EDR Planned Products?

[brother]

I always wanted to give Deadlands a try, so may be worth looking into.

Will get my "nerd dice" out, as my son calls them, and force him to play!

[slayride]

Savage Worlds is an interesting game. Its a tactical miniature game where everyone has limited HP. Extras have 1 Wound, Wild Cards have 4 Wounds = Incapacitated, where Wound Threshold is the Toughness + Armor of the region struck +4. So a person wearing leather armor with a Toughness of 5 has a 6 Armor on the Torso, Leg, and Arm, but the head has 5 Toughness. So a head shot deals 1 Wound on 9 damage (9-5 toughness =4), and 1 Wound on 10 damage (10-6 toughness=4) to the other 3 areas. Savage Worlds has rolling up and adding up of all dice on damage. Trait rolls have you roll one (extras) or two dice (wild cards) and take the better result, with the usual DN as a 4 or an opponent's Parry. Rolling +4 the result is a raise, which adds a D6 to damage Tests and otherwise ends up with a better result, much like an Excellent Result in Earthdawn. Even at the highest dice (d12+D6), the chance of success is less than 90% (3/12 fail on the D12 and 3/6 fail on the D6 so 3x 3= 9/72 = 12.5% fail/87.5% success, and bonuses and penalties have huge effects on the percentages), which is generally where the three bennies come in to allow you to reroll Trait Tests (and Damage Tests if you have No Mercy or are playing Shaintar which allows it as a setting rule that everyone effectively has it). The setting's Wounds cause -1 penalties on Trait only Tests and also has a Fatigue system for non-lethal damage that also causes a -1 penalty per Fatigue Level. 4 Wounds= Incapacitated, which is KO, injured (permanent injuries) and bleeding to death, as well as Dead as potential results. A person with 3 Fatigue Levels becomes KO.
Preventing Wounds is done by spending bennies to Soak, which becomes the system's version of avoid blow/recovery test in a way. As an Earthdawn player, the game is extremely easy for you to figure out and understand since its like a small step system (D4-D6-D8-D10-D12 are the dice used with further steps up being D12+1, D12+2, etc.). But it is much more lethal than Earthdawn because of the limited HP in terms of Wounds, with bennies acting as an extra HP source that can potentially extend your life. Also a lot of people do not like the way the system handles the Shaken status which can really lock you out of a combat in the same way as say a Horror's Terror power can. You can spend a Bennie to remove it and still act if you cannot make the Spirit Roll to get out of it, but only a raise will allow you to unshake and still act. Some people do not like the skill system since its similar to old Shadowrun with things not linked intrinsically to attributes and the attributes themselves being used to determine the rate of skill progress in a way. Also if you do not have a skill it defaults to D4-2 when trying, not the Attribute its based on, which makes default skills extremely hard to succeed since you must get a 6 on the D6 and the D4 requires 4+2 on the second rollup.

The Adventure Deck adds an interesting element to the game, in some ways the extra card can act like an additional bennie depending on what is drawn. It also can add interesting role playing elements such as by playing the Love Interest card.

Deadlands is a lot like if you set Earthdawn in an alternative history Wild West (especially Hell on Earth). We'll be playing this after 50 Fathoms in my midweek game.

50 Fathoms has been a lot of fun, sort of a Pirates of Dark Water meets Pirates of the Caribbean experience.

The real good thing about Savage Worlds is that knowing the game system gives you access to many great settings to play.

[brother]

Thanks for the breakdown. Looks like you are getting pretty good use out of the system!

[zayven]

Interesting. Sounds pretty pulp adventure-ish in spirit, which I guess would make sense considering that it was designed by Pinnacle.

As a universal system, Savage Worlds seems to run into the same limitations that GURPS and d20 had in that it does certain types of games well, but others not so much. I like GURPS a lot, but I've always found it to be a hard sell with players because it leans too heavily towards realism. The system is great for a hard sci-fi setting or low fantasy/historical settings, but it doesn't do space opera or epic fantasy very well. It's just too much of a pain in the neck to build high powered characters like that. Character development is also very horizontal rather than vertical, so you don't get that typical rpg development curve of getting obviously more powerful. The d20 system was the opposite in that it did epic fantasy and over-the-top action really well, but it couldn't really handle more realistic, nuanced settings because it was so driven by demands of level progression.

For straight ahead action-adventure, though, it sounds like Savage Worlds is an ideal system.

[slayride]

My recap of Wednesday's game, so you can get an idea of how the SW game tends to flow (also shows good use of the Adventure Cards).

50 Fathoms Recap 05292013:

Salomo sold some goods to get a winter cloak and boots. Salomo and his beloved were married by the captain of his sloop (his air mage).

