Messing with the Wild Die?

Question

I'm planning on running a post-apocalyptic setting for my Savage Worlds campaign, and one thing I want to do is to make Wild Cards have less of an advantage over the average inhabitant of the world-they take more to kill, but basically they don't get as much of an edge-there's less mercy for them.

One thing I've considered doing is replacing the d6 Wild Die with a d4, to make things less powerful (I want to leave Acing in so that there's a chance of getting, say, 11 on the Wild Die, but you'll need to Ace twice to do so). However, will this create issues? Should I instead, say, limit the use of Wild Dice to a few select instances?

EDIT: When I say that I don't want the Wild Cards to have much of an advantage over an Extra, I more meant to say that I want to keep the distinction, but mess around with it to be more lethal in general-I'm okay with frequent and horrible failure, as it fits the feel of the game.

Answer 1

Working with a d4 Wild Die will have a number of effects on the system. Note that I haven't yet run the numbers on the exact changes to probabilities with this change, but I believe that the general trends I've identified will hold:

• You will reduce the average die total on trait rolls, but the results you get will be more 'swingy', as 25% of the time you will get a 1 on the d4, and 25% you will get a raise. This may make the system feel a little more arbitrary and luck based as on average, results for PCs will be less consistent. It will also increase the frequency of critical fails, and depending on the setting this could have a major impact on the dangerousness of characters with Arcane Backgrounds and the unpredictability of Skills with bad outcomes when these are rolled.
• It becomes more important to spend advances on raising skills and attributes in order to compensate for the lower Wild Die. This is likely to lead to fewer Edges being taken by your players. As Edges are more important than skills for defining the 'niches' that each PC fills, you may well end up with PCs that are more similar in terms of what they are good at.
• Average damage rolls will be lower as there will be fewer Raises on successful attacks. This will impact on the value of Edges relating to Damage such as No Mercy.

Regarding other suggestions to achieve what you are trying to do:

• Removal of the Wild Die altogether is a huge change, and will have a massive impact on all sorts of areas of the game. Even if you only consider doing this for certain rolls, I would be very careful, as it is likely to have consequences on other areas of the system that will be difficult to correct for.
• Most suggestions around this raise NPC abilities rather than lower those of the PCs, as this is a far easier angle of attack with tried and tested methods. For example, you can introduce more gradual 'levels' between Extras and Wild Cards including Extras with 3 wounds, Wild Cards with no Wounds, Extras who only use a Wild Die in their 'expert' skills, varying the number of bennies available to different NPCs.
• If you want to make PCs more 'squishy', then an obvious area to look at is the way wounds and injuries work. Gritty Damage and Critical Fails are both setting rules that could be used to help reinforce this feel, as well as being frugal with the number of Bennies you reward during each session.

Answer 2

The basic Target Number for a success 4 and 8 for a raise are built into the system and assume that the players will have their Wild Die. If you remove the Wild Die or change it from a d6 then the basic chance of making a 4 for normal trait check become harder. A simpler solution if you really want to have NPC on a more equal footing is to always roll a wild die for the NPC. This way you don't need to change the scales for TN etc. There is no reason that most NPC can't still only have one wound which reduces you GM work load.

Answer 3

Here's the usual difference between Wild Cards (PC or NPC) vs. Extras regarding probability. As you can see, WCs are much more competent than Extras.

What if you change the Wild Die to d4? Things start to look up for the Extras.

You could also change how acing works, a common house rule is -1 per ace (i.e., if you ace and the next roll is 1, you don't get anything).

If you combine both approaches, it looks like you'll be closer to what you want.

Before messing around with the rules though, I'd try using it to my advantage. How do you plan on playing this PA? If sort of Road Warrior or Fallout, I'd have one or more WC villains and lots of extras to gang up on PCs (learn your combat options, they make a great difference).

If you're leaning more like The Road, where the PCs encounter very small groups of antagonists, I'd consider having them being wild cards as well.

Also the Setting Rules Critical Failure and Gritty Damage are your friends. (Though I personally despise the complexity of Gritty Damage and find it runs against Fast, Furious, Fun).

I haven't seen much complaints against Savage Worlds being too "easy", quite the opposite. Have a go at these tips and if you and your table want to ramp up the game, change the system (be careful not to break it, though).

Phil makes an excellent point: if your players find themselves spending more points in skills to compensate (an less in edges), you'll miss out a lot of flavor in your game. This makes it a deal-breaker to me, might not be to you.

Answer 4

Keep in mind that lower dice actually have a better advantage for specific TNs. If you replace the wild die with a d4, your players will have an easier time hitting a TN of 6. This is easy to plot around as a GM, but important to be mindful of so you don't actually make it easier for them.

Here's a link to a previous answer of mine regarding the statistics: Aced d4s vs skill development in Savage Worlds