The Square Deal Saloon

Started a new RPG campaign just recently. The setting is more-or-less that of Shadows of Brimstone meets HBO's Deadwood. Two of the PCs collectively own a house-of-ill-repute in a boom-town, somewhere in the New Mexico Territory, just down the road from the smoking crater that is Brimstone. There's another competing saloon and gambling den in town, and a number of weird supernatural hijinks afoot. The other PC is one of their regular customers, who happens to work at the Telegraph Office.

For the first session I made some incoming Telegraph props. One was an actual message for one of the PCs, but the others are essentially plot coupons and nuggets of important information about sub-plots and opportunities, that the Telegraph Operator PC is obligated to make the rounds and deliver. It's working pretty well, as the PCs basically get to eavesdrop on everything going on in town. I made the community bustling with plotlines, colorful characters, and mysteries. It's meant to be layered and sandboxy, with the PCs getting to decide what things they want to stick their noses into, and whose pockets they wish to pick. So I've arranged all my subplots on a color-coded calendar (the first session is Wednesday, March 9th, 1887) that tracks how each storyline will progress if the players do nothing to interfere. I'm hoping they'll interfere frequently and with gusto. They seemed to love it, which is good, because I'm prepared to add a couple more Telegraphs each session for foreshadowing, character development, and clue-delivery.

The mechanics are a blend of Savage Worlds and the Drama System from Hillfolk, with some custom mechanics to emulate parts of Brimstone, and a few cool ideas lifted from other games I like. During character creation, I had the players choose from several small "fill-in-the-blank" quizzes I had prepared. Their answers to those questions let them define things in the town, name NPCs and establish relationships to them. Each of the quizzes had some mechanical benefit that it unlocked. For example, there was one that said: "There's a group of bandits causing trouble in the region. You used to ride with them, but had a falling out." It then listed two of the canonical Infamous Bandit Gangs from Shadows of Brimstone, and had the player choose which one they'd been part of. Then it said "someone in town knows your secret past. Who are they, and can you trust them?" It then gave a bonus on Guts and Riding skills, as befits someone who used to ride with a bunch of train-robbers. The player who chose this card was effectively embracing a western trope, getting a connection to something that's part of the official setting, and then given carte-blanche to invent and ally or foe in town. It worked great. We ended up with a really cool interlocking web of NPCs and plotlines.

I'm running this game at a friends' house, because one of the players is allergic to my cat. So I needed a good way to bring the game with me that doesn't involve me hauling the rulebooks to Savage Worlds, Deadlands, Hillfolk, and Shadows of Brimstone with me every week. So, I popped over to wikidot.com, and made myself a new GMing Notes wiki. It's a closed/private wiki, so I can just bring it up on my iPad.  All the most important rules are on there now, along with pages on every location, every NPC, those Telegraphs and other visual aides to show the players, and that color-coded plotline calendar that keeps me on top of what's likely to happen when. It's working pretty great thus far. I'm liking it enough I've begun adding my note files for my other two active RPG campaigns to the same wiki, so I'll have one highly-portable campaign database for all my future games.

The Armchair Musketeer

Last night I played in a superhero RPG loosely based on "Mystery Men", in that we were supposed to play incompetent superheroes. The system was Savage Worlds, using the Supers Compendium.

I played the Armchair Musketeer, which is exactly what it doesn't sound like: a plushly upholstered Louis XV chair that had been granted sentience, served in the Royal Musketeers, and has been fighting crime ever since. Complete with an inconsistent "french" accent... and the last time he his upholstery repaired, he had "magic fingers" installed... "for ze ladies".

I spent his ten hero points on Construct (a requirement, really) and the rest on Super Skills. This, combined with the "Blind" Hindrance (chairs don't have eyes, you see) and "Trademark Weapon" edge allowed me a Fighting skill of d12-4 (d12 +1 +1 -6). I also had Taunt at d12-2, and Shooting at d10-6. Awesomely incompetent. I rolled a lot of (adjusted) 1's, but also the occasional high-level exploding successes.

Playing a Blind PC is really hard, by the way. GMs nearly always do the majority of their narrating as "Here's what you see when you open the door..." or "In walks a villain in a lab coat, and three thugs carrying submachineguns..." or, in our case last night "You hit Santa in the face, which peels back revealing he's a robot!" For some strange reason, the other players don't really enjoy having to repeat everything the GM says.

Or, maybe, they just didn't want to constantly explain things to an armchair. I can't completely rule out "the furniture factor".

Savagely Tricky

Here's what the Savage Worlds rule book should have said about Tricks, but didn't:

Tricks are only really worth it if your character has a low Fighting die but a high Agility or Smarts, and the enemy has a Parry higher than your average attack roll.

Despite what you might have inferred from the concept and fluff text of Tricks, they are not actually intended to model crafty or sneaky fighters. Any character who has actually invested points in their Fighting score and related combat stats will be more effective making normal attacks than wasting their time and actions throwing sand in the opponents eyes, or telling the enemy to look behind them.

What tricks do well is they enable typically non-combatant characters (such as gadgeteers, healers, and spellcasters who've run out of power points) to contribute to the group's success during a fight scene. Tricks are most effective against foes with a low Agility or Smarts, so they're better against Extras and henchman than against a named criminal mastermind that's intended to be a challenge for the whole party.

Even then, the best benefit of a trick will be felt only if someone is prepared to follow it up with a normal attack before the tricked foe acts again. Players should coordinate tricks so that one PC sets it up, and someone else acting right after them takes advantage of it. If you cannot guarantee this sort of situation, only use Tricks if you're the last PC acting in the round, as then a lucky initiative draw may allow the trick to be in effect when yourself of an allied character acts next round. If no one is positioned to follow up on your trick, the low-Fighting character is generally better off firing a pistol at a distant foe than using a trick on an adjacent one.

One exception to needing teamwork, however, is when a character that is not combat-oriented at all is stuck in melee and just wants to flee. With a lucky back-to-back initiative draw, you might be able to use a trick followed by an attack to shake a foe and get away without provoking a free attack. This is of course a desperate move, one best used when the alternative is probably the death of your character. If you succeed at the Trick escape, the GM should proceed to use the Chase mechanics instead of normal movement rules, as without the special Chase rules most foes will be able to automatically catch up with you again if they successfully unshake on their turn.

Honestly, no one writes rule books like that, but I really wish they did. If every game book discussed mechanics so frankly it would improve performance at the table for the casual gamer, and eliminate much of the advantage that can be gained by rules lawyering and munchkinism.

My buddy Erik recently did an amazing mathematical analysis of the Trick mechanic in Savage Worlds. Here's the link. Go ogle his charts and probability graphs for yourself. My proposed text above is really just a straight-forward summary of his discoveries and hard work. I've been meaning to provide a link for the past two weeks, but wanted to find the best way to summarize the heart of his findings. Thank you Erik, it was really helpful to me to see these things spelled out clearly!

Core Clues ported to Savage Worlds

This started as a short tangent in my last post* (about using Gumshoe's "Core Clues" in Warhammer FRP), and grew long enough to need a post of it's own:

When I was running Savage Worlds on a more regular basis*, I borrowed from Gumshoe and set my difficulties for clue-gathering at a 2, usually with some added bonus/benefit if the PC got an 8+.

Didn't matter if it was an interrogation using Streetwise, or search involving Notice, the only way you could fail was by getting double 1's, and choosing not to spend a benny on a reroll. That way, the PCs either got the clue, or I was given an opportunity to narrate how some ridiculous blunder or bizarre coincidence kept them from getting the info they wanted.

It sounds better than it actually plays, unfortunately. I've found that some Savage Worlds players horde their bennies and only expend them in combat. Which means that in practice, there's still some danger of things stalling out because of a bad roll. It's still better than failing to get the clue because you rolled a "3" on a d8 and a d6, but not as much better as I'd imagined it to be. And should someone be so unlucky as to roll the critical failure, spend a benny and get a second critical failure, then you're adding insult to injury.

*: Link to the post using on "core clues" in Warhammer FRP
**: I'm still running my Savage Worlds fantasy game whenever my wife and I go visit our friends in Portland, but that only happens 4 or 5 times a year, so I hardly call that "regular".

Creeping up on sentries

We all make mistakes while gaming. I've made plenty. There are times where craziness happens, or where one mistake leads to another. Hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes all you can do about it is learn not to make the same mistakes next time.

