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Worlds of Design: Too Much Dice?
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<blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 9029122" data-attributes="member: 6777737"><p>I'll also say that 3 is not a bucketful.</p><p></p><p>But I also remember us playing ShadowRun, and everybody had one of those cases of thirty-six 12mm d6s. The joke was, "roll 1dBrick". I also remember playing Vampire and became clear that the dice pool system didn't really work very well.</p><p></p><p>Overall I think the problem with dice pools are that it's hard to tell what's really going on. The math isn't obvious. It's really easy to understand the math of a single die roll. Two dice are not immediately obvious, but not that bad. More than that and you're down to intuition at best. If you're adding them up, it gets weird because the range of outcomes is really high, but the standard deviation is really small. If you have success-based target numbers per die, it's hard to intuit what the odds actually are. It gets worse when the same system will sometimes change the number of dice you roll <em>and</em> change the target number you need <em>and</em> you change the number of successes you need.</p><p></p><p>What's the difference between 3d6 vs TN 4+ and 5d6 vs TN 5+? What if you need 1 success? 2 successes? 3? Which is harder when? <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" alt="🤷♀️" title="Woman shrugging :woman_shrugging:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2640.png" data-shortname=":woman_shrugging:" /> It's not even trivial to figure out.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Bacon Bits, post: 9029122, member: 6777737"] I'll also say that 3 is not a bucketful. But I also remember us playing ShadowRun, and everybody had one of those cases of thirty-six 12mm d6s. The joke was, "roll 1dBrick". I also remember playing Vampire and became clear that the dice pool system didn't really work very well. Overall I think the problem with dice pools are that it's hard to tell what's really going on. The math isn't obvious. It's really easy to understand the math of a single die roll. Two dice are not immediately obvious, but not that bad. More than that and you're down to intuition at best. If you're adding them up, it gets weird because the range of outcomes is really high, but the standard deviation is really small. If you have success-based target numbers per die, it's hard to intuit what the odds actually are. It gets worse when the same system will sometimes change the number of dice you roll [I]and[/I] change the target number you need [I]and[/I] you change the number of successes you need. What's the difference between 3d6 vs TN 4+ and 5d6 vs TN 5+? What if you need 1 success? 2 successes? 3? Which is harder when? 🤷♀️ It's not even trivial to figure out. [/QUOTE]
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