Number One: It's Lean and It's Mean: I flirted with using GURPS sometime back in the late eighties/ early nineties and still have several source books tucked away somewhere. In practice it ended up being a tad too fiddly and bloated for our group, but I loved the concept of a universal RPG that could be plugged into and played in a variety of settings with a minimal learning curve. Savage Worlds achieves this with elegance and panache. You can literally teach all of the important rules of the game, which essentially boils down to a universal task resolution system based on what the game calls traits, in minutes. You can roll up a character in slightly more time. Flexibility is built right into the game's DNA if you can live with the sort of abstraction that doesn't require a different set of skills, powers/ spells, classes, etc... for every game and genre. If you can't, it's not necessarily a deal-breaker. Just use the rules as a tool kit and make as much of that stuff explicit and setting-specific as you like.
We ran a short, zombie-apocalypse survival game as our first foray into SW. It began with me handing out pre-generated characters and reading a few lines that amounted to what anybody who watches The Walking Dead already knows and we were off and playing in minutes. For maps I used Google Maps and for descriptions I just used the Google street views and pretty much described the burnt-out, riot-damaged and zombified version of whatever was there on the laptop screen. The gang ended up reaching West Philly from a barricaded hotel near Rittenhouse Square with a bag full of guns, a double-digit zombie body count and a car trunk full of Dunkin Donuts coffee within hours of learning the game. I've never gotten from purchase of new game to running it by the group to memorable adventure that quickly. I think my prep time was the about the same amount of time character generation took.
Number Two: Easy Character Generation That Still Provides Quite a Lot of Choice: I've already mentioned easy chargen, but it bears repeating. As a player, I used to love elaborate character generation and I suppose given enough time, I still do. As a DM I have 5-6 players who range from "Let's play already!" to "I'm torn between choosing the bec de corbin or the military fork for my henchman's secondary weapon, what do you think?" We have limited time to play. I want to account for all approaches to making characters and still get a game in. With SW you can literally take a pre-defined "class" like fighter or thief and run with it or tailor-make your staff-wielding, thief-mage with meaningful choices that can still be made in the time it takes for water to boil. Character advancement further allows you to easily change or modify your concept as the character evolves.
Number Three: No Implied Purpose: D&D is great. I love D&D. I'm not here to trash it. But if you choose to not kill things and take their stuff, the tangible rewards of D&D are zero. Some will argue that great role-playing is its own reward. I'm aware of and can even tell the sea story where "...we sat around the table barely picking up the dice and had a transcendent moment of pure role-playing magic." It's either the exception to the rule or the sort of regular game experience as a whole my group is generally not interested in having. My players want to progress. They want to earn power and agency within the context of the game. I like a system that can provide tangible game rewards to players for pursuing the group's goals in varied ways. Since character advancement in SW isn't tied to killing things and taking their stuff, the intent of the game can be other things and there can be a tangible reward for almost anything. This subjectivity admittedly poses its own problems that I'll cover later in Five Things That I Hate About Savage Worlds, but on balance the flexibility is a good thing.
Number Four: Incremental & Varied Character Advancement: This is happening on two separate but related scales in SW. Every few sessions or so characters should have gained enough experience to choose some small benefit/ upgrade. Earn enough experience and make enough of these small improvements over time and one day the character gets bumped in rank from Novice to Seasoned. Rank advancement opens up access to more advanced abilities. I haven't played long enough to say yet, but these incremental choices on the whole should provide for some unique character progression. One so-called "fighter" can be very meaningfully different from another without fiddly sub-systems, sub-classes, etc... it's all built right into the baseline system.
Number Four: Combat is Quick, Deadly & Swingy at all Levels: While advancing through ranks, characters will become better equipped to survive combat, but it never seems to lose its deadliness. Opponents must be treated with respect. A lucky arrow shot or hit from a dagger can kill your mid-rank character. Hit Points don't exist in SW, instead characters other than common mooks (called extras) accrue wound levels. Each wound level carries increasing penalties to trait rolls. As you get hurt and therefore closer to death, you become less effective. Get hurt enough and you die. A parallel fatigue system does the same thing without killing you. One's ability to avoid getting wounded is a combination of their fighting ability, their toughness, the amount of armor they wear and their opponent's ability to hit and do damage, but "exploding" dice make the (un)lucky hits possible and keep the players honest. This is all accomplished in a tidy, quickly managed combat system that doesn't require a lot of record-keeping of hit points and doesn't bog down even with combats involving tens of participants. Players love the exploding dice. Who doesn't love to roll dice?
In the above-mentioned zombie-apocalypse game (our first ever) we ran about 3-5 separate combats per session (we had two sessions). Most of these included the use of firearms, and none of them took more than 20 minutes of real-time to resolve. Player-characters received wounds from buckshot, shattering glass and maybe one bullet from a roof-top sniper. There was also a van crash, a foot-chase through a block of row homes and a careful approach to an overrun military checkpoint at the South Street Bridge. Things moved quickly and in cinematic fashion without being a cake-walk.
Honorable Mention, Big, Community with Lots of Support: If you've got or want an idea for a setting feature or rule there's a big, friendly, well-supported community of players and publishers out there to help you.
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