Mutants and Muskets post mortem

I had a basic system of my own about 1/3 finished for Mutants and Muskets when you guys talked me into Savage Worlds.   The switch in systems caused a lot of change in how the campaign played out.   First of all, the game got a lot more over the top.  When we had mutant powers and weird science, it made the whole setting much more gonzo and much less gritty than I had first imagined.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, almost every campaign I've ever done has been gritty in imagination, but goofy in practice.  Just as the characters were goofy, I enjoyed cooking up weird, goofy mutants of all sorts.   The original scheme would have seen mostly mutant cannibals, rabid dogs and a few mutant animals that weren't outrageous.  That would have been fine for fiction, but weird mutants were much more fun.

The characters also were a lot more broken than they could ever have been in my system.  I ended having to replace the standard ape-men with tough ape-men, and had to give most enemies 11+ on toughness just to make it worth putting them on the table.   I suspect that some people weren't cyphering correctly, but I decided not to care. 

I probably shouldn't have set the armor ratings so high for the breastplates.   I let myself be led by the desire to have gradually improving equipment, rather than keeping the danger level under control.   Having so many guys with 12-13 toughness just fed into the arms race.

I do know that Marlon's character made it impossible to have any adventure with a heavy role-playing component.  He would just say "roll persuasion" or whatever and add 8 to his dice and win.  Yeah, that's a big incentive for me to put in a lot of role-playing encounters.

Savage World's flaws always leak out in the end.  You have broken, one-note characters and battles turn on a randomly occurring humongous damage roll.

I really enjoyed the overland exploration and the encounter system I used.  And then after a while, I had had enough.   Luckily you guys had the truck at that point so I just tried to pressure you into taking the truck everywhere.  That wasn't my plan, but it came as a relief.  

I especially enjoyed the two set-piece battles in Scarptown.   Just having a miniatures battle every once in a while is just plain cool.  Since old school D&D and Savage Worlds were both developed from miniatures battle systems, we've been able to do them now and again.

The Bat-cave dungeon and the Crab People dungeon were both excellent crawls.  I also learned enough about the 12" square geomorph scheme to be confident enough to rely on it for ACKS.   The railroady  Speed-boat/hurricane opening of the crab people dungeon was pretty darn cool too.

I couldn't have dreamed up anything better than Nut-Spanky in my wildest pre-planning fevered dreams.  The fact that he shot down Jock in his junk 3 times in 3 separate sessions was just freaking amazing.