Last night, in a moment of curiosity, I posted simultaneously to both Twitter and G+ a question:
Roleplayers! For running a hard-science with magick SF-genre game set in a high-tech near-future setting, which system would you choose?
Among several dozen responses, one game system was echoed back to me more than any other: Savage Worlds.
I wrote about Savage Worlds back in 2012. I was pretty positive too.
But I never took the plunge.
Why?
Savage Fear
Back in 2012, I was worried about three things:
- It’s yet another change of system
- On the surface it seems too “rules lite” and not tactical enough
- I’m not sure that it provides the right tone for my gaming style
This morning, again using the wonders of G+, I asked the Savage Worlds community to “sell” me on the game. I aired two of my worries… and was robustly rebuffed.
It’s not “too rules lite”; it’s got all the tactics I could want; the tone is what you make it.
You see, the barrier to playing Savage Worlds has never really been any of those three things. Not really. The real fear has been much more simple: I’ve been afraid that my gaming buddies won’t like it.
Giving It A Go
This afternoon, in the same spirit as last weekend with Palladium, I decided to give Savage Worlds a go. Actually, I took the advice from within the rule book itself: create a hero, grab some bad guy “extras”, and have at it!
Enter Jeb Bantam, “Space Pirate”.
First thing I did (after rooting out a pack of cards for the Action Deck) was grab some miniatures and to run Jeb through a fight with three Zombies.
Blam! All over in about 5 minutes – even with page flipping!
Next up: three Thugs with laser pistols too. Blam, blam, blam!
5 minutes more action, with Jeb taking a moment of being “shaken”… and three dead thugs. Marvellous!
They say, you know, that Savage Worlds is “fast, furious, fun”. They mean it.
Wanting More
I need to overcome this fear. The fear is that my players won’t like it.
You know, we’re busy playing a D&D5e campaign right now. I certainly don’t want to stop, or even undermine, that game. But sometimes I do want to try something different… and I’ve been itching for some SF for ages.
Jeb Bantam is just a guy I whipped up in a trice (on scrap paper first, mind!) and blasted through some fights. But Jeb is also a cry for guns blazing action in the future. He’s a desire to do something different every once in a while.
I need to allow Jeb and his friends the room to play. Once again, I’ve been “savaged”.
Game on!
Yep! I had my mates try a demo and were intrigued – we’ve played a 6 month mostly weekly campaign firm-science campaign set in the Solar System until “life, family and plans” got in the way our weekly habit. We’re all wargamers, so something as gooey as FATE/Fudge were right out the window.
I really *really* want to like FATE/Fudge, but it’s just not defined enough. Savage Worlds gives an awesomely consistent set of rules for $10/player and for those of us who are used to skirmish based Miniature Wargames, even gives a fantastic Table Top tactical combat experience (although it’s not necessary at all to use minis, we just often do usually for immersion and clarity).
My first taste of Savage Worlds was an online play-by-post Rifts game. That was a tough way to try to learn a new system and it put me off SW for a long time. However, your posts have made me want to take another look, for the sake of the many excellent settings that are available in SW.
Glad you found something useful in my posts – the goal is always to be encouraging people to play games, helping to get them playing in a way that suits them best. Let me know how you find it.
I recently bought the new SW Adventure Edition PDF for $1 too. The hardback copy is on a list.