Saga System

Sometimes, I don’t get gamers. There are certain and rare systems that come out that are excellent, yet they do not catch on. Why, I wonder is this?
One of those systems was the Saga System. Like all systems, it was not perfect but it was one of the better ones out there. It was fast and simple, which most games claim but it’s a damn dirty lie.
The Saga System was used by TSR for two of their games. Marvel Superheroes and Dragonlance. It was a very novel attempt. I have played the Marvel Superhero version of Saga and read about the Dragonlance version.
The Saga system used cards, not dice, as it’s method of resolution. I’ve seen a handful of card systems and they are solidly okay. Castle Falkenstein, a great setting, used cards, but the card value was a bit wonky. In that game, if the suite of the card matched your action (Hearts for social for example) you would use the full value of the card. If not, then you would only add one. The cheap things about Castle Falkenstein was that you could pitch in as many cards as needed, so if you had a hand of 4 crap cards, you could attempt an action, just to pitch all 4 cards and then re-draw a full hand, thus circumventing the limit of your mitt of cards.
The Saga system was better but a bit monty haul, because it went the other direction. A card is worth it’s base value, no matter the suite. You would add Stat (or Power) and the value of the card and try to get over a difficulty number. Marvel went a bit nuts because the stat values varied so much. A 1 was pretty weak. 10 was max human. And beyond that? Well Hulk had a 20 Strength but you could go up to 30 or higher for beings such as Galactus.
Now if the suite of the cards matched your action, then you would get a Trump, which is to say, you could draw the top card on the deck and add that to your value. If that card was the same suite, you would Trump again. There was no limit to the amount of Trumps you could do, but eventually it would stop (cuz you would eventually pull a non-suite appropriate card).
I cannot express to you how much fun it was to play this system, as superheroes. The card system was actually fun to use, rather than dice, which are not fun but functional. The math was relatively easy and quick. Heroes could try to stack the odds in their favour by holding onto an appropriate attack relevant suite for later. By the time combat hit, you were blurring through cards like crazy.
Did I mention that there were five suites to the Marvel system? Well the first four just matched the four stats: Strength, Agility, Intellect and Willpower. As you can imagine, these four stats governed everything, including your powers (so all powers had to be attached to one of those stats). The only flaw here is that your Strength could be used to hit, for damage and to resist damage. (I hate mechanics which allow one ‘godstat’).
So what’s the 5th suite? In Marvel it was the Doom suite (for Dr. Doom, duh). The Doom suite was a great mechanic. You could add the numbers just like normal, but the Doom suite never associated itself to any action, so it never Trumped. Furthermore, the GM took the Doom card and formed a hand of cards with it, using it to increase the difficulty of a particular action. A wonderful mechanic (and it gets better but I’ll get to that).
There is a further component to the Saga card system. They call it Edge and Hand Size. Every character has an Edge, representing how skilled they are. 1 is a wiener. 2-3 is your average character. 4 is Captain America. It can get as high as 6 but they didn’t give any examples of anybody that high.
Your Edge represents two things. First, you add two to your Edge and that’s your hand size (more on that later). Second, you can use any card that’s equal to or lower than your Edge in addition to whatever card you ‘actually’ use. Thus with a 3 Edge, you can add your crap 1-3 cards into a challenge in addition to the card that you actually play. Very few games handle ‘experience’ in such as brilliant and easy fashion. Captain America, has a high Edge because he’s got more experience than anybody else. Thus, he can win over others because if he had good and bad cards, they all work out.
Back to the hand size, there is more to it than just more cards. See when your character is hit and takes damage, you have to discard a number of cards at least equal to the damage. So if you took 8 damage and had 9 a 4, a 3 and a 1 you have two choices. Discard the 9 which temporary reduces your hand size to 3 cards and be done with it. Or discard the 4, 3 and the 1 (which equal 8) and temporary reduces your hand size to 1. In this way, the player can make the decision on how powerful the hit actually becomes, based on the cards in their hand at the time. And more experienced heroes, who have a higher Edge and thus a higher hand size, know how to roll with the blow better than other, less experienced heroes.
Oh and one more neat thing about discarding cards due to damage: If you happen to discard a Doom card in that process…well…the GM can say that something bad happened to your character, such as a broken leg or something more serious. If say you discarded a Doom card as your final card (which would normally KO you), the GM might decide to say that you are now actually dying.
Overall the system works extremely well and is fun, as I said before. There are problems with the system but they are fairly trivial and would be easy enough to fix. We once had a bird-girl who had a ranged attack that would shoot her feathers out. She once Trumped so many times she could have wounded The Hulk or Galactus with her attack. This was more of a once in a lifetime sorta thing but it can happen, so it would be something to watch for.
Now I’ve read some reviews on the failed attempt to bring the Saga system to D&D. I’m sad to say that it failed but it did. Players, I guess, just couldn’t accept that much of a departure from regular D&D. I can understand the loosy-goosy feel to the cards, rather than the dice. With crap cards and no appropriate suites, a high stat doesn’t really amount for much. That was the one ‘big’ flaw in that if you’re a smashy character (and who isn’t in a superhero game) and you can’t get your favoured suite, you would sit there and not be able to do much in a fight.
That being said, with the new D&D 4th edition, there is a big push to allow each and every character to use different stats for their powers. If such a concept were applied to the Dragonlance version, that could have been very cool. The Dragonlance version had 8 stats (2 for each suite I believe) and thus you open up a lot of neat potential combos. Perhaps you have a Strength Maneuver, an Intellect Maneuver and a Resolve Maneuver. This would open your combat up to use 3 of the 4 suites available to you. If you keep getting Strength cards, keep using the Strength Maneuver. But when you get an Intellect card, you can switch off to that Maneuver if you like.
But alas, I believe that it was just use Strength or Agility to hit. If you get the right cards to Trump, then great. If not, then oh well, you suck this fight (that’s not exactly true, a high non-aligned suite card works just fine, but players LOVE to Trump).
Magic was a little different and there was no equipment if the review is to be believed and I think that had something to do with how the game failed. Going from the traditional d20 world to something altogether different and not having kewl stuff like equipment and an unfamiliar magic system spelt it’s doom. (Personally, I can’t figure out why they wouldn’t have had equipment).
The feel of a game system is important. The Saga system was one of those rare gems but it has a definite fast paced feel to it. That’s why it was exciting in a superhero game but I can see how it would be difficult to get it in a D&D style game. Something about cards just has a different quality to them. Cards to be associated with many other things, particularly a host of card games. Using them as your random mechanic makes for a very different game. There is less randomness to it, because if you have a stat of 8 and your best card is an 8, your best ‘roll’ is a 16. A Trump adds some measure of randomness but it’s not quite the same as a randomly rolled die. At the same time, you also tend to know when you’re going to suck in the next encounter, because if you have nothing but garbage in your hand and nothing that Trumps for the situation, you’re going to feel that you’re being screwed or punished by your lousy hand. Strangely enough, I for one would much rather know that I suck in advance than to suck after I’ve rolled that die. If I’m going to suck, at the very least it prevents me from making crazy promises that “nobody’ll get hurt on my watch!” or something to that effect.
Still, if you can part with your dice, there is something that’s quite magically about how the Saga system handles pretty much everything and with relative ease. Too bad it’s effectively dead. =(