[Savage Worlds] Sell Me/Unsell Me
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[Savage Worlds] Sell Me/Unsell Me
I really want to like Savage Worlds because it's popular, it's quasi-open source, and it's philosophically a lot like HERO System, only without enough crunch to cause brain paralysis in halfwits that can't do maths.
Tell me why you think it's good and/or bad.
Tell me why you think it's good and/or bad.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
- angelfromanotherpin
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FrankTrollman wrote:Savage Worlds has the problem where it is a shitty clunky system that doesn't do anything well and can't even be fucked to have underlying math resilient enough to make sure that being better at a task makes you more likely to succeed rather than less in all cases. Savage Worlds can eat my entire asshole. This is the 21st century and you are not allowed to be taken seriously if your random number generator has epicycles in it.
Fair enough except that Frank Trollman hates fucking EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME (except Ends of the Matrix, After Sundown, Doubt, Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker, Robert Derie, being mean, and booze).
Don't get me wrong, it's one of the reason I find reading his musings so entertaining.
***
More importantly, I will Paypal anyone who can explain to me what an "epicycle" is in a way I can understand $10.00 USD. Fair warning: I failed a 101 level Statistics class in college, but mainly because it was at 8AM and I only went to it four times.
Does this "epicycle" bullshit have something to do with "exploding/progressive" dice in Earthdawn and how they don't work?
Don't get me wrong, it's one of the reason I find reading his musings so entertaining.
***
More importantly, I will Paypal anyone who can explain to me what an "epicycle" is in a way I can understand $10.00 USD. Fair warning: I failed a 101 level Statistics class in college, but mainly because it was at 8AM and I only went to it four times.
Does this "epicycle" bullshit have something to do with "exploding/progressive" dice in Earthdawn and how they don't work?
Last edited by Neurosis on Tue Aug 30, 2016 6:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
An epicycle is a smaller circle whose center moves along the circumference of a larger circle.
In the context of Savage Worlds, there are difficulties that are easier with smaller dice than with the larger. A difficulty 6 test is easier with a d4 than a d6, for example. A diff 8 is easier with a d6, a diff10 is easier with a d8, etc. The reason why is because whenever you roll the max value of a die, you reroll it and add, which means your probability curve jumps from X-1 to X+1 (on a dX). This overlap can metaphorically look like an epicycle.
In the context of Savage Worlds, there are difficulties that are easier with smaller dice than with the larger. A difficulty 6 test is easier with a d4 than a d6, for example. A diff 8 is easier with a d6, a diff10 is easier with a d8, etc. The reason why is because whenever you roll the max value of a die, you reroll it and add, which means your probability curve jumps from X-1 to X+1 (on a dX). This overlap can metaphorically look like an epicycle.
Last edited by virgil on Tue Aug 30, 2016 7:24 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Come see Sprockets & Serials
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
EXPLOSIVE RUNES!
OHHHHHH....I GET IT NOW.
I see why it's problematic, but it's not a deal breaker for me.
@virgil: PM me your paypal deets if you actually want the $10.00 USD.
I see why it's problematic, but it's not a deal breaker for me.
@virgil: PM me your paypal deets if you actually want the $10.00 USD.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
Come see Sprockets & Serials
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
EXPLOSIVE RUNES!
You forgot Munchausen, Neurosis.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
Savage Worlds is indie hipster bullshit that only sold at all because the equivalent of the mesozoic extinction event hit the RPG industry killing the giant flesh ripping reptiles and letting the tiny mammals thrive, and the Brilliant Gameologists gushed way too much about it.
I don't have any actual insight into the game system itself.
I don't have any actual insight into the game system itself.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Savage Worlds doesn't do one good thing. Combat is grindy and swingy. Resolution isn't fast. The difference between skilled characters and unskilled characters isn't a lot and way too often the arrow of competence points the wrong fucking direction.
I don't even really like FATE that much, and I literally can't come up with a single reason to use Savage Worlds over FATE. It's just a worse engine. It's worse on resolution times. It's worse on giving appropriate outcomes. It's worse on letting people get their late 80s "you can play anything you can imagine" funk on. It's just worse.
-Username17
I don't even really like FATE that much, and I literally can't come up with a single reason to use Savage Worlds over FATE. It's just a worse engine. It's worse on resolution times. It's worse on giving appropriate outcomes. It's worse on letting people get their late 80s "you can play anything you can imagine" funk on. It's just worse.
