the rules suck ass for ship combat, the ship combat rules for fucking D&D 3.5 are better
Elaborate.

>and after five years of playing the game I still cannot find where the hell it says a vehicle takes four wounds.
Page 100 under Damage, as you'd expect:
>When a vehicle takes its fourth wound, it is automatically wrecked and the driver must make a Driving roll or go out of control.

It's fantastic.

Savage Worlds is my preferred system if my group wants something besides Burning Wheel or my homebrew. Currently running a 5e game as a favor, but after that it's back to Savage Worlds.

Keep the bennies sparse, adjust the weapon/armor stats as need.

Just be careful mixing rule sets. Especially the superpower supplement.