Advice for the next time you're creeping up on the sentries around an enemy camp:

• Don't split up the party if you don't have to. If you do split up, don't get impatient and head away from your agreed rendezvous point without permission.
  
• If you happen to know that your groups Tank / Fighter is prone to wandering off and stirring up trouble, and you see him wander off, follow him. Don't do your own thing instead.
  
• If the sentries are of a race that has infravision, your stealth precautions need to be more significant than putting out your torch, and carrying the smouldering remains of it with you. This goes doubly so if the system in question doesn't put a limit on infravision range, it just says "Goblins and Orcs suffer no penalties for darkness".
• If you don't know the total numbers of the enemies at the camp, dispatch their sentries with something silent, like a knife or a bow, not an area-effect stunning spell.
• If you do use the area-affect stunning spell on the two sentries you can see, arrange the area-of-effect so that it includes both of them.
  
• After you use your area-affect stunning spell, and it alerts a huge crowd of orcs to chase after you, if you can cast it again, do so. Don't spend several actions standing around trying to make a persuasion roll against the two dozen orcs that are charging you. They're not listening.
• When the resulting chase lasts so long the GM asks for a Vigor roll to resist fatigue, AND you roll double-ones on it, use your last bennie to reroll that. Don't save it for "if things get really dire later". Double ones on your Fatigue-resisting roll when dozens of orcs are chasing you is dire.

In the end, all the PCs survived, but extricating themselves from the situations this caused took over 6 more hours of play, and a lot of die rolls. It was ugly.

Savage Boomerang

I have a player in my irregular Savage Worlds fantasy campaign whose character uses a boomerang. Just for flavor reasons, the boomerang is her main weapon. I think it's rather cool, in a Road Warrior sort of way.

In the previous session, in which she made the character on-the-spot and dove right in to the game-in-progress, I just used the same stats as a throwing knife. Which, not surprisingly, is a little wimpy. Chances are, those stats will result in her feeling underpowered, and eventually swapping to a better ranged weapon, like a bow. That would be a shame.

She's a new player, with no previous tabletop experience, so rewarding her flavorful decisions is the right thing to do. My hope is that it will encourage her to experiment and invent, and overcome any shyness or awkwardness about the game. It's always best to make someone's first couple of gaming experiences positive and welcoming, so I've spent a tiny bit of energy figuring out ways to make it a feasible weapon choice in the long run.

First, I'm pumping up the range to match that of a sling: 4/8/16 (instead of a daggers 3/6/12). That's a pretty minor boost, and something I can do without any worries about balance, but of course it still makes it inferior to a bow.

So, to pump it up a notch, I made up the following edge for her.

Boomerang (Combat Edge)
Requirements: Agility d8, Notice d8
When you make a Throwing attack with a Boomerang (the weapon), you may pick a secondary target, which must be a different character than the primary one. If your attack misses against the primary target, you may immediately make another attack roll against the second target. Only one target can be hit per round - if you hit against the primary target, you do not roll against the secondary one. You're only throwing one boomerang per action, but the circular flight path "buzzes" past more than one target.

It's not terribly realistic, admittedly, but it catches the proper cinematic feel of someone using a boomerang weapon. More importantly, the the second attack roll will help compensate for the low damage rating, making it a good mook-killing weapon even in the later stages of the campaign. The secondary attack will take some of the sting out of bad dice rolls, which is something that can be very frustrating for new players.

Fantasy Companion Bullets

More than a month ago, I picked up the Savage Worlds Fantasy Companion, and recently used elements from several chapters for my thanksgiving gaming, so I'm pretty familiar with the book now.

Here's my point-by-point observations about the Fantasy Companion -- and apparently, I have a lot to say about it:

• It's a good book, and you'll be happy with it, provided you understand how it came to be. It's compiled from several pdfs the company had released previously. As a result, sometimes the 4th chapter doesn't know what the 3rd chapter is doing, and vice-versa. If they'd integrated these documents better, it would have been a far more cohesive and immediately useful book. If you already have the pdfs, the print version doesn't add anything. I only had one of the PDFs, so I found the book well worth the money.
  
  
• At first glance, it would seem races in Savage Worlds are far less fiddly than in D&D. A Savage Dwarf, for example, is elegant and entirely unlike the complicated package of racial bonuses seen in just about any edition of D&D.
  
  
• Then you get to the Saurian and Rakashan races, which have no direct D&D analog, and for whatever reason they are significantly more complicated. It's an odd choice to simplify elves and dwarves so much, but make the new races very crunchy. I suspect there's some sort of copyright issue at work - if they'd duplicated all those dwarf bonuses from D&D, it could have been lawsuit bait.
  
  
• I'm skeptical of the ability of the "Racial Enemy" flaw as a way of balancing the Rakashan race. They already have -4 to Charisma from one of the other flaws, and that -4 is pretty heavy. You'd never dream of building a Rakashan Diplomat PC, for example. Instead, they'll certainly be the parties muscle. So, then piling -4 to Charisma vs Saurians as an additional modifier is dubious. You're already talking about a character who desperately wants to avoid social rolls, so giving him an extra social roll penalty against 1 specific race feels kinda munchkiny to me.
  
  
• I also don't like that that results in a situation where you can't just add one of the these two new races to the game, you have to add both or come up with some other major flaw to balance them out.
  
  
• At least they follow that up with a really good system for creating your own races. That system is very sweat, and a GM's dream.
  
• I kind of feel like Troubadour should be it's own Arcane Background, and not a second Edge. The little bit of cash you can make out of it doesn't really justify having to take a Major Hindrance to afford the second Edge to go with your Arcane Background (Miracles).
  
  
• The list of possible Familiars is a little extreme. I'm not sure how I feel about a PC having a Rhino or Great White Shark as a familiar. It definitely out-performs the Beast Master edge from the main book, even before you start adding in the powers a Familiar can give you.
  
  
• For that matter, this Familiar edge suffers from a similar problem to that which plagues the Shape Change power in the main book. For either the edge or the power, your choice as a starting character is between hawk, rabbit, or cat (or snake as a 4th option for familiar). Both provide reasons why the GM would need stats for those three animals - as they result in the PCs stats being increased if the creature chosen would naturally have higher stats. Problem is, hawks cats and rabbits aren't given stats in either book. How do I know if my rabbit familiar/form has higher agility than the d6 my PC started with?
  
  
• I wish the Assassin edge had defined "unawares". The +2 bonus it gives is certainly not as devastating as the backstab in D&D that it's emulating, so it's hard to judge how hard it should be to earn the bonus. I could see some GMs interpret this to mean the bonus is only in cases where the Assassin had The Drop on a foe, whereas others would allow it to work with a mid-combat stealth roll, and my own inclinations would be to allow it vs Tricked or Shaken characters.
  
  
• The gear section is pretty good, I especially love how they handled Studded Leather. I'd been thinking there was no good solution, because the main rules had truncated all armor down to a 3-point scale, but they found a way that works for me. Bravo.
  
  
• The gear list includes both Hunting Dog and War Dog, at different prices. Seeing as how there's only one set of Dog stats in the rules, I wish they'd explained the difference.
  
  
• Love the expanded siege rules. If I ever run a major war plotline, these will see serious use.
  
  
• While I like the Deific Templates for Cleric-types, I was puzzled by the spell lists.
  Example: Bolt is Savage World's premiere attack spell, the equivalent of Magic Missile in D&D. So which of the following clerics should have access to it: A cleric of the Goddess of Healing, a cleric of the God of the Sea, or a cleric of the God of War? As it turns out, it's on the spell list for all three. Other oddities show up, like Burrow on the spell list for the God of the Sun.
  As mentioned above, the book was assembled from several small PDF releases, and this magic section is where that starts to show. If they'd actually used any of the spells from this book on their spell list for clerics, they could have made lists that had less overlap and strangeness. Instead, that work is left for the GM to do.
  
  
• The section on Spell Trappings is certainly desired, but could have been better with more concrete advice and another editing pass. It was full of examples, but no actual guidance on how to balance those examples. No attempts were made to explain how much of an advantage was worth costing one more spell point, for example. If they'd given the trappings system the same treatment they gave the race-building system, the results would be more useful.
  
