Paperwork-Free Powers in Savage Worlds

I'm a big fan of Savage Worlds, mainly because it significantly reduces the number of things a player has to keep track of. It's one of things that makes the game "Fast, Furious, and Fun".

Unfortunately, those characters with Arcane Backgrounds missed the FFF boat. You have to keep track of potentially dozens of power points, as well as the number of rounds many spells take. Some of the more recent Savage Worlds settings, including Solomon Kane, introduce a power-point free system, and Hellfrost goes a step further and does something about tracking duration, but both these setting, I think, move a fair ways away from the standard Savage Worlds system, so I've come up with my own system.

Replacing Power-Points

First of all, to eliminate power points, both Solomon Kane and Hellfrost make casting more risky by replacing the normal backlash rules with a more severe version. The effects vary, but are typically something like taking a level of fatigue and loosing the use of your powers for some time. I think this idea is sound, although it does makes magic quite a bit more

unpredictable. I've pretty much adopted this system with a somewhat scaled back backlash table. If you don't want to create your own backlash table, you could probably just substitute the fatigue level and shaken for the normal shaken result and have something that worked OK.

One problem with eliminating power points this way is how to deal with variable power point spells like the ever popular Bolt. Both systems introduce a Casting Penalty for more powerful versions of a spell, although Solomon Kane allows you to reduce these penalties by spending multiple rounds to cast the spell. While this works, it means that more advanced casters, who in the original system would have more power points to spend, are worse off, since they suffer the same penalty Novice casters do. Sure, they may have some more powerful powers available, but you don't really want your old Novice powers becoming obsolete either. You have few enough powers as it is to waste one of your level-ups on a power that will be near useless in a rank or two.

What I did was made the more powerful version of the powers available for free once you reach a higher rank. For example, the Bolt power might do 1d6 for a Novice wizard, but 2d10 at Veteran. I also allow casters to "push" a power to get the effects of the next level, but at a -2 penalty on their skill roll. This effectively implements the Casting Penalty used in Solomon Kane and Hellfrost, but reduces that penalty as the character increases rank.

Deleting Durations

My second big peeve with Arcane characters is tracking duration. You have to track when the power runs out, then remember to spend power points each round to maintain it. So in a power-point free system, how do you maintain spells? In Solomon Kane, the duration is typically based on your rank (so you still have to track it). Hellfrost actually deals with the tracking issue by having all such powers last indefinitely (as long as you are conscious) but limits the number you can have on at any one time to half your skill die. This certainly eliminates the accounting burden, but seems a bit too powerful. You might as well just cast your buff powers at the start of the day, and then spend the entire combat throwing bolts and blasts.

Instead, I've decided to just have these powers last for the duration of the combat. You would still need to cast them during (or just before) combat, and would have to cast again if you had another combat later that day. This keeps their effectiveness closer to that in the original system. After all, three rounds with maybe a maintenance round or two is usually pretty close to one combat anyway.

If you are casting one of these powers out of combat, it lasts about half an hour.

This system also simplifies the power descriptions, since most powers now have a duration of either "Instant" or "Combat".

The Professional Edge

So lets consider the thief edge from my last post:

Stealth Fighter
Requirements: Seasoned, Thief
If the character starts his turn unobserved by the enemy, they may make a Stealth Attack. To do this, they must first make a successful stealth roll vs their target's notice. If successful, they get a +2 bonus to any Fighting roll they then make against that enemy during their turn. If they get a raise on their stealth roll, they also get a bonus 1d6 on damage.

To be honest, I wouldn't use this edge in my game.

Here's the edge I would use:

Shadow Hand Rogue
Requirements: Seasoned, Thief
The character is a member of the notorious Shadow Hand, an organization of professional thieves. Shadow Hand is lead by the mysterious Darkclaw, whose true identity is only known to his most trusted associates. Shadow Hand is despised by the wealthy nobles and merchants of the city's High Street district, but is equally lauded in the city slums where Shadow Hand provides assistance to the poor and needy.

If the character starts his turn unobserved by the enemy, they may make a Stealth Attack. To do this, they must first make a successful stealth roll vs their target's notice. If successful, they get a +2 bonus to any Fighting roll they then make against that enemy during their turn. If they get a raise on their stealth roll, they also get a bonus 1d6 on damage.

