I actually got the chance to do a little roleplaying on Saturday!  Tom, internet buddy turned real-life friend, invited me to do some gaming at his house on Saturday.  Since I wasn't able to attend mini-mace due to another commitment in the evening, I was thrilled both to get in gaming of any kind and even more so to get to know Tom and some of his friends a little better.  I sort of invited Kenny with Tom's permission, and were joined by married couple Terry and Cindy for a light adventure using the Savage Worlds system.

Setting and Story

The setting was fantasy, and we were playing in the fictional city of Henford.  I played Flynn, an overconfident, loudmouth swashbuckler (but really, are there any other kind of swashbucklers?).  Kenny was Boaty McBoaterson or something like that (Keel something-or-nother was his real name), a former soldier and current boatman on the Hen river.  Terry was a thief... and I don't mean a "rogue" type of person, I mean a real thief that steals money from people and possibly even candy from babies.  Cindy was a halfling spellcaster, whom I tried my best to patronize and treat as my little sidekick the whole game long.  Thankfully, she still continued to throw most all of her fireballs in a direction that did not contain me.  


Clockwise left to right: Zachary (Jr GM), Tom, Terry, Cindy, and Kenny
We didn't have a heck of a lot of time, so Tom planned a nice little adventure that started when a scorched barge came floating downriver.  The city guard boarded it and discovered, too late of course, that the captain had tried to contain a bunch of zombie-like undead down in the hold and then burn them to death.  As the zombies burst forth into the city, I leaped onto the boat and began my flamboyant attack.  

I'll stop here to mention how good a job Tom did in setting up this initial scene.  He used multiple points of view and cut-scenes to paint a picture of what was happening, and actually managed to build in some cool dramatic tension into what would usually be a dry and mechanical exposition.  Whether he meant to or not, he put some significant trust in us as mature gamers to be able to handle the difference between player and character knowledge, and the tension which resulted was really cool.

So anyway, we managed to dispatch the initial group of undead, but not before the captain of the guard and some other townsfolk were infected as well.  After they were safely contained, we were contracted by the guard to seek out a rare component that the chief healer of the city needed to cure the disease.  Tom used debts that both Terry and Kenny had to the town to compel their participation, while I and Cindy were offered a great reward.

We then traipsed off into the wilderness upstream, encountering bandits along the way, and harvested a good number of the MacGuffin roots.  Before we could get away, though, an ogre-ish giant-type crixture behind the waterfall decided to throw stuff at us, so we had to take care of him as well.  Cindy pounded him with fireballs from a distance as Kenny and I closed in.  Once we got there, we teamed up on him for a while, but he eventually managed to wound Kenny and leave him shaken.  In the last of an incredible string of great rolls throughout the day, I aced three times in a row to deal 30-some-odd points of damage to the beast and end it.

System and Thoughts

I definitely have to say that I had a lot more fun with Savage Worlds this time than I did at MACE.  Both games were fantasy (which I'll mention again later), but the style of Tom's game was wildly different from the one I'd played before. 

One of the biggest issues that I'm having with Savage Worlds as a system right now is that it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be.  Heck, maybe it's just trying to be too many things to too many people.  Right there on the rulebook, though, it calls itself  a "Fast! Furious! and Fun! rules system for any genre of roleplaying game!"  But if you play combat exactly like they suggest, using a battlemat and minis and all the rules for range and stuff, combat is not really all that fast, furious, or particularly fun.  And if I'm going to play a (fantasy in particular) game involving tactical miniature combat, I'll go with D&D 3.5, which does it a lot better in my opinion.

Savage Worlds and the whole wild die, card-based initiative, and exploding dice type set of mechanics seems to lend itself to a more fast-and-loose, luck-based and free-wheelin' type of combat.  And especially in the fights against the bandits and the giant, I thought that Tom got it nearly perfect.  We did use minis (with the bad guys being lego dudes), but they were just laid out on the table with distances that were approximate, so we could keep track of the general positions and numbers of all the participants.  And throughout the whole thing, he tried to keep our focus on the narrative of the fight rather than on the numbers.

And this brings me to the thing I probably like best about Savage Worlds and this session in particular.  SW doesn't use hit points or anything like that, but instead, it uses a wound system.  When you take a hit, you're first "shaken", but a raise on the damage or another hit will cause one or more wounds.  "Mooks" only take one wound, but "wild cards" (player characters and named opponents) can take four before they are killed.  But each successive wound also has a description of severity and has an impact on performance. 

And even more important, the number of wounds resulting from an attack can guide the narrative of the story.  Tom was adamant about this throughout play, asking us to describe the action after we made an attack/damage roll.  When I dealt 30+ points of damage to the already shaken and wounded giant, Tom let me know that I had taken it out, and asked me to tell how I did it.  It was then totally up to me to describe how I flipped up on to its back, slashed deeply into its neck, and then leaped off, using its own momentum from attacking Kenny along with my final kick to propel it through the waterfall and into the rocks below.

Still, though, I think that a different setting would probably showcase all these elements better than fantasy does.  Not that there's anything particularly wrong or innately un-pulpy about fantasy (although a true Sword & Sorcery style is a better fit), but it's more just that the fantasy setting has been so overdone with other, non-pulpy RPG's.  Instead, I'd love to see Savage Worlds in more of a 50's sci-fi setting or, even better, in the Necessary Evil post-alien-apocalypse, super-powered setting.

But before I finish up here, I absolutely need to give another big thank-you to Ron Blessing for the special Smiling Jack's Bar and Grill die that he gave me at MACE.  I don't know how many times it aced throughout the adventure, but it was so many that it made it really hard to play an overconfident, big-mouthed character, 'cause I was always able to back up my talk and bravado with results. It was great to meet Terry and Cindy, nice to get to roleplay with Kenny again, and really cool to play in a game under Tom.  And even with as much grief as I've given Savage Worlds as a system, it's still something that I want to give some more play in the future.