[Savage Worlds] Sell Me/Unsell Me

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Omegonthesane
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Post by Omegonthesane »

I'm surprised you're entertaining the option of playing the same world under terrible rules, if that's the state of things. Is a clean break not an option?
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.

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Post by Neurosis »

Prak wrote:...the Brilliant Gameologists gushed way too much about it.
First off, now that I'm gonna be paying you money to do stuff, if you can get Brilliant Gameologists to gush anywhere near that much about my shit (see sig, see website)...I will pay you a lot of money for that. Or things of that sort.

But obviously even if you can't do that, I will also still pay you to write words. And you'll get an email about that late next week.

Now, enough business, let us carry on our Denscussion in typical Den etiquette.
Prak wrote:I don't have any actual insight into the game system itself.
Since you've admitted total ignorance to the rules of Savage Worlds and I'm speaking from a position of less-than-total ignorance, let me politely correct that....
Prak wrote:Savage Worlds FATE BEARWORLD 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...
There. I fixed that for you. :tongue:

Savage Worlds on the other hand shares at least 90% of its game design DNA with HERO System, and I am totally willing to write a 5000 word essay to prove this point if any of you are willing to read it.

That would be when I get any free time not spent busily running a medium-small game company...
...or inflicting a Serious wound on myself with a huge fucking knife, like a sentimental idiot that can't take getting shitcanned by Jason Hardy like a man.
***

Conceding a point: the exploding dice are still shitty and stupid .

General question to the group: If you were to say "exploding dice don't explode, forget it, it's not a thing" would that in practice make Savage Worlds better, worse, unplayable, or the same but different?
Last edited by Neurosis on Thu Sep 01, 2016 8:41 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.)
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Neurosis
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Post by Neurosis »

Omegonthesane wrote:I'm surprised you're entertaining the option of playing the same world under terrible rules, if that's the state of things. Is a clean break not an option?
To paraphrase either Robert Boyle or Adam Jury (can't recall which) speaking to JMH, Shadowrun is the one thing I have loved for my entire life. It's a paraphrase and not a direct quote because they said "my entire adult life". (The quote ended with "and if you fuck it up, I will literally kill you" just in case you were curious. And I think it was Adam Jury. And Adam has since told publicly told Jason he was off the hook.).

Shadowrun has been my primary fandom since I was 10 years old. I feel about it the way "normal" nerds feel about Star Wars.

Convincing me of the terribleness of Savage Worlds as a system has yet to be achieved, but is far from impossible.

Like, I mean, I'm not fucking silva. I'm not some kind of Savage Worlds partisan. I just don't see what's wrong with it besides the fucking epicycles, and I still see a lot of things in it I REALLY like (they're universally the same things I like about HERO System).
Last edited by Neurosis on Thu Sep 01, 2016 8:47 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.)
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Post by Roog »

Neurosis wrote:I still see a lot of things in it I REALLY like (they're universally the same things I like about HERO System).
I'm not sure what the HERO system and Savage Worlds have in common. Could you state exactly what those common things are?
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Post by Username17 »

Neurosis wrote:If you were to say "exploding dice don't explode, forget it, it's not a thing" would that in practice make Savage Worlds better, worse, unplayable, or the same but different?
Basically it would make the game unplayable. The game is already precious close to unplayable because of the very high failure rate of all actions and the associated high number of attempt spamming everything breaks down into. But if you had dice not explode, the higher end target numbers would be literally unreachable rather than just requiring an asstonne of retries before you get anywhere.

Savage Worlds is basically the natural result of the same dead end of game design that brought us Earthdawn. Some people are unhappy with static bonuses pushing players off the RNG and leaving them incapable of failing at tasks. So they ask: what if bonuses were just that you rolled bigger dice so the average result increased but the minimum result did not? And then they give themselves a round of high fives and blow jobs without actually answering that question. Because the answer is that the probabilities get stupid because the different sized polyhedrons don't have the same probability profiles and aren't divisible by the same numbers. The actual game design answer to that particular demand is dice pools. Because adding dice that can contribute zero or one hit actually does increase averages without eliminating the chance of a minimum result.
Neurosis wrote: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.
I told you so?

I know that's not the most helpful thing for you to hear right now, but I genuinely did tell you so. I told everyone. The people in control of the Shadowrun tabletop license are bad people who are emotionally invested in perpetuating a bad process which cannot produce anything but a bad product.

People asked why I didn't work to save Shadowrun from the inside. This is why. It is because I was right and all the people who said it wasn't so bad were wrong. If you present Jason Hardy with two plausible working mechanics he will choose a third option that doesn't work. Every. Fucking. Time.

That being said, Bobby and I have had to grieve in our own ways and in our own time. While I think we can all agree that actually stabbing yourself is the wrong way to handle this grief, I'm not going to tell you what the right way is. Everyone is going to have their own right way.

There was a time I was so angry that I basically started rewriting the entire combat engine to be better. That was interesting. I probably would have finished that if the dumpshockers hadn't been such a bunch of shit stains about it (history note: they created a special subforum for the project on Dumpshock and then denied me access to that subforum, thus making it impossible for me to read anyone else's comments or contributions). Bobby did a year blog about Eclipse Phase to work through it all.

The thing you'll eventually have to come to terms with is that Shadowrun is dead. Shadowrun has been dead for years, and the fact that there are some deadenders in Washington who still have the rights and can put "official Shadowrun product!" on whatever the fuck it is they shit out from time to time is neither here nor there. I mean, Onyx Path has the rights to print New World of Darkness materials, but that line is still dead. In the modern world, the intellectual property rights to things pretty much never just expire, someone still owns your entire childhood. And sometimes they'll try to sell you some warmed over garbage branded with the trademarks of your youth. But that shit isn't real. Your childhood is still over and they aren't really making any more episodes of classic He-Man or adding new cartridges for the Super Nintendo. They're just selling you a play mat with a digital reproduction of Castle Greyskull on it for twenty bucks.

