So, my Savage Worlds-Hunter: The Vigil game is now over. And how did the systems merge together? Not great, but not too bad either.
First, the negatives, because it's alphabetical of course. The main problems I encountered were setting versus system. In general, the World of Darkness settings have always been about a world with a varied cast of thousands, all individuals. Whether it's a PC, the head of a vampire clan, a random passerby, a werewolf cop, they're all characters in their own way. Savage Worlds on the other hand is built to run medium to large fights with plenty of enemy minions to blaze away at. Sure, you could run a fight between PCs and a huge horde of vampires who all go down in one hit but that's not really what the setting runs on. I created golems and zombies to get around this problem, which worked well enough, but for a long running campaign, it would get stale. Secondly, as I mentioned in my last RPG update, it's tough to recreate long lists of powers. Which you sorta need to do when building World of Darkness style vampires. I barely used them, mainly because they were a side plot and possible set up for future, but it was tricky working out how the powers should work and not worth it for using them so little.
And now, the positives, because P comes after N you see? Overall, rolling skills in SW is better than rolling skills in nWoD. Failure at any level is still an option, as are botching and critting, but it is much easier to work out the chances of that happening and build fights around it. In SW, if Doug has a parry of 5 and the zombie rolls 1d6 damage, there's a 1/6 chance it'll score equal to or more and hit him. In nWoD, if Doug has a defense of 2 and the zombie has strength of 5 and a melee of 2 then it rolls 7 minus 2 for 5, then it needs to score one 8 or more on those 5 and what succeeds is the damage.....GAAAH!
Another positive is that since NPCs will be minions, this stops lesser characters from overshadowing the group. For the final battle, the group were accompanied by Jeremy, their Ashwood Abbey contact, and his (un)trustworthy machine gun. In nWoD, this guy would be pretty awesome in terms of stats, an experienced hunter with training in military arms is something to be scared of (so is the Ashwood Abbey but we'll come back to that...). In SW, he's still pretty good, he's firing on full auto and has a d8 in shooting so he's got a 62.5% chance to hit (told you it was easy to work out) and gets three rolls per round but he's not as good as a PC would be with the same situation, because they have the wild dice. Also, he had pathetic luck, his machine gun barely scratched the main enemy boss and he managed to KO one of the PCs who's player wasn't in the last session. Well done there Jez.
So all in all, it went okay. I don't think I'll combine the same setting and system in future but I certainly hope to run both separately.
