Can someone explain the reasoning behind Savage World dice to me? Okay, so the dice "explode", but the HIGHER your skill is (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12), the LOWER chance you have to roll the highest number to make the die explode. So instead of trying to advance to the highest rating, doesn't it make more sense just to advance to a sweet spot and stay there?
Savage World probabilities
Jason Hughes
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Luis Collins
Because dice only explode so many times if you roll them properly (and don't just drop d4s on the table, you fuckers know who you are). A larger die gives you more of a chance of a regular success, while lower dice are more prone to a beginners' luck effect.
Asher Brooks
careful, this is probably that one user who shits on savage worlds because shotguns are good in it
To keep this discussion alive, what is your favorite setting and if it isn't Rippers or Weird War Vietnam why do you insist on being wrong
Gavin Allen
No, the expected value is still higher for higher die types, even with exploding dice.
That said, Savage Worlds is still a bad system, and you shouldn't play it.
Jaxson Lee
Care to explain why you think it's a bad system? I've only had good experiences with it.
Though I definitely see it in a good light these days since I've been playing fucking Pathfinder for the last year with my group. So glad the campaigns over soon and we're switching system.
Ayden Peterson
I think there is only one exact number where you are a couple percent more likely to hit it with the d4 over the d6. In all other cases the higher dice are better.
Some people use fudge dice to smooth over this single error case. Those people are colloquially know own as autists.
Jeremiah Ross
Because the 'Nam book is crying out for an update and Rippers attracts steampunk faggots.
Give me Weird War II any day. It's compatible with the extra shit from Achtung Cthulhu.
Isaac Bell
I feel weird war 2 offers more variety in game style (saboteurs blending in with the civilians, globe trotting mcguffin hunt, hole the line against the crazy axis creations, etc.) also I'm more knowledgeable about events and persons from that era. so fight me bruh!
Oliver Butler
When you're looking at exploding dice, there are some circumstances where having a smaller die is better, but the cases are limited, and the difference is marginal. If you need to roll the maximum value on a die to succeed, you're better off with a die one size lower. This is because when dice explode, you're always adding at least one to the maximum value, making it impossible to get the maximum value, itself (you can't get a final result of 6 on a d6, because if you roll a 6, you're adding another roll to it).
There are a few ways to address this. The simplest one is just not to give a shit (which is the Savage Worlds approach). It only matters when your target number is 6, 8, 10, or 12, and only when you're comparing two specific dice (for a target number of 8, the only dice whose probabilities are inverted are the d6 and d8 -- comparing any other combination of dice still works out fine). And it's worth mentioning that there are cases when a person with less skill is better in a certain situation than one with a bit more skill (a total noob, button-masher is often more dangerous in a fighting game against somebody who is decent than somebody who has slightly more than zero experience).
Another pretty easy way to address things is to say that a maximum roll on your second roll is zero. That means that if you roll a 4 on a d4, causing it to explode, then roll another 4, you get a final result of 4+0=4. This means you aren't skipping over the maximum die value, and thus it will always be better to have a larger die. It also means that dice can only explode once, which may or may not be something you like.
If you want dice to be able to repeatedly explode without skipping over a number (and thus occasionally making a smaller die better), you could simply subtract 1 point when rolling up. So if you roll a 6 on a d6, the result is 5 + another die roll (instead of 6 + another die roll). I find this a bit inelegant on the user end, but the math is fine.
Anthony Howard
What is bad about it? I heard mostly good things about it.
Nathaniel Perez
>the reasoning
The reasoning is it makes combat less predictable and therefore more exciting, because it involves a lot of random exploding dice, leading to a lot of extreme variance in damage, rather than the standard damage range. It does achieve that, more or less, but introduces other problems, mainly the fact that minions can occasionally one shot heroes or that with boss enemies, it is often impossible to kill them without big explosion rolls, because you can't wear an enemy down like in other games. Some people like it better than attrition systems, some people don't.