Same mechanics, but much more compelling. Not only do you get the mechanical benefits, but a bunch of role playing benefits as well. Need to unload some hot loot quickly? Hire a top notch locksmith? Pick up some burglary tools? Our thief now has somewhere to go for these things. And membership in the Shadow Hand isn't a one-way street. If you as GM need to get the characters somewhere, the Shadow Hand can contact our thief with a mission. If the local potentate decides to crack down on the Shadow Hand, your players have some skin in the game.

So if your professional edges are just a boring set of rules, you are missing out on a major opportunity to get your players more involved in the campaign.

Professionals in Combat

One criticism of savage worlds at our game table has been the lack of well defined character roles, resulting in all the characters pretty much doing the same thing in combat, and taking the same edges when leveling up. In fact, while I was in the process of drafting this post, I came across Tommy Brownell's series on the same topic. Its a great series, but all it proves is that a savvy Savage Worlds player could create a character that runs a bit different from the norm. It doesn't address how real players actually create their characters. And if you have to introduce in a bunch of obscure edges to prove your point, you loose.

The real question is, how do I as a GM encourage players to build characters that they will have more fun playing, knowing that a major component of "fun" for most players is uniquely contributing to the success of the party.

I don't think anyone can argue that Arcane Background characters play differently than your stock fighter. Let's set them aside for now, although all I say subsequently could certainly apply when you compare one Arcana user to another.

Consider a related problem - in a combat-heavy campaign, players are reluctant to take non-combat edges and skills. Strategical, this makes sense - they are going to be making Fighting rolls much more often than, say, Lockpicking rolls, and taking a non-combat edge means forgoing a combat edge. Its only rational for a player to spend their limited resource (Advances) where they will be most useful. Contrast this to D&D, where combat resources and non-combat resources are almost completely separate.

Now, one obvious solution is to make your character roll on non-combat skills as much as possible. This certainly worked for our group in Fifty Fathoms when we realized we had nobody with decent boating skill. Many days lost at sea and two advances later, we had several competent boaters. Of course, those characters paid a price for that when a melee broke out, being significantly less effective.

So as GMs, we need to reward, not punish. characters who take non-combat skill and edges. One great way to reward them is to to give them a chance to make use of those non-combat abilities to improve their combat. And if we do this right, they will develop a distinctly different tactical style compared to their fighter companions, solving the "everyone plays the same" problem. And we do this by introducing a bunch of obscure edges. Specifically, Professional Edges.

Take the classic RPG trope, the thief. In my experience, the thief was the role assigned to the guy who joined after the campaign was already well under way, because playing a thief requires a significant investment in non-combat skills and edges, and you were rewarded with the thankless job of picking locks and detecting the occasional trap. The thief trope already has a nice Professional Edge to support it, but if it didn't we should create one - that's what Professional Edges are for, after all - highlighting the useful character tropes of your campaign (more on this in a later post). Unfortunately, there really isn't much incentive to take Thief as it stands now, so lets add a new edge:

Stealth Fighter
Requirements: Seasoned, Thief
If the character starts his turn unobserved by the enemy, they may make a Stealth Attack. To do this, they must first make a successful stealth roll vs their target's notice. If successful, they get a +2 bonus to any Fighting roll they then make against that enemy during their turn. If they get a raise on their stealth roll, they also get a bonus 1d6 on damage.

A character with this edge is going to have a distinctly different fighting style. Instead of directly engaging his foe, he's going to try and stay out of sight until he gets a chance to sneak up and execute his Stealth Attack. As GMs, we can set up our combats so that the player gets opportunities to do this. Maybe their is a single guard the party needs to take out quickly and silently. Maybe some archers are shooting from a balcony, where the thief can approach unobserved from below, then use stealth and climbing to pop-up and attack. Suddenly, our thief goes from being "the other fighter" to a key player on the combat team.

When doing this, we need to make sure the prerequisites are set sufficiently high to discourage everyone from taking the edge, and they should synergize with the other skills and edges required by the profession we are trying to boost. The easy way to do this is to make the professional edge a prerequisite to our new edge. Even if we hadn't done that, the Thief bonus to Stealth rolls makes it very appealing to someone who wants to take Stealth Fighter. In fact, the main reason to make Thief a prerequisite is that Stealth Fighter is a little too good, and we don't to make it so easy to get that every fighter takes it.

Give each profession two or three of these exclusive edges (at different ranks) and you are good to go.