Savage Worlds - Getting Started

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PolarBlues

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I recently picked up the Mutant Chronicles for Savage Worlds on the basis that Modiphius's licence for MC has expired (see the fire sale on their MC 2D20 books) and ever since the MC movie I've had a softspot of the setting (nevermind the movie isn't all that faithful to the orginal setting).

It joins a remarkable range of Savage Worlds books and pdfs I have accumulated, despite never having run the game (I have played it, though that was a while back). I figured, maybe it's time I do something with this?

So this moring I took out my old Explorer's Edition book and read through it. It's probably the top end of crunchiness that I can manage as it has a lot of ad-hoc rules, but I figure if I am organised enough, who knows.

1. Characters Generation
Any one know of a good character builder for Savage Worlds. I am terrible at sitting with pen & paper, crafting characters and expect whatever setting I go for, I'll probably need to create some pregens for the players (not to mention major NPCs). I found these two, I would necessarily mind an offline on:

https://savaged.us/
SavageToolsWeb - Future Tech

Or perhaps there is a good archive somewhere of pregenerated characters that can be quickly reskinned?

Any other tips/short cut for creating NPCs people use?

2. Initiave Card Online
If you are playing online, without a fancy VTT, how are you managing the initiative cards? https://savaged.us/ seems to have a option, but I wonder that other people are doing,

3. Any other tips for a Savage Worlds newbie GM?
 
I run SW, and have moved on to the current edition, but I still find these cards (I play face-to-face) useful:


The advice given in the rules for creating characters is: for PCs, even if you choose to start at a higher level, do the creation step-wise from Novice and advance normally to make sure all the pre-requisites for Edges are met.

For NPCs, "don't worry about it". Just give the characters any stat and Edges that seem appropriate and don't worry about the stat and rank requirements.
 
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So this moring I took out my old Explorer's Edition book and read through it. It's probably the top end of crunchiness that I can manage as it has a lot of ad-hoc rules, but I figure if I am organised enough, who knows.

I feel similarly about SW's crunch level. I've been running Adventure Edition for the past ~3 years, but I ran Explorer's Edition for ~2 years before that.

One thing I do to keep it simple for myself is use the "Hordes of Extras" setting rule from Flash Gordon. Using it, Extras never get shaken, they're either fine or Incapacitated. That way, there's less to track, especially if you're using lots of Extras.

As for creating, NPC's, from the horse's mouth, specifically Savage Worlds Adventure Edition (print version), p. 202 (bolds are in the original text):

"Creating Extras
Consider this Game Master's Rule #1 when it comes to Extras: Don't "build" them!

Don't create your Extras with the character creation rules. Just give them what you think they ought to have in their various skills and attributes and move on."
 
The Grognard Files released an episode on Savage Worlds today, in haven’t listened yet but am looking forward to it.
 
2. Initiave Card Online
If you are playing online, without a fancy VTT, how are you managing the initiative cards? https://savaged.us/ seems to have a option, but I wonder that other people are doing,
Like E E-Rocker I just use cards even when running it online. I just make an improvised playmat out of piece of copy paper. I write the players' names on it, on lay their initiative card in their spot.
3. Any other tips for a Savage Worlds newbie GM?
As others have said, just make up NPC stats based on what feels right. I only write down stats that seem important. If anything else comes up, it's d6 or d4. If you have taken more than a minute to create a Savage Worlds NPC, you might be overthinking it.

I find 5-step scales are particularly easy to improvise stats with.

There is a page spread in Explorer's edition with the Edges and Flaws summarized. Try and have at least one copy of that on the table. This was the element of the system I was most wary, of as I had just come from 3E and it's Feat Bloat. I was pleasantly surprised with the Edges in SW. None of them are particularly complex, and after running the game for a few weeks, I largely had them memorized. And bloat has never been a problem. Aside from setting-specific Edges, the ones in the core book are largely all you need.

I used a mix of theater of the mind and mini play depending on what fit a particular fight. When I used minis, I obviously had color-coded gaming stones to designate wounds and shaken status, but I found those were handy even in theater of the mind play. I'd layout counters/minis/stones in front of me for each NPC in the fight. I wouldn't do any kind of movement or positioning with them. It just allowed me to place wound and shaken markers on them, allowing me to go a whole fight without picking up a pencil.
 
One way of making Quick NPCs is to utilise the Hit Die concept.

The average human is 6d in everything with skills in whatever his profession calls for.

A weaker than usual NPC is d4, a stronger d8, a real threat d10.

Depending on type, an NPC will have some traits/skills 1 die level above, and some 1 die level below.

For example, a goblin type will have d6 as baseline, with d8 for Agility, and d4 for Strength and Vigor.

An ogre type will have d8 as baseline, with maybe d10 for Strength and Vigor, and d6 or even d4 for Agility and Smarts.
 
Update
I think I am getting the hang of the system. My Mutant Chronicles campaign hasn't started yet, it's schedule to start after our current Dune campaign (in which I am a player) which is coming to an end. But I've now read through the Dark Legion campaign, created my own intro adventure to leading the players into it and created a selection of pregens. Pregenerated character aren't everyone's favourite option, but in our group, unless it's a game everyone own and knows, or the system is really, really simple, by convention the GM provides some ready to play character which the player can adjust. I've also gather various resources and cheat sheets, including the much loved Combat Survival guide.

Various thoughts
On balance, I like the system. I get what it's aims to do and I think we will get along nicely. I like the way that between exploding dice and the impact of the inititaive card combat promises to be really swingy and that you aren't really meant to worry too much about balancing encounters. The only thing the feels out of place to me are the Hinderances, not so much as a concept but in their implementation.

