Recent content by dbm

Savage Worlds has pulp action at its core, and it is one of the few games I have personally found that delivers on that premise. It’s my favourite genre-flexible system because pretty much all the games I want to run are some type of pulp - pulp sci-fi, pulp horror, pulp fantasy and so on. It’s...

Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion has a power stunt mechanic. A character can spend a benny (a meta currency) to use their powers creatively to achieve some non-standard aim. So maybe a character with fire powers might use a power stunt to create an obscuring cloud by blasting water into...

One of the stated aims for the GURPS 4e Revised rulebook is to improve accessibility (though with a constraint of maintaining page numbers for cross referencing) so it will be interesting to see how that turns out. Due March ‘26.

I haven’t played Brindlewood Bay but I know my group would see a very big difference between acquiring clues to solve a pre-designed mystery and acquiring clues to a point where they can roll to see if their theory is correct (which would solve the mystery). While the second option might leave...

Genre and style are definitely different things. You can run noir / horror / four-colour supers / fantasy / sci-fi with Fate, Savage Worlds, GURPS or HERO and each would deliver the same genre with a different feel through their approach. Systems like Cortex and Fudge are more like toolkits in...

GURPS gives you a lot of tools for this in the core books, including advantages and disadvantages for allies, dependents and enemies. There are also a range of different social and influencing skills / ads + disads that can affect NPCs where the player doesn’t have an established relationship...

Boardgames are my secondary hobby, and I’ve gotten in pretty extensively over the last five years or so, building up my own collection. One of my regular gaming buddies also has an extensive board game collection (more extensive than mine). Personally I tend to buy fantasy-themed games (with...

The game still continues… in that video she was a kitten but even now she still likes to wrestle ratty from time to time We have a leather glove inside the hand puppet as those claws got too sharp for plush a long time ago!

We’ve played a fair bit of Savage Pathfinder. Both the ancestries and class edges are slightly up-powered compared to the versions in core Savage Worlds and the Fantasy Companion, so you would potentially want to adjust for that. It probably isn’t a significant factor, especially after the...

I find this, too. Reading how Pinnacle implemented Deadlands, Pathfinder, and Rifts using Savage Worlds taught me a lot about how to home brew and customise the game to better fit a desired campaign concept.

As a person who is generally happy to play a genre-flexible system (Savage Worlds) and that system happens to have good support for action-adventure which helps with a bunch of popular IPs the advantage of licensed games isn’t really for me, it’s for the other members of the group. What I mean...

Why yes, I do…

I think the warlock mechanics could fit an action adventure game well - lots of spamming Eldritch Blast and invocations. A couple of uses of bigger powers (spells) per level before they reset.

I think it depends on where a company gets it money from. Smaller RPG companies with one tent-pole property kind of need to keep generating content that will sell, and that usually means player content, typically new classes or the equivalent. That tends to mean the game starts to sag under its...

Speak for yourself. I have more empathy than that.