Does anyone here play Savage Worlds...

Yeah, melee combat can be pretty bad like that. My suggestion is to always use the reckless attack (I think that's the name) option to get +2 attack +2 damage, and -2 parry.

The horror companion has both the sanity meter and a literal "chosen slayer" NPC template. It's quite capable of both.

Wild Attack is pretty hardcore broken. Just pray you hit and actually hurt your target.

I honestly wouldn't say it's all that broken, since parry starts out 2 higher than the typical rolled value of the die and 2 damage isn't that much to a dedicated melee combatant (for a guy with a 1d8 strength and a longsword, it raises it from a typical value of 9 to 11, and that +2 can't explode so it's not a big deal).

Yeah, you're probably right, I've never really GMed a heavily melee-focused campaign (although I did a cyberpunk game where one PC was a cyborg assassin who used monoknives exclusively, he did very well for himself). Shotguns really do need toning down, though, or at least given the treatment they got in East Texas University that softens their to-hit bonuses.

I'd just give them their bonus to hit only when they start losing damage. +1 when they're down to 2d6, +2 when they're down to 1d6. There's no reason a cluster of pellets less than an inch across should be getting a bonus to hit.

I really would not suggest playing Savage Worlds. It is a badly designed system with terrible meta-mechanics that encourage not only metagaming but ending session early, it also makes it near impossible for characters to fail at anything. The gun mechanic are broken, and literally do not make sense. The only thing it is good for is being a miniatures wargame, and it even sucks at most of that. Exploding dice make stupid shit happen constantly, the damage is way overkill for 90% of the threats allowing characters to one-shot massive creatures with tiny weapons. On the other end, characters literally cannot fail, because they have three bennies per session which allow them to reroll whatever the fuck they want (not damage rolls, to be fair, but still). And the GM is told he is a piece of shit if he doesn't hand out more bennies for "good roleplaying" (in other words, stupid nat20-lolz bullshit). Also the characters get to roll a wild die with their normal roll and take the wild die if it is higher, thus making them even less likely to fail at anything. Not to mention the cancer of the bennies being basically a safe-space for retarded character actions, CAN and WILL spread to other RPGs you play with this group. Just count down the sessions until your character asks during D&D after failing a roll "can I have a bennie"? No, get fucked faggot. Failure is an important part of RPGs and Savage Worlds throws that shit out the window.

That's kinda how ETU does it, but there it's +2 from 2d6 onwards. Me, I just tend to chop it down to a flat +1 to all ranges unless it's a sawed-off. Those things need some love.
Oh look, it's this guy again. Nice pasta, shame it's so stale.

Funny, because I've never experienced anything you've described here in all the years I've played Savage Worlds.

Of course, I happen to have a group that isn't complete ass, so...

Nice pasta, by the way.

What gets me laughing at this shit pasta is that he seems to think bennies make your character invulnerable.
Tell that to the Nord thief I played in an Elder Scrolls campaign who nearly died due to the rest of the team being clumsy fucktards and general bad luck in the resulting fight. Rerolling doesn't help if your dice refuse to roll above three.

>SW shotguns

here's how I do it, on top of +0/+1/+2 to-hit: if target has any armor, then the armor value applies to EVERY buckshot dice separately. That means suddenly cheapo flak jacket of Armor 4 stops almost all buckshot damage, like it should.

>not only metagaming but ending session early
I've never had my players want to end the session early to refill their bennies.

Maybe you just play with shitty people.

>my anecdotal evidence is a counterargument.

Don't bennies give you a shot of bonus experience if you save them?

>and it honestly reads like an elaborated version of a minis game,

Because that's exactly what it is. Even I, a big fan of the system, will admit that.

> So I'm curious, does this game actually, for real, do less punchy stuff well?

Nope! Savage Worlds shines at its best when you stick to the pulpy roots where it's coming from. In other words, either a medieval swordsman level or power, or by more modern standards a skilled guy with a few guns to see him through danger. Any power level higher than that, and the characters are more or less gods you can't touch as a GM.

Now in spite of the critique, there's still A LOT of shit Savage Worlds is good for, and it's worth learning the rules just so you can open yourself up to a lot of potential games in the future. All very different from each other, depending on the GM's imagination. The games Savage Worlds does well, it does very well.

In certain settings, they used to. I haven't seen one that does in the last 5 years or so, though.

No.

>Looks mostly like a pretty light game about punching things in the face and pulpy action.

System is a secondary concern if your GM is good. You can have great games with just "roll d100" for every action.

SW is pretty okay if you want a rules light system. Just houserule stupid shit like exploding dice or card decks for initiative.

