Five Things I Hate Most About Savage Worlds

Number One: The Benny: Admittedly this is a fear of the unknown and a vague sense that we're "cheating" as much as anything.  I think its important that a game presents failure as a reasonable outcome and in its purest implementation this means rolling and abiding by the dice.  Any system that subverts this in the name of achieving "fun" or a desired "narrative" I look at with skepticism.  In fact, it was the ubiquity of the benny that made me really struggle with bothering to learn and play Savage Worlds at all, as my first instinct was to remove them but I balked at home-ruling before having practical, first-hand experience with how the system plays at the table.  In the end, I decided  to start playing the game as designed, bennies and all, until I feel strongly otherwise. 

Number Two: Lack of Randomization During Character Creation:  The idea of players being able to custom build their characters through a point-buy system is not uniquely Savage Worlds.  Implementing hindrances along with edges balances that customization out some, but it's still subject to the plague of min/maxing and  the rut of ideally synergized character builds. What's lacking is some good old fashioned randomization.  I've always felt that there's no reason why the game shouldn't begin prior to meeting in a tavern... that is, character generation should be part of the game and not just something done in preparation for the game, and therefore subject to the meaningful influence of dice.  One of my favorite character generation systems is Traveller's where a potential character may not even survive their own back-story.  Lacking a class-system (and not wanting to implement one) though, means players have to pick something.  I've pointed out in the previous post that chargen in Savage Worlds is pretty quick and easy, so I'm going to accept this one for now, too.  If we keep choosing the same old hindrances, though, I'm apt to at least randomize those.

Number Three: The Paradox of Choice:  I tend to do better creatively when working within a narrow framework. I find, for instance, the technical writing I've done in my professional life to be far easier than any of the creative writing I've done outside of it.  Hand me a schematic or interface drawing, a technical spec and a deadline and I might purr like a kitten.  Hand me a blank piece of paper (or a blog) and either my head swims in paralytic euphoria with the possibilities or I break out in a cold sweat over them.  The utility and flexibility of SW means it can really enable my tendency to lack focus when left to my own devices.  I have no answers for this other than listening to any advice others may have and guarding against it.  For my first full-blown SW campaign I'm going for the familiar and narrow "vanilla fantasy" I grew up in after the unfamiliar and narrow zombie apocalypse game I briefly ran as an experiment. I'm sure in a year or two it'll be post-apocalyptic far-future science fantasy... with hedgehogs.

But the players will need some guidelines too.  I foresee a problem when looking over the power descriptions, for instance, which are intentionally generic and reliant upon player and DM for genre flavor.  Quick and easy character generation just ground to a halt.  To remedy this I'll be pre-generating novice-rank spells as a list to choose from during character creation.  After that, the payers can go wild tweaking their own spells with trappings and trade-offs, but I think the baseline needs to be established.  This will probably be the most actual prep work I do for the game, writing out 20-30 spells. 

Number Four: Predetermined Narrative as a Goal: It's hard to escape this nowadays when not playing anything decidedly "Old School" and while its more overtly acknowledged by participants (i.e. popular podcasters and vloggers) of the game then its designers as far as I have seen, it is still implicit in the rules.  What else are bennies, wild dice and power trappings but means by which the game's participants enact or exert control over a desired storyline.  I understand that it's RPG's narrative elements that separate it from other games, but in practice I like for story to follow the game-play and not the other way around.  To me a good game is about the outcomes of the choices the players made and not about the player's making the right choices.  Randomness within the context of predetermined odds should ultimately determine outcomes.  The DM must create the opportunity for choice, the players should fiddle with the odds through preparation, planning and inspired thinking but the dice must have their say. There's still plenty of randomness already built-into SW, we still roll dice after-all, so in practice this one isn't tough to overlook or mitigate, but it still must be acknowledged. 

Number Five: "Everybody Gets a Trophy" Experience Point System:  I said in the previous post that I really liked both the system for character progression and it not being tied to something as specific as D&D's "murder hobo" sensibilities.  But... lacking implicit or explicit goals, and objective rewards derived from them, what we're left with is an XP system where everybody seems to get a trophy.  Every five experience points gets you some advancement and players should be earning 1-3 experience points per game.  The danger here is that once players figure out that the rewards are pretty much already doled out and all they have to do is show up and wait for them, they're going to risk less.  They're going to feel less enabled, because no matter how brilliantly or terribly they do they're pretty much looking at the same 1-3 expereince points.  What's worse is that whether they get 1, 2 or 3 experience points seems to rely solely on DM subjectivity and, frankly, a player's ability to play up to the DM's sensibilities.  This won't do.  I haven't figured it all out yet, but I'll be overhauling the manner by which XP rewards are given to make it more transparent, specific and objective for our game.