TTRPG enthusiast from Germany, rolling dice since 1988. As an eternally online player and GM I create games for easy VTT use in various genres.
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Differences Of Pathfinder And Savage Worlds Combat And How They Relate To Savage Design
Differences of Pathfinder and Savage Worlds Combat and how they relate to Savage Design
While reacquainting myself with Savage Worlds, I read an Interview from 2021, given around the Savage Pathfinder Kickstarter. In it I think Mike Barbeau said the following: "If you boil Pathfinder combat down to its barest essence, you're making a bunch of decisions managing your most important resource: hit points. You can still see the influence of grandaddy Chainmail in Pathfinder's design. You have so many tools to shift the flow of hit points in battle that you’re constantly discovering new strategies and tactics as you play. It's still a wargame at heart, which makes the decisions in combat feel so vital and fun. While Savage Worlds still has tactical combat that follows the same generalized principles as Pathfinder, when you take a hit, we want to scare the player. Taking a Wound is a big deal, especially since you can only take three before you're taken out. That said, Wounds modify your ability to succeed at rolls and negatively impact your actions. Tests, Support, Bennies, etc., all focus on altering your ability to succeed on a roll. The bonus and penalties to your rolls are the resources you manage in Savage Worlds. So long as you're still on your feet, you still have a chance to make a big difference in combat." This is an incredibly clear and very important distinction between the two games. Something that was always implicitly clear to me, but seeing it spelt out like that was eye-opening. Many new players to Savage Worlds struggle to understand what's really important in combat and how to approach it compared to D&D. These two paragraphs clearly mark the difference. Explaining this to new players can shift their perspective where it needs to be. This is also a good guideline for when I am thinking about Savage Space and how to approach ship edges and ship combat. I don't like giving creatures more wounds. It can be done in exceptional cases, but I avoid it as much as I can. Just my preference. Instead, I can focus on reducing the penalties from Wounds or getting better modifiers on rolls for the opposition and the players. Manoeuvres, Edges and all the other fun toys SWADE is giving us are more interesting than simply more hitpoints. I'm not sure where this all fits into the reboot, but I will keep it in mind when I re-examine my old work.
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Patchwork World is a weird fantasy game that mixes principles from powered-by-the-apocalypse (PbtA) and old school renaissance (OSR) games. I wrote it for people who prefer or need simple character sheets and rules and for people trying to move away from D&D. I’ll go into more detail about each of the bolded terms below.
1. WEIRD FANTASY is the genre description I settled on because the game is fantastical, it’s about fantasizing about a better world, and it doesn’t draw from the same fantasy traditions as D&D.
Instead, I wanted to recreate the feeling of playing games like Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Super Mario World for the first time. I drew inspiration from books like Hav by Jan Morris, Iceland’s Bell by Halldór Laxness, Circe by Madeline Miller, and A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. I wanted the game to feel like my favorite surreal comic books, like Krazy Kat by George Herriman, Rudy by Mark Connery, and the works of A. Degen.
In Patchwork World, you can burst into a herd of cats, be haunted by your troll grandma, speak with birds, and tend a crystalline garden.
2. PbtA: Patchwork World draws on the principles and system originated in Apocalypse World by Vincent and Meguey Baker and the “roll with the questions” iteration created by Brandon Leon-Gambetta for Pasión de las Pasiones (one of the finest RPGs ever written).
Players (including the GM) have clear principles to help them get started, like being a fan of each other and being open to change. Players have a lot of power over what a session will look like based on the moves (special abilities) they pick for their characters—a group that owns a castle (the Castle move) and can burst into cats will have a much different approach to problems than a group with a Magnificent Weapon and a bunch of curses.
And rolling with the questions means that every time someone makes a move, they have to consider the state of their character, both emotionally and fictionally. You have a better chance to avoid danger if you made an ominous prediction about it, for example, and you’re more likely to win a fight if you’ve witnessed your enemy acting unjustly.
3. OSR principles are tailored around “old school” gaming and are often phrased as in opposition to newer “story games” like Apocalypse World. But looking at the headings in the classic Principia Apocrypha, one of the building blocks of OSR culture, there’s a lot that aligns! And a lot of stuff I love.
Embrace chaos, telegraph lethality, subvert expectations, build responsive situations. These are all principles I love, and I tried to give the GM advice and tools to do this. There are lots of tables to roll on in Patchwork World to build strange places and drive the strange occupants of those places.
It’s also really easy to make a character in Patchwork World, much like in OSR games, because…
4. SIMPLE CHARACTER SHEETS & RULES! I run games for people with full-time jobs, people with kids, people with ADHD and memory issues. And it can be such a barrier to say to people like that, “We’re going to have a bunch of fun! But we’ll have to reference this big book, and you’ll have to parse this tiny text, and if you want to be a cool wizard, you’ll have to flip back and forth between even more complicated rules.”