  
• The expanded Grimoire has some very good spells in it, but also a lot of filler that seems to be redundant, especially given the trappings system that immediately proceeds it. Several of the new attack spells could have just been an old spell with a trapping tacked on.
  
  
• I mostly like the Magic Item system. It's something the game really needed, and I'm a-ok with being a large section of the book. There were plenty of ideas contained within, and it has a pricing system that I found very helpful for my campaign.
  
  
• However, the pieced-together nature of the book is again obvious. You can roll up a scroll with any of the spells from the main book, but not with any of the new spells introduced in the previous chapter. I find that very annoying.
  
  
• Not sure having Minor Artifacts have their own pool of power points is a good design decision if your mantra is "Fast! Furious! Fun!" If a PC already has his own pool of 10-20 power points, I'm a little apprehensive about separately tracking the power points available to each of his two wands. Speaking of which, some of the wand descriptions are missing any indication of how many power points they should have, and only list how many points the effects use.
  
  
• Loved the Tomes entry, and would have liked to see it expanded on. It's a great fix for one thing I consider a minor problem of the core rules. Savage Worlds is pretty much unique in gaming in that wizards actually lag behind fighters in the late campaign. Tomes give the GM a way to fine-tune and course-correct the wizard power level over time, so I'm very much in favor of them.
  
  
• Moving on to the monsters section, I'm impressed. There's far more than 100 monsters here, including equivalents to many of the staple monsters from D&D that you're likely to have distinctive miniatures of.
  
  
• My only real complaint about the monster section is the fact that again they've neglected to include any sort of rating system for the monsters. I understand that the authors of Savage Worlds prefer the sandbox feel where the PCs can sometimes pick fights they can't win. I'm okay with that. But as a GM, I'd like to know when this is happening before half the party dies. And yes, given the unstructured nature of the experience / level-up system, it's hard to say what "level" of characters are a good match for a particular monster. But what's not hard, when you're making monsters, is to put them into 3 or 4 categories based on relative power. Would it really have been that big a chore for them to do so? Or to just include a short list of the dozen weakest monsters, so the GM doesn't have to scan over 150 creature entries trying to find something appropriate for his first session of the new campaign?

Overall, I'm glad I bought the book, and feel I got my money's worth last week.

My biggest complaint with the book is the one I made again and again above. It feels like a tacked-together collection of other documents, and not a coherent whole. That's a natural outgrowth of how the book came to be, but I really wish they'd spent some editing efforts integrating the parts better.

Burning the Clocktower, Damming the Gulch

For the majority of this year, I was running a Deadlands Reloaded game, a campaign entitled "Guns of Shallow Gulch". I ended it several weeks back (has it been a month?), and to this point I haven't blogged about it, because the ending was uncomfortable*.

The plot never full resolved. Here's where it left off:

The big bad, Cobb, was temporarily defeated, but was a few days away from being able to rematerialize, and the PCs knew it. The PCs were presented with the big clocktower in the middle of town, an enormous architectural ghost trap. Cobb's wife had told the PCs they could use the tower as a weapon against Cobb, that it might be able to destroy him. However, there was the danger that whoever built the tower would be able to harness his power in the process. The PCs had already dynamited the leader of the faction who built the tower, but they didn't really know for certain if they'd killed him.

As you can see, we were using legos for miniatures in this campaign, and I made a fairly intricate model of the clocktower, complete with corrupted altars, 1,000-year-old vampire coffin, and flayed souls dangling from spectral chains.

The clocktower was eating spirits and ghosts left and right. It was even gobbling down harrowed who got too close. One harrowed the PCs were hunting had tried to take shelter in it, and was destroyed. Another harrowed that was helping the party got attacked by the tower. I had the tower make some ballsy moves. It was just a minor variation on the evil clocktower in my old "H.O.D." LARP, which most of the play group had a love/hate relationship with back in the day, from that LARP campaign. At the LARP, various people had tried to destroy the tower, but no one ever succeeded. It was too powerful, and too well defended, and the players had that pesky Masquerade to worry about.

So, I kind of expected the same in this campaign. To their credit, the players really surprised me. They burned the place to the ground. It was a pretty good fight, they had to put down the ghosts who had bargained with the Tower (to be minions instead of lunch). All the PCs got away with their lives, but one lost his horse and took a bunch of wounds himself. Another got trapped inside the tower for several rounds, and had to fight his way out. In the end, they fled just as the reinforcements were arriving from the Templar Lodge that had built the tower. I really wasn't expecting them to be able to do that much damage to it - the tower was a goner.

Mind you, destroying the clocktower would have meant the PCs had to fight with Cobb again in a few days, and no good leads on ways to put him down permanently. As it was, the campaign wrapped, the gaming group disbanded, and we didn't have to deal with that.

More on the Clock Tower:
in this Deadlands campaign
in the old LARP

Lego miniatures:
The PCs
Chuckwagon

Other posts about the campaign:
starting each session with storytime
Blessed are powerhouses
every post about the campaign on a single page (includes all the above plus several more posts)

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*: I ended the campaign for purely out-of-character reasons, which is why I've been slow to blog about it. I'd decided to end my friendship with two people - and since those two people played in the game, the game was going to have to go as well. I'm still too close to the events to write about it with wisdom. I expect I will look back at it years from now with remarkably few regrets, but for now, there's still a measure of guilt and worry that I could have done it in a less painful way. As an observer said to me about it: "Unfriending people in real life is a lot harder than on Facebook."

Why I don't like starting at Seasoned

Thursday night I played in the second half of a really good Savage Worlds short-shot where the PCs were Seasoned-level characters. Before going any further, I'll reiterate that it was a great game and I had lots of fun.

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At that session, however, I made an offhand comment about really not liking the process of how you make an experienced PC in the Savage Worlds system. The other players questioned me about it, but I couldn't articulate it at that moment. On the walk home from the game, though, I realized roughly my issue with it.

My main complaint can be summed up as:

• The system actively bills itself as being faster and lighter than D&D, but the process of making a Seasoned character is much slower and more complicated than making the equivalent level of character in D&D.
  

This complaint has several corollaries and sub-points, which are:

• Seasoned looks on the surface like it's the equivalent of a mid-level character in most systems, but it's really just the equivalent of 2nd-level in D&D.
• The greater flexibility in Savage Worlds open-ended character system means the learning curve of making a good character is much higher.
• While Edges and Feats are equivalent in power, the prereqs for an Edge are often more like the prereqs for a Prestige Class.
• It's really easy to screw up the order of your advances, or take more than one Seasoned-level advance, which means the GM has to police the character creation process pretty heavily.
• Novice level spellcasters are pretty potent in Savage Worlds, but advancing to Seasoned rank almost never results in any increase in the power of said magic-users. It's the inverse of the "Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards" trope.
  

That's it. The rest of this post is just specific examples of those points. If those points made the case for you, feel free to stop. If you're unclear about what I mean by any of that, read on...

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At first glance, the 4 advancements of being a Seasoned PC feels like you're making a 4th or 5th level character. But you're not, you're making a 2nd level character. Here's how I came to that conclusion:

The power increase from going from starting character to Seasoned in Savage Worlds is akin to the power increase in going from 1st to 2nd level in D&D. A fighter gaining second level in 3.x D&D gains +1 to his attacks, +2 skill points, and a bonus feat. A Feat is roughly like an Edge, and the rest are basically the same as advancing 4 Skills (consider that +1 to BAB in D&D is like increasing both your Fighting and Shooting skills in SW). That's 3 Savage World's advances right there. The D&D fighter then gets a +1 to his Fortitude Saves, which, by it self isn't nearly as broad as +1 to Vigor in SW, however, he also gets big boost in Hit Points - his chance of surviving any given sword blow has probably gone up by 50%. The combination of hit points and Fort is roughly equal to increasing Vigor by a Die-Type in SW. That's roughly equal to 4 advances.

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Even if the above point weren't true, and you were making a slightly higher-level character in comparison, I feel that SW makes the advancement system more complicated then it needs to be.

Let's say, for the sake of the argument, I'm making a D&D character of moderate level - say a 5th level character.

In 1st or 2nd Edition, that really only takes about 90 seconds longer than making a 1st level character. You had to pick a couple of proficiencies (none of which have prerequisites, and most of which will almost never actually matter in-game), and if you're a 2nd Ed Thief you had to assign some thief skill points. More if you're a spell caster, because you have two more spell lists to read over, but I'll say more about that in a moment. The biggest time-sink is just spending your extra money.