>SW is pretty okay if you want a rules light system.

No.

Savage Worlds is a shitty system that tries too hard to reinvent the wheel. The exploding die and raise mechanics make any form of encounter balance/planning impossible. A rank 1 novice can one-shot a dragon with lucky die rolls using his fist. The system boasts that bennies are used for "cool things" like players changing narrative or pulling off impossible stunts, but players just hoard them for use as extra hit points. The chase system (any iteration of it) is an absolute shit storm of retardation. The 3-wound limit is just plain bad game design. The community is full of sad 40-something-year-old zealots who foam at the mouth at any notion of house ruling the assy mechanics. Shotguns are utterly broken and despite having the same average damage as a rifle, end up dealing twice as much because of exploding dice. The entire game works on a fucktarded tabletop scale so you either have to use miniatures for EVERY combat or have fun doing extra math every time you want to figure out range penalties.

It's like the worst parts of FATE and GURPS put together, with none of the upsides. Don't play it. Leave it in the trash where it belongs.

>Shotguns are utterly broken
Short range and no armor piercing. Exploding dice don't come to play nearly as often as to have them do "twice as much" damage. Shotguns are fine.

You know the core book literally tells you to modify stuff you don't like like removing exploding dice or adding more wounds? Hell, books often offer tons of side rules and changes you may want to use.

>sad 40-something-year-old zealots who foam at the mouth at any notion of house ruling the assy mechanics

Never ever happened to me. It's D&D fags who are always crazy about muh rules.

>You know the core book literally tells you to modify stuff you don't like like removing exploding dice or adding more wounds?
It matters little when his understanding of the rules is so faulty to begin with. It'd be like trying to fix your computer by replacing parts that already work with some faulty bullshit.

>worst parts of GURPS
But SW doesn't try to autistically replicate every possible variable or have combat turns that take ages user

In my experience, the main sticking point with shotguns is that +2 to attack they get, which makes it much more likely you'll get a raise. Between that the decent chance of exploding dice at close range, they're absurdly deadly.

>A rank 1 novice can one-shot a dragon with lucky die rolls using his fist.

Would someone who is better than me at math calculate the odds of a wildcard with a d12 melee skill, a d12 strength, and the martial arts edge doing this to a dragon with a parry of 7, a toughness of 20, and the +4 to hit for the dragon being huge doing this?

Also

>encounter balance

Kek. Don't fuss about balancing encounters and just describe things as should make sense; let the players figure out their own survival.

Sure, but they'll completely whittle out at long range, and still don't do too much against armor or damage reduction.

With exploding dice, they'll do plenty against both since they just add to toughness.

Benny economy.

Poorly designed, the whole system is built around it, and ruins the entire game.

If you redesign the Benny system to actually work, it could be a decent pulpy system.

Only other gripe is that when you improve a skill and go up a die type, your odds against specific dcs (sometimes very common dcs) actually go *down*.

That one can easily be fixed by adding 2-3 fate dice to every roll.

What's wrong with the benny economy?

>Only other gripe is that when you improve a skill and go up a die type, your odds against specific dcs (sometimes very common dcs) actually go *down*.

This has been debunked. It's in one instance (d4-d6) and it's a tiny amount.

this, it's something stupid, like a fraction of a percent IIRC.

any opinions on my houserule plox?

>houserule

I like the to-hit bonuses, but I think you've misunderstood armor in SW. Since it doesn't reduce damage but adds to toughness. Unless you're considering a multiplier to armor based on buckshot, but I'd say negative AP (which should have been a thing from the start) would be a better solution.

I know armor adds to toughness, I meant deducing the armor value alone from the results, lemme explain:
For example: target has standard 5 toughness and 3 armor on top of that (just to be clear, 4AP would only remove 3 armor, since ap doesn't *bite* into raw toughness). RAW, a shotgun roll of 4,4,3 without modifiers would add up to 11dmg total, shaking the character. With +2, it would even score a wound.
My idea is to have the 3 armor removed from each result on shot dice, so with my houserule a roll of 4,4,3 would look liek this - 4(-3),4(-3),3(-3), so it'd only add up to 2; or 4 with +2 from buckshot. See where I'm getting at? You could still aim for the head to blow someone's brains out, though. Buckshot it still killmurdery against unarmored targets, but even a bit of armor goes a long way againt my variant, like it should.

I think ti overcomplicates things. If armor bothers you so much, just say that the -4 to AP of modern body armor applies as additional armor to shotguns.

>no armor piercing.
>he thinks armor piercing actually matters

It makes a difference when you're fighting anything that isn't armored with ballistic armor.

