Hindrance Cards

GMs in Savage Worlds are encouraged to hand out bennies when the players roleplay their Hindrances, although no specific guidelines are given - rewarding bennies falls very much into "GM's discretion" territory.

Personally I usually aim to award 1 benny per Hindrance per session. I will also give additional bennies for special cases, but those first 3 bennies tend to be the easiest to earn, particularly for crunchy Hindrances. For example I'd award a benny to a Lame character the first time they're in a Chase, or in a situation where their reduced Pace prevents them from completing a desirable action; I feel that it should be easier to earn bennies for crunchy Hindrances, to compensate for the fact that they also give a mechanical drawback (compared to the fluffy Hindrances that are purely roleplayed).

This approach works well for me, but sometimes I forget which PCs have which Hindrances, and which Hindrances I've already rewarded during the session. This becomes particularly problematic for one-shots and new campaigns, as it takes me a while to familiarise myself with the various PCs.

One solution I came up with is to write out the PCs Hindrances on cards (one Hindrance per card), and hand out the cards at the beginning of the session. The players can then cash in each of their cards when the respective Hindrances come into play, as long as their justification isn't too much of a stretch.

More recently I've had some newer players who aren't familiar with the system, and they sometimes have difficulty remembering what their Hindrances do (which can sometimes make it difficult to know when to cash in a card). So I decided to put together a tool that can generate printable cards complete with descriptions.

You can access it here: Hindrance Card Generator