Don't Mess With the Goose

Anyone who knows me on a geek level knows that I'm more than a little infatuated with the Savage Worlds rules for RPG's. I've been playing/collecting/digging RPG's since the original box set that my brother picked up in 1980, and I even remember my first character: Pindar the Halfling, one of the pre-gens from the back of the book (cut me some slack, I was eleven years old). Anyhow, after...damned near 22 years of D&D 1, 2, 3, 3.5 and 4, Pathfinder, Tunnels & Trolls, Traveler, GURPS and all the rest, I finally found what felt like home when I impulse-bought the Savage Worlds Deluxe book on Amazon.


I really like you, Pathfinder. But I just don't feel fulfilled anymore.

What do I like about Savage Worlds? To stretch a scientific term, it's elegant. I don't mean it looks like my beloved Princess, Kate Middleton (sigh). I mean elegant as in neatly and simply fitting my needs without a lot of fuss and twisting required. The basic framework of the rules is so flexible, so much a guide-without-being-a-restriction, that it just feels great to make up a campaign, a world, a story within the SW rules. And they do it all in 160 pages (Deluxe hardcover edition).
Yeah, the setting-books are nice. I'm a huge fan of Weird War II. But, strictly speaking, it's nothing I couldn't have made myself, using the SWD book, if only I were smarter, more creative and less lazy. The setting books don't fundamentally change the base mechanics or feel of the game, and that's awesome.
So why am I taking the time to write this on a cold Saturday morning when I should be drinking coffee and working on aforementioned campaign? Well, just a word of warning:

Savage Worlds is awesome, and I love it, but I have unintentionally been working really hard to break it into tiny, useless bits.


I'm only trying to dismember you because I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!

You see, with all the freedom that comes with writing for Savage Worlds, it's easy to get a little crazy. Like the Glenn Close crazy above. You get the urge to tweak things. To add skills and Edges and Hindrances. To write special rules for using a crossbow to differentiate it from a long bow. To throw in special damage types for edged weapons versus blunt impact weapons, and to tweak those based on armor types. Hell, why not? This is Savage Worlds, and they made it really easy to tweak and poke and prod! Let's go batshit! Let's make hermaphrodite spirit monster elves with wings, and write special rules for 'em! Woohooooo!
So I wrote the above setting-tweaks. Then I proceeded to write some more. And, before I really knew it, I had this =>
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An utterly unwieldy beast of rules and canards and tables and dice rolling trivia.
I had the beginnings of an OCD houserule version of early-80's AD&D. Not fast. Not furious. Not fun. Full of suck.


The moral of this embarassing personal revelation is simple: the beauty of Savage Worlds as a rule-set is that it gives you the utter freedom to totally screw it up. You have the reins, and you can ride that horse straight off a cliff if you want. Despite Shane Hensley's MULTIPLE warnings on page 128 (now permanently bookmarked in my copy) that most of what you want in your game is already there if you're willing to use a little interpretation, there's a certain siren song to jamming your own ideas on top of a perfectly good system.

So don't be a moron like me. Heed the Hensley. Get support from the awesome bro's and sis's at Savage Worlds on Google+ to keep sane. But whatever you do, don't be a dick like I almost was and break what you love just because you can.