Downtuning lethality in Savage Worlds

Question

My groups go-to system is Savage Worlds, and it works pretty well for our needs. But the system uses exploding dice, and that means that sometimes a casual encounter that should be a cakewalk for the party can turn suddenly lethal. On one hand, we agree that we kind of like this aspect of the system. On the other hand, it sucks when it actually happens.

My question is, are there any good hacks for this? I would especially like a sneaky way of doing it that keeps the impression that death can come at any time while it actually makes the chances of that slim to none.

Answer 1

Here's a good blog article about tweaking the lethality of Savage Worlds at The Geek Life Project.

In summary:

• Be generous with bennies. Really generous. Give them out like candy.
• When you spend bennies as a GM, don't spend them to "beat" the players, but to increase drama. Use them to re-roll encounter-turning skill rolls like Notice or Stealth, not for soak rolls or for attack rolls. Use GM bennies outside of combat more than in combat.
• Don't use the Incapacitation chart and Injury table, just use the Incapacitated-on-fourth-wound status as written up on p. 76 of the Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition. That is, they're out of the fight until healed.
• Use the "toughing it out" rules from Winterweir: make a Toughness and a Spirit check to keep up and fighting despite Incapacitation.

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My own suggestion would be to use the death spiral and Incapacitation chart, but treat all results as if they were nonlethal. Heroes and Wild Card enemies then can only be properly killed if they're first taken out and then served a coup de grace while unconscious.

That gives you, as the GM, lots of options for unconscious heroes, and it makes it easier for fallen heroes to be dragged off by their companions to get healing. It also puts heroes in a moral quandary when they defeat a villain: to kill in cold blood, or not?

Use the injury table if you want that kind of long-term Incapacitation consequence, or not.

Answer 2

I'm loving Savage Worlds too. It's a recent find for me; I use it mainly for Deadlands Reloaded and Realms of Cthulhu.

I can only go by Savage Worlds:Explorer's Edition, but I find that even without tweaking the player character lethality has more to do with how reckless the players are than the exploding dice themselves. Even being incapacitated doesn't kill a PC most of the time.

However, if you are truly being reamed by the mechanics, the obvious answer is to limit the number of aces any one damage roll can have. One per die would seem to be adequate. Of course, your players may demand that the rule doesn't apply to their damage rolls, players being what they are. This sort of behavior should be greeted with your "yeah, right" face.

NPCs are virtual people too.

And of course, there are all those bennies (though they can't alter a damage roll unless a particular edge has been taken) for re-rolling soak rolls, vigor tests and so on.

Sudden Thought Department: One common misconception I've come across is that you should add a D6 per raise on a combat hit, when the rulebook clearly states that one or more raises gets you a single extra d6. One game I watched had a very high lethality on account of this one small misreading of the rules alone.

Answer 3

Isn't that what bennies are for? Those are the built in "save your bacon when someone gets a lucky hit in" mechanic. If you think they're really sucking it up, throw some more bennies their way for doing something arguably cool or in character. No need to add/mess with the mechanics when there's a built in way already.

Of course, doing away with the death spiral can help too, or at least the penalties to soak and other stay alive/defensive rolls from it.

Answer 4

A completely different approach stolen from the Conan RPG might also serve your purpose: allow a bennie spend to be "left for dead" instead of being actually dead.

If I were going to do this I would probably make the spend more costly than a re-roll though, I think. Perhaps a two-bennie cost.

This would have an undesirable side effect of making players unwilling to spend that last one or two bennies though, so on the whole I would have to give this one a lot of thought before I implemented it.

Answer 5

In Savage Worlds: Deluxe, the 'Heroes Never Die' setting rule greatly decreases lethality. With this rule in play, heroes are never killed and instead are knocked unconscious unless dramatically appropriate.

Another setting rule, 'High Adventure', allows you to spend bennies to get combat edges. A player with spirit d8 could get Harder to Kill, preventing them from dying.

