My First Game (With My Kids!)

A Savage Tale of character creation

So, I got my kids interested in gaming (my daughter, age 13 & my son, age 8). They both seemed interested in a fantasy setting and both had ideas for unique characters. I decided to sit down and write up two characters for them. My daughter is an avid fiction writer and has a favorite character in her stories. This character is a half demon/half angel who is torn between her heritages and constantly struggles to do the right thing. Nathan really wanted to be a huge bruiser with big weapons.

I sat down and started to thumb through the SWD-Ex & Fantasy Companion. I created a custom Aasimar/Tiefling mix. She wanted to be able to cast magic instinctually rather than through book learning like the classic D&D Wizard. She wanted to be more like the D&D Sorcerer. Inside of twenty minutes, I managed to create my daughter’s character, complete with all edges, hindrances, skills, and equipment. All that was left was for her to pick what spells she wanted to have.

For my son, it took me only ten minutes to put his character completely together, though I made a few very minor tweaks based on some simple questions I put to him (do you want to be able to throw things, or do you want to be all melee? for example).

The characters I made are not strictly by the rules, they are more powerful than a basic character, they started with 6 points for Attributes and 1 extra free edge. They also started with 5 xp and the related raise. But in the end, they were balanced to one another and the extra power allowed me to throw more at them without the need for too many NPC extras helping them out.

What I learned doing this was that Savage Worlds character creation is a lot easier and faster than I would have ever suspected. It took me about half an hour to make two characters, one with a unique race created from scratch. This is while I am still new to the rules and these are the first two characters I’ve actually attempted to create from scratch as opposed to using a template or pre-gen. And Savage Worlds is even more flexible than I originally thought. This system was easily able to handle a custom race that fit the vision of my daughter almost to a tee with minimal fuss.

From a GM standpoint, this made getting the game going extremely fast and easy. Once the characters were made, I was able to dive into the campaign with only a bare bones outline of the adventure. I was easily able to re-skin some monsters to create a nice, memorable battle between the players and a group of rat-men and a wererat. They had fun and because of the minimal downtime needed to pull up the creatures and read up the stats, my son, who has the attention span of an 8 year old video game loving boy, was able to stay interested for THREE HOURS! He has not stuck with any board game for that amount of time, EVER!

I feel if I tried using Pathfinder or D&D 3.5 (I never played 4th, and have not yet had the opportunity to try 5th. Though I want to try 5th, looks good!), he would not have remained interested. The HP grind and slew of rules needed would overwhelm him and cause him to lose interest. He was playing Savage Worlds with all the full rules (wild attacks, bennies, movement, multiple actions, etc…) and was not overwhelmed or bored.

The best thing of all? Both of my kids want to keep playing! I’m hoping to turn this into a weekly session with them.

How was your first game of Savage Worlds game?

Let me know what you think in the comments below.