Give It All That You Got

Savage Worlds combat can be the most brutal combat of any game system I’ve ever played. At the same time I struggle to balance the fight to make it challenging enough for my players and interesting enough for me. The fluidness of the dice can really shake a battle one way or another. If the players roll poorly the end may be nigh. If the dice explode they win without too much of a problem. So how do we tip the scales in a oh so subtle way?

Change Weapons

It’s hard to predict how well the dice will roll, luck is a harsh mistress. However, it can be easy to hand wave a bit on exactly what types of weapons your enemies are carrying. For example if your encounter is built around melee fighting; bringing a gun to a knife fight is just not fair. So drop a couple of extra Saturday Night Specials on your mooks to even out the playing field. It takes a bit of a deft hand to make sure that the dice don’t explode in a terrible gruesome way but switching out the weapons to something a bit deadlier will quickly level the playing field.

Make ‘em tougher to Hit

Paul is a bit famous in our group of taking a by the book D&D monster and “doubling the hit points and armor class” in order to make the combat more interesting. While we obviously can’t double the hit points in Savage Worlds finding the Toughness sweet spot can prove to be a bit of a challenge. So if your mooks or wild card starts the battle out with a low toughness and are proving too easy to kick the crap out of then have them duck behind something. Even better have them find a make shift shield or body, to hide behind. This quick change in toughness will definitely bring a bit more spice to your battles.

Give them an Out

While learning the ins and outs of a good combat session it’s entirely possible that you may end up accidently killing the entire party. Trust me, it happens. It’s why it’s good to give your players an out to continue playing their characters. While it depends on your setting a well-placed ambulance or resurrection scroll can do wonders for your combat tweaking. Just try not to pull the deus ex machina card too often or your players will see through your façade.

Learning when you can tweak battles is a time honored skill that takes years to learn, and a couple too many total party kills to master. Unfortunately for every GM, every time you change the system you need to relearn how to tweak it to your liking.

Do you change combat on the fly, or do you just stick with the numbers you wrote down originally?