Patchwork World has no stats (thanks to rolling with the questions) and no classes. Making a character is as simple as choosing two moves (and if I were richer, I would have printed them on a deck of cards so players could just have them that way) and describing who they are.
(And because I embrace chaos, there’s also a table to roll for random moves instead.)
Other than their two moves, players will need to reference a simple sheet to track their wellness and experience and a sheet of basic moves that everyone has. And you’ll only need two six-sided dice to play.
5. MOVING AWAY FROM D&D is hard! You get invested in those big books and the time and money you’ve spent on them. You’re invested in the stories you’ve told. I get it. But D&D ended up actively pushing against a lot of what my weird friends wanted to do in a game, and we’d either have to follow the rules (meaning stuff was less cool), write new rules (more homework for the DM), or toss the rules away. And if we did that, why bother using them in the first place?
If you’re moving from D&D to Patchwork World, you can still play an elf wizard, a human fighter, a dwarven barbarian, or anything else like that. You can have cool weapons, fancy magic, and roguish charm and stealth. Just choose those moves and get going.
But you can also be an elf barbarian without having to worry about balancing your stat bonuses. Or you can be sneaky and cast spells without having to make it to a level three subclass or deal with multiclassing. And my hope is that once you start getting weird with that stuff, you’ll only get weirder.
6. A FINAL WORD: Making Patchwork World was an intensely personal experience for me. I was writing it in 2020 and 2021, in the rise of COVID and the aftermath of my city’s police murdering George Floyd a mile from my home. I was thinking about building communities in a broken world. I was struggling with the solitude of lockdown, away from my joyfully radical and queer communities. I was thinking about how much I’ve changed and how much I still want to change. So this is a game with rules for building communities, for mutating, for going on dates and making friends.
But you can also have a cool sword that takes memories or an eyeball helmet that sees through walls. Players have been grubby raccoons, otherdimensional children, necromancer puppets, and sullen teen busboys. This game has brought me a lot of joy! Maybe it can bring you some too. (It’s free, btw.)
(Doing a little post here about each of my games so that they’re around for me to reblog or link to. Reblogs welcome!)
TRICUBE TALES
I'm going to start moving (and updating) reviews from my website, and today I wanted to start with a rules-lite system that packs a surprising amount of punch: Tricube Tales by Richard Woolcock of Zadmar’s Games. There’s a lot I want to say about it, which is crazy because it’s also pretty lite and simple. Also, the damn game is free (full thing in the DTRPG preview) so you can easily check it for yourself.
I’ll keep this brief: Tricube Tales is a minimalist, lite RPG using a mechanic where you roll 1 to 3 six-sided dice, and if any of them hit the target number you succeed. It uses fluctuating difficulty (a base scale of 4, 5, and 6) and Players make all the rolls. This makes it a great system for solo gaming and asynchronous play-by-chat games over Discord.
Character creation is very straight forward, appearing almost too simple but there is weight for it. Here’s what a playable character looks like at a glance:
Sam Strongblade, a Brawny Dwarf Soldier Perks: Dwarf Stamina Quirks: Wooden Peg-Leg Karma: 3 / Resolve: 3
That’s it. You can glance at that, have an idea of what the character does, and maybe dismiss the fact that there’s no stats (Karma and Resolve are point pools, which I’ll explain in a bit.)
That first statement is your archetype, which includes a trait (Agile, Brawny or Crafty) and a concept. Your archetype will help determine if you’re rolling two or three dice (or 1 if it has nothing in common with the action being performed). Your Perks establish special qualities, powers, abilities or unique equipment. Often you can spend a Karma point to use a perk significantly in an action (such as lowering the difficulty). Quirks, likewise, can hinder the character. A player can actively choose to work their Quirk into the narrative, taking a penalty but in doing so restores 1 Karma.
So, if you haven’t guessed yet, Karma is the luck/fortune/power pool that lets the players do cool things. Resolve is the stress/health/endurance pool for every character. When a character hits 0 resolve, they’re taken out of the conflict, and the victor (either PC or GM) gets to narrate what happens. When this happens to player characters, they return next scene, their Resolve restored but now with an Affliction — usually a temporary quirk, but sometimes these can become more serious. Character death isn’t off the table as long as GM and Players agree to the arbitration.
Running things on the GM side is pretty easy-peasy. Most challenges are static pass-or-fail; more elaborate obstacles or tasks are assigned a pool of Effort tokens (where each successful die roll against it removes a token). Combat encounters can track multiple foes separately or you can just say “a horde of goblins” and track a single pool of effort tokens.
There’s a lot more going on — the game covers some quick ground on genre rules, like handling cybernetics, fear, magic & psionics, varying power levels, superheroes and vehicles. For the most part, all of these are just common-sense guides for arbitrating things based on context. This may be the deal breaker for some — this is a game system where players and the GM should be comfortable going back and forth making their own judgment calls on how things go down. It’s pretty much “Roll the dice, and if you succeed — narrate what happens.” It was a system originally designed with kids in mind, but obviously it has appeal to older gamers as well.