Hitting the dragon isn't a problem. With the guy rolling d12+4, he's got a 75% chance of hitting the dragon.

I'm using AnyDice to calculate damage so bear with me if this is incorrect, but to kill the dragon in one hit you'd need to roll high enough to Shake it plus three raises, so 20+4+4+4. According to AnyDice the odds of rolling 32 with d12+d4 even on exploding dice is something like 0.29%.

That's also completely ignoring the fact that a Dragon is a Wild Card and therefore can use GM bennies to make a Soak Roll.

So basically user is being a hyperbolic fuckwit.

Oh, also, this is ignoring the fact that a dragon has Fear -2, so anyone who sees it has to make a Fear check at a -2 penalty, and someone who minmaxed their character to have d12 Strength and d12 Fighting skill as a Rank 1 novice is going to have a piss-poor Spirit or Guts stat.

Thanks. I kinda figure it would be absurdly small, even with the punching savant. Fun fact: he'd likely shit-all for vigor and no other edges.

It's a small amount. The fact remains that rather than getting *better* you get worse. And it happens for a specific TN at every increase, IIRC.

It's a small issue, but it's still bullshit. *not increasing* with investment is bullshit. And it's not like they're only rare DCs that won't come up. But with a couple of fate dice to smooth out the curve, the issue disappears completely.

The fact that Bennies=hp, and that the whole game hinges on people having the right flow of Bennies or combat = stun lock and die, is something I just can't stomach. I absolutely hated it.

Better than the deadlands classic system though!

>And it happens for a specific TN at every increase, IIRC.
When a die has to roll maximum, you're better off rolling the next lower die instead.

I agree that it's not an ideal situation, but A) it *is* a small difference, B) you can sometimes see something like this at play in real life (frequently a new fighting game player who just mashes buttons furiously is a bit more dangerous to a skilled player than one who is inexperienced but starting to learn the ropes, as the latter is more predictable), and C) it's easy to remedy if you care about it.

How do you fix it? One of two ways. The simple way: if you roll maximum on your second roll, treat it as 0. This, of course, means you can only roll up once, so if you're not okay with that you can do it the slightly more annoying way, which is to subtract one from the result each time you roll up (so a d8 that rolls 8, 8, 5 = 19). Why didn't Savage Worlds go ahead and fix it? I'm guess that they didn't think that people would be autistic enough to care about or even notice the small discrepancies (and I'm not trying to insult other people by saying this; I'm absolutely autistic enough to be concerned about shit like this, myself). The also probably figured that it wasn't worth the complexity involved in adding in a fix. And sure, it wouldn't be that complex, but then the problem also isn't that big.

The stunlock thing shouldn't happen if you don't tank spirit.

>combat = stun lock and die

They fixed this with an errata literally every group uses now.

s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/peg-freebies/SW_FAQ_May_2015.pdf

Long story short, if you succeed your spirit roll to unshake you still get your full turn, whereas previously you needed a raise to do so.

I like it, though I do apply a few tweaks.

>Use Savage Armory for weapons.
>Fuse strength and vigor into one attribute, especially for modern stuff.
>Use the "exploding roll is 0 on max" as above.
>If I want to go really simple, default skills to the relevant attributes.

Also, even if you stay shaken you can still move your entire Pace and try to avoid whatever it was that hit you having another go.

>The system boasts that bennies are used for "cool things" like players changing narrative or pulling off impossible stunts, but players just hoard them for use as extra hit points
This is actually something I've encountered. What are some ways to "fix" that problem?

Don't. There's nothing wrong with using it that way. It's their bennies. But if you insist on fucking with it, then just be really stingy with your bennies (I only hand them out if PCs actually play out their flaws) and give them the opportunity to make a lot of skill rolls - they'll flunk some of them eventually and burn a benny to reroll. Don't FORCE them to make a lot of unnecessary skill rolls, just give them opportunities to get a little more information or cool little bonuses for doing a skill check on something.

Encourage their use by not only bringing up the opportunities for cool stunts, but also charging them with narrative and emotional weight so that the players have all the more reason to try and succeed. Make rolls relatively rare but high-stakes, so that if they fail they'll want to spend a benny for another try. Maybe also throw stronger enemies at them so that they might want to try soak rolls when they get hurt.

Basically just use the system for what it's intended. If the players don't use their bennies so much, maybe it's because the GM isn't giving them enough reason to.

That table is misleading. The goal is not to HIT the number but to hit or surpass.

Just looking at the d4 and d6 here are the probability of succeeding with TN 6
d4 - 49.9
d6 - 65.7

Gotta add up the probabilities of the TN and every number higher (obviously not the gray ones).

