Newbie GM Tips? Deadlands

Hey folks, running my first game of Deadlands. Anyone else have experience with this system? Things to look out for, ways to make the narrative more fun? So far it seems like a blast.

before starting your game you should work on prepping for it and playing around with your game board so you know how to use the deck and some other things of that nature if you haven't done that yet. I spent about 20 hrs just playing with the board to see what I could do with it before I ran a single game on it but that is my style of learning. Never played or ran deadlands but I've read savage world and I understand they are the same or very similar so take your time and learn the in and out of how the game board works for your system.

From technical point of view the initiative cards would probably cause most trouble. I'm not really familiar what you can and can't do with the decks in Roll20 but it's possible that you can't do half of the stuff in Roll20 ini-tool what you need to.

Which version of Deadlands?  The original Deadlands or Deadlands Reloaded (which uses the Savage Worlds system)?  If you are using the original version of Deadlands, the difficulty I see could be with Hucksters, because they need a separate Spell Deck  that's not necessarily a problem, just a difficulty, and the more Hucksters you have the more decks of cards you'll need.  It's been close to 10 years since I played Original Deadlands, so I can't remember if each player needs an init deck or not.  If so, you're going to have a lot of decks all over the place...  I'd probably recommend using the newest version of Deadlands, which would make things a lot easier. I've been using Roll20 to play Savage Worlds for the past couple of months and have found the system actually very accomodating, so no major issues that I can think of at the moment, system-wise.

Deadlands Classic. The dice rolls on skills are XdY exploding, non additive. I'm probably just going to roll exploding and add it up manually. Ex: in  an example 5d12 roll of 5 6 7 12 12, 12s explode for 1 and 2, the net roll is a 14. We'll be using physical decks for the huckster and initiative. Was thinking more issues with balancing things like "Dinero" or "Friends in High Places"*. Or dealing with incredibly inventive players. I'm brand new to GMing deadlands.  *Which give players continual income or NPC assistance.

Kristin C. said: Maetco, in case you didn't know, within the past month the Devs added a couple of new features to make Savage Worlds easier to play. One is being able to deal directly to the turn tracker from the "Deal" window of a card deck. The other one is an option to auto-sort the turn tracker via Savage Worlds' preferred suit order. Not sure if there's anything else the card deck lacks for your needs for Savage Worlds, but we'd like to hear about shortcomings like that. I have tested the deck very little but it seemed that when you deal to the turn tracker you can't recall the cards. From this I made the assumption that Roll20 doesn't keep track of what cards have already been dealt. This would be problematic with the joker rules where the deck is supposed to be shuffled only when a joker is dealt. Also I'm not certain (like I said I haven't really tested the decks yet) whether you can switch the cards that have been dealt (switching the initiative) or choose a card to be dealt. Also I'm not sure if there is a way to deal an initiative card only to a specific token (when a character draws a new card until they get a card which is at least something). Like said I need to test it properly before I make any suggestions for improvements in the proper forum.

That was a concern I had with dealing to the Turn Tracker as well, but it does seem to keep track.  I tested it and dealt all 52 cards and it does run out.  The only problem I've found is that it doesn't seem to put those cards in the discard pile (which was why I thought it wasn't keeping track).  But it does work.

I think you have to recall them and reshuffle but I don't mess with the decks much so that is more of a guess than a statement. good luck.