Moonguide

Not sure about fifth gen, but I moved to Savage Worlds after the OGL debacle and after I ran my first session with 7 players.

Part of the reason I moved was because SWADE is generic and made for homebrew, since that means I can run nearly anything I can imagine. The other part is that DMing it is way, way easier. It is about as crunchy as DND, while demanding less homework and allowing more fiat for the DM (as is with lighter rules ttrpgs).

One example, an encounter with 10+ combatants at early levels could easily take up to two hours at the very least on DnD. In savage worlds, you make those mooks extras and focus on keeping the boss interesting. Mooks hit as hard anyone else, but they'll drop from the first solid hit. This makes scenes like Boromir's last stand very achievable. That, plus the simplified action economy (similar to PF but simpler), power points instead of vancian magic, classless character system, means that people aren't looking and fidgeting around while a player rereads their sheet for the fifth time looking for a specific feature or description of a spell. Combat is over in minutes and since it just takes a couple of aced dice for it all to go wrong, it's exciting.

It does have some stuff I'd remove if I could (removing attack rolls would be the first thing I'd do, replacing it with a straight damage roll with riders to inflict shaken and/or wounds), but it is far and away the TTRPG I want to DM.

Edit: lots of edits, I'm sleepy and missed some stuff.

The way it's made makes it accessible to both combat and non-combat interactions, with lots of GM fiat to affect the story in the best way possible. It is very friendly to homebrew and picking whatever rules you want, and adding skills whenever/wherever you want.

The one thing that makes replicating cyberpunk hard is gear. Since SWADE is a step die you don't have a ton of space to pump weapon numbers up, and the way that Powers work (with trappings), damage types are more of a flavour-turned-into-mechanics kind of thing. Plus, gear does not degrade in SWADE (though that for me is a plus, just more bookkeeping).

For reference, the thing I like most about SWADE in general, is that I can run almost anything with the same system and that it isn't crunchy. Doesn't matter if its a space opera, horror, sci-fi, dark fantasy or high fantasy medieval. Easier to run the campaigns I want if I don't have to talk my table into learning 5 different systems. The weaknesses of SWADE don't outweigh that for me.

Others have given alternatives, but no one has offered Savage Worlds. It'd probably work great in a cyberpunk setting with magic, and it plays super easy.

You could just run it straight out of the box with the SWADE rulebook, but there're published books (and free homebrews) that go for that feeling as well (like Sprawlrunners).

I don't hate 5e, in fact I'd join in as a player very happily, but I wouldn't run it. 5e is geared towards a very specific kind of campaign that I'm not very interested in running.

I'm more of a social campaign with big action sequences kind of DM and Savage Worlds does that perfectly. It is:

• Classless
• 3 actions per turn, going over 1 heightens the chance you'll fail on all actions. Players tend to spend less time thinking.
• Step die instead of d20, easy math.
• Extremely easy to make homebrew for.
• Generic, which means it can do any genre (I've done dark fantasy western and high fantasy medieval, next up I'll do dark fantasy cyberpunk hopefully).

I tried to turn 5e into something that fit a cyberpunk setting for about 3 months, before just buying SWADE and being able to run every genre I could imagine from the go.

Haven't played em, but Eat the Reich looked interesting. Vampires killing nazis. I remember reading something a while back called World of Future Darkness, which mixed Cyberpunk and Vampire the masquerade, however I'm not sure if that was ever expanded upon or which system it used.

I was working on a module for Savage Worlds that was basically World of Future Darkness with simplified lore and adapted to SWADE, but I never ended up running it to test it since I'm pretty sure the supernatural ancestries and cybernetics will need some work. If you're interested DM me and I'll give you the pdf.

Just going to chime in with some help, in case you need it. If you end up deciding for Foundry and find you need a public ip or something, look up zgrok (tailscale and tunnelmole are also options, but they're not as good). It is probably the friendliest tunneling service I've found, and easy to set up as well. Doesn't really have a GUI but it worked.

Just going to chime in with some help, in case you need it. If you end up deciding for Foundry and find you need a public ip or something, look up zgrok (tailscale and tunnelmole are also options, but they're not as good). It is probably the friendliest tunneling service I've found, and easy to set up as well. Doesn't really have a GUI but it worked.

My party tends to try to optimize starting positions, and it makes sessions kinda long. Last session, I decided I would add extras to a boss fight that would aid the players during the fight. The players started debating what the best approach would be after successfully sneaking into an already good position.

Decided right then and there that the extras were red shirts. While the players were debating, I interjected saying that one of the zombies took a chunk out of one of the gunmen (one of the extras). The energy in the call heightened immediately and they started to frantically make a battle plan and triggered the fight quickly.

I'm thinking I'll start doing that more often. Adds narrative weight to their dilly dallying.

It's great! I'm running a campaign at the moment (or trying to, hosting Foundry behind a CGNAT is a pain and I'm 4-for-4 on services that haven't worked for me) and it's been a breeze to run. We ran 5e before, and the transition has been buttery smooth.

Their main gripes about 5e was how slow combat was IRL, even with digital tools for dice rolling and calculations (mostly due to 5e's HP bloat and action economy). My main gripe about 5e is that homebrewing feels like balancing a jenga tower of oddly shaped blocks. SW fixes both through sheer simplicity.

We're running a low-fantasy western themed campaign set in the british isles circa 1900 atm, and I've already got a cyberpunk+vtm campaign planned, a star wars campaign planned, a concept of a witcher campaign (want to nail the themes and storytelling logic of the books), and a ragnarök campaign planned.

I was window shopping other systems when I got tired of trying to nail a cyberpunk red homebrew for 5e, and starting designing my own system, only to discover it already existed in the form of Savage Worlds, even down to how feats and antifeats work in it (edges and hindrances). As if it was tailor made for what I want to run.