The important point is that in D&D you don't have to make a 1st level character, then advance them to 2nd level, then to 3rd, etc. Instead, you just make a 5th-level character, and the charts are set up to let you just copy over the relevant info. Your character is at least 200% more powerful, with only like 10% more work.

In 3.X edition D&D, it's a little more complicated. Everybody has skill points, and you're looking at an extra feat (or three for a fighter). Feats have prerequisites, so it can take a bit more time building the character, and you need to have an idea what you want the character to be. But, over all, it's still probably at most 15% more effort, for a character who is at least 200% more powerful. Again, the most lengthy part of the process is probably picking out your magic items. (And again, this is assuming you're not an arcane caster with spell lists to consider - I'll get to that, I swear.)

In Savage Worlds, a Seasoned character is definitely not 200% more powerful than a Novice character - it's more like a 50% increase in power. Yet despite that far tamer power curve, the amount of work added is about a 25% increase. Nearly twice as much additional effort for about a quarter of the boost. I'll detail why it's so complicated in the next section.


I'm going take a quick aside to justify my math on Savage Worlds:

Building a character has 4 steps.

1. You assign 5 attribute points - but that's really just two decisions, which single attribute do you want at d8 and which one do you want at d4. Yes, sometimes you'll decide you want a d10 in an attribute, but you probably won't do it at this stage - the drawback of having 2 or more traits at d4 is much nastier than the benefit of having a d10. 8/6/6/6/4 is the most common split I've seen.
   
2. You assign 15 skill points - which probably takes rather longer than the previous step. On the other hand, some character concepts need just a couple skills. Some characters have to make do with a lot of d4s, while others just pick 3 or 4 skills and max them out.
   
3. You pick 0 to 3 Hindrances. If this is your first Savage character, that's tricky. But by your 3rd, you'll realize that half the list (at least) are bizarre things you'd only use for 1 character in a thousand, and you can safely ignore them. How many one-armed or blind PCs do you make?
   
4. Now you choose 1 Edge, plus possibly a few more advances, depending on how many hindrances you've picked. Edges are beyond a doubt the trickiest thing about character creation. Many have prerequisites, some of which aren't easy to get. More on that in a later section.
   

Counting each skill point, it's a total of 19-26 decisions, with the majority of the difficulty being in the 1-3 decisions that could involve edges.

If you want, you could bump that up by including the equipment decision, but honestly, vanilla Savage Worlds has no decisions to make in regards to equipment. Unless you took the Pacifist Hindrance, you get the best weapon and armor available for the setting of the game - SW lacks the extensive equipment lists of D&D, and there's nothing in edges or powers that motivates you to take a substandard weapon. Plus, weapons are expensive enough, you aren't going to have a bunch of back-up and contingency items as a starting character.

Now let's look at a seasoned character. I'm only adding 4 more decisions - but they're all akin to the level of complexity of the Edge decision - slightly more so, because they can be an attribute raise, various permutations of skill bumps, etc, in addition to being Edges. Because they can be used for skills, you could call it 8 new decisions. 0, 1 or 2 of which can be attribute raises - if the number is 0, you'll also get 1 Seasoned-rank Edge or Power. If the number is 1, then you may or may not get a seasoned-rank Edge, depending on when in the process you raised that attribute. The number of decisions is probably only up by 20% or so. However, you're more than doubling the number of really hard decisions.

---

In D&D, advancement just flows from your class. It's a hallmark of 3.X - advancement can be really tricky (multiclassing, prestige classes, complicated feat choices, etc) if you enjoy that, but it has plenty of tools to speed it up and simplify if you'd prefer - there's some straightforward paths to advance characters along that, once initiated, make leveling-up quick and easy.

Savage Worlds has no equivalent, no obvious choices, no shortcuts. If you've got the time to spend on it, and a good solid understanding of how the system works, that's an advantage to Savage Worlds. It's really flexible, and you're never pigeon-holed or restricted. But unless you've mastered the system, and have a really clear idea of what you want your character to be like, it's just tricky. The system is opaque. There's no archetypes to base your character on. It's hard to figure out just how much better d10 is than d8. No yardstick by which to measure how proficient your character actually is.

Partly as a result, those advances in Savage Worlds take a lot more thought than their D&D counterpart. It's not just read one line of a chart, then pick two skills (as it is to raise a D&D fighter by a level). Instead, on each of those 4 advances that make up a rank, I have darned-near limitless options. I'm choosing between raising one attribute, raising 2 skills, raising 1 really good skill, buying a whole new skill, or picking one of over 50 Edges. In the D&D equivalent, 3 of those 4 decisions are made for me, and all I really have to worry about is what feat I'm taking... if it's a level where I get a feat.

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Complicating it further is the prerequisite issue. Yes, I realize there's prereqs in D&D as well, but here's the big difference:

• While Edges and Feats are equivalent in power, the prereqs for an Edge are often more like the prereqs for a Prestige Class.

Let's say I want an Edge that does something simple but potent - a boost to my skills. Both games have a Feat/Edge called "Investigator", that gives you +2 to rolls to find clues and get information from people. In D&D, it has no prerequisites. In Savage Worlds, it requires you to have a d8+ (so, above average, and a significant expenditure during character creation) in Smarts, Investigation, and Streetwise.

Similar things can be said about Acrobatic/Acrobat, Stealthy/Thief, etc. There's a few exceptions (for example, every Savage Worlds PC effectively has D&D's Power Attack for free), but in general the prereqs are higher and more fiddly in Savage Worlds. The result is, much more care must be taken when advancing your SW character. I think the worst perpetrator I've seen is the Texas Ranger Edge in Deadlands Reloaded, the cost-to-benefit ratio for that one is just wonky. It costs 2 Attribute Points, 12 Skill points, and Seasoned Rank to qualify - for benefits that comparable to (and in some campaigns less reliable than) the Charismatic Edge.

On a related note, many of the best Edges list "Seasoned" (or a higher rank) as a prerequisite. Starting at a particular level doesn't mean you get to take Edges of that level. It means you get to take exactly 1 Edge of that level - or exactly 1 Power of that level - or raise 1 more attribute instead.

If I'm gonna have 4 or 8 advances, I need to think ahead to decide whether or not I need the early advances to qualify me (by being prerequisities) for the better advances I plan to take after them. It's really easy to get 3 advances in, and then realize you're 1 skill point short of the thing you want.

---

The fact that you only get 1 Seasoned advancement when making a Season character trips me up a lot - for my most recent character, I basically had to build him three times to get the order of advancements right. From looking at other PCs character sheets, I see I'm not the only one having this trouble. My wife had similar troubles with her character. The GM caught a similar problem on another PCs sheet last night at the start of the game - and he'd even goofed up and taken 3 such advances, not just two. Likewise, in my Deadlands campaign, 2 of the 3 players who took Veteran of the Weird West had made the same mistake as well.

One reason for this is that in normal character creation, you get to apply the steps in whatever order you want. This means you can finagle "extra" skill points out of the system by using your bonus points from a Hindrance to boost your Attributes before doing skills. Or you can buy up a prerequisite skill to qualify for an Edge before you take it. In making a higher level character, however, you first build a Novice character, then apply advances in order. It seems like a simple and self-evident difference, and the Explorer's edition book just casually drops it in a single sentence. But it's a fundamentally different paradigm, and causes all sorts of slip-ups. Switching between the two modes requires a conscious analysis/transition, but nothing in the text makes that clear - and so again and again I see people screw it up.

Policing the character sheets to prevent this extremely common mistake, however, is really time-consuming. There's a decided lack of transparency in character creation - the order is so important, but there's no good way from a character sheet to track the order without deconstructing your build. A legal Seasoned character could have between 3 and 9 Attribute points, and between 10 and 32 Skill points, depending on Hindrances and order of creation. There's 13 edges and 7 powers that are restricted to Seasoned rank, and any PC can only have one of them - but if so they end up with 1 less Attribute point. You can't eyeball that.

So much so that the GM is tempted to just let it slide. A character built without paying strict attention to that timing restriction while leveling up can be a little more potent. That's all, just a little - the various Powers and Edges that require a higher rank aren't really all that much more potent, and there's (to Savage World's credit) not many degenerate combos in the system. If you goof up and take two Seasoned Edges, it's not like you're going to overshadow all the other PCs and make people angry.

