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Pacifism is a type of hindrance/disadvantage/flaw that works very differently in different types of games. In most games I play or run, no-one would take the pacifism unless there's a work-a-round against it's limitations - and I can't blame anyone for that, as these games usually have at least one combat each session, and usually everyone's most eagerly waiting for those combats! And they often are the most exciting parts of a game session.
This post is meant for the players in my own upcoming Beasts & Barbarians campaign, but you can freely use it for your own campaign.
Links: Beasts & Barbarians Quick Start guide, Savage Worlds Test drive. You REALLY should read the quick start & it's recommendable to read the later parts (rules) of the Test drive too.
Session starts where the previous one ended - the group is attacked by a patrol from the mercenary fortress. A fight that was meant as a warmer took surprisingly long, due to standard start-of-session circumstances as our little girl is still up, constantly climbing to my lap and keeping my wife (who's playing Doris) occupied. Also, damage rolls were very low. You'll find the photos related to each chapter after the text.
Spoilers warning! This session actually reminded me of my Ptolus 4E campaign, with a difference of things happening instantly instead of calculating helpless villain's hitpoints from thousands to zero. But let's start from where the heroes ended the last session, running away from a horde of snake men in the ruined city of Quollaba. They ran down the hill and hid in a building, and everyone was able to jump to the roof of an adjacent building from the balcony when the creatures finally found them.
Warning: This post contains spoilers from the adventure! As we were playing in the middle of the week and were able to start closer to 9pm, we weren't able to get very far this time; This was the first session with no combats, we started right after a combat against captain Nekerios and finished when a group of crystal spirits pulled themselves out of spears they were impaled to and rushed towards Tereis and Doris. I'll post the next session in this post too as I run it before being able to post this... But let's start from the beginning.
These are the simple but functional cyberpunk rules for savage worlds I'm using in my Savage Cyberworlds cybercthulhu campaign. The rules may be subject to changes but I'm mainly quite happy about them.
I wasn't immediately converted to Savage Worlds after finding it. I first disliked the idea of the system; As I've written a lot of SW materials, I thought of telling how I got into the game after trying several other ones, including trying to create my own rpg rules. If you're very critical about the system you want to use, this post may be an eye-opener.
GRAmel, which has recently become my favorite publisher, released a free Halloween -themed adventure for Beasts & Barbarians. The whole Beasts & Barbarians -series is most fascinating and this adventure is no disappointment. I read the adventure through and it's one of my two options to run next sunday, even if I usually dislike ready adventures.
A few days ago I saw a new interesting Savage Worlds product at Drivethrurpg, and did something I rarely do - bought it right away. While Beasts & Barbarians scratched my Sword & Sorcery gaming itch, this High Space might well scratch well enough my Space gaming itch.
In a recent discussion about roleplaying mechanics I heard an opinion mentioning that character flaws should be a disadvantage and therefore rewarding well for playing them isn't something that should be done. My way of looking at flaws is completely opposite. While flaws are in general supposed to be a tool of balancing (or in practice min-maxing) characters, they work best as a tool to bring atmosphere, good story and drama to a game. And for this purpose, they work best if players want their flaws to cause them problems.