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Some More Thoughts on Sword & Sorcery

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It’s been a while since I did rant about sword & sorcery as a genre. That last post Sword & Sorcery: It’s More Than Just No Elves was pretty popular and since I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Barbaric! and other games, I figured it was time for another post. This time I want to talk a little more about characters and focus on the diversity of skills and abilities.

So let me get this part out of the way first. This is opinion. Some folks have a hard time understanding that.

I think the first thing to say is that very few people agree on what exactly Sword & Sorcery is and where the lines are between High Fantasy, Heroic Fantasy, and Sword & Sorcery. Sure there have been more scholarly articles written on the subject and don’t look for that sort of thing here. Instead, you’re getting just my silly opinion as it goes for gaming.

I’m going to jump right in and probably catch hell for this. Is D&D (any edition) Sword & Sorcery? Yes and no. And I think other games can do it better. As I posted before it’s more than just no elves. Sure you can have elves, dwarves, and halflings and still have a game be “Sword & Sorcery”. However, I feel these races still have a heavy Tolkien style connections (which I feel is more Heroic or High Fantasy) that give the players a preconceived notion of the game. And speaking of preconceived notions, when you sit down with D&D style rules, players will expect a D&D style game. And going even further out on a limb, IMHO, over the years D&D has become it’s own sub-genre somewhere between all the aforementioned sub-genres with elements of all of them wrapped and presented in different ways in different worlds. That’s all cool. But I feel characters get caught in a niche.

Sword & Sorcery characters tend to have a broader range of skills than characters normally have when they are tied to a class/level system. So I decided to some digging the ancient archives of D&D and see how some of the iconic characters were handled “officially”. I’m not do full stat blocks but just looking at class and level as a general idea.

Let’s look at the Barbarian to rule them all, Conan. According to the old TSR modules Conan Unchained and Conan Against Darkness, Conan is a 13th Level Fighter and 7th Level Thief. Conan Unchained, also gives us Valeria of the Red Brotherhood as 10th Level Fighter and 9th Level Thief. Pretty epic level characters and in the old days dual classing for humans was a pain. But other characters didn’t fair so well. In TSR’s Red Sonja Unconquered, Sonja is only an 11th fighter. According to Dragon No 57, Belit the Queen of the Black Coast is only a 10th level fighter (but has some special abilities). So in a way Red Sonja and Belit got short changed. And of course, Dragon No 36 has a more detailed write up of Conan at various ages/levels of experience. Compared to some other iconic characters, Howard’s Heroes are weaklings.

Next up let’s look at Deities & Demigods at that’s where things get really odd. Our favorite thieves of Lankhmar are stacked. Fafhrd has the abilities of a 15th Level Ranger/13th Level Thief/5th Level Bard. And Mouser; a 15th Level Thief/11th Level Fighter/3rd Level Magic-User. Also, we have a write up of Elric, a 19th Level Magic-User/15th Level Fighter/10th Level Cleric/10th Level Illusionist/10th Level Assassin/5th Level Druid. Wow.

Yes I know these are epic and iconic heroes. Your starting character isn’t going to be any where near that power level. The thing is your experienced or even “epic” character probably isn’t going to get any where near that power and diversity of abilities. I know why they are so amped up. Remember that guy back in the day? “I killed Elric and took Stormbringer. It’s a great match with Thor’s hammer. I killed him too.” Like I said, what I’m really looking at is diversity of skills and abilities.

It’s tough to do that diversity of skills without some odd dual classing/multiclassing. And that’s why I like RPG’s that are more skilled focused rather than class and level based for Sword & Sorcery. And yes. I did do my own little attempt to do this with Forgotten Tales of Sword & Sorcery but still using the class/level system. But there’s plenty of other games to think about.

The grand daddy of Sword & Sorcery RPG’s is Barbarians of Lemuria. It’s a great game and plenty has been written about it. Up next, there’s Runequest. I personally like the older versions and dare I say the original MagicWorld and I’ve still got that crazy idea in my head. I know haven’t written about Savage Worlds in a long, long time. I think the best for Savage Worlds is Beast & Barbarians followed very closely by Legend of Steel. Of course, there’s also the Savage Worlds Lankhmar. And rounding out my top picks is of course, Barbaric! OK, I did mention Lankhmar so I need to mention the Dungeon Crawl Classics version. I like it and it’s got a lot of good things going for it and it’s a blast to play. But it still has a lot of the feel of a DCC game. (Note: I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I love DCC and a whole lot of other games.) Of course, there’s also GURPS. A personal pet peeve that I’ve developed over the years is that I don’t like games where I need a spread sheet to run or create my character. Keep it simple.