As a GM, be generous with bennies so players can soak more often. If that's not enough, you can house-rule in bonuses to soak rolls.

Finally, remember that going below 3 wounds is not automatic death! Several rolls still separate a player with multiple wounds from actual death.

Answer 6

I recently played a Pathfinder Adventure Path converted to Savage Worlds rules. As the lethality of PF and DnD is much lower than Savage Worlds, the Gamemaster made a couple of adaptations.

First, he gave every character the Hard to Kill edge for free. It makes a big difference: DnD players are used to fall in combat and be cured back to action; without Hard to Kill this becomes more difficult as it is not uncommon to die when you are incapacitated. Hard to Kill makes sure that accidental non-climactic death in combat happens rarely.

Then he made a point of explaining the incapacitation rules and suggested that everybody saved a bennie for that last "roll against death". The combination of Hard to Kill and a final bennie makes death very unlikely (unless in a TPK situation), but it has an additional benefit: it also adds a bit of drama to combat! When you fail what could be your last attack against your foe, will you spend your last bennie to attack again or will you save it in case your foe hits you after?

Answer 7

The new Savage Worlds Flash Gordon setting introduced the Wound Cap setting rule:

Wild Cards can never suffer more than four wounds in a single hit—and therefore never have to Soak more than four wounds either.

This is probably the simplest and cleanest way to get a less lethal game.

Answer 8

I added the concept of an "anti-bennie", which can be used to force the GM to reroll, and can be used even for damage rolls.

That discards those lucky 40-something damage results that the dice sometimes come up with.

In my case I give maximum of one per session, and only to players that have done something extra for the game: summaries, drawings, etc., but you can grant them as you wish or even allow normal bennies to be used like that.

Answer 9

Have you looked at the free Pulp Rules from Triple Ace Games? http://www.tripleacegames.com/free-downloads/daring-tales-of-adventure/ You might find them helpful. Be advised that you need to use Acrobat for Mac/PC/iPad to display it. I did manage to unlock it and save it with print preview so I could use GoodReader instead.

Answer 10

I recently ran my first Savage Worlds adventure, and stumbled on a fairly neat way of reducing lethality (to PCs): red shirts, aka meat shields.

My party had a "support team" -- thinly disguised mercenaries who officially served as climbing assistants and porters. When the crunch came, and they were being attacked by a dozen dinosaurs, these "extras" took the brunt of the initial charge, even though their weapons turned out to be disastrously inadequate for the (extremely tough) creatures. That eliminated the biggest "one shot" potential, kept the dinos engaged, and allowed the PCs who were equipped to do so to make effective attacks.

Answer 11

Somewhat counterintuitively, when I ran Savage Worlds, I tried to increase the lethality by banning Soak rolls and found that it had the exact opposite effect: Lethality was greatly reduced because, when players weren't able to spend their bennies on trying to Soak damage, that meant they still had the bennies to spend on rerolling Incapacitation Table results instead. So they went down frequently, but never died or took permanent injuries.

In one of your comments responding to another answer, you said that "When the damage-rolls get sky-high the soak-rolls have to be incredibly good as well". This is the answer to that problem as well - if the Soak difficulty is beyond what you think you can beat, then just take the hit and save your bennies for the Incapacitation Table so that you'll survive the wound.

Answer 12

Keep a benny for the incapacitation roll and remember to read the various combat options in the book that could save you from incapacitation. simply dropping prone or taking cover help provide a bit of protection for you against being shot, as can taking out extras to reduce enemy action economy. generally easier to incapacitate an extra than it is to wound a wild card. though not using GM bennies to soak or reroll attacks for NPC wild cards kind of helps. rerolling tests of will or rerolling notice, stealth or persuasion rolls is plenty. nothing like an NPC wild card soaking 10 attacks back to back.

Reducing the Parry, Toughness, Combat Gear Quality, and Combat skills of extras also helps as long as kept sensible. your average soldier has a d6 shooting and special forces have a d8. d10 and d12 are meant to be extremely rare.