Savage Worlds Thoughts
Aug 20 2024
I was thinking a bit about why I didn't really get into Savage Worlds RPG. I have Classic Deadlands and Classic Deadlands: Hell on Earth and the latter I ran a campaign for my friends. A quirky cumbersome system but not too unlike D&D 3E (classes, stats, skills, feats except you roll stat dice instead of a d20).
When Savage Worlds version of Hell on Earth came out I bought it and switched the last part of the campaign to that ruleset. I feel the classes lost their flavor. Before pretty much every class had their own special powers system, whether magic or psionic or whatever and each class's version worked a little different than the others. In Savage Worlds all magic works the same you differentiate with special effects or spell selection. All edges work the same though once again different classes have different access to edges. It lost a lot of flavor compared to Classic rules (mind you Savage Worlds was intended to be a simpler and clearer rendition of Classic rules).
Here's the thing I hated with D&D 3E and Savage Worlds: as publishers add more classes the way to differentiate them is to add more feats (edges in Savage Worlds). In D&D there are no guidelines for how to create new feats -- all feats cost the same and the gating requirements are either character level or feat pre-reqs so you get these feat chains and then you a player has to figure which chain(s) they want to develop.
Similarly Savage World edges have either a level gate (in Savage Worlds this is flatter mook, heroic, veteran, legendary or something like that) or edge pre-reqs. Once again every new book can add more feats so it becomes a jumble.
Eventually you get different books presenting similar feats which makes it weird to mix and match.
Contrast to GURPS where almost all advantages are in the Characters book (a few were added in Powers, not sure if there are more) and instead a supplement might say "here is an advantage and this is what it does" with optionally showing that behind the scenes this "new" advantage is a standard advantage with appropriate modifiers. To me that's more coherently universal than having several supplements each with their own edges which don't need to be balanced between supplements. (It's why I also like HERO system.)
Savage Worlds is a great system to get into if you want to play lots of different worlds and I love that there are Savage Worlds versions of Rifts and Space: 1889 and other RPGs as well as many licensed media supplements. But unfortunately the rpg system itself doesn't do it for me.
When Savage Worlds version of Hell on Earth came out I bought it and switched the last part of the campaign to that ruleset. I feel the classes lost their flavor. Before pretty much every class had their own special powers system, whether magic or psionic or whatever and each class's version worked a little different than the others. In Savage Worlds all magic works the same you differentiate with special effects or spell selection. All edges work the same though once again different classes have different access to edges. It lost a lot of flavor compared to Classic rules (mind you Savage Worlds was intended to be a simpler and clearer rendition of Classic rules).
Here's the thing I hated with D&D 3E and Savage Worlds: as publishers add more classes the way to differentiate them is to add more feats (edges in Savage Worlds). In D&D there are no guidelines for how to create new feats -- all feats cost the same and the gating requirements are either character level or feat pre-reqs so you get these feat chains and then you a player has to figure which chain(s) they want to develop.
Similarly Savage World edges have either a level gate (in Savage Worlds this is flatter mook, heroic, veteran, legendary or something like that) or edge pre-reqs. Once again every new book can add more feats so it becomes a jumble.
Eventually you get different books presenting similar feats which makes it weird to mix and match.
Contrast to GURPS where almost all advantages are in the Characters book (a few were added in Powers, not sure if there are more) and instead a supplement might say "here is an advantage and this is what it does" with optionally showing that behind the scenes this "new" advantage is a standard advantage with appropriate modifiers. To me that's more coherently universal than having several supplements each with their own edges which don't need to be balanced between supplements. (It's why I also like HERO system.)
Savage Worlds is a great system to get into if you want to play lots of different worlds and I love that there are Savage Worlds versions of Rifts and Space: 1889 and other RPGs as well as many licensed media supplements. But unfortunately the rpg system itself doesn't do it for me.