This post is already pretty long and chances are that I’ve ticked off somebody (probably on Facebook). There’s a lot of factors that go into making a game “Sword & Sorcery”. Not every one agrees on what those factors are and which games are and aren’t “Sword & Sorcery”. That’s perfectly OK. And I also know I rambled a lot. So let me finish up with this. Play your game the way you want to.

Adventures in Gaming

Savage Space Opera Meet The Band

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Well that Savage Worlds Space Opera game got off the ground last week. (No pun intended.) Here’s what the players came up with: And sorry the silly GM left his notes laying about so I forgot most of the PC’s names.
Tyler Titanic AKA TyTi: That’s the ship. I went ahead and gave them light freighter that in no way has ever been used for smuggling.
The no nonsense bounty hunter and pilot with a few enemies and a few connections.
The beautiful Katana-Wielding Rebel (or Terrorist depending on your point of view) who likes to blow things up.
A deep space salvage expert who also happens to really good ar gunnery and probably not a pirate.
The ray gunslinging guy who sounds like Batman.
The crazy SPACE GOBLIN! engineer. And yes it is spelled SPACE GOBLIN!
And Nut who is not Groot.
The party got hired to find out why a supply ship has gone missing on its run to a remote gas mining outpost orbiting a gas giant. I hate doing whole sessions write ups but here’s the highlights of the session. As a GM I kit bashed a couple of Savage One Sheets for the adventure (Routine Extermination for FEAR Agent and Ghost in the Machine for Last Parsec) and I’ll try to keep this spoiler free.
The group miscalculated their hyperjump and ends up running out of food four days before they get to their destination. So yeah the party is in deep space and no food.
The stations is overrun with rogue killer robots and the crew (except for some blood and a finger that the SPACE GOBLIN! ate) were missing. They blast their way thru a bunch of bots with no problem until they get to the main processing chamber. There they find a huge bot, building more bots and doing something else but they just aren’t sure what. This fight is pretty bloody for the player characters with about half the party having at least one wound. The Rebel Bomb Maker (who is not a Terrorist) decides to throw a bomb this goes very badly and doesn’t even detonate and lands way off target (Read way too close to the PC’s). The bomb does go off when they finish off the big bot which explodes on it’s own thus causing the bomb to go off. This rips a huge hole in the floor and half the party gets banged up even more and starts falling down the umbilical used by the miners skim gas from the planet’s upper atmosphere. And that’s where we ended the session.

Adventures in Gaming

Savage Worlds Whiff and Ping Revisited

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This post appeared years ago on the old blog. Most of the thoughts still apply and since I’m starting up a little Savage Worlds game, I thought it would be good to bring it back.
This time I want to rant a little about Whiff & Ping. For those not up on the local gamer jargon, Whiff & Ping is easy to explain. Whiff: I swing, I “miss”. Ping: I swing, I hit, it bounces off my opponents thick scaly hide. Pretty much not matter what your system of choice is you’ve felt at least a little bit of this. In D&D, in it’s many forms, you’ve got high AC’s, Spell Resistance, Energy Resistance, Damage Resistance, Evasion, the lucky Saving Throw and the list goes on. In GURPS, you’ve got your Active Defense, Damage Reduction and a host of resistance rolls. In World of Darkness, you’ve got a one die pool mechanic, sometimes known as the “Roll a Pile of Dice and Nothing Happens” System. The danger of Whiff & Ping exist in pretty much every game.
At first glance, it might appear that Savage Worlds combat can suffer from Whiff & Ping Syndrome and in a way it does. In Savage Worlds, you have two defensive stats, Parry and Toughness. Parry is basically your target number to hit. Toughness is basically the target number to damage. Simple. Right? Anyway, some Big Bads can get some pretty high numbers. So it can be pretty hard for your buff fighter with a d8 in Fighting and shells out 2d8 in damage can hit the dragon but he’s going to have a hard time hurting it.
But here’s the deal. A lot of games out there basically use attrition damage systems (At least, that’s what I’m calling it here.) Let me explain. Most damage systems rely on a slow whittling away of Hit Points, Life Points, Wound Levels or whatever. Now, there’s nothing wrong with this. In a way, it’s kind of neat. It builds tension in the fight scene whether the players realize it or not. They slowly see their life getting chipped away bit by bit. When they hit an opponent, even it’s for the tiniest amount of damage it’s a reward. It builds the excitement and the players gain some sense of accomplishment. Our gaming brains have been wired to look at combat and damage in this light. Savage Worlds is more about the constant danger that the rug will be yanked out from underneath you at any moment. A couple of good hits and the right dice mojo will end a fight.
The act of hitting and not damaging an opponent equates to failure in most gamer’s minds. And nobody likes to fail. Even if you land that solid blow, you still might not hurt the guy. I’m going to use an extreme and overly simplified example here. Let’s say that we have an encounter with your standard D&D adventuring party of four versus a big nasty red dragon with 100 HP. On average due to various conditions each of our heroes does 5 HP a round to the dragon. It would take about five rounds with a total of 20 attacks to finally take down the dragon. In Savage Worlds, a similar encounter would run pretty much the same way. Twenty or so attacks until someone finally rams a sword through the beast’s eye. There will probably be a couple of Shaken results and maybe a Wound. Now, I know some of the math fetishists out there will want me to run some sort of simulation and work out all the probabilities. That ain’t happenin’.
Now it’s time to talk about the Whiff factor. This one is really simple. If you’re having problems hitting an opponent, read the Combat Survival Guide. If you are still having problems, you need to figure out if your GM is cranking up things too high. Finally, gauge your character to your oppoents. You might think your character is a bad ass but according the GM’s encounters, you’re a mook. Just talk things out, folk.
Just like any other game, it’s real easy to outclass the player characters if GM’s aren’t careful. The key here is just like every other game is to know the player characters and their capabilities and then design encounters that will challenge them. There’s no real magic bullet to balance an encounter and it doesn’t matter what game system you are using.