How do people not know this?

Remind them of what they can use them for besides soak rolls. Hell, expand upon it if you can think of cool shit to spend them on (can't remember if adding something narratively is already an option, but if it's not it should be).

western horror with tiny brooms attached to your shoes, and chinamen that can tornado through dirt.

>How do people not know this?
System bitching doesn't have to be accurate, it just has to look plausible when someone glances at it.

>They fixed this with an errata literally every group uses now.
Every gm in my group myself included refuses to do so.

>The goal is not to HIT the number but to hit or surpass.
That's what the numbers are. You don't have a 75% chance to roll a 2 on a d4. You have a 75% chance to roll a 2 or higher.

A) The system bitching *is* accurate. B) It wasn't really system bitching.

If you read you'll see that while I acknowledge the matter as an issue, I indicate that it's minor, might have at least some precedence in life, and is easily remedied.

What are people's thoughts on exploding matryoshka dice? As in each time it explodes it gets 1 step smaller, with a d4 exploding into nothing. Or alternatively the wacky variant where rolling 1 below max results in an matryoshka explosion.

Sounds like a good way of preventing things from getting too silly by chance.

Unfortunately the only SW games I can get these days are on Roll20, and I don't think their die roller supports that yet. Aside from just rolling each exploded die individually, that is.

Then my apologies, I'm an idiot.

Seems like it's just an excuse for extra work. If you want to limit the power of exploding dice, just do one and done.

No problem. We all have a brain-fart from time to time.

Why?

Because all change is universally bad. :(

>Savage Worlds general never

If GURPS shit can have one than /savgen/ should be capable of existing too.

>People asking for advice on homerules and settings.
>Talking about their favourite supplements.
>Sharing content.
>Arguing over bennies.
>tfw.

>A) The system bitching *is* accurate.
Except it's not. You're factually wrong.

Why is 50 Fathoms the best Savage Worlds setting and why does no one want to play it with me?

>You're factually wrong.
Really? Please show me where my math is wrong.

I'll play it with you.

Because Weird War Two exists.

>weird war II
>not weird war I
Also, Tour of Darkness second edition when?

>Don't. There's nothing wrong with using it that way.
Yes there is, it makes characters basically invincible in combat unless you throw an unbelievable shit-ton of mooks against them.

>implying the entire point of mooks isn't for them to die in droves wearing down the heroes

Mix a wild card in with those mooks

I had a player who complained that attribute die don't really affect anything other than providing a soft cap for skill die, which I think is mostly untrue since Strength governs melee damage, Agility governs movement speed, Vigor is used for Toughness and Soak rolls, and Spirit is used to come out of Shaken and for various morale checks.

Does Wits actually do anything though?

Anyone want me to share my collection of Savage Worlds media? I've got 407 files in it.

That's a fair few more books than what I've got, so go right ahead.

>original argument wasn't constructed entirely of anecdotal bullshit.

The shotgun is borked, yes.

Ending a game early to refill your bennies never happened.

3/10, consistent posting with every reference of SW, and got be to reply

I mean I've seen some shitty enough player groups that it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine some would decide to end a session early just to refill their bennies.

Shit, let me just find my dewatermarked versions of some of these.

I usually just change the "per session" mechanic of bennies to "per adventure" and then hand out bennies for good roleplaying along the way.

The issue is Savage Worlds draws out dedicated shit posters.

Haven't seen daily threads about Savage Worlds being garbage yet, though.

That's a problem with the players then, and not the system.

It's not popular enough to warrant that.

Which is also why SW generals can be killed by one to two shitters shitting everywhere.

You're supposed to give bennies for good roleplaying anyway.
One of my GMs never did and turned a supers game into a grim slog out of sheer forgetfulness/stinginess

It's not quite as bad as with Fate, thank goodness, but it is pretty bad. I wonder if it's that guy from the Rifts threads who got butthurt about the Savage Rifts getting more discussion than Palladium Rifts.

Yeah. I mean perhaps more permissively than typical to make up for slower rate of refresh. Our sessions can often be quite short, so doing them per session wound up with too many on hand.

>Does Wits actually do anything though?

As per the book, not really. But what I often do is gave players make Wits rolls to provide them with hints and clues for a given situation they need to think through.

Common knowledge rolls.

This is just not true. Sounds like a player issue or sounds like someone is just a crunch-faggot and simply does not like the game and making shit up.

He's not wrong about shotguns. The 3d6 damage with +2 to attack means they'll often hit with a raise, doing 4d6 damage in the process, which stands a pretty good chance of one or more dice exploding.

Even with a d4 Spirit you still come back from Shaken 62% of the time.