So, you want to just say "screw it". However, there's a slippery slope here. It magnifies the potential that a player who's more familiar with the system will have a huge advantage over someone new to the game, and opens a potential for point-weaseling and munchkinism. A mistaken extra Seasoned power or edge won't unbalance anything - but intentionally taking all your advances as Seasoned-rank ones might. Or taking Seasoned-Rank powers with not just your advances but also initial character build - that'll give you a significant step up. Exceeding the number of Attribute raises you take, especially if you also have a Power who's derived stats come from those attributes will give you a huge leg up. So, a mistake is not likely to cause any troubles, but waiving all restrictions probably will.

This is not an insurmountable flaw, not a game-breaker, but it is the sort of thing that just rankles my hide.

---

Now, as promised, let's talk about Magic. One of the strengths of Savage Worlds is the simplified magic system. The spell list is much shorter, and in theory the trappings let you customize as you need without having to read an extra 150 spell descriptions. Even assuming that the trapping system does that (which it would if they gave a few more examples - there's not much guidance and no real tools for balancing it in the Explorer's Edition), we still hit an issue with the utter lack of high end magic.

Savage Worlds seems takes pains to avoid the "Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards" trope. Magic Users do not appear to suddenly jump out ahead of other character types in later stages of the campaign. At first blush, this is admirable and welcome - I am not a fan of that trope, after all. However, the more I build high-rank characters, the more I suspect they overcompensated and went too far to fix it.

There are 31 spells in Savage Worlds - 20 of which can be taken by starting characters, 7 that require Seasoned level, and 4 that require Veteran status. Invisibility, Quickness, and Telekinesis are all pretty buff (Telekinesis sickly so), the other Seasoned-rank spells aren't really worth it. Of those 11 "higher level" spells, four of them are even sadly redundant to lower level powers:

• Blast is only marginally better than lower level Bolt or Burst (and not a lot better than Stun, either).
• Fly and Teleport both have situations where they are superior to Burrow and Speed, but come with a lot more complexity and expense in the process.
• Greater Healing is really expensive, and in most situations not actually more helpful than Healing.

No doubt there are specific situations, plotlines and campaigns where these will pay off, but their the sort of situations that a GM has to specifically set out to create, or else it will never matter. Unless a PC has Fly, the GM is not going to make the story involve an impassable crevasse 20 table top inches long with no bridge. Buying the power creates situations where the power is needed - kinda circular, huh? In D&D, that wouldn't be the case - there's an established number of flying creatures, traps and magical tricks are common, castles dominate the countryside, etc, and plenty of reason to expect every wizard will eventually be able to fly. That setting has a need to fly built into it, but SW has no default setting.

When you take one of these advanced Powers, you really don't get you much more than the Novice powers would give you. I had Burrow and Bolt, I'd never be seriously tempted to pick up Teleport and Blast. In both cases, sinking the points into my spellcasting skill would be a better upgrade - it'd make my existing powers more effective. Since Bolt (SW's Magic Missile) takes the same amount of Power Points as Blast (SW's Fireball), and does the same amount of damage, there's not much desire to take both. Bolt can hit the same target three times, or hit three targets. Blast, the "better spell" can sometimes hit more targets, but it's gonna be rare to get more than 3 enemies in the radius with no friendly fire problems, and it can never do more than 1 hit to a single target. The sole real advantage it has is the reduced chance of rolling 1's and getting a misfire - but since the dice mechanics of SW are a little wonky, it's hard to say if that's really better than just spending the advancement (where you would have bought Blast) on raising your Spellcasting stat. Either method reduces the chance of scoring a critical failure, and the later method would improve all your other spells as well.

In D&D, picking up new spells is pretty easy. Spellcasters just naturally gain versatility as they level up, and you're happy that you have both Magic Missile and Fireball, because it didn't really cost you anything. In Savage Worlds, each new spell costs an Edge. That edge, "Extra Power" feels weak. The original Arcane Background Edge got me 10 power points, plus 2 or 3 powers. The new Extra Power Edge gets me just 1 power, with no power points. I've gained versatility, but have to spread my powerpoints thinner to use it. They didn't just do away with "Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards", they effectively inverted it - it's now "Linear Everything Else, Diminishing Returns On Magic".

Compared to D&D, making an experienced wizard in Savage Worlds takes a lot less time - and I applaud that. This character type is the only one that takes so much less effort in Savage Worlds. It accomplishes this because there's such shorter spell lists to read over. However, the cost of that simplification is that you can't really capture the feel of a high-level wizard. There's just no spells that boggle the mind, wipe out armies, or make everyone sit up and take notice.

---

Well, I've rambled on long enough. The point was to just explain why I'm not enamored with making experienced characters in Savage Worlds. I don't feel they gain enough power to warrant the extra complexity. I'm pretty happy with starting characters in Savage Worlds, and feel my desire for elegance outweighs my desire for power. I'd rather play a starting character than have to worry about all that crunchiness.

Crunchometer and Savage Worlds / Deadlands Reloaded

My current Deadlands Reloaded game is moving towards a storyline climax after which we will change systems, and possibly just do something else completely. I like the setting, but it's a lot more complicated than vanilla Savage-Worlds. I've been running Deadlands Reloaded every other Sunday, and a few sessions of straight Savage Worlds fantasy with a different group in-between. What I've learned is that if Savage Worlds is a c12 on the crunchometer, Deadlands Reloaded is at least a c16, and probably a c20. Even without the Adventure Deck (which we've been using), the additional fate chip options and the far less homogenous magic of Deadlands make it really hard to keep on top of the expanded system.

By contrast, in the vanilla fantasy version I spend a lot less time looking up rules, and especially charts. I can run it without opening a rule book except when we're leveling-up the characters or if a PC gets incapacitated. For the Deadlands version, I've made a different summary-sheet for each spellcaster, plus printed off combat modifier cheat-sheets for the whole group, and yet we still end up having to consult charts or text every single session.

I know there's D&D groups out there that make do with that all the time, but for me it's a real drag to pause and look things up in the middle of a session (in session after session). It's been diminishing the fun, so we're intentionally moving towards a plot resolution that will allow us to ditch the system. The group was a little divided on this. Of the 5 of us (down from 6 after one player moved out-of-state), 1 really likes the system, 1 loves her character so much she'll tolerate the system, and 3 of us detest the system enough we want to end the game. Obviously, that's not healthy or sustainable, so we're wrapping up. My plan is for 2-3 more sessions.

Petrified PCs

I killed a character this weekend. I haven't done so in a while - at least not to a character that wasn't in a one-shot. Every so often we head down to Portland for the weekend to visit friends, and recently that's involved some D&D-esque gaming. We've been using Savage Worlds instead of D&D, but working to make it feel like an old school 1st Ed AD&D campaign. While starting Savage Worlds characters are pretty robust (especially compared to 1st-level D&D characters), I feel it's necessary to have PC death loom as a serious specter in a game that's mostly dungeon a romp. I play the monsters to their abilities and intelligence, never fudge the dice and rarely pull my punches. It's mostly balanced for the player's stats, but there's some sandbox elements and the players ran smack into them this Saturday.

Long story short, the PCs ended up in a significant battle. I'd statted it out, but didn't expect to actually have them encounter the big bad (a Medusa) until the next session - I was just dropping some foreshadowing. The players, bless their heroic little hearts, dove right in and chased after those hints. They found the back door escape route that the Medusa would have otherwise used if she were badly pressed, and cut straight to the big encounter. They traipsed in, using polished shields as mirrors, and making zero efforts at stealth or concealment.

Out pops the Medusa, her mate (based on the Maedar from an old issue of Dragon magazine) and two blind Grimlock bodyguards. They caught the PCs on a bit of narrow terrain in the old sandbox. The good news was that view to the Medusa was partially eclipsed by the guards. The bad news was that the PCs couldn't flee (or get to her) without taking opportunity hits. Things went south pretty quickly. First I thought it was going to be a TPK. Then I thought one PC would escape. Then that PC went back into the fight, and it looked like a TPK again. In the end, though, the big armored fighter held his ground and made every roll he needed to resist poison and petrification, so only one of the three PCs died. Not that there weren't ramifications for the other two, however - one PC ended up with a permanent -1 Charisma disfigurement - her facial muscles frozen in a horrified expression.

