At its "baseline" the assumption is Savage Worlds is going to be "over the top" adventure where PC's are supposed to be like Indiana Jones doing cool stuff and largely succeeding*. The Benny system is also supposed to be an incentive to get players to do more over-the-top actions, which feeds more daring stuff that *should* reward more Bennies.

One of the trickiest things for new GM's to learn/remember is to hand out Bennies for the kind of play you want. If you leave it as a "static" mechanic where PC's only get their three Bennies per session (which is what happens with a lot of starting GM's) then the game will get lethal pretty quickly.

I've noticed this can make players *very* cautious and more passive, even if the players are uncharacteristically not passive. Mainly because once you take a bad turn, you start hording those Bennies for survival.

The takeaway is that the Benny-economy can *massively* affect the tone of the game. More Bennies makes players more daring. Less Bennies makes the game much more grimdark. The game fully acknowledges this as a Setting mechanic. There are various rules that either incentivize more Benny expenditure - or at least rolls where the odds are higher you'll need to spend Bennies like Grim and Gritty rules, or other rules where GM's get Bennies when players spend theirs.

The reality is using the baseline rules and tossing Bennies at players for playing their characters well is more than enough to keep things rolling right along.

Quote from: ForgottenF on September 19, 2024, 10:38:17 PMThe thing about stats not contributing directly to skills is odd, but yeah that's how it works.

Palladium games was much the same. Only one stat actually impacted any skills and that was INT. Otherise skills were their own thing and only your level impacted them.

However - the stats *do* impact gameplay directly. Strength impacts your melee damage. It impacts your Encumbrance. All of your stats are your resistance to Tricks. Vigor impacts your Toughness. Those certainly aren't insignificant and are tied directly to much of the core task resolution (at least for combat - which is core for adventure gaming).

The separation of Stats vs. Skills as die rolling mechanics solves the perceived D&D issue of those that quibble between OSR and modern 3.x and later editions about skills.

Here, Skills *are* tied directly to Stats as your stats are a soft limitation on your skill's cap. But ultimately your skill matters more than your stat when comes to actively doing things. I think this is a better emulation than just rolling stats.

It took me quite some times to understand Savage Worlds, but once I discoreved Savage Worlds Rifts, I was enlightened in the marwel of SW (I also happened to have been a player in many one-shots and one ongoing campaign).
SW + Rifts make so much more sense to a "modern" audience than the old basic Palladium ruleset that it makes it weird to teach the OG Rifts rules to new players.
I am quite glad that Kevin Siembieda had the forethought to make sure that Rifts survives his lifetime (for all I know, he is one of the surviving OG Old Ones in the RPG industry, stil alive and active).

That's just it. Mechanics are mostly (not entirely) about abstracting the task resolutions of what goes in a game to the desires of the GM and players.

Not *everyone* calibrates the "resolution" of those abstractions the same. For instance many of us are deeply indoctrinated into the d20 mechanical abstractions which don't make much sense to a lot of people despite our adoption of it. Decades worth of debates over "What is AC?" and "What are HP?" and "What is Alignment?" etc. which even when pointed out how many of the mechanics are simply short-handed holdovers from wargaming or tacked on "features" that simply made sense to those designers at the time who were fluent in the flow of the mechanics and didn't need to really think about them.

As time has gone on, further editions of d20 have added and added until the abstraction of the rules are now largely taking place of the actual RP in RPG. I think there is a sweet-spot to it. It's not like d20 mechanics ever got in the way of having deep immersive experiences - but I attest this not to the mechanics, but to the GM's that promote those things in their games.

SW does something *better* than d20 does. It is by design to let you tinker with the system as a feature not as an afterthought. Yes, you can, and we all have done this in d20 for decades, but d20's design is not cohesive enough to abstract beyond its original DNA easily. It's been done - and in some cases I'd say fantastically well. True20, Fantasycraft, and Mutants & Masterminds are superb examples. But they also are their own strains of the system that require a *lot* of fuss to be backwards compatible.

Meanwhile - SW is like an IT Datalake. It's a centralized location where disparate pieces of data can all coexist and be abstracted under a simple and centralized pipeline. If you know what the values of a different setting or system are supposed to represent, you can model it in SW with very close fidelity.

And Savage Rifts is a testimony to that fact. MANY Rifts fans have gotten on the Savage Worlds train - and all their old Rifts books are still valid. They just become wonderful reference material. The scale of Rifts is not some secret to the rest of the gaming world that's been doing this for a reasonable amount of time. We *all* know how crazy powerful it is. That's precisely why the other Savage Worlds settings make Savage Worlds so important: they're all running on the same chassis and are interchangeable mechanically.

What's more is once you get your feet wet and actually run some stuff, you'll see the potential of your otherwise "normal d20" game, for instance, which by WotC own metrics will implode somewhere south of 12th level by an overwhelming probability due in part to the mechanics, can be eliminated. The verticality of SW towers over many other systems with tools to dial in the resolution of those mechanics as you see fit with very little effort.

I wouldn't even say it's like GURPS where the universality introduces more complexity - most of the rules for high-powered play do introduce slightly higher numbers, but they're relatively small by comparison of other systems, and nothing about the core combat/non-combat changes. Hence you can have Rifts and Supers running on the same system as literal kids from Stranger Things (Pinebox Middle-school is awesome). That's a pretty amazing piece of design that people should check out.

I did a screengrab from Savagegoose (good YT channel if you wanna check out SW stuff) for a very simple but accurate conversion of d20 DC's to Savage Worlds modifiers.



