When comparing The Pool vs Savage Worlds, the Slant community recommends Savage Worlds for most people. In the question“What are the best tabletop RPGs?” Savage Worlds is ranked 2nd while The Pool is ranked 34th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Rolls are made to resolve intent not actions
Instead of rolling to perform actions such as swinging a sword, rolling is used for resolving intent with descriptions of actions left to players and GM to describe.
Pro Fast-paced play
Pro Generic rule-set
The rules cater to multiple genres, and offer additional rules for GMs (or players) to create their own races, powers, etc.
Pro Companion books with expanded rules to support 4 major genres
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horrer, and Super Heroes. Each of which can be portrayed in a basic sense with only the core book.
Pro Classless
( Not a Class Based System ) This is also listed as a con, but it can be very refreshing to build you character from scratch. You can make whatever sort of archetype you like, and many are available pre configured for you.
Pro Easy to learn / teach
Pro General machanical similarities to d20, d6, and conventional RPGs
Cons
Con Monologue of Victory may stop any GMs plans
The Pool includes a system, called the Monologue of Victory, that allows a player to take over narration of the game in the event of a successful roll without the GM being able to interfere. As such using the system for complex plots may be difficult, because the player may remove an essential part of the story without knowing it.
Con No combat rating guidelines
No guidelines exist in the game to advise the difficulty of combat encounters. It is generally assumed in the rules, that the opponents will be reasonably proportional to the narrative situation, and that players will use ingenuity, retreat and avoid combat, or muster the villagers into a militia using the rules for Extras (mooks) as necessary.
Con Medium complexity
Straddles the space between lightweight games like Fate, and heavyweight games like d20 System.
Con Classless
Characters are developed completely independently of any sort of D&D-esque class framework. This allows players to make more free-form characters, but as a result characters which are less focused may be generally weaker. The book does provide a number of "archtype" partial-builds, which can generally serve as an alternative to classes, and Savage Rifts offers the Iconic frameworks, which more closely resembles classes.