-Username17
It looks and works more like D&D and people know D&D, Frank. That's a reason people use it over FATE.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
- OgreBattle
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I gave Savage Worlds a reasonably thorough test drive and can corroborate everything Frank has to say. I'd like to add that getting on the edge of someone's RNG really fucks their ability to affect you in combat. Defense 6 vs. Attack d6 lasts forever.
I also want to point out the dreary mess of combat options available in Savage Worlds. https://www.peginc.com/freebies/SWcore/ ... 0Guide.pdf I think some of these are degenerate in goofy ways: Wild Attack maybe.
However, I don't bring up this table because it's mathematically unsound, but because you need a summary table to explain all of your combat options. The game abjectly fails at staying light once your start looking at the details.
I also want to point out the dreary mess of combat options available in Savage Worlds. https://www.peginc.com/freebies/SWcore/ ... 0Guide.pdf I think some of these are degenerate in goofy ways: Wild Attack maybe.
However, I don't bring up this table because it's mathematically unsound, but because you need a summary table to explain all of your combat options. The game abjectly fails at staying light once your start looking at the details.
It is a failure certainly to the extent that you may be tempted to use the rules. Rifts is a clusterfuck but many of the rules are so bad and unclear that you aren't likely to use them. Lots of skills are adjudicated by "oh you have the skill? You pass" since the guidelines are so thin.OgreBattle wrote:So... is RIFTS using Savage Worlds rules an upgrade or downgrade to RIFTS using RIFTS rules
This part is a guess but combat is sadly probably better in Rifts for Rifts. I haven't seen how SW deals with mega damage/armor tiers but given their track record I suspect they didn't deal with it well.
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A d4 beats a d12 about 18% of the time when explosions are involved. It's difficult for me to imagine a system that is worse at representing giant robots and leyline walking dragons alongside maverick inventors and shit than Savage Worlds. The disparity in competence that you want just can't fucking exist in that rule set.
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Savage Worlds has set difficulties which grind the game to goddamn halt. The toughness of things is often well off the chart. If you need to roll a 10 on a d10 just to get a hit in, it is going to be a long time of plinking away for no effect before anything happens. That there exist tags that say "actually, just don't even bother trying" is pretty much just a formality.Orca wrote:There are vehicles and big creatures in SW which can only be damaged by weapons/spells with the 'heavy weapon' tag. It's a simple yes/no cutoff but it does exist.
No, the issue is setting difficulties for nominally powerful characters necessarily involves:
- The supposedly power character failing constantly like they were a character in a 3 Stooges short.
and - Nominally weak characters, including characters for whom the task at hand is specifically a weakness outshining them on a regular basis.
It fails every way it's possible for an RNG to fail. All the outputs are bad. And embarrassingly bad to boot. You simply can't demonstrate absolute or relative competence in any field. Every character in the game is a clown who fails at their nominal core competencies yet manages to outshine other characters at actions they are supposed to suck at with distressing regularity. The only settings I would even consider doing with Savage Worlds would be Toon or Paranoia. And that only because having a core system that was obviously crap is part of the joke.
-Username17
What do heavy weapons do to non armors? Some things have hundreds or thousands of Damage Capacity to even take some megadamsge hits. I'm only morbidly curious since it has little impact on the overall picture since to paraphrase Frank, the system is shit at handling proficiency disparities.
And Rifts is all about imbalance.
I learned to hate SW early in its life when I bought the SW Deadlands book and found it worse than original Deadlands.
And Rifts is all about imbalance.
I learned to hate SW early in its life when I bought the SW Deadlands book and found it worse than original Deadlands.
Ah, Savage Worlds, I remember blowing shit away with one decent Bolt after the entire party did jack fucking shit to it in what felt like forever. It was kinda funny when we noticed combat lasted longer than Shadowrun or D&D. This game really only somewhat works in the "pulp" range of "regular humans with extra ordinary skill".
AVOID AT ALL COST!
AVOID AT ALL COST!
To a man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail.
- momothefiddler
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I feel like while the d4 having a higher chance of hitting DC5 than a d6 does is a fundamental problem, the statistics you've outlined above just mean that there's a pretty narrow range of proficiency, which isn't necessarily bad - just a design choice. For comparison, that 19% of the time is the same probability as 7 points on a d20 (an Int 6 char outsmarting an Int 20 char, for instance). And while that's definitely a stupid design decision for D&D, and very possibly for whatever Savage Worlds pitches (which I haven't at all been paying attention to), it's not indefensible in the way that "higher numbers sometimes make you worse than lower numbers" is.FrankTrollman wrote:If you roll the big die (a d12) and another person rolls the smallest die (d4), then 19% of the time they are going to roll higher than you. A Difficulty of 7 is a fail parade for the d12 50% of the time, but success for smaller dice isn't exactly rare. The d10 succeeds 40% of the time, the d8 25% of the time, the d6 17% of the time and the d4 12.5% of the time.
