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After two ‘real’ sessions using Savage Worlds and several play tests, the critical hit system in Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition is still bugging me as a GM based on the impact it has on the PC’s… enthusiasm I guess might be a good word to describe it.

In SWEX if you achieve your to-hit roll by 4 over what you needed to roll to achieve success you get to add an extra 1d6 damage to your damage roll. You then take your total damage output and compare that to the target’s defenses. If you meet or exceed the defense you can start applying damage to the target.

What this can result in, is that a player might roll really well on a to-hit roll and then roll not so well on damage and have the end result that they do zero damage to the target. No effect what-so-ever. This can be aggravated on the player’s side if they roll REALLY well. Although the developers recommend you stop rolling exploding dice once you’ve achieved 4 over your target number on to-hit rolls, since I use an App that does give you totals, rolling a 22 to hit versus a target number of 4 can really have a “That suxx0r’s” moment for the player if they don’t get decent damage.

This is worse, in my opinion, than rolling well in DnD and then rolling low damage. At least in DnD you feel you’re having ‘some’ effect even if it’s minor if you roll low damage. Also because of the flat adds in other systems the die roll isn’t the only source of damage, you’re guaranteed a minimum value of the lowest die result possible + the additional damage. In part to eliminate the ‘lows’ of combat this is why I implemented using average damage for our 4th edition game and I do believe it helped significantly in many ways and making suck rolls impossible is one of them.

But with Savage Worlds you can’t really use average dice or you might as well throw away the entire dice based system or at least the exploding die part. And that exploding die part is in many cases what makes the system work where anyone can in theory damage anyone with any given attack. And of course exploding dice are fun.

In thinking about this I’ve come up with some possible options that I’m going to consider further.

Option A – Average Joes – Use average damage as a minimum value for every attack. So if you roll 2d6 damage the least amount of damage you can roll is 7, 3d6 is 11, d4+d6 would be 6 and so on.

Basing the chance to hit and the chance to do damage IF you hit on random rolls is a little… random and creates situations where too many possible outcomes yield no combat effect. Making a change like this long term will have the effect of shifting the average upwards and reducing the ‘spread’. To be fair it would have to be applied to both sides equally. This is the most ‘equal’ option of the possible options I’ve come up with I believe although it does favor the PC’s but less so than the others. This would remove the high to-hit roll, crap damage roll turn a hit into a miss syndrome although it doesn’t guarantee that the hit is going to have an effect on the wrong end of the bell curve where something is trying to get through a really high toughness factor.

Option B – Always Shaken – Any critical hit has the minimum effect that the target is shaken if it’s not shaken or inflicts one wound if it is. In essence the minimum damage becomes the target’s toughness.

This means that every critical effect has an ingame impact rather than just a chance to actually have the attack have any effect. Never a bad thing. This is going have a broader and wider spread impact as a result It means that a child armed with a pen knife could in theory roll two critical hits in a row and kill an Extra simply by Shaking it with one hit, and Wounding it with the second regardless of damage output. This one is going to favor the Wild Cards significantly more than Extra’s since they’re much more likely to get critical hits. It could also have absurd situations where a guy with a toothpick can kill someone as easily as guy with a sword although GM fiat could fix that.

Option C – Critical Joes - This would work the same as Option A but only apply on a critical hit. i.e. only if a creature’s T0-Hit roll is 4+ what they need would they get to use average damage on their die rolls as the minimum value.

Again this one is going to favor WC’s more due to the increased crit chance they get and it would have less game impact since it would apply is a lot fewer attack rolls.

Option D – To the Max - This option would let the character choose to either roll their dice as normal including the bonus 1d6 OR simply take the maximum amount on their normal dice pool for a regular attack. In other words if they roll a critical hit and they normally do 2d6 on a regular hit, they could either roll 2d6+1d6 or take the max of the base damage, in this case 2d6 = 12 damage.

This in many cases is going to be close to taking average damage but it does eliminate the math. Not sure it’s variable enough to keep for consideration but there you go.

Option E – Edgy – Just give every creature the No Mercy edge which lets them re-roll damage with a Benny.

This gives everyone a chance to recover from a bad roll but it adds yet another thing to spend Bennies on and could disrupt the Benny mechanic. A Benny spent to re-roll damage is a Benny lost to try and soak damage. Also this yet again favors the players over the NPC’s due to the fact that PC’s have a lot more Bennies than the GM does.

I think they’re all viable, some have a greater impact than others in different ways so I’ll probably just put them all out there for my players to peruse and get their input since they’re the ones that are impacted the most by this.

And just so you know, I don’t think every person who enters a contest should get a blue ribbon, but every person who enters a contest with a really great entry should at least get an honorable mention.