The Exploding Kind!

My local gaming group has been playing Savage Worlds lately.  I've been game mastering, using a nifty Romans meet the ice age world.  (You can see my campaign design here.)

I'd not previously played Savage Worlds to any great degree.  Game mechanically, it uses different-sized dice, with more skilled or capable characters getting a bigger die.  So a crappy creature might roll d4, a massive one d12.  Player characters and important NPCs always get a second, "wild" d6, rolling both and taking the highest.  So far, so simple.  The parameters of such a system would be easily predictable and limited, if left there.

However, Savage Worlds uses "exploding" dice.  If you roll the highest number on the die, you get to roll it again, and add them together. If you roll the maximum again, you do it again.  So the high end of die rolls is potentially infinite.

This has some interesting mathematical ramifications. In game play, typically results will remain in the single digits, providing "normal" results.  But every so often, there will be a super-dooper roll in the teens or even over twenty.  In practice, this means that every so often, a roll will simply exceed any normal defense.  We have a large player group, and players characters are more likely to make a super roll than regular characters.  So in aggregate, the group has a lot of super rolls.  I'm finding it hard to keep any single monster or NPC alive long enough to be interesting!  Instead, I tend to throw a lot of smaller opponents at the group. 

This isn't entirely unexpected or inappropriate -- Savage Worlds is a pulp system, in which the players should be able to perform sword-swirling feats of daring-do.

Anyway, as a mathematically tool for game design, I'm finding the exploding die interesting, even if I can see no use for it in my current wargame.