I could have sworn this was the DMs job. You can’t stat away fear. Rolling dice isn’t scary. You have to put the fear into the story. You want something that no RPG can provide, and that’s the ability to inspire fear in your players.

The majority of things that “just showed up” have been in development for years, and were in development long before the licensing changed. The same can be said of the fan created material. Savage Worlds fans have never been shy about generating conversion, or full settings for the game. I speak from experience from 2004 when I created The Last Shifter War. That was the only setting I put on the internet for SW, but I have a hard drive full of other material, including material that expands on that one document.

In the list above Sticks and Stones, Runepunk, Iron Dynasty, Wonderland No More, Ravaged Earth, Shaintar, Sundered Skies, and Vampire Earth were all in production or even produced when the licensing was more restrictive. Necropolis was a Pinnacle baby originally, and was published by them first, the new version is published by the author under his own imprint. Realms of Cthulhu and Agents of Oblivion are both being worked on by an original (ie. when it was more restrictive) licensee. Freeport and SpirosBlaak are from another game company and each has a proven pedigree. Cursed Empire and Suzerain are from smaller companies. Lastly, the way I understand it, Space 1889 is being done by Pinnacle.

If you look carefully you’ll see some overlap between the Savage Worlds developers and the True20 developers. Now that Pinnacle’s license has become more open, a lot of them are coming over and gaining publication interest in Savage Worlds. Thus Interface Zero. I think it’s a good thing that the license is less restrictive, and I think it’s a really good thing that the publishers are working together.

Also, the cost-benefit ratio is harder to maintain in duplicated genres. If I have Hellfrost, for example, almost by definition I will get less “value” from buying Winterweir, and vice versa, since certain rule concepts will be at best duplicated and at worst contradictory.

I believe that is a greater danger of licensing: too many choices so I’ll make none, or I’ll base my opinion on the reduced value I got from a duplicated genre.

When I was given the opportunity to work on Gaslight (after I had converted Sherwood), I thought very hard about making sure that the rules representation did not overlap too heavily with Rippers, and in fact could be seen to complement same. From comments I’ve seen on the PEG boards that seems to have worked.

As the editor of Shark Bytes (the SW fanzine) it’s obvious to me that the appetite of SW fans for new and diverse material has not changed, but rather shifted from an unofficial fan-based approach to a licensee approach, since both interest in and submissions to Shark Bytes severely plummeted once a more steady stream of licensee products became available.

I’ll second Mike Dukes comment that there is a bit more communication among licensees than it seemed like there was for d20.

Finally, just to play devil’s advocate, I think the list above contains both announced but not released products (e.g. SpiroBlaak & Realms of Eldrath) and products that were clearly in the pipeline before the opening of the license (e.g. Sundered Skies was in the works for a long time and is a hybrid PEG/TAG release and Vampire Earth which was from 2005.) This ends up covering a larger span of time than the 18 months.

But thanks for the thought-provoking article which reminds us to continue thinking about such things.

I think this would be an excellent challenge to the SW licensees: Can you really customize Savage Worlds to make the gameplay emulate some genre that’s not pulpy?

Now you’re making me think; always a dangerous activity…
.-= Telas´s last blog ..Herding Links Across The Web =-.

What I meant (but communicated poorly) by “the need for more mechanics” in some cases was that for some settings you really want a mechanic that brings out what the setting or game theme is all about. For example, guts checks and random charts for psychological disorders do not do Cthulhu style horror justice – you want a sanity mechanic where a character’s grip on reality slowly erodes away. Similarly, you could play a Battlestar Galactica game using SW rules but the game, if you understand and want to emulate the show, isn’t really about fighting the enemy – it’s about not knowing who the enemy is and the sense of anxiety, or outright terror, that can cause. SW doesn’t capture that.

Those are the types of mechanics I’m talking about which a lot of SW-adoptees seem to miss. Instead, you just get generic SW with a new setting, a few edges/hindrances, and some flavor text. Most troublesome to me are the ones which are now simply porting their poor D20 products over to a SW version.

Of course all this is just for my tastes and I am certainly not the average gamer, nor a huge fan of Savage Worlds (though I do think it’s a solid system). My hunch is a lot of people are just looking for a new skin (or in SW parlance, trapping) to play the same game in different settings in which case some of the SW-based products are probably a good fit.

I do have to politely disagree with some of the complaints here. (BTW, I’m the “Kurt” mentioned in Comment #10.)

Background: I feel that rules-heavy gaming has done an unintentional disservice to the gaming world by stifling the open-ended creativity of players, who now look to their character sheets to solve problems instead of to their imaginations. In other words, more rules = less creativity.

Savage Worlds is a bare structure; it is not the sum total of the world. Fill in those blank spaces with imaginative Trappings and Hindrances, and use them creatively. Borrow heavily from other Savage Settings or even from such innovations as the group chargen process from SotC.

As to the pulpy nature of the game; that is very true. However, I’ve been toying with the “What happens at 4 Wounds?” question, and the game can get gritty pretty quickly if your answer is “You are permanently dead.”
.-= Telas´s last blog ..Herding Links Across The Web =-.

Characters of the same class can end up looking the same depending on the class. Take D&D v3.5 for example. Rogues, Wizards, Clerics, and Druids have some versatility to make each character taking levels in those classes all different. Fighters, Sorcerers, Barbarians, Rangers, and Bards pretty much look the same. However, characters of different classes, combinations of classes, or levels in prestige classes look differently enough and play very differently from one another. This means that if you choose to play a Wizard, your character will look and feel very differently from a Warlock. A Favored Soul will play differently from a Cleric.

Essentially, the class abilities really set the character concepts apart from one another when compared to a system such as Savage Worlds.
.-= Kristian´s last blog ..Gaming with Blogger =-.