Character generation is more complicated than in most systems I use. There are a lot of depencies and things to keep track off. The character generation tool of Savaged.us came in handy, though I still had to bolt on Mutant Chronicles specifc aspects to it. Creating five characters took me the whole afternoon. I sure this gets better with practice.

As others have mentioned in this thread, NPC extras can be really simplied to just a key dice code. I found Zadmar Zadmar 's NPCs on The Fly blogpost https://savage-stuff.blogspot.com/2015/01/creating-npcs-on-fly.html particularly on this subject, Given how I am used to doing this sort of thing with my homebrew Fudge games, it's a major selling point.

As I wll be running this online, I spent some time figuring out how best to track the status codes and the initiative cards. I don't think the full VTT approach won't would suit us as we normally just play threatre of the mind style and some of us just use their phone while sitting back on their sofas. What I might try is using Roll20 as a presentation tool while sharing my screen over Discord. What way, I can use the cards and status tokens that the tool provides, without doing the whole grid/map thing.

I am also considering if I can also show on the screen an some sort of basic, abstract zone system (a little like 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars). Nothing fancy but it might reduce the "am I in range of X?" questions.

The Modiphius Mutant Chronicle books themselves are pretty terrible. I mean I like the setting and all, but the editiing is really poor. The section title for "Nercomutants" just says "Cromutants", which had me confused for a while. And one of the sourcebooks references to and adventure supposedly at back of the book that does not exist. The Savage World specifc book contains no adventures (let alone a plot point campaign), barely any sample characters and so, so much padding. The art seems to be mostly recycled from previous editions, though in fairness it captures the mood of the game well enough. I get the feeling Modiphius's heart just wasn't into this property.
 
I'm just recently coming down from a three/four year Savage Worlds streak where SW was the only game system I would run anything in for a while. (It's a great system and I had a lot of fun with it, I'm just ready to go back to OSR now.) I do remember for my first few months of GMing I meticulously stated out every encounter, tweaking here and there, actually concerned about game balance and such like I did with D&D 3.5 or something...


One way of making Quick NPCs is to utilise the Hit Die concept.

The average human is 6d in everything with skills in whatever his profession calls for.

A weaker than usual NPC is d4, a stronger d8, a real threat d10.

Depending on type, an NPC will have some traits/skills 1 die level above, and some 1 die level below.

For example, a goblin type will have d6 as baseline, with d8 for Agility, and d4 for Strength and Vigor.

An ogre type will have d8 as baseline, with maybe d10 for Strength and Vigor, and d6 or even d4 for Agility and Smarts.

...But oh, man, after those first few months this is pretty much the exact system I used instead, to the point where I didn't even need to bother looking up monster/antagonist stats anymore. It works phenomenally well for that game system, with in-actual-play results that are basically indistinguishable from if you had actually put hours of effort into it. :wink:
 
Ran my first session Savage Worlds session with the Mutant Chronicles setting. It went pretty smoothly but I was very organised with cheat sheets and other resources at hand. As I mentioned above, I planned to use roll20 not as VTT but as whiteboard, using Discord's share screen function. I wanted the visual cue to manage the initiative cards and show status effects like Shaken. I also tried a crude zone system because some sort of approximation for range seemed kind of important, but I didn't want to go the whole counting squares route. It's all pretty basic, as you can see from the screenshot below, but that is kind of the point. I'm trying to keep it as much theatre of the mind while still making all the essential information available to the players. In theory the players could sign into Roll20 too, but for now they seem happy with this kind of hybrid method. We'll see how it goes.

The combat was very swingy, which is fine with me. One player Snaked Eyed on a Fear check so had to miss out the final encounter which suddenly started to look pretty desperated. Then main villain. the only NPC Wildsnake Snaked Eyed while casting a spell. Cosmic Karma in action.


roll20.jpg
 
Ran my first session Savage Worlds session with the Mutant Chronicles setting. It went pretty smoothly but I was very organised with cheat sheets and other resources at hand. As I mentioned above, I planned to use roll20 not as VTT but as whiteboard, using Discord's share screen function. I wanted the visual cue to manage the initiative cards and show status effects like Shaken. I also tried a crude zone system because some sort of approximation for range seemed kind of important, but I didn't want to go the whole counting squares route. It's all pretty basic, as you can see from the screenshot below, but that is kind of the point. I'm trying to keep it as much theatre of the mind while still making all the essential information available to the players. In theory the players could sign into Roll20 too, but for now they seem happy with this kind of hybrid method. We'll see how it goes.

The combat was very swingy, which is fine with me. One player Snaked Eyed on a Fear check so had to miss out the final encounter which suddenly started to look pretty desperated. Then main villain. the only NPC Wildsnake Snaked Eyed while casting a spell. Cosmic Karma in action.


View attachment 49181
It is definitely a swingy game.

For me (and many of its fans) that's a feature and not a bug. My advice is to lean into it, and not away from it.
 
It is definitely a swingy game.

For me (and many of its fans) that's a feature and not a bug. My advice is to lean into it, and not away from it.
I'm good with swinginess. My homebrew rules for Fudge include custom initiative rules that can throw in random bonuses for either side resulting in the tide of the battle often moving back and forth.

Also, I forgot to mention, one of the things I shared with the players in advance was the "Up To 4 Players" comic-strip version of the Savage Worlds rules. They said that found that resource very useful.
 
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