Instead of making up whole new rules for petrifying gaze, I just used the existing Terror / Fright Table rules, but suspended the "Becoming Jaded" portion. Everytime they attacked her, they'd have to make a Guts check. Averting your eyes could give you a bonus on the guts check, at the cost of the same penalty to your other actions and parry. Partial cover (on either end) also provided a bonus on the PCs rolls. It was simple and easy, amounting to just applying "trappings" to the guts check - if you died of a heart attack (a roll of 21+ on the Fright Chart) you'd turn to stone, the "Mark of Terror" result was a partial petrification, etc. It worked like a charm - constant danger, plenty of guts checks (which is an otherwise underutilized skill), drained several bennies, and yet was never actually lethal.

The actual kill ended up being when the Medusa got close enough to do poison bites - which I treated as a single mundane venomous snake attack but with +2 on the Fighting Roll to represent that there were a dozen snakes. A bad vigor roll took down the PCs healer. Let that be a warning to those who play Savage Worlds - the venomous snake entry is surprisingly potent.

Naked Savages

I ran some more Savage-Worlds-in-Dungeons-&-Dragons-clothing this weekend. It was a really incredibly good session. Here's some highlights.

Deck of Many Things: They were facing the demonic-tinged ghost of the grandfather of one of the PCs, and he had a Deck of Many Things. I actually got out a prop version - Green Ronin Games' beautiful copy. Since I wasn't stuck with the letter of D&D's laws, I could improvise a lot. He would basically flick cards at PCs, and they'd see the drawn card and be affected by it. You'd be a real jerk to do that in D&D, since it's not only against the rules, but also there's cards that just bone the PCs. There's a card that casts Imprison on you - that's a 9th Level spell and pretty much ends a character's existence unless they're very high level. Instead, since it wasn't D&D, he just got sucked to a lower level of the dungeon. Without armor. Or weapons. Or clothing. The card says "all gear and spells are stripped from the victim", and I took that literally.

Streaking: So, the Barbarian gets sucked down a few levels by a magic card, sans everything. Naked and unarmed. In most other games, this would be a death warrant. However, we were playing Savage Worlds, which has decent chase rules, and using my 1 hit = 1 wound houserule. I split the table in half, laid out dungeon tiles, and let him run for his life. Meanwhile, the other players raced down into the dungeon trying to find him. They hit more resistance going down than he did coming up, and he had lucky rolls, quick thinking, and bennies to protect him. When they met in the middle, the scene was quite enjoyable.

Kobolds: Part of the adventure involved Kobolds, and I really wanted them to feel miserably weak. So I gave them d8 Agility, but only d4 fighting. Nimble, but unskilled. To hit the PCs, they needed the die to explode, and to swarm in for the gang-up bonus. This would make them vulnerable to Sweep attacks. I also gave them a d4 Vigor, so their toughness became a mere 4. Then I made them extras, so 1 wound takes them out. That still didn't say pathetic to me, and I wanted these guys to make goblins look hearty, so I went one step beyond. They couldn't be shaken by damage - any hit that shook a kobold incapacitated it. Now they went down in droves, and it made for very epic combat dynamics. It also all meant that Agility tricks were useless against them, so the Rogue-Ranger had to use very different tactics than she did in the other fights.

The battle ended, by the way, with the naked barbarian running into the room, flanking the Kobolds. He was armed only with a branding iron (not hot) that he'd stolen off the wall of the room full of dark elves two levels below. He crashed into Kobolds, and in two consecutive Sweep Attacks wiped out the whole room. In two actions he killed over 12 kobolds - and they didn't even hit him despite his lack of armor or shield. A very memorable scene.

One of the two female players in the group said "I used to game, years ago, with a bunch of teenage guys, and the horny-little-bastard GM would always manufacture excuses to get my characters naked. So thank you turning the tables just once." It probably didn't hurt that her husband was playing the naked barbarian, either, or that everyone saw the completely random draw of the Donjon card that had rendered him naked and alone. Good times, good times.

Edit: I just realized the context there implied her husband was the horny-little-bastard GM of days gone by. He is a horny bastard, :) but he's not the horny bastard she was complaining about. :)

Recent Thoughts On Savage Worlds

A friend of mine recently stumbled across an old post from October where I lamented the dice mechanics of Savage Worlds and how there wasn't much motivation to stat yourself out with anything above a d8, maybe not even above a d6.

He pointed out, correctly, that it all depends on whether or not you have any Edges that give bonuses for Raises. To which I'll add, some GMs probably give more situational bonuses than others for getting a Raise. The rules read as just +1d6 damage or a handful of other specific benefits in specific situations. I've played with, and often try to be, the type of GM who improvises wildly, and thus could see how a GM might exist who makes something fun happen everytime someone gets a raise. In those circumstances, a d10 or d12 would be justified.

As Erik put it:

Now, exactly as you say, if you want to succeed at a standard task, ie roll a 4, you really don't gain much going above d8 until you start to get the static adds of d12+1 and d12+2. However, if you want to roll raises, ie an 8, which you might if you were say a spell caster as they get extra effect and with a certain feat reduced energy cost if they do, then things change. d4, d6 and d8 are about the same in rolling 8's but there is a significant increase when you go to d10 and d12. So oddly, if you are just interested in regular successes then moderate levels of skill, d6 or d8, are for you. If you want those raises to show just how amazing you are then a high skill, d10 or d12, is for you.

Very good points. What you want out of your gaming experience defines whether your character should be a d6 generalist or a d12 microspecialist. One nice feature of the game is that both character archetypes will feel potent.

Thinking about this, it occurred to me that I haven't really blogged much about Savage Worlds lately, other than in the context of the plotline of my Deadlands campaign. There's a few observations I'd like to make.

After a lot of waffling, I eventually decided I like the system. It's still a little more complicated than it really needs to be. Especially the Deadlands Reloaded version. I think normal Savage Worlds is 10% to 20% more crunchy than I want it to be, and Deadlands is 10% crunchier than vanilla Savage. It's very versatile though, and remains a good generic system for use in campaigns where characters should be hardy and competent but can still have some fear of being killed by an unlucky roll.

On a related note, the game has more Edges than it needs, and they don't all seem terribly well balanced. There's no game-breakers (at least none I've found so far), but some are definitely better and more popular than others. There's a few that only shine if you combo them, and I don't much care for that style of character design, since it rewards system knowledge at the expense of character concept. It's still a far cry better than Scion.

Likewise, the Magic system is losing a bit of it's luster for me. Again, the powers aren't well balanced, and since a new power requires the New Power Edge, you also have to consider them against the rest of the Edges as well. Some are much better than most Edges, others are really weak. Throw in trappings, and that gets even wonkier. Despite the problem-solving freedom of being a Mad Scientist and a Gadgeteer, Kevin finds himself wanting to buy a big attack power, and I can't blame him. The Blessed have found that the Barrier and Raise/Lower Attribute outperform everything else in their arsenal. The Huckster and Mad Scientist can't compete with them in any arena but damage (which is why Kevin wants the attack Ryan already has). Probably, this is a trouble-spot specific to Deadlands, not all of Savage Worlds. If I'd made my own campaign setting from the ground-up, I wouldn't be having this trouble. In a setting with less magic, or fewer flavors of magic, or smaller spell-lists for each variety of magic and no overlap between schools, this would be less of a problem.

Lastly, I've dumped my 1 hit = 1 wound house rule. I'm no longer using it in my Deadlands game. On paper, it was great, and may still be of good use in speeding up combat and preventing anticlimactic character death in some other game down the road. However, I found that I give out so many bennies, it's pointless. Especially in Deadlands Reloaded with its special Red, Blue, and Legend bennies. Soaking damage became too easy, and there wasn't enough challenge in my fights. I waived the rule for the climactic showdown with Finnegan Cobb, and found that the resulting fight was much more enjoyable. It even drained the PCs of bennies for once, whereas the session prior everyone finished with 4 or more bennies in reserve (you start with 3). If I didn't give the darned things out like water, then the 1 hit = 1 wound rule would be helpful. At the rate I award bennies, the house-rule becomes a tiny shaving of time at the cost of reducing dramatic tension. It's going by the wayside starting next session.