Since SW uses smaller values it's fairly easy to calibrate and even run d20 material on the fly in SW.

Quote from: tenbones on September 27, 2024, 03:16:48 PMI did a screengrab from Savagegoose (good YT channel if you wanna check out SW stuff) for a very simple but accurate conversion of d20 DC's to Savage Worlds modifiers.



Since SW uses smaller values it's fairly easy to calibrate and even run d20 material on the fly in SW.

Thanks, Tenbones, it will be most helpful for any Rifts to Savage Rifts conversion !!!

In my humble opinion, the best way to approach SW is, like that :
Following the dice progression : 1d4 = you are a beginner ; 1d12 = you are an Olympic athelete/Avenger (1d4 -2,= you suck, big time !) ;
Making your own character, following the rulebook, with a character sheet, il will click, quite quickly ;
The basic challenge number is 4 on one of the 2 dice you throw ; max throwing, it explodes (6 on 1d6), but if you do snake eyes, there will hell to pay !!!

I think it's great game and I've run it a ton and run amazing campaigns in it.

1. Incredibly robust. You can hack and change things and it still works.
2. Incredible amount of fan and commercial support. I've got gigs of stuff.
3. Easy to make a character "like you want."
4. Sort of level progression, but you can still keep going for a long time, and you can always be killed by a guy with a 1d4 damage weapon.
5. Game plays really well at the table whether you're doing combat heavy or investigation or social stuff even though there's absolutely no reason it seems like it should.
6. Does run nearly everything, even though it's not clear why it does this. I'm 100% confident you could run Vampire the Masquerade in it and it would work "fine".
7. Card mechanic in combat and exploding dice is actually fun once you get used to it.

Some challenges (maybe)
1. Game is incredibly biased towards PC success, and it gets worse over time. This can be mitigated.
2. Combat is 100% designed for tabletop minis. You can kind of work around it if there are only a few combatants.

So, I saw that there is a Savage Worlds Sci-Fi supplement for sale on DriveThru RPG.

The point of Savage Worlds is to do it all as standalone game, so are supplement books like this really that important?

The big test for most games: Can you run a Star Wars campaign with it?  Or does the as Sci-Fi book add enough details to make it worthwhile?

No, you don't need them but they are very helpful. 

The Companions do a good job of drilling down into what setting rules would apply for a particular genre.  There is some overlap with some of the Savage Worlds settings but in general they offer quite a bit of insight into designing your own setting. 

If you were only to get one, my recommendation would be the Super Powers Companion because it allows you to essentially make Savage Worlds a point buy system without specifically coming out and saying it. 

To your second question, yes, you can do Star Wars with the Science Fiction Companion. There is an Arcane Background that is essentially a Jedi with the serial numbers filed off with some Edges on how to handle blaster deflection. 

Savage Star Wars has been a thing since the system launched. I probably have half a dozen different fan conversions.

Here is what, to the best of my knowledge, is the current unofficial, unlicensed fan-made Star Wars compendium.

https://www.reddit.com/r/savageworlds/comments/lewh4w/savage_worlds_star_wars_swade/

Quote from: weirdguy564 on September 28, 2024, 09:59:27 PMThe point of Savage Worlds is to do it all as standalone game, so are supplement books like this really that important?

The point of Savage Worlds is to be a universal framework you can build any kind of game on, so I'd say that genre/setting supplement books are exactly what you'd expect for it.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on September 28, 2024, 09:59:27 PMThe big test for most games: Can you run a Star Wars campaign with it?

That is a really strange litmus test for a game system.

That said, I think the reason why SWADE isn't a much more popular system is that while it has A LOT of licensed settings, it doesn't have the ones people really care about. The biggest "get" is probably Rifts, but I don't think Rifts has much of a footprint for anyone under 45. A big license like Star Wars, Star Trek or LOTR would push SWADE into the hands of tons of players who would never try it otherwise.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on September 28, 2024, 09:59:27 PMThe point of Savage Worlds is to do it all as standalone game, so are supplement books like this really that important?

All the questions you ask depend on the kind of GM you are. I have known a Savage Worlds GMs who meticulously planned out every NPC, bought every book PEG ever published, looked up every single thing in those books, and only ever played Rules As Written.

I've known another Savage Worlds GM who would look up absolutely nothing and kept a bowl full of 3-4 sets of dice and one random D20 in it and whenever he needed to roll for something--which was all the time--he would just snag a die out of it on a whim. I'm sure he could feel the different kinds of dice. I didn't play with that group for long, but that D20 had a reputation among the other players for suspiciously good timing.

Quote from: ForgottenF on September 29, 2024, 04:50:50 PM

Quote from: weirdguy564 on September 28, 2024, 09:59:27 PMThe big test for most games: Can you run a Star Wars campaign with it?

That is a really strange litmus test for a game system.

It is.  Actually, the full quote is that it is a universal law that all games  eventually get converted to Star Wars and Cthulhu. 

Quote from: weirdguy564 on September 29, 2024, 07:21:03 PM

Quote from: ForgottenF on September 29, 2024, 04:50:50 PM

Quote from: weirdguy564 on September 28, 2024, 09:59:27 PMThe big test for most games: Can you run a Star Wars campaign with it?

That is a really strange litmus test for a game system.

It is.  Actually, the full quote is that it is a universal law that all games  eventually get converted to Star Wars and Cthulhu.

Yeah that's probably true. Well there is a savage worlds Cthulhu setting (if not several)

Is there a Gurps for Star Wars?