Races

The Gremlox

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It’s been a long time since I messed around with Savage Worlds. Well, here’s the first alien race for player characters.
Imagine a cross between a monkey and an iguana with a sick sense of humor, warped knack for technology and a love of money. Then you have the Gremlox.
Gremlox Ingenuity: Gremlox gain a +1 bonus to Repair skill rolls. However, any other character (including other Gremlox) have a -2 penalty to attempt to repair or maintain that equipment.
Tough Little Bugger: Gremlox have -1 Toughness but also have the Hardy Edge.
Gremlox Technology: Gremlox love gadgets and tinker around with “new and improved” ideas. They are the only race with the AB (Weird Science)*
Greedy (minor)
Quirk (Sick Practical Joker)
*It may sound strange to use Weird Science in a space opera game since there’s already so much technology. But unstable nature of Weird Science and those possible Glitches make it perfect pulpy fit.
There will be more on the way and some house rules too.

Adventures in Gaming, My Gaming Projects, World Building

Savage Space Opera Coming Soon

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As regular readers well know I’ve been on a streak about running a space opera game. And I’ve done a couple of posts and talked to the FLGS group and looks like things will get off the ground so to speak. So in my copious free time, I need to do a little brainstorming.
First of all. Yes. Savage Worlds. I’ve already been asked “Why not White Star?” Heck, I love White Star and OSR stuff. But one of the players did mention they’d like do something that wasn’t d20 based. For me that left two choices. The good Star Wars d6 and Savage Worlds. I have fond memories of the d6 system and ran it a few times back in the day. However, I wanted to add a few gonzo elements that just didn’t quite work in my mind with d6. And (this is just my opinion) I think Savage Worlds is a better system. Not saying that d6 is bad, it’s just Savage Worlds edges it out here and there like initiative, character generation, and most importantly I’ve had enough experience with Savage Worlds I can tweak a bit and not totally break the game. Additionally, one player has had a less than stellar (no pun intended) experience with Savage Worlds due to some GM issues. So it’s nice to have a player willing to try a system again.
Now for some nuts and bolts. The SciFi Companion is cool and I’ll be using a couple of things from like some Edges, Hindrances and cinematic Ammo rules but the bulk of the inspiration is going to come from Daring Tales of the Space Lanes by Triple Ace Games and Slipstream. I really want to run with a pulpy space opera type feel. And these two fit the bill. As a bonus, there’s some good adventures and inspiration from The Last Parsec as well. And a similar to that there’s some great adventure ideas and inspiration from Bulldogs.
I’ll have some more posts in the future about the setting, alien races, house rules and few other things.
But for now here’s some freebies (This mostly for players.):
Daring Tales of the Spaces Lanes (Just don’t look at the adventures. Looking at you players. 🙂 )