>doesn't it make more sense just to advance to a sweet spot and stay there?
Sort of. Past d8, the returns on investment for buying higher skills is weak, especially since buying up a single rank of a skill is often the same amount of XP investment as an Edge, or at the least, half that. So once you get to d8, it is almost never worth it to raise your skill over buying an Edge that also improves that same roll. Except for Fighting because of Parry, but that only applies to melee characters.
The rule of thumb with Savage Worlds is set your skills at character creation and then never raise them again. The XP investment is too high for too little return to be worth it.
Joseph Sullivan
i will never not post it:
NERFing shotguns is as easy as makign target's armor apply to each shotty dmg die separately, and then just giving them +0/+1/+2 on short/med/long range. They still shred unarmored targets, but barely any armor works wonders, and depending on the distance you trade damage for chance to hit
Asher Nguyen
fixing *this* is as simple as counting exploding dice results as one less, so 6, then 1 ond d6 still comes up as 6
Luis Russell
As I recall, Hackmaster 5E uses this superior type of exploding dice mechanic where every die after the first subtracts 1. Every potential number result is thus possible.
Jacob Williams
>makign target's armor apply to each shotty dmg die separately
I wish I could hate you to death. Double-ought buckshot is on par with a hail of 9mm rounds, this makes the shotgun strictly worse than a fucking pistol
Lincoln Cook
>this makes the shotgun strictly worse than a fucking pistol
Depends on the setting. WWII setting where people don't wear armor? Probably fine. Cyberpunk setting where even mall cops get kevlar vests, not so much.
Hunter Williams
If there's anything stupid about SW's math it's handing out +2s like candy in such a low dice-size game. That's much more of a problem than some quirky math with the explosions.
Ryder Murphy
>mainly the fact that minions can occasionally one shot heroes
How is that a flaw? If people are trying to kill you, you're in danger. To me the real flawed system is D&D's, where certain enemies almost literally cannot harm you past a certain point, forcing the game's power level to get ever more ludicrous just to keep up. There are plenty of mechanics in place to stop you from getting dicked over by an unlucky role, so in practice the odds of random goblin with a rusty pocket knife killing a legendary hero are very small. The point is to have just enough of a chance of it happening to stop you from getting arrogant.
John Adams
I want Weird Napoleonic Wars or Weird Colonialism or something.
John Gomez
>WWII setting where people don't wear armour
>helmets and flak jackets are in the Weird War II gear listings
Also shotguns were pretty rare in the WWII frontlines to begin with, unless you're doing a partisan game you're unlikely to get one
Joshua Sanders
A 20's gangster campaign then, whatever
Zachary Green
>implying a smart gangster wouldn't have something like a flattened-out pan snugged under his suit if he expects trouble
Hudson Stewart
>No one really did this and it wouldn't have done much IRL, but I'm too invested in my viewpoint not to come up with nitpicky fringe cases for any example you cite
k
William Edwards
>nitpicky fringe cases
lol 'k
Also, the .38 Super and .357 were designed in the 20s and 30s to take down criminals who were actually wearing body armour made of cotton padding. Your example is shit, you should read some history books and you should feel bad.
Robert Walker
Sure, keep pretending this was something absolutely everyone did, to the point that it would make shotguns "worse than a fucking pistol" in overall in such a campaign
Liam Jackson
In a combat situation against hoods expecting a rumble (which would be the reason anyone brought a fucking shotgun along)? You're damn right it would be something they did. And again, it was enough of a problem iRL for calibres with better penetration to be developed.
But stay mad
Cooper Murphy
>We've got to take out a rival gangs safehouse
>Let's go up to their lookout and tell him we're coming in a few hours so they have time to prepare. That way it's a fair fight!
If you think this is how the world works, I wouldn't be calling others retarded. Again, tell me how this makes shotguns "worse than fucking pistols," and not simply great against certain enemies and shit against others. And why do you keep bringing up calibers? If a .22 is hindered at least as much as a shotgun aren't you totally contradicting your "worse than fucking pistols" point?
