[x]Blackmoor Vituperative

Tuesday, 2015-04-14

My opinion on Savage Worlds

Filed under: Gaming — bblackmoor @ 09:16

I am writing up my opinion on Savage Worlds here, not because I think anyone actually cares or because I want to talk anyone out of playing it, but because from time to time someone asks for my opinion, and I would rather direct them here than write this repeatedly. So here we go:

“Hey, Blackmoor, what do you think about Savage Worlds?”

I have played Savage Worlds with people who loved it. I may in fact be the one human being on Earth who does not like Savage Worlds. I do not like the extraneous fiddly bits just for task resolution (dice AND cards AND poker chips AND … wtf). Imagine having a roleplaying game where each time there was a test to see if your character is successful at some task, you had to play a game of Bop It — but the outcome of playing Bop It had no effect on whether you were successful or not. Whether your character is successful is actually based on a flip of a coin, but the color of that coin changes depending on how good your character is at a particular ability. If you are really good, you flip a red coin … after playing a full round of Bop It.

I do not like the “growing dice” mechanic that, when coupled with the “moving target based on dice size” mechanic makes character advancement an illusion, and in fact renders the multiple dice sizes merely one more extraneous fiddly bit. There is no way in Savage Worlds to set a task difficulty such that it is nigh-impossible for a novice but nigh-automatic for an expert. If you have an expert and a novice in the group of PCs, it makes virtually no difference which of them attempts to pick the lock or crack the code or hack into the computer system.

That’s how I experience Savage Worlds. It may be the most needlessly (and pointlessly) complex game system that I personally have ever played.

Personally, I do not care for it.