I love the damn thing. I’ve played solo games with it, and even made a pocketfold game based on it.
Definitely check it out, and if you dig it — toss the guy a couples bucks. Buying the game gets you a PDF scaled for tablet/PC use as well as a Word doc so you can hack it and make your own stuff with it.
Looks like SWADE is back on the menu!
So I've taken a vow to move my RPG reviews/rambles to my Tumblr, and I'm willing to bet someone after this week might be in the market for some new indie fantasy RPG -- especially one that isn't using the OGL. So let me tell you about EYES BEYOND THE TORCHLIGHT!
Disclaimer: I originally reviewed this on Twitter months ago,and have decided to put it all together here in support of this game I love.
SUMMARY:
It's a fantasy heartbreaker. It has 4 archetypes (Cleric, Mage, Rogue & Warrior) and familiar fantasy ancestries (Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Halfling, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, and Human). It has dungeons, dragons, & themes that will surprise nobody. But it's the approach to game mechanics I've been enjoying.
The core mechanic is d20+Stat vs 12. The catch is that stats are rated in dice, from d4 to d12. There also "Boosts" and "Setbacks" that add or subtract d6s to the total. The system is player facing, with some fun twists.
For example: on successful attack rolls, the value of the Stat Die determines the amount of damage dealt to the target. On unsuccessful defense rolls, your Stat die determines how much damage is soaked (on successful defense rolls, you dodge completely). Enemies have flat damage values -- this is all one roll and go.
Character Creation is fun and flexible. It doesn't inundate a newcomer with too many choices, but it gives a lot of room to build on a theme. Your choice of ancestry and archetype provides starting Edges, and you can choose to gain extras by taking on Hindrances.
Edges & Hindrances are pretty straight forward. They give boosts (or setbacks), raise (or lower) a Stat Die in a situation, or establish a factoid feature or flaw in the narrative. These are all interesting choices, and not "build theory" number tweaks like feats in DND.
I should also note here: there's only 4 stats (Brawn, Agility, Intellect, Presence) and some derivatives (Hit Points, Armor, Initiative & Movement). Oh, and there's HERO POINTS! (Your luck/cool point meta-currency that lets you re-roll or do cool things).
Then there's Backgrounds. Your Background actually functions as your "skill" set -- any non-combat roll associated with it gets a Boost.
Let's talk a bit about what there's not -- NO LEVELS! At least, not proper (there are "tiers" of characters). At the end of every adventure, you get Advancement points. You spend these to raise stats, buy off hindrances or acquire edges. The character progression is pretty open.
One of my players was an Ugly Dwarf Pirate, whose punching attacks deal lethal damage. His companion is a Half-Elf Warrior Poet, who can shapeshift into small animals. Tell me that doesn't sound badass out the gate!
The game also has a pretty complete bestiary of traditional fantasy game monsters, although it skimps details and expects you to already be familiar with them from other games. But hey: stat blocks for them fit on a notecard, which is my most desired aspect as a GM!
I should mention that every monster is listed with a "Threat Number" -- this is the penalty to actions opposing them. You have two choices: add the Threat to the base 12 target number or subtract it from a player's roll instead (whichever is easier).
Now let's talk POWERS -- aka magic. Powers are spells, and once you learn one you keep it. You roll dice when you cast; should you fail you have the option to either take damage OR "burn" the spell to cast it (can't cast it again until you rest).
There's a good list of Powers here, but not a crazy tome like other fantasy games have. Most are utility, with a few combat-based ones. Your token Area of Effect spell "Blast" is dangerous -- it targets EVERYTHING in an area. Fire it off in a mine you risk a cave in.
Blast and other spells also have consequences should you roll 1's on both the d20 and your Stat Die. In this case: your caster *literally explodes and dies* while also harming nearby people. Thankfully not all powers are this risky!
Anyway, plenty of treasure and magical items provided in these rules as well. Anyone can pick up a scroll or potion as a single-use power. There's your usual magical arms and armor, rings that do cool things like teleport you, grant 3 wishes, command elementals etc.
Finally, the rules come with a sample setting and adventure. The setting is a free city on the borderlands between warring nations, with ruins and monsters about. Again, not breaking any molds, but it's pretty cool and has a lot of loose hooks to build a campaign on.
So, to wrap this up: EYES BEYOND THE TORCHLIGHT is RPG comfort food to me. I love the dice mechanics, and how easy it is to hack new content into it. Flexible & interesting player facing mechanics means it's easy to run online. It has old-school vibes without the baggage. Scott Myer wrote and illustrated this game, and now it's in the hands of the folks at MAX HP who seem to be pretty cool as well. PS -- there's an SRD for the Target 12 System that it's built on, and released under Creative Commons.
SHROOM GOONS. Little Mushroom Folk on Big Adventures. Completely free, powered by Tunnel Goons. Artwork by Skullfungus. Just need some six-sided dice, writing utensils, some weird friends and your imagination.