Caleb Robinson
>To me the real flawed system is D&D's, where certain enemies almost literally cannot harm you past a certain point, forcing the game's power level to get ever more ludicrous
Only a problem with 3.5.
Caleb Hall
>gangsters don't snitch on each other or have informants
>gangsters don't have lookouts for a fucking reason
And it makes them worse than pistols because a Browning 9mm deals the same damage as a mid-range shotgun and presumably doesn't have to deal with the "hurr durr damage dice have to beat armour individually!" mental retardation you're defending.
The entire point of shotguns dealing an extra d6 worth of damage at short range is so they can be actually worth a fuck at that niche. But someone as mentally challenged as yourself might struggle to grasp that.
Connor Cruz
Again, if your opponents consistently have hours to prepare for you, you're doing things very, very wrong. If you have to not only keep changing the subject, but keep going back to the same point over and over, maybe it's time to admit you've lost?
Oliver Brown
>slinging on a padded vest under a jacket takes hours
Nathan Long
>Double-ought buckshot is on par with a hail of 9mm rounds
It really isn't. Maybe a hail of .32 ACP. 00 shot has less than a third of 9mm's KE and pretty terrible ballistics. Still really fucking dangerous obviously, but it isn't going to punch through even medieval armour.
Chase Carter
So there only ever seems to be three complaints about Savage Worlds.
The bennies, the shotguns and the exploding dice.
As far as RPG's go only have three issues, one of which is only specific to games that actually include shotguns, is pretty fucking good.
Robert Kelly
Well like I said, some people like that damage system and some don't. I think it depends on your game style. For someone who runs a story based game, the unpredictable lethality can be an issue.
Liam Adams
>To keep this discussion alive, what is your favorite setting and if it isn't Rippers or Weird War Vietnam why do you insist on being wrong
Achtung Cthulhu.
Easton Young
Yeah that is pretty dumb. Unless you're in full coverage armor it wouldn't make sense, and it makes shotguns worthless in any game with armor. Getting sjot poijt blank with a shotgun would do less damage than getting hit with a bat.
Kayden Cooper
And yet ironically, the opposite is also true, since for the first level or two it's easy to get one shot.
Xavier Foster
Yeah it's not a bad game. I would probably still use it, but I just sort of burned out. I like to try new stuff.
Grayson Foster
It's a great system, he's just an idiot. It single handedly saved the Rifts settings from complete obscurity.
Ian Adams
There's nothing wrong with it in any great sense, just some stylistic nitpicks. People just hate it because it's different.
Caleb Allen
>I'm bad at math
Do some calculations with exploding dice and you'll see there isn't a sweet spot.
Nolan Martin
honestly from my end this is more of a game balance thing that trying to be super realistic, so take it as you will. I was talking about basic buckshot, too.
Ethan Ortiz
Andrew Hughes
Savage Worlds is good if you're sick of Pathfinder, because ANY system seems good when you are sick of Pathfinder.
David Morales
Savage Worlds sucks for multiple reasons. Not only are shotguns ridiculously unrealistic to the point of being stupid, so are the three-round burst rules. The game thinks a +2 bonus means the same thing in a system where you roll d6s and d10s for checks as it does in a system where you roll d20s for checks. A +2 in Savage Worlds is more like a +8 in D&D. Imagine if you had a shotgun in D&D and the buckshot gave it a +8 to hit. Yes that's right a barely-trained soldier picks up a shotgun and now has +8 to hit. That is basically what is happening with Savage Worlds. Same with 3-round burst. Holy shit, I didn't know American soldiers became literally twice as accurate when they got their A2s! That's fucking amazing! Why doesn't every fucking gun use 3 round burst ever? There's no reason not to. It turns a firefight, which should have very few "hits" into the same "I whack you you whack me" bullshit. Also, the toughness mechanic means that a soldier can get shot several times and suffer absolutely no ill effects if his "toughness" isn't overcome. In fact, nothing happens to anything if you don't beat it's toughness. It's either down or up, which is fine for mooks but makes the game absolute fucking crap for handling boss fights. Even with bennies and wounds it's really no good. It's just waiting for the exploding dice to kick in and overcome something's toughness of 20 or so. It's not exciting, half the attacks you make are completely useless, and then once in a while you end up with some dumb shit like someone throwing a pocket knife for 33 damage and gibbing someone. It's so fucking stupid I am convinced it is a psyop to sell more GURPS books. I have played Savage Worlds for several years now and I only still play it with people who think GURPS is "bad" yet still want to play a system that literally needs metacurrency just to function.
