[RPG] How to plan Savage Worlds combats based on PC ability

Here's a good blog article about tweaking the lethality of Savage Worlds at The Geek Life Project.

In summary:

• Be generous with bennies. Really generous. Give them out like candy.
• When you spend bennies as a GM, don't spend them to "beat" the players, but to increase drama. Use them to re-roll encounter-turning skill rolls like Notice or Stealth, not for soak rolls or for attack rolls. Use GM bennies outside of combat more than in combat.
• Don't use the Incapacitation chart and Injury table, just use the Incapacitated-on-fourth-wound status as written up on p. 76 of the Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition. That is, they're out of the fight until healed.
• Use the "toughing it out" rules from Winterweir: make a Toughness and a Spirit check to keep up and fighting despite Incapacitation.

My own suggestion would be to use the death spiral and Incapacitation chart, but treat all results as if they were nonlethal. Heroes and Wild Card enemies then can only be properly killed if they're first taken out and then served a coup de grace while unconscious.

That gives you, as the GM, lots of options for unconscious heroes, and it makes it easier for fallen heroes to be dragged off by their companions to get healing. It also puts heroes in a moral quandary when they defeat a villain: to kill in cold blood, or not?

Use the injury table if you want that kind of long-term Incapacitation consequence, or not.

I tend to look at the resolution to this problem more from a stand-point of visualization than system. In a slightly off-color blog post last year I called it, 'Premature Imagination.' The key point of that entry was to say that a major failing in approach that can lead to increasing dissatisfaction with, and growing focus on, the problem of whiff & ping is that players and GMs can come to forget that the outcome of the dice determines only results, not the events of the scene, or the way it is imagined and described.

I recognize that the question asks for a way to mitigate the effect of whiff&ping in Savage Worlds, and that the advice to seek out the Combat Survival Guide is a very sound first step, as is the advice from The Geek Life Project about discussing threat leveling in encounters. However, I think that premature imagination also plays a significant role, in that it colors the expected outcome for both GMs and players and tends to make it devolve into a sort of tunnel vision where all the vagaries of chance and change that combat could be, is instead boiled down to hits and misses and amounts of damage.

I approach dealing with the situation by changing the focus of the GM and the players from basing their expectations on the basic function of the die roll, to basing them on the descriptions we invoke in response to them. This is a small thing, but it can have a profound effect. By removing the concept of I swing and miss, and I hit, but did no damage and replacing them with What do these die rolls represent this turn? combat expands into a much more dynamic and opportunity-laden experience that can sometimes even be resolved narratively rather than only by applying damage.

Focusing on what people are attempting, narratively, and then applying the die roll to the attempt, rather than the expected outcome, turns the focus from failure, to a more fluid and ongoing interplay of offense and defense. This in turn helps the players and GM define hooks, openings, weaknesses, opportunities, errors, mistakes, etc in those attacks and defenses which can be turned into bonuses and penalties that can then be applied mechanically to overcome the systemic problems of being able to hit, but not damage, or not being able to hit at all; harnessing the overall creativity and imagination of the group.

If an encounter description shifts from the Player stating that they shoot the mook in the face, to "I line my revolver up on the man's head and pull the trigger!" and then prepare the dice for an aimed shot, they have shifted the focus from what they want to happen to what the character is doing to achieve it. If a miss is rolled, the scene is already partially described. It is not a cold and meaningless "I roll to hit and I miss" but rather a vivid image of the character aiming his smoke wagon at a gangster in the midst of a raid. What happened to interfere with the shot? That is where the focus needs to be to avoid the annoyance generated by Whiff. That is also where the answers to generating the much-needed modifiers to mitigate the problem will be found as the players and GM make their way through detailing the scene. Who knows? The GM might even have the villain capitulate [if that is a desired effect] now that the scene is made so graphically clear. Ping works the same way - What prevented a significant wound? What needs to change to ensure victory? A good example from film is in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when Indy is fighting the enormous guard in the mines. He has no trouble hitting... ;) Things don't improve until he shifts his tactics to incorporate scene elements such as ore... and a huge crushing machine.

The end result is, once the players and GM have a grip on not being limited to what the function of the die roll is (hit/miss) and return it to facilitating the imagination of the scene by adding complications and results to attempted action (not verifying or preventing completed actions such as "I blow his head off") the resulting descriptions can be harvested to provide the group with the modifiers and conditional/situational information necessary to resolve the systemic problem.