Now what you end up doing about that is your own business. My suggestion would be to write your own cyberpunk world and just let Shadowrun go. It's painful. I haven't really made very much progress on Asymmetric Threat, in no small part because it still hurts. But that's the only real way forward.

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Post by Ancient History »

Sometimes you have to burn your bridges. Sometimes you need a fresh start. Because I don't want to be the guy bitching in 2020 about how Shadowrun isn't the game it was when I was writing it.

Let's not get nostalgic here: there was a time I lived and breathed the game, but I was never the best game designer on the planet. I look back at the first draft I submitted to Runner Havens and cringe. Rob Boyle rewrote basically all of our final draft for the martial arts rules and he was correct to do so. Runner's Companion is a dumpster fire and a large part of the fault is yours truly.

So I was not, was never, the best writer when it came to Shadowrun. I accepted that then, and I accept it now. I managed to get as much work in SR as I did because of the set of circumstances surrounding it - freelancers leaving, pitching for books, being able and willing to generate copy according to a deadline and wordcount limitations. I like to think I was getting better, especially near the end. There was a day I could cite chapter and verse for damn near anything - and did. I worked uncredited, I worked unpaid, I worked on the freelancer wiki and the errata and...I did a lot. It was my hobby while I was going to college.

But we all have to grow up sometime.

There's a lot of stuff I put up with in Shadowrun because I was engaged. Suspension of disbelief, mindcaulk, whatever you want to call it. There's stuff that you don't blink at when you're 12 that makes you wonder at 22, and at 32 the flaws are so obvious it's a bit painful. Shadowrun was a great game, but it was never perfect. For some people, maybe, it was even a form of expression. They really cared about doing it right. Keeping it alive. Keeping it moving, changing, evolving.

But it's also a business. And that's a kind of thing that's really hard to square with being in love. Because when you're in love with something, you'll work hard, even without payment, just to do it right. And then when it doesn't come out right...when you look back at all the time and effort you spent and what you got out of it...knowing somebody profited off that...well, it'll break you heart. At least a little.

The realization that always hits home, of course, is how little caring matters. You can care deeply as a fan, as a freelancer; but unless you own the property that means nothing. It's never your final call, what gets published and what doesn't. And you can't judge how a product is received. Was Vice a good product? I don't know. There aren't a lot of reviews out there for it, good or bad. I worked hard on a lot of Vice, but most game fans don't notice. Even at my busiest, I wasn't a big name in Shadowrun.

So, I move on. This is literally the most I've written about Shadowrun in years - since Frank and I did the Elf nations OSSR, probably. I haven't followed SR5, or the MMO, or anything since I put out the final version of PACKS. I don't want to be the bitter old ghost haunting the SR forums, bitching about how it was in my day. What kind of life is that?
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Post by Orca »

If you want a minor tinker to the SW rules, allowing dice to roll up once, max, prevents people who are bad at rolling d4s from doing unreal damage while having minimal effect on anything more.
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Post by Lokathor »

FrankTrollman wrote:If you present Jason Hardy with two plausible working mechanics he will choose a third option that doesn't work. Every. Fucking. Time.
A game-mechanical reverse Ubermench. Impressive.
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Post by Blade »

@Neurosis: In case you're interested, I've posted an introduction to my SR ruleset here.
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Post by Neurosis »

So I have a friend that isn't actually banned from RPG.net yet. Shocking, right?

He ran this whole "Savage Math" thing past them and here's what he got back from the math wizzes on the Big Purple (I'm leaving out a lot of irrelevant "but it's fun to playyyyyyyy" type stuff that the Den would pounce on like hyenas on a baby).
someone not yet banned from RPG.net wrote: tn 6
with d4: chances are 3/16, or 18.75%
with d6: chances are 1/6, or 16.67%

Even when I was playing percentiles games, I never bothered to apply a 2% modifier.
Dammit, I ignore anything that is under 10%
someone not yet banned from RPG.net wrote: To tell the probability, the odds of getting a six on a four-sided die and a wild die are 32.22% as opposed to a 30.55% on a six-sided die.

The odds of getting a raise on that roll,however are about 10% and 10.8% respectively.

Also, the chances of snake-eyes are 4.17% and 2.78% respectively.
someone not yet banned from RPG.net wrote:The difference is under 2% so its largely academic. The majority of TNs are 4 in which case higher dice are always better so in those instances where you do need a 6 (attacking in melee vs someone with fighting D8) then sure you are slightly better off with a D4 because on 1 roll in 50 it will matter.

And that's fine because if you can only throw a D4 in a fight vs enemies with D8s you are not the character in charge of carrying that scene.
This is the only non-numbers based comment my friend got that seemed to have any kind of meaning:
someone not yet banned from rpg.net wrote:If it helps at all, I like to explain this math quirk as "beginner's luck" in my head, which I feel is on-point thematically for Savage Worlds.

So take the example of a d4 vs. a d6. At the standard target number of 4, the d6 is better because the person with the d6 is more skilled. At very high TNs like an 8 or a 10, the d6 is still better, because the lower-skill d4 person is just not likely to do well enough at such a difficult task even with luck.

But at TN 6, the task is just difficult enough that sometimes an amateur with a d4 focuses and beats the odds and beginner's luck just kicks in, and he outperforms the guy with the d6.

I suppose this doesn't actually make sense, but it makes sense to me as long as I don't think about it too long.
Last edited by Neurosis on Thu Sep 08, 2016 8:48 pm, edited 4 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.)
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