The Red Right Hand (vs The Adventure Deck)

Yesterday's Deadlands game ran long, but it was well worth it. The PCs caught up with Cobb and "possed up" with him, ostensibly to capture his fugitive wife. So, having a moment to talk, I turned on fanaticism and symbolism nobs to 11.

The party had 4 horses and a flying machine. As part of their approach plan, though, they left one of the two white horses behind. (Legos keep being a real boon. Everyone had, several sessions ago, chosen between three colors of horse.)

Cobb had a red right hand, just as Belial describes God possessing in Book II of Paradise Lost. This started significant theological debate. Cobb indicated that between his horse, and the three the PCs brought, they had four horseman, and exactly one horse was pale. He confessed a recent crisis of faith, but that their arrival and joining up with him now convinced him that he was indeed following the correct path. He'd been just a touch worried that he was unwittingly serving the devil, but now, thanks to the PCs, he was certain that all the signs were right and he was God's punishment for the wickedness of man. The debate raged for several scenes, the two blessed in the group arguing quite vehemently against him, while the least moral PC negotiated a power deal with him. Eventually, it ended with an understanding that the Blessed would lead him to the river and baptize him.

Turns out the water they blessed was like acid to him, and thus the fight began.

It was the nastiest battle I'd run in a while. Cobb's very first action was to rip the face off one PC. One character in particular was saved from death three times. Two cards from the Action Deck were used on him: Lucky Break and Out Of The Frying Pan, both of which cancel an entire attack. The third time he was shot by The Gun, he spent every bennie he had to soak up the wounds. Two PCs sat at three wounds for most of the fight (and one of them had some fatigue as well). Several characters had to take cover in the blessed river. They went to all sorts of trouble to reach Cobb's wife and get her help in the fight, too, and she died.

They blew off Cobb's head, and he kept fighting (it's good to be a Liche). In fact, he put on the face he'd stolen from a PC at the start of the fight. The PCs spent every power point available to them, then played cards for more. The two blessed used miracles every round. 4 out of 5 PCs ran out of Bennies at one point or another, and all 5 spent their Adventure Deck cards. The Mad Scientist wrecked his flying machine taking Cobb out. They fired quite a few magic bullets. In the end, all that was left of Cobb was his red right hand, still clutching the cursed pistol. The hand spent most of its remaining power points to escape and regrow his body. They did kill "Skin'n'Ash" his mount / familiar / boneless horse husk. There's also a pile of demon corpses in the Rio Grande.

The PCs now have the Necronomicon. It'll only take 7 hours of work to get the flying machine mobile again, but 120 hours for Cobb to get back all the power points he spent. They have breathing room, a couple leads on more effective weapons against him, and a window of opportunity if they figure out what to do with it. Wish 'em luck.

Deputized by Adventure Cards

Okay, that headline's neither fair nor accurate. The players in my Deadlands campaign did an astounding job of deputizing themselves yesterday. They were relentless in their pursuit of Finnegan Cobb, regardless of how many diversions, distractions, red herrings, and "wandering encounters" I dragged across the path. They were single-minded bloodhounds, even before the Adventure Deck came through with perfectly timed hole-card aces to every dilemma.

It's just that three Adventure Cards got played, and each one put a hard 112-degree turn into my prepared narrative.

My main plan was to tie them up in a complicated situation. I often throw "Kobayashi Maru" scenes at players, where there is no right course of action, and a high likelihood of misery and trouble no matter what they do. The idea being that you great roleplaying and memorably intense scenes, at the small cost of bogging down the plotline for several hours. In this case, the prepared scene could easily devolve into inter-party feuding (or even one PC arresting another), a very bloody 3-way battle with cowboys and a witch, curses on the whole group, death by evil tumbleweed, and a knife-fight with the peg-legged cook.

Yesterday, though, the PCs were able to sidestep everything easily, thanks partly to the Adventure Deck. Everybody drew real powerhouse cards. One got played that made peace break out. It took most of the wind out of my sails, diffusing the tension, and the players thought and acted quickly in its wake. Problem solved (about 2 hours early) without any bloodshed.

All of two minutes later they played a card that gave them an additional supernatural advantage in chasing after Cobb. I had easy ways to counter this, and would have felt justified, since no one card should short-circuit the plot. However, I really wanted to reward the PCs for handling things so well and being so determined. So I gave them a glimpse of Cobb high on a ridge before them, now only a few hours ride ahead of them (minutes if they left their horses behind and piled into Dr Immelman's flying machine). Cobb spots them, and starts testing the wind, like he expects his pistol to have the range of a modern sniper rifle (it is The Gun, afterall).

Down comes another Adventure card. This one causes a case of mistaken identity, to the players benefit. Cobb thinks they're someone else. So he shoots a bird, reanimates it, and sends it flying to the PCs. It lands in a tree, and it's beak twitches with Cobb's voice. "Which one of you is Hoyle?"

An aside: In Deadlands, the laws of magic were codified and "popularized" by Edmond Hoyle, author of the book of rules to card games. Officially, he's been dead 100 years, but then, Cobb's got several slugs lodged in his eye, so it's not impossible Hoyle might be up and about, too.

The session ended with the PCs bluffing a bit to their intentions, and arranging to meet up with Cobb and "posse up" together.

For the record, I'd planned on having the chase for Cobb last about 8 sessions (and I tend to over-prep, so 8 could easily become 10 or 12), but between determination, cleverness, and good cards, it looks like the PCs will be in pistol range on session 4. (We'd been playing once a month, due to scheduling conflicts, but that's cleared up a bit, and the next session will be two weeks from yesterday.) I'm excited, as much fun as the chase has been - the confrontation should be far better.

GM set to overload

That whistling sound you hear in the background is just me, not a Phaser set on self-destruct / overload. Close enough, though.

• Sunday: 1st Session of Deadlands Reloaded, which I'd never run before. It's a big step up in complexity from vanilla Savage Worlds.
  
• Monday: Wrote a rough draft of a Robot Chicken RPG. Later that day, an old friend sent me a copy of his new RPG, F#, asking for feedback (and eventually a playtest). [By the way: F# reads pretty damn sweet. I'll let you know more when I've actually played it, which I'm definitely looking forward too.]
• Late Tuesday: realized I might just run Robot Chicken the next day, which would mean a bunch more "adventure" prep the next morning.
  
• Wednesday: Ran Robot Chicken RPG at my own birthday party.
• Thursday: Ran Og for the weekly coffeeshop group. It was my second time doing so, and the first time was way back in October. I had to reread the rules before running it.
  
• Saturday: I'll be running Trail of Cthulhu for the second time ever. It uses the very prep-intensive GUMSHOE mystery system.
  

Feeling spread a little thin at the moment... I know, I know, it's a pretty good problem to have.

Blessed Be

Sunday afternoon was the first session of my Deadlands Reloaded campaign. A few observations:

• Blessed freakin' rock. I knew that they were pretty buff on paper, but I really wasn't prepared for just how potent they were. In theory, they're kept in check by not being able to sin, and getting penalties for attempting miracles that aren't direly needed. Given the questy nature of the campaign -the PCs are hunting supernatural evil- that second restriction isn't going to factor in as often as the rules may be assuming. This session, for example, the two Blessed in the party were the dominating force in the game, and the penalties I applied weren't even effective speedbumps. Who'd a thunk Clerics would be such powerhouses? This will take some getting used to.
  
• Savage Worlds is "Fast! Furious! Fun!", but Deadlands Reloaded definitely notches up the complexity. Poker hands, magic rules, and 3 flavors of fate chips seem to be the tangled roots of it. It's a little more fiddly than I'd like, to be honest.
• One player maintained it was more complicated than d20, but I have to strongly disagree there. What the player wasn't taking into account was that this wasn't the equivalent of a 1st-level d20 game. The Blessed each cast multiple of what would be a 5th level spell in d20, and the nasty they were battling was a pretty huge challenge. If 3 out of 5 players have no previous d20 experience, and you handed them 9th level D&D spellcasters to play, and then threw them up against a CR13 vampire, I dare say your first session would be rather painful. (Especially if the GM had never run D&D and had only 20 hours of d20 Modern GMing to handle things - which is roughly my situation, except in regards to Deadlands Reloaded and Savage Worlds.) Compared to that, this was a pleasant walk in the shade while a comforting breeze blew at my back.
• Next time, I'm carrying the lego minis to the game in a hard-sided tub, not a cloth bag. Within that tub, everything will be ziplock-bagged. When the fight started, I was shocked to discover I had to fish for pieces and put my pre-made terrain back together, which rather sucked. Once that delay had been solved, things went pretty smoothly, but the rocky start to combat had me scared for a bit.
• Blessed kick butt. I know I already said that, but it bears repeating. I'm gonna have to play hardball when enforcing the sinnin' rules, as that's the only easy way to maintain/restore balance. If I don't, then Blessed are the best character archetype, no contest.
  

