Mutants & Masterminds vs. Savage Worlds: Part 3
PREVIOUSLY — Part 2: Attributes
Dice and Mechanics
Mutants and Masterminds
As we know, Mutants and Masterminds is a system with roots in D20. In fact, Mutants and Masterminds only uses the D20. It uses no other dice. This differs significantly from many other D20 games, but that’s because everything in Mutants and Masterminds is a difficulty check. Even in combat, an attempt to hit an opponent will be opposed by a difficulty class based on the targets parry or dodge, depending on the type of attack. Damage is also difficulty based, whereby the damage done by the weapon is the difficulty class, and the defender gets to roll for toughness against it. Furthermore, damage is not hit point based, so there’s no need for the complexity of additional dice. Because it is D20, there’s still a significant amount of randomness. A 1d20 is a brutally random die roll, there is no curve. It’s strictly linear. However, more powerful characters erode this randomness with flat modifiers to the point of possible automatic success. In a nutshell, the more capable your character is in a certain area, the less random their results will be in that area.
Savage Worlds
Savage Worlds on the other hand is very unique. As mentioned previously, attribute and skill levels are represented by a different die rolls: d4 through d12. These are all the dice that Mutants and Masterminds doesn’t use, and Savage Worlds rarely if ever uses the D20. Flat modifiers are also possible. But the most unique thing about Savage Worlds is not that it uses different dice, it’s how it uses them.
Acing
In Savage Worlds, whenever you roll a die, if you roll the highest number possible for that die type, you get to re-roll and add the results together. And you get to keep doing it! So with a d4 you could conceivably roll: 4+4+4+3 = 15. Boom! The effect of this is that it adds approximately 0.58 to 0.83 points on average to your die rolls (depends on die type). The advantage naturally degrades because a d4 is more likely to ace than a d12. More on this later.
Wild Die
Player characters and major villains are known as Wild Cards in Savage Worlds. And Wild Cards get to roll an extra die called a Wild Die. The Wild Die is always a d6. The idea is that you roll your regular die as per the level of your trait (d4 through d12), as well as a d6. If the Wild Die happens to be higher than your regular die, you can use it instead. And yes, the Wild Die can ace as well! For example, if you have a d8 in Fighting, you would roll 1d8 for the fighting skill and the 1d6 Wild Die. Let’s say you roll a 3 on the d8 and a 6 on the d6. You’d definitely choose the d6, then you’d also re-roll it, as it aced. Say you then roll a 4. Your total would be 10 for this check. The net effect of adding a Wild Die alone without acing, is slightly greater than acing alone adds, but it also degrades faster and slightly more. Thus it adds about 4.9–1.4 points to the average die roll.
Things really get interesting when Wild Dice are combined with Acing, which is exactly what Savage Worlds does as part of its core mechanic for Wild Card characters. With both Wild Dice and Acing in effect, your average rolls will gain from 1.5–2.7 points. That may not sound like much, but consider this: the base Target Number (similar to Difficulty Class in D20 and M&M) is 4. Yes, four. With a Wild Die and Acing adding 2.7 points at the D4 level, you’re pretty close to guaranteeing success even at low levels. Of course there are plenty of modifiers that come into play based on the situation. The following chart depicts Acing, Wild and combined dice mechanics compared with normal rolls for each of the die types. Notice that the degradation of the benefit as you increase in die type.
Normalizing Characters
As we discussed above, Mutants and Masterminds has a great deal of variability in the check rolls due to the d20 being so volatile. Savage Worlds takes away a lot of this randomness, but in doing so it also seems to greatly normalize characters and reduces the benefit of being higher level. Of course higher is still better, but as the chart below shows, the distance between the first point on the d4 and the last point on the d12 is much greater for normal dice rolls, than it is for Wild/Ace rolls. In fact it’s nearly half the range of likely successes from d4 through d12 against a standard target number of 4. With normal dice rolls, the success ratios range from 25% for the d4 to 75% for the d12 — a difference of 50%. With the Wild Aces, these numbers change to about 62% for the d4 through 87% for the d12 — a difference of only about 25%. Thus the difference between the highest die type and the lowest is halved with the inclusion of Wild Dice and Acing mechanics. This plays perfectly into the pulpy normal character that Savage Worlds seems to cherish. To further normalize things, critical failures only occur on double ones (1 is rolled on both the trait die, and on the wild die), which is far less likely than rolling a 1 on a d20.
Summary
Mutants and Masterminds opts for a simple, linear, highly random d20 mechanic that is easy to understand and fast to play with a single die. The downside is that the d20 can be a ruthless die and ruins lives with its high degree of randomness.
Savage Worlds opts for a creative system that has the potential to generate a lot of excitement with exploding dice via the Acing mechanic, as well as the second chance d6 known as the Wild Die. However, for all its efforts, statistically speaking these mechanics normalize characters and erodes the difference between high and low power/skill characters.
Statistics may not do either of these systems justice, but there you have it. :-)
