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Savage Worlds Rule Guidance: Bennies Part 2

Written by Jeff Carlsen on 2010/01/08 – 00:00 -

Yesterday, in Part 1 of this article, we covered what bennies are and how to use them as a player. Today we provide a system for Game Masters to handle giving out bennies, and various related house rules.

Game Master Advice

As a Game Master, you can help prevent player hoarding or overspending of bennies by carefully managing the number you give to players, but at the same time they are a great reward to give players. Here are some tips for keeping a smooth benny economy:

• Use physical tokens to represent bennies. Sure, you could just mark them down, but all the advice that follows is reinforced when you have to actually hand the benny to someone, or recieve it from them when it’s spent. Poker chips work very well and fit the feel of the game, but cards, glass beads, or polished stones would be nice as well.
• Give one benny per encounter to each player. As a rule, give this at the end of the encounter. The same advice holds true for any non-combat scene that involves a lot of rolling, because bennies may be spent. This ensures that the players have a steady flow of bennies that they can count on. Of course, if the encounter turned out to be easy and few or no bennies were spent, then don’t give out bennies at the end, lest the players wind up with enough to make future encounters too easy.
• Take pity when bad luck strikes. Sometimes the dice really hate your players, and the only way they succeed or survive is to blow through their bennies. If this happens, give everyone some extra bennies. In essence, you can use bennies to help balance out bad streaks and keep the game fun. Still, don’t do this until it’s obvious that the players are struggling. This should never be a common occurrence.
• Use your GM bennies, especially to soak damage or have wild cards recover from shaken on their turn. This helps remind players that they can do the same thing, but it also allows you to raise the difficulty of a challenge when the dice truly love your players.
• Give extra bennies as a reward for behavior you want to reinforce. Often, this is good roleplaying, but there are other reasons. Every campaign has it’s own tone. In a lighthearted game, you might give a benny for a witty remark, but in a gritty, serious game, you should reward someone who plays the tone to the disadvantage of their character. Other reasons to reward bennies include playing up a character’s hindrances, clever planning, or just doing something that adds positively to the game.
• Don’t hold every player to the same standard. A long time role-player who always gets into character should have to work harder to get a benny than the newcomer who you want to convince to stick around. Rewards don’t have to be equal so long as you’re giving out a steady minimum of bennies. Rewards are to encourage improvement in players and in the game. Make them earn them, but then overtly give the reward when they do.
• Limit bennies for hoarders. It’s alright for players to be frugal with their bennies, but if a character starts to amass a pile because they aren’t using them, subtly avoid giving them reward bennies. If they wind up with too many during the big boss fight, they’ll be able to outshine the other players at the very point where you want all of them engaged.
• Take Edges and Hindrances into consideration. A player who took the Lucky edge, with grants an additional benny each session, should see a reward for that in the form of an extra benny every once in a while. Similarly, a character who took the Unlucky hindrance should occasionally be denied a benny when everyone else receives one. In both cases, do this approximately a third of the time, and make sure to mention why you are doing it to reinforce the effect of the player’s build choices.

Common House Rules

Bennies are one part of the rules that people seem to love to play around with. but several house rules seem to crop up regularly.

• No Re-rolling Snake Eyes. This is probably the most common rule variant, and it probably speaks ill of humanity, but many groups do not allow bennies to be spent to re-roll Snake Eyes, seeing this as the price wild cards suffer for having the wild die. Alternatively, you can allow a re-roll of Snake Eyes, but require that it cost two bennies.
• Give a benny when a GM benny is used. Essentially, when the Game Master spends a benny, he gives it to another player, usually the one it most directly affects.
• A true benny economy. As an extension of the previous idea, player bennies, when spent, are given to the Game Master to use. In this setup, there are a finite number of bennies in the game, and they simply pass back and forth among the players. If someone hoards bennies, he is actively denying them to others, but spending bennies empowers your enemies.
• The Golden Benny. This is a special player benny that can be given to another player at will (this normally can’t be done without the Common Bond edge).
• The Super Benny. This can take many forms, but essentially there is a single benny that does something very powerful, such as an automatic success with a raise. The Game Master can reward this to someone, or perhaps it gets passed to a new player when spent, or is handled like the true benny economy above.
• Cookie Bennies. Use cookies as your bennies. When you spend it, you eat it. This will prevent hoarding, but there are other consequences.

Have we missed anything? Got a killer house rule you can share? Let us know!

Tags: bennies, Game Masters, jeff carlsen, pinnacle entertainment group, Savage Worlds
Categories: Savage Worlds, Savage Worlds Primer |
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