Savage Worlds Dice

A brief report

This will not be extensive, nor will I defend my method, just yet. To the degree of accuracy that I'm reporting, these numbers are close enough to precise that you could call 'em precise. Hopefully, this can serve as an aid to Savage Worlds GM's or players. I make no warranty about the accuracy of these numbers, of course. Once I post the method, you can pick it apart or support it, as you will.

First, the average results for each of the die types, rolled individually, accounting for aces:

Averages

Extras
Die Type	Average
d4	3.3
d6	4.2
d8	5.1
d10	6.1
d12	7.1

Wild Cards
Die Type	Average
d4	5.3
d6	5.8
d8	6.5
d10	7.2
d12	8.1

Now, you can use the table above to calculate the results of other exploding dice rolls. That 3d6 Bolt? The average should be about 12.6 -- 3 times the average of a single d6, right? What you can't do is use this to predict the results of Deadlands-style dice rolling, for example, 3d10 and take the best. That's a much more complicated equation that might force me to do real math. For now, I'm just doing Savage Worlds work, so you cowpokes will just have to cool yer heels!

Red Swamp spoilers!

If a certain barbarian character we know picked up a certain sword we've heard about, what would the average damage be? Yup: 8.2 + 4.2 = 12.4. (That's d10+1 Strength as a Wild Card character + 1d6 for the weapon.) Of course, he's hitting a target with Toughness of 15! Yikes!

The next section reports your chances of success for a given TN, based on what you're rolling. In other words, these are the odds of rolling this result or higher. I'm only going to extend this up to 15, for the time being, as it takes a bit of work to make this into a pretty HTML table. I could cheat, but then it's so hard to edit the resulting file.

As before, I'll present "extras" and Wild Cards separately.

Success Odds

Extras
TN	d4	d6	d8	d10	d12
1	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%
2	75.0%	83.3%	87.5%	90.0%	91.7%
3	50.0%	66.7%	75.0%	80.0%	83.3%
4	25.0%	50.0%	62.5%	70.0%	75.0%
5	25.0%	33.3%	50.0%	60.0%	66.7%
6	18.8%	16.7%	37.5%	50.0%	58.3%
7	12.5%	16.7%	25.0%	40.0%	50.0%
8	6.3%	13.9%	12.5%	30.0%	41.7%
9	6.3%	11.1%	12.5%	20.0%	33.3%
10	4.7%	8.3%	10.9%	10.0%	25.0%
11	3.1%	5.6%	9.4%	10.0%	16.7%
12	1.6%	2.8%	7.8%	9.0%	8.3%
13	1.6%	2.8%	6.3%	8.0%	8.3%
14	1.2%	2.3%	4.7%	7.0%	7.6%
15	0.8%	1.9%	3.1%	6.0%	6.9%

Wild Cards
TN	d4	d6	d8	d10	d12
1	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%
2	95.8%	97.2%	97.9%	98.3%	98.6%
3	83.3%	88.9%	91.7%	93.3%	94.4%
4	62.5%	75.0%	81.3%	85.0%	87.5%
5	50.0%	55.6%	66.7%	73.3%	77.8%
6	32.3%	30.6%	47.9%	58.3%	65.3%
7	27.1%	30.6%	37.5%	50.0%	58.3%
8	19.3%	25.8%	24.7%	39.7%	49.8%
9	16.7%	21.0%	22.2%	28.9%	40.7%
10	12.6%	16.0%	18.4%	17.5%	31.3%
11	8.5%	10.8%	14.4%	15.0%	21.3%
12	4.3%	5.5%	10.4%	11.5%	10.9%
13	4.3%	5.5%	8.9%	10.6%	10.9%
14	3.5%	4.6%	6.9%	9.2%	9.8%
15	2.6%	3.7%	4.9%	7.7%	8.7%

Method

This is the hardest part, I think; explaining what it is I did to arrive at the numbers above. At this point, I'm still going to have to save it for another time. A hint, though: if you have the numbers in the bottom two tables, you can derive the numbers in the top table.