Dice pool mechanics

[Morrus]

Separate to my other thread about a specific mechanic I'm working on, I was curious in general about dice pools.

I like them aesthetically. Adding and removing dice from a pool is less "fiddly" than adding or subtracting bonuses and penalties; and rolling a handful of dice is fun whatever game you play!

What do they tend to do about scaling, though? I assume there are some common ways to deal with the dice pool turning into 35d6. Do they just go ahead and roll the 35d6, or are there various ways to make that a little less cumbersome?

(Yes, I appreciate that the answer is "they don't design games that make you roll 35d6").

My guess is that certain groupings of the dice turn into a bonus? Say, every full 10 becomes 35 instead (assuming you're rolling d6s). 35d6 is therefore 5d6 + 105.

 

[Dungeoneer]

I don't have much experience with dice pools, but in 13th Age you can wind up rolling handfuls of damage dice at higher levels. The core rule book's advice is either to take the average unless it's a very special roll, or average most and roll two or three.

If you're consistently rolling tons of dice, I wonder if you shouldn't consider that maybe whatever you're abstracting is better represented by something other than dice.

 

[Morrus]

I don't have much experience with dice pools, but in 13th Age you can wind up rolling handfuls of damage dice at higher levels. The core rule book's advice is either to take the average unless it's a very special roll, or average most and roll two or three.

If you're consistently rolling tons of dice, I wonder if you shouldn't consider that maybe whatever you're abstracting is better represented by something other than dice.

Well, one hopes it's not consistent! 10d6 is a nice Fireball handful, though. That's FUN to roll!

 

[Bedrockgames]

In our games we have a cap of 6d10. In very rare cases this cap can be exceeded by up to 10d10. There are other places in the system you can can give bonuses to contain the dice pool explosion. I like dice pools, but i do fine after a certain point they become difficult if you allow them to get too big.

 

[billd91]

What do they tend to do about scaling, though? I assume there are some common ways to deal with the dice pool turning into 35d6. Do they just go ahead and roll the 35d6, or are there various ways to make that a little less cumbersome?

(Yes, I appreciate that the answer is "they don't design games that make you roll 35d6").

My guess is that certain groupings of the dice turn into a bonus? Say, every full 10 becomes 35 instead (assuming you're rolling d6s). 35d6 is therefore 5d6 + 105.

I would expect that any game that involves rolling that many dice is probably trying to enable too much scaling of effects and probably should cut the number in half, at least. Rolling a lot of dice can be fun, but it gets cumbersome if the pool is too big. Up to 10 is great, up to 20 may be pushing it, over 20 is pretty much right out of consideration as far as I'm concerned. Abstracting that down to a flat modifier (like +35 per 10d6) is really just putting lipstick on the pig. It may put the actual physical mechanics down to reasonable level again, but it still represents bloat.

 

[Dungeoneer]

Well, one hopes it's not consistent! 10d6 is a nice Fireball handful, though. That's FUN to roll!

Oh yeah! No one's saying you shouldn't roll that!

 

[Dragongrief]

The most common way to deal with expanding dice pools is to cap them. L5R/7th Sea (Roll & Keep) and World of Darkness* (Roll for Success) cap the pool at 10 dice, with anything over that turning into some form of flat bonus.

*My knowledge of WoD is at least 4 years old and I may be misremembering, so I'll leave it at just that statement (which should be true).

Roll and Keep creates your dice pool by combining your "Attribute" and "Training" scores. When your rolled dice exceed 10, they increase your kept dice instead. If you gain an additional rolled die after your kept dice are maxed (10k10), you gain a flat bonus (+10).

The target numbers for the system are designed with the idea that there are things which should be nearly impossible to do, and things where no roll is needed except in extreme circumstances.

Target numbers for creatures are based on the creatures skills, so they scale naturally.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

What type of dice pool? Are you adding the results? Or using target numbers?

I played Exalted maybe 6 years ago, and they use large dice pools with target number 7. Every skill or combat check took 10-20 dice, divided into piles of 1s, 2-6, 7-9, and 10. That was a huge time sink. For whatever reason that's a lot slower than counting 10d6, or even 33d6! Unless you're offering special dice, avoid that kind of target number dice pool please! (Well, avoid if the pool is more than 7 dice. Anymore and counting starts taking effort.)

 

[GMMichael]

I would expect that any game that involves rolling that many dice is probably trying to enable too much scaling of effects and probably should cut the number in half, at least. Rolling a lot of dice can be fun, but it gets cumbersome if the pool is too big. Up to 10 is great, up to 20 may be pushing it, over 20 is pretty much right out of consideration as far as I'm concerned. Abstracting that down to a flat modifier (like +35 per 10d6) is really just putting lipstick on the pig. It may put the actual physical mechanics down to reasonable level again, but it still represents bloat.

Lots of dice: cool effect, but slows the game down with math. Unless of course, you get to throw your dice over the battle map and knock down minis/NPCs with them.

I'm with Bill: players should be taking half or average results from their dice, honestly, if the die count is over 4. Maybe it's still easy to add up several dice, but your results, more likely than not, are right in the middle of the population (?).

One way to fix scaling: switch to percentages. If I'm not mistaken, large dice pools and lots of math are primarily required for damaging hit points. Using a percentage system would at least cap hit points at 100. You could incorporate scaling into that with 5% bumps, like this:

Superhero: I attack the uber-demon with my uber-demon slayer sap.
GM: Roll damage. Uber-demon's defense is 50%.
Superhero: (rolls 2d10) 38. Crap! Well, my class bonus is 22, so I get 60.
GM: Uber-demon is at (60-50) 90% hit points, and runs away.
Superhero: Woohoo! I attack my hireling.
GM: He's two levels lower than you, so you get a 10% bonus.
Superhero: (rolls 2d10) 87. He's toast!
GM: Less his 20% defense, add his 10% level difference...he was at 44% health, so yeah. He died in your service.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Separate to my other thread about a specific mechanic I'm working on, I was curious in general about dice pools.

I like them aesthetically. Adding and removing dice from a pool is less "fiddly" than adding or subtracting bonuses and penalties; and rolling a handful of dice is fun whatever game you play!

Being the mathematical type, I find dice pools (target number variety) to be extremely fiddly.

Comparing 1Di +j to a target number is a snap compared to checking how large n is with a roll of oDp when having to compare o dice versus the target number and counting.

The ability to manipulate the pool size and the target number is fantastic - in theory. In real life it just exacerbates the problem.

Another thing is the allocation subgame. Say you have different dice pools (maybe with different refresh rates?) and have to allocate your dice for specific functions: "OK, use 5 dice from my melee pool for the attack and 4 for defense. That means I still have 2 dice in reserve."

You can do pretty cool things with such a system, but IMHO it aggrandizes resource management, changing an RP support mechanism (die rolling) into a small built-in board game.