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After looking at the Test Drive, I do not see anything about party sizes. Is there a standard Savage Worlds party size? I want to try out the Tomb of Terrors one-shot with the Test Drive rules, but have no idea how many players to grab to try it out.

What should the typical Savage Worlds party size be?

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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

Savage Worlds doesn't exactly define a standard party size. And, like most open-ended point-build systems, doesn't define "standard roles," either.

That said, the nominal limit seems implied by the bennies coin sets being about 50 coins... the expectation is that players start with 3, and earn up to 3 more, and the GM gets 1 per PC and 2 per wildcard character... for 7 per PC, plus 2 per wild card, and really, one wild card per PC sounds about right... so that puts 5 players at right about 45 in use.

Not that the system can't handle larger group sizes. It's just the bennie sets I've seen are all 50 tokens, and 50 tokens really only supports about 5 PC's.

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So for a one-sheet adventure that doesn't mention a party size, the bennies make up for the party size? I don't want to run this adventure and have it be ridiculously easy or difficult because of the number of players involved. – lathomas64 Dec 27 '11 at 16:20
For a one-sheet, presume it is written for no more than 5p. I suspect they write for the normal 3-5 player group size. But that I can't prove. – aramis Dec 28 '11 at 0:17
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Incredibly late, but you can always adjust adventure difficulty on the spot with more mooks (extras) and/or more bennies. – Yianes the Sneak Mar 8 at 12:22
up vote 3 down vote

This is not specified but a lot of adventures have N times players characters for the number of monsters. A lot of groups are 3 to 6 players we normaly try for 5.

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up vote 3 down vote

I run two games. One had six players (now five), the other three.

The six player game has the problem that the group can become very diverse and the individual members quite specialised. Some players simply have nothing to do during certain scenarios. Combat can take a long time. But there is a lot of ideas and input into the game. We all have a lot of fun. If one or two people can't make it, it's no big deal to continue onward and simply drop a baddie or two if need be.

The three player game is a lot more cohesive. The players are all involved all of the time. The characters are complementary. However, when one person can't make it the ideas dry up very quickly and the game can grind to a halt without GM intervention.

I recommend starting with four players if you can. It's not too many players to handle, and the players should be able help each other out as they learn the game.

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up vote 0 down vote

I've noticed a lot of adventures list creatures as something like this:

Wild Dogs: 2 per player

Thus, it doesn't really matter how many people you play with. Play with the number you're comfortable with.

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"The number you're comfortable with" is a good start, but could you go into more detail? For example do things fall apart with only 2 characters because important roles are left unfilled? Do you run into trouble with 10+ characters, because it's hard for the DM to justify all those wild dogs not ganging up on 1 player and killing them in a single round? – Oblivious Sage Oct 21 '12 at 0:51

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