Kevin Reed
Been GMing and playing SW for years. It's pretty respected hereabouts.
Kevin Morales
Nobody plays GURPS, go away.
Eli Foster
shit system trying to be different for difference sake
Lincoln Scott
>been GMing and playing SW for years
The fact that you still like the system after playing it for years means you're a fucking brainlet.
Explain, please, why my choice of session length should completely unbalance the game? You literally NEED to run a 4-6 hour session for bennies to be balanced. Oh and if you do a lot of roleplay but have a combat near the end? There is no way the characters are losing that combat, unless it's against overwhelming odds. Oh and you had a big battle near the beginning of the session? Watch as players hesitate to take on more enemies throughout the rest of the session and try to delay things so that they don't go into battle without their get-out-of-jail-free cards. And how could you blame them?? It's like going into combat in D&D with 1 hp left. It's a completely fucking stupid idea. And, what, you're gonna be the shithead DM who accuses them of metagaming and "punishes" them with a random encounter? Go fuck yourself. The metacurrency is not only metacurrency, but it's based off of something that doesn't even exist in the world: the goddamn length of the session. And you can't even play without bennies because the game does not work without them, unless you are going for hyper-gritty realism. In which case, why not just play GURPS lite? It has fewer pages, and doesn't have fuck-tarded metacurrency. I don't even like GURPS that much but it's a hell of a lot better than this stupid-ass system. They could have at least made bennies a per-day thing that you can rest and get back after some downtime, but no, no, it had to be a session-based thing, for this stupid game made by these 40-year-old fucktards who have nothing better to do than sit around the game store all day playing their shitty wargame scenarios.
Parker Jenkins
I'm not even going to get into how stupid the skill system is. Nothing for crafting, it's all lumped under "repair", but there's a fucking gambling skill? Oh and you can unload your entire revolver in 1 round and get six attacks at -4? You can tell that this is a bad wild west game adapted to be a "generic" system. What an absolute piece of crap. Climbing and Swimming are separate skills, but "Fighting" and "Shooting" are all one thing: whether you're trying to shoot a cannon or a rifle or a bow. Nice job, Savage Worlds! You claim to want things "fast furious and fun".... as long as you aren't fighting a dragon, in which case you're sitting on your ass waiting for someone to hit with a raise and then get two sixes. So that they can shake the thing. And then it makes its spirit roll to unshake, and zero fucking progress has been made in the fight. What a joke. High-level Savage Worlds play fucking sucks, and the only reason low-level play doesn't is because you're still enamored by the lack of bookkeeping in combat. Which is great for mook battles, but once you get sick of those, there's no good reason left to play the system anymore. The attack rolls have no granularity, so the modifiers are fucking stupid. Aiming is the only thing in Savage Worlds that deserves a +2. Wild Attacking is almost always the best idea in melee, given what shit Fighting scores most of the enemies have. And since exploding dice are a thing, if the orc rolls max on his Fighting die he's probably going to hit you anyway, so you might as well Wild Attack, who gives a fuck the difference between Parry 8 and Parry 10? A -2 on one thing (parry) gives a +2 to BOTH fighting and damage.... yeah, that seems balanced. So does a firemode on a gun that doubles your chance to hit... by firing 3 bullets at once instead of 1. Fucking brilliant.