Meanwhile, preparations were being made for Grof to marry his betrothed, an ice princess from northern Arfk. Kei’ali snuck into the ice palace to murder the ice princess. Bobbie played the skill card and Kei’ali gained tracking, using it to navigate through the ice maze. She snuck past a few guards and entered the main chamber. Ten grael guards were in front of five doors. Kei’ali hid and waited. Caterers came with carts filled with food for the ice princess and went to the third door on the left. Kei’ali saw her chance and tried to sneak past the guards. They spotted her as she entered the higher balcony area. She murdered four grael guards then smashed through the door to the ice princesses’ room. The ice princess threw a spear at Kei’ali that struck but drew no blood. The ice princess then picked up a silver tray as a shield. Kei’ali smashed through the tray with her first attack and then broke her jaw with a following uppercut. The ice princess staggered back, then Kei’ali struck again and ripped out her eye. She fell to the ground and bled to death from the vicious eye wound. Kei’ali turned to the guards who had finally caught up, killing two of them. But their numbers were too great and her body was broken by a vicious grael battleball hit. She died but her harder to kill kicked in…

We stayed in Kaja for two more days. Rather than a wedding, Grof attended a funeral for his betrothed. Grof was given all the items received from the dead assassin. Grof also took care of the iron stolen from the Kieran frigate that arrived during our stay.

We left Kaja and fished during a calm wind, finding a great haul of fish and strangely, Kei’ali in our nets. Unconscious and heavily wounded, we placed her in a ship cabin in the lower deck. The wind picked up and with Tellah’s Zephyr and my x2 travel card this got us far into the Flotsam Sea. We grabbed a bottle of water from the Flotsam Sea to heal the water elemental orb at Bluth’s Crown. We then looked for an Earth ship with barrels of water from the Earth still on it. Kevin played the autofind card, using the card to search through the adventure deck for a bennie to do so. We found a ship from Earth and rushed towards it. We found a shark figurehead and barrels of water from Earth in the ship’s hold. It seemed to be looted of everything else though. Tellah placed some in a glass bottle and Admiral Kirel drank his fill, ordering his men to take the water, getting strange looks from both his men and Tellah. But when we got back upstairs, a giant tentacle appeared and grappled the ship. Octopons jumped out of the water onto the upper deck. We ended session there on a cliffhanger.

[slayride]

The pace works well in 50 Fathoms, sort of action-adventure with breaks caused by the need to carouse which tend to make up roleplaying/interlude sessions. Interested in seeing how Deadlands plays out next.

Savage Worlds can do high fantasy well actually. Shaintar is a great high fantasy extension of the game (The Fantasy Companion can help there as well).

[zayven]

Is Savage Worlds based on the original Deadlands system? I never played the old versions of the game, but I seem to remember it using a deck of cards in similar fashion. Did Pinnacle just strip the Deadlands specific stuff out of the system and rework it to be more universal?

Like Brother, I've also always wanted to play Deadlands. I love westerns and it always seemed like a cool setting. The Solomon Kane rpg was the book that really brought Savage Worlds to my attention, though. That's another one on the wish list.

I think I have a pdf copy of the d20 version of Deadlands somewhere, but the system didn't feel like it really captured the flavor of the setting very well. That was a criticism I had about a lot of OGL d20 games, though there were some notable exceptions. The Conan rpg from Mongoose was probably the biggest one, but that game did a lot of tinkering with the system to give it a very Conan flavor. I always had a soft spot for Spycraft, too.

Savage Worlds does sound interesting, though. I may have to have a look at the ED adaptation after all.

[Anunnaki]

Hiya,

There's a development history somewhere on the Pinnacle site (www.peginc.com). But simply put, Deadlands Classic had a miniatures game, called The Great Rail Wars, that used a stripped down version of the Deadlands Classic rules (faster play, etc.). That rule set, with refinement and community involvement over the years, became the Savage Worlds rules. As a side note, the "buy-in" to Savage Worlds is low. The small-format SW Deluxe Explorer's Edition book is just $10 -- and full color throughout, to boot.

Take kaer, James

[brother]

As slayride mentioned, Deadlands is a lot like Earthdawn in a western setting. I seemed to recall thinking the same thing years ago, when reading about the game.

Deadlands would be a good excuse to give Savage Worlds a spin. It would be great to do some gunslingin'. If I liked it, then do some Earthdawn too!

Zayven, you don't live in OKC do you?

[slayride]

The deck of cards is used for Initiative in Deadlands. So you draw a card and it becomes your Initiative for the round. With a scale of Joker -Ace- King-Queen-Jack 10-2 as the order and tied cards go in reverse alphabetical suite (spade first-heart-diamond-club last). So that the fastest card is Joker and the slowest is the two of clubs. Some edges like Quick, Levelheaded, and Tactician can modify the card drawn in some way.

The Game Master has an Action Deck that is used to determine random encounters where spade is conflict (enemies), clubs is complications (obstacles), hearts is neutral/friendly characters (allies), and diamonds is loot (treasure). Clubs as complications is also used in chase and timed skill scenes.

Its also used by Hucksters in Deadlands to gain power powers to power spells by playing a hand of poker versus the manitou.