How Rocketships Saved Gaming

Once a week we go behind the bar at Apathy Games and discuss gaming in more personal terms.

Savage Worlds is a bit of a mental leap; at least, it was for me.  I’ve mentioned before that Shadowrun is my one true love of gaming.  That holds true, even today.  I’m committed, or should be (mental institution’s are standing by).  The system and setting are both very nuanced, complete, and malleable.  There’s a clear logic in the design, and the mechanics suit my view of reality.

Savage Worlds does everything backwards.  Plus, it’s simple compared to other games, like a bicycle compared to an F-22.  I love F-22′s.  Yet, I’m probably more likely to ride a bicycle.  Somewhere, my inner child is crying in a dark alley.

You get all this already, I know.  But I promise this is leading somewhere.

The Apathy Games team, before we were a company, were a gaming group.  That group had just finished a epic level D&D Third Edition campaign, and it was time to play around with something else.  So I decide to give Savage Worlds a try.

I’d become enamored with the Plot Point books from a design perspective, so I picked up a copy of Slipstream and an Explorer’s Edition handbook.  With quite a bit of prodding, I convinced my group to play a single session.

Now, thirty levels of D&D is a very serious event.  An epoch, even.  We weren’t just burned out; our brains were week old stew left on the oven to mutate.  Most of our other breaks included games of Shadowrun.  Gritty, deadly, slightly pornographic Shadowrun.

Suddenly, before our eyes was this simple, stupid setting based on 1930′s serial sci-fi.  Rayguns & Rocketships, I called it.  You can breath in space, and the whole thing is ruled by the Evil Spider Queen Anathraxa.  Laughter was most evident.  It would not be incorrect to say we giggled like children.

One session turned into two.  We slowly figured out these backwards rules.  Terrible mistakes were made that would make Clint and Shane wince if they saw us.  But we played on, fighting space pirates, saving Lion Men, and jetting our rocketships between broken planets.

And suddenly something happened that would change our gaming lives forever.  Our dashing hero yelled “CUT!  That is not what the script says!”.  Without missing a beat, the players went from playing characters to being actors playing those characters.  The actors were developed on the fly.  Names generated when needed.  History created on the spot.  It was most grand.

And it was crude.  Much of the conversation was racially/gender/human-race inappropriate, but it was fun.  For the rest of the session, and the one that both followed and terminated that game, we regularly jumped back and forth between actors and characters, all the while still playing through the campaign.

And get this, for it’s reason behind everything you have read on this entire site:  we did it all without ever slowing down the game.

A crude comparison is in order.  We had also taken this time to play some D&D Fourth Edition.  You know, to try it out (I was shamefully enamoured at the time).  If you’ve played, then you probably know how the game grinds to a screeching halt during the Paragon levels.  It was at this point, after an hour and a half fighting a single monster, that I said, “We could have fought three large-scale combats in this time if we were playing Savage Worlds.”

The worlds that Savage Worlds has opened up for us are strange, creative, and often under-developed compaired to their mainstream cousins.  Slipstream could never support an entire product line.  But, because you don’t have to learn a complex system, and because the rules get out of the way and let you just enjoy what you’re playing, you can play a savage setting like you would engage in a movie:  without commitment.  Like Popcorn.  Like a 1930′s Serial Sci-Fi.

This is Jeff.  Blasting Off.