Gavin Reyes
The game also rewards edgelord behavior by making tons of "roleplay-only" hindrances like GURPS has. Except at least GURPS puts some hard rules on them. Other than -4 Charisma here and there (defeating the whole purpose of removing Charisma as a stat to prevent dump-statting) and "you must do X to prisoners" it really isn't much of a hindrance. Not to mention people forget about it, and when you have an entire party of 3 to 6 people with different edgelord hindrances it gets hard to keep track of them. This stupid-ass "GM-enforced roleplaying" shit needs to fucking stop. Stop holding players' hands and holding them lollipops if they promise to roleplay. This isn't a fucking middle school. If you want to roleplay your character, roleplay your character. If you want to take some edgy hindrances to justify the shitty way you behave in RPGs anyway, then get more skill points for it, then fuck off. Stupid chucklefucks who make this game probably love braining the enemies they capture and getting extra XP for it. Fuck that. Some of them are shit like "Phobia" and you can pick two phobias of some obscure shit that will never show up, stack it into your stupid "concept" and bam! free skill points. You get rewarded for doing the shittiest, most uncreative, most base and inane roleplaying possible. What a fucking joke of a rule. Fuck the hindrances. And the game assumes you take three, by the way: you don't have to take any, but if you don't, you are playing at a power level below what the game expects. Play an edgelord user. Do it. It's not like being blind or deaf is a better option, because that ACTUALLY hurts you. At least being blind counts as two hindrances. For if you can find a way to overcome having -6 to every fucking roll.
Zachary Russell
Virt pls
Landon Barnes
...
Josiah Lopez
I've never played SW so that guy's rant looks like a fairly compelling against it
Nathaniel Reed
SW has problems but virt has never played it and doesn't actually know what he's talking about. Wait, is this virt too? Please tell me you haven't resorted to literally begging for (you)s.
Parker Morales
Nah, I was just planning to read through the system to maybe switch my group to it for a later campaign and that was the first time I saw someone shit on it so agressively
Anthony Watson
The vehicle rules are also a fucking joke. Gotta love how you can "wound" a tank with a bazooka, then as a result of your roll on the crit table the tank moves 20 feet TOWARD where it got shot from. What the fuck? It's also absolute trash for ship combat, or really anything larger than a tank or truck. Collisions are "very deadly" yet in a fantasy game the characters' armored wagon plowed through horse cavalry and suffered no damage at all.
I mean, you can give it a try if you want. You will like it at first. It looks familiar yet refreshing. You've never seen a generic system before that wasn't a fucking mess, and you've been misled to believe that GURPS is a fucking mess as well (it is, but for different reasons, and it's a much better-designed game that SW overall). And you just found the test drive, which is an unintimidating 16 pages or so. A longsword still deals 1d8 damage, there are still attack rolls, the Toughness system looks like that one thing you and your D&D group "came up with" once when trying to make D&D "make more sense." And you get really excited. This looks really simple and powerful. You might notice that shotguns give a +2 to hit. You might realize a lot of the modifiers are kinda large for a game with such small dice. But that doesn't matter, right? You're excited and want your group to try it. And it's fun....for a few months, until your realize how much it sucks. I bet the developers even were told by someone in the playtest that shotguns were kind of dumb, but like all devs with their heads in their asses they ignored it.
Asher Rogers
Try this with your group. It's an abridged (and somewhat outdated) version of the system meant to give you a feel for it. It's a well made, flexible, incredibly easy to homebrew for system for the most part, but it also has a lot of love-it-or-hate-it design choices, like exploding dice and the ability to trade roleplay-only flaws for mechanical advantages in chargen.
Adrian Rivera
I insist on being wrong because I made this damn book myself... and a lot of input from you guys, of course.
>tfw I need to update this, but already have two writing projects on the go