Winging it…sort of

The plan to begin the Freeport campaign hit a small snag this weekend. One of the players had to miss the game due to an emergency. I didn’t want to start without the player or his character so, instead, we went ahead and just played using the Freeport characters as a another test run. I had a short adventure, laid out a basic premise for the players (and characters), and away we went. Almost immediately, we departed from the adventure as written. We probably spent the first hour or so of play on an improv “encounter” and the roleplaying that went with it.

Improving or going off the rails isn’t really anything out of the ordinary in tabletop rpgs but it just seemed so damn easy with Savage Worlds. I had no worries about notions of game “balance,” no worries about having fully stated NPCs, no worries about this unscripted encounter leading to other encounters that have no stats prepped already, and so on. It may just have been my comfort level with both of the recent versions of D&D but there was always a certain tension or sense of apprehension if things went to far astray from the prepped materials. There was a definite liberating feel to playing and just winging certain things. It makes me feel much more comfortable with running the Freeport campaign with Savage Worlds.