Re: Savage Worlds: Wildcards mechanics
The person who's "supposed to" win in a battle between the novice and the expert depends on a lot of factors. But the keywords there are "supposed to." In the real world, we'd expect the better equipped, better trained, more experienced, or more numerous foe to overcome. "Realistically," a dragon would just fly overhead and roast a column of mounted knights or a slightly past his prime Gothic hero with nary a care.
But in our narratives, our stories, the plucky novice, the well-meaning amateur, or the lone powerful hero can stand against professionals, monsters, and armies. Any dice mechanic that isn't either simulating or streamlining is putting its hand on the narrative scales, encouraging a certain kind of story to be told.
Specifically, games with mechanics like the Wild Card mechanic, or games with Mook mechanics like Feng Shui or Exalted, are saying explicitly that some characters are more important than others. A Wild Card can take risks a non-Wild Card can't, because the story allows and encourages him to take risks. It allows the important characters to stand out, to be more adventurous, and to survive improbable odds, not because of their peerless skill or their sweet gear or their higher level, but because they have some element that makes them stand out. They are chosen by the gods (Exalted), they are explicitly the main character in their own story (Feng Shui), or they have a certain inexpressible grit that elevates them above the common man (Savage Worlds).
This expressed preference loosens the mechanical grip on character creation that a purely simulationist system would have. It allows players to make characters who are imperfect, or incomplete, who still have something to learn. It also (perhaps especially) allows characters whose skills don't match up well to the challenge at hand, and to still participate in the story meaningfully. They can be in the scene and taking pot shots at ninjas from a balcony or desperately fending off assassins with a desk chair, even though they are the group's hacker and have no business being there, without just melting into a pool of blood.
These kinds of "participatory" mechanics can help prop up characters who have huge deficiencies in a system with limited resources to emulate basic human competence, where NPCs don't have to worry about points budgets and power creep, and skeptical guards who have to be fooled can "afford" to have decent Social and Combat skills.
This message had punctuation tweaked by the user at 07:16, Fri 23 Nov 2018.