Relearning How To Breathe

When I ran Continuum, I had to largely give up the notion of controlling the pacing of the game. Players were time-travellers, and could bop over to whatever moment caught their interest. There were things I could do to provide direction, but if they really wanted to focus in on a moment, or span over the slow bits, they could do that themselves, and as long as they didn't frag themselves in the process I couldn't stop them. This made for a game that was very player driven, and every moment was entertainly pregnant with opportunity. It was a great campaign.

That "I've got ADD, lets span" dynamic made me a little lazy, though, and thus when I ran the Amber campaign that started the week after my Continuum campaign dropped curtain, I did a poor job of pacing. Instead of grabbing the reigns and cutting scenes, I spent too much time waiting for players to do things in the first 6 sessions. I sort of blame Continuum, because it required I take such concise notes, and left me really wanting to prep and record absolutely nothing. One campaigns success contributed to another campaigns failure.

When I ran Scion, I definitely got the pacing back under control - at least outside of combat. The combat system was pretty volatile, however, and the game rules had ugly tattered seams. I started house-ruling to mend them, bit by bit. As the campaign progressed, and the basic math of the system fell apart, I had to compensate by getting much more aggressive in my house-ruling. When the second chapter of the Scion companion released in PDF, I tore into it, leveling harsh criticism and pre-emptively houseruling like a man possessed. I don't regret that, in and of itself. White Wolf composes beautiful settings, but their "too many cooks" approach to authorship results in sloppy, even contradictory, rules with holes you could drive a mac truck through. Scion is, hands down, the worst perpetrator of White Wolf's signature flaw that I've read. The game is desperately in need of a revised edition, but they'll probably never make one and I'll probably be too jaded to buy it if they did. End result was a game my players are still talking lovingly about the setting and plot, but which I hated to run. Too much hard work and frustration.

So now I'm running Deadlands Reloaded. It's "rules medium-light", meaning a little lighter than D&D 4th, but a step heavier than vanilla Savage Worlds. It's got some extra complexity (beyond Savage Worlds) in the Magic system, Dueling rules, a few other card draws, and the way Bennies work. The first printing had some rough edges. They weren't nearly as tattered as Scion's rules, and Pinnacle released a nice little FAQ that mended 95% of the fraying. It's still not perfect, but it's more than playable.

Problem is, the campaign that went before is casting a shadow on the various games that follow. Just as Continuum allowed me to focus on flavor and PC freedom at the cost of pacing, Scion has inclined me to focus on niggling rules flaws at the cost of... well, I'm not sure at the cost of what (beyond perhaps my peace of mind), since we've only done character creation. I am noticing, however, that my gut instinct has become to bitch here and then house-rule. It's kinda sad how quickly I jump to fix what ain't necessarily broke.

For example, in Deadlands Reloaded, I find that the Poker Hands chart isn't perfectly to my liking:

• it isn't terribly clear whether "Jacks of Better" counts as a whole hand rank above a mundane pair when you're dueling, or if that's just for spellcasting. (Same vagueness with Ace High - is it just a tie breaker in a duel or does it count as a hand rank above slop?)
• the system ranks Straight Flush above 5 of a Kind - despite 5 of a kind requiring a Joker. Jokers burn the PC a little, so I'd think you'd wanna make the best possible hand require them.
• they didn't make the Dead Man's Hand special. The hand is both black aces, both black eights, and whatever you believe the 5th card Wild Bill Hickock drew - I lean towards Jack of Diamonds myself - seconds before he died.

For those incredibly minor "flaws", I nearly house-ruled it to duplicate the hand ranks of Doomtown, the old Deadlands CCG. That would have been silly and pointless, since I'm the only person in the group who played Doomtown, and the vagueness about a pair of jacks in a duel will hardly ever come up. If and when it does, I can rule on it. The other two complaints are just flavorful things, and functional (playtested!) mechanics is probably more important than cramming just a little bit more flavor into an already zesty rule set.

As I look through the Deadlands Reloaded book, lots of little things like that keep popping up. What can I say? Scion made me gun shy. I need to learn to just "go with the flow" again, instead of riding hard to head off potential rules-flaws at the pass. I need to relearn how to relax and breathe.

Cop-Out on page 173

Savage Worlds is a great system, and Deadlands is a great setting, and both are great games. In general, they're very well written. That said, the sidebar on page 173 of Deadlands Reloaded is an egregious cop-out. I'm gonna give 'em some hell here, because that sidebar really got under my skin. It's the most frustrating part of the Deadlands Reloaded rulebook.

The first three paragraphs of said sidebar explain how they won't make any efforts to indicate what rank of PC while find any particular monster / NPC appropriately challenging. The game has this nice ranking structure for characters, Novice/Seasoned/Veteran/Heroic/Legendary, which corresponds to how many XP advances you've had, and dictates what level of Powers and Edges you have access to. Sure, two Veteran characters are gonna be very different, but they'll both be serious badasses at whatever it is they chose to specialize in, and they certainly won't have a Parry of 2. So the framework is there to have given monsters a ballpark rating. They chose not to use it for the monster section.

They claim it's for mostly philosophical reasons. They say it's more realistic for the Weird West to be populated by variable threats that don't conveniently correspond to the experience level of the party. They thumb their noses at D&D's challenge ratings and balanced encounters. Sometimes the PCs will massacre the baddies, and sometimes the PCs better just turn tales and run.

On one level, I agree with this sand-box approach, as it leads to far greater verisimilitude - the world is unfair and some challenges have no easy solutions. On the other hand, it seems kinda out of place - since so much of Deadlands is about capturing the feel of Western movies (admittedly, flavored with some supernatural evil) and random encounters of variable power is antithetical to that genre. Nearly every damn Western I've ever seen escalates to a gloriously violent climax. The heroes do sometimes get left for dead in scene one, but that's always set up for a revenge tale that ends with a fairer (but still challenging) fight in the final reel. It's never "That random encounter nearly killed us, we'd better not go back for round two!" No Western hero would ever do that.

But, if they really meant to go full-blown-oldschool-sandbox-and-random-encounter mode, I could respect it. Instead, come paragraph four, the sidebar undoes itself:

"All that said, the GM should tweak encounters to fit the nature of his party. You'll have a good handle on what your party can manage after a few sessions, without the need for some sort of formula."

WTF? So, realism trumps balance, except really you should balance it after all, and we aren't gonna help. I suspect the truth is that laziness trumps realism and balance both.

Oh, sure, I'll get the hang of it, at the cost of my first few sessions being clumsy and poorly balanced. Great. If this preceeded a 4-page monster section, I'd understand that you could eyeball the easier encounters quickly, and something akin to Challenge Rating isn't necessary. But no, the antagonist section it heads up is 77 pages long. Sure, there's several things in there I can push off till later in the campaign by means o' knee jerk reaction to their stat line, but I really don't want to have to read 77 pages in order to start planning my first session.

Why not include a short list of, say, the 6 monsters most appropriate to Novice characters. That would have saved the new GM a lot of trouble, and been pretty damn easy to fit in the book. Off the top of my head, I can think of 3 or 4 paragraphs they could have taken out to shoehorn it in.

Savagepedia

I posted some of my house-rules for Savage Worlds to Savagepedia today. It's a Savage Worlds wiki. Everything I posted there was already on this blog for some time, with nothing new beyond some organization-related edits and minor clarifications. Here's the relevant links:

• Cinematic Damage: aka "1 Hit = 1 Wound" rule. Speeds up damage rolls and prevents random anticlimactic PC death.
• Non-Arcane Cybernetics System: Uses a new thing called The Cyber Die instead of making Cybernetics just another form of Arcane Background (as I'd seen elsewhere).
• Cyberpunk 2020 Setting Conversion: A framework for catching the feel of R. Talsorian's classic setting without losing the mechanical elegance of Savage Worlds.