Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Savage Worlds Play Aid to Resolve Incapaitation

A few months ago we switched the fantasy campaign over to the Savage Worlds rules set.  As with any RPG there's some things it does well, and other things that it doesn't do so well.  I'll probably do a full review of the system in a future post.

I'm a fan of flowcharts.  A good flowchart can replace several paragraphs, though they tend to take up more paper, making it understandable why more publishers don't include them. When I found Andrew Gronsky's Combat Flowchart, it made life a lot easier for me. While it's from an older edition, it still works. As a new player/GM its a lot quicker for me to just run down the flowchart for each player than it is to flip through the rulebook when I come across a lesser used part of the rules.

In our last session a PC became incapacitated. "Incapacitated" is the Savage Worlds' equivalent of AD&D's 0-hit points or Schrödinger's cat--the PC is neither alive nor dead, but rather exists in an indeterminate state. Establishing the state of Dr. Schrödinger's feline friend is easy: you merely open the box. Establishing the state of an incapacitated PC in Savage Worlds, on the other hand, requires a series of dice rolls.

You know where this is headed, don't you?


So I made a flowchart following the process to determine the poor PC's ultimate fate.  The image below will be hard to read on screen, so for your printing pleasure, I also made a PDF version.

Monday, July 7, 2014

Preparing for a Real Life Adventure

Following in the mode of the Tolkien stories, characters in fantasy campaigns often face long treks from one place to another. These are often long arduous journeys taken on foot. I have decided to embark on one such journey, known as the Camino de Santiago. Rather than fill this blog with all that off-topic stuff, I have started a new blog just for that.If you're interested, you can follow my preparations and my thoughts on that in my new blog, Camino Crawler.