Oh nice, Savage Worlds is out with a new edition. For our group, this game was eclipsed by FATE and kind of stayed on the shelf - despite being an excellent system that could literally do anything. This is one I wanted to play, but events in my life and my group breaking up kind of put the entire jump to this system on hold in favor of keeping with FATE and D&D 4th/Pathfinder until that story ended.
Part of what got me posting again is I am looking for homes for a lot of my older books, and only keeping what I want. So I am unboxing everything, building some nice sets of shelves to sort through things with, and I am sharing my feelings about over 40 years in this hobby. When I can, I am updating the games I want to keep and looking at a few new ones to fill my time.
Savage Worlds = Super Popular
Some of my previous articles discussing using Savage Worlds to do World of Warcraft are still some of this blog's most popular articles, and the point still is a good one - simulate the flavor of the World of Warcraft experience, rather than converting in thousands of powers, monsters, items, and spells. Design your characters to closely match what you feel a WoW character should be, and given when you played the game this will likely be different depending on if you are still playing or the time you quit. That game changes and reinvents itself every year to keep things fresh, so yesterday's WoW is not tomorrow's.
As long as you are close and get the feeling right, you are fine. Play. Enjoy.
Solo Game?
As a solo game? This could work. It is a more simple framework than a GURPS, and many people prefer this to that game as well, so I could see running some one-offs for myself with the system. Admittedly, GURPS is more simulationist and old-school, but the games are similar enough with this one having a more pulp flavor I could see this one working for a lot of things I am looking at doing.
I wished our group would have adopted this game more, I can see it have solving a lot of the system wrestling we went through with several settings and rules systems. When D&D 4th fell through, we switched to Pathfinder for several campaigns, and moved over to the computer-aided design program for characters. The entire experiment was a bust as I look back, and no one was happy with the system. Pathfinder just wasn't two-fisted fun and exciting, there were so many "rules by interrupt and exception" that to run as many characters as we did, we spent more time tracking, building, and referencing than playing.
Something makes me wish we switched to Savage Worlds and never looked back. That would have solved so many issues. We could have had our actiony, two-fisted, action oriented heroes with as little rules chaff as possible. The less work you have to put in getting to a "place of fun" the better. I could completely see the group of 4th Edition larger than life fantasy superheroes we ran in Savage Worlds, kicking butt, and taking names.
Minor Changes
From what I read the game does not make too many changes from the older edition. They add five default skills for everyone, some skills are combined to reduce the list size and broaden the use of those, some slight changes to chases, and weird science being an arcane background. There are also some layout, art, and presentation changes to clean things up. I am looking forward to seeing this edition and diving in already.
Coming Soon
I am looking forward to getting my hands on the new hardcover soon, and will do an article on it when it arrives. Perhaps I will flip through some of these old 4th Edition characters and convert them over for an adventure or two...you never know.
No comments:
Post a Comment