Last edited by momothefiddler on Wed Aug 31, 2016 7:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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1) It has jackshit to do with HERO and everything to do with d20.
2) It's written with the kind demagogy Paizo excelled at during PF's launch.
3) It appropriates d20 Star Wars' Force Point system, which is rather sad given how by the time Savage Worlds came about, we already had both FATE and M&M providing examples of what actual metagame currency looks like.
It's basically a tardtrad game that wants to pass itself for "avant garde," kind of like Numenera. Both written with the same kind of unintentional duplicity because their respective authors spent so long inside d&d's bubble that they're no longer able to produce anything different.
2) It's written with the kind demagogy Paizo excelled at during PF's launch.
3) It appropriates d20 Star Wars' Force Point system, which is rather sad given how by the time Savage Worlds came about, we already had both FATE and M&M providing examples of what actual metagame currency looks like.
It's basically a tardtrad game that wants to pass itself for "avant garde," kind of like Numenera. Both written with the same kind of unintentional duplicity because their respective authors spent so long inside d&d's bubble that they're no longer able to produce anything different.
Last edited by Dogbert on Thu Sep 01, 2016 3:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
First thing's first: I literally actually just paid virgil $20.00 USD for helping/making me understand epicycles.
***That Said***
In spite of the awe-inspiring hate pile that this thread has turned into, I think I'll give SW a shot and see how it thinks, because I really need a go-to System for Shadowrun that is not SR4 or SR5, and I personally hate FATE and anything rules-liter than FATE with every fucking fiber of my being.
I know, I know, trying things and then forming my own opinions, boo, hiss.
: P
***That Said***
In spite of the awe-inspiring hate pile that this thread has turned into, I think I'll give SW a shot and see how it thinks, because I really need a go-to System for Shadowrun that is not SR4 or SR5, and I personally hate FATE and anything rules-liter than FATE with every fucking fiber of my being.
I know, I know, trying things and then forming my own opinions, boo, hiss.
: P
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
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What's wrong with SR4?
...Specifically, what is sufficiently wrong with SR4 that throwing out the bathwater, baby, and bathtub and starting all over again would be quicker than fixing it?
...Specifically, what is sufficiently wrong with SR4 that throwing out the bathwater, baby, and bathtub and starting all over again would be quicker than fixing it?
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath, Justin Bieber, shitmuffin
@Neurosis: If you're interested, I've made a home system for Shadowrun. It aims at removing what I consider to be cumbersome and useless, focusing on what's important, speeding up the game while not losing too much granularity and options. It doesn't try to be "lite" it tries to be lean.
It's also meant for Shadowrun, not a generic system, so it's based on mechanics that serve the kind of stories you'll want to tell in Shadowrun, and it is also meant to be adaptable to the kind of Shadowrun you want (from technothriller to 80s cyberpunk to post-cyberpunk).
It's also meant for Shadowrun, not a generic system, so it's based on mechanics that serve the kind of stories you'll want to tell in Shadowrun, and it is also meant to be adaptable to the kind of Shadowrun you want (from technothriller to 80s cyberpunk to post-cyberpunk).
The short answer is:Omegonthesane wrote:What's wrong with SR4?
...Specifically, what is sufficiently wrong with SR4 that throwing out the bathwater, baby, and bathtub and starting all over again would be quicker than fixing it?
SR4 has given me PSTD.
I was on the design team for SR5. I tried so hard, fought so hard, to make it into an actual good game, into SR4+. I lost the fight, and JMH et al made it into the trash fire that is SR5.
Hence...thinking about SR4 literally triggers me, because I tried SO HARD to evolve it, and it then DEVOLVED so hard.
It's hard to explain. Imagine that SR4 was my Jedi apprentice that I was trying to groom to be even more powerful than his master...then instead he lost all his powers and became a child rapist (SR5). Even thinking about SR4 is painful for me. Playing it is right out.
Also the matrix rules are whack and I don't like Ends.
Last edited by Neurosis on Thu Sep 01, 2016 8:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)