Are Dice Pools Good, Actually?

[Fenris-77]

I like die pools too. One, it's satisfying to roll a handful of dice. I'm a GW gamer from back in the day, so handfuls of d6's are my happy place. Two, I like systems that use ranges of success. If I set the difficulty at 3 successes and the player rolls two successes, in a lot of systems that means success with complications. Once you get used to it that's a great handle for a GM to advance the narrative in all sorts of neat ways. Three, I'm a huge fan of exploding die pools. Not for every roll, but for some things. Rolling three sixes out of five dice and then getting to roll three more dice is about as satisfying as die rolling gets. Plus it generates a lot more nuanced occurrences of additional success, not just roll a 20 or not.

Not that I don't like d20 mechanics, they're fine, but die pools are cooler, IMO anyway.

 

[Nimblegrund]

That’s a nonsensical response.

So what do you find confusing about the term "hit"?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So what do you find confusing about the term "hit"?

Nothing. I didn’t suggest confusion. I’ve also explained the issue with it in this thread already. Feel free to read my other posts in this very thread.

 

[schneeland]

I feel dice pools have a number of advantages over plain rolls with modifiers (some of them mentioned already by @Fenris-77 ) :

• With a skill and attribute system that has single digit values for both, you can directly translate these values into the number of dice you roll, so it's quite easy to grasp
• When you roll a larger number of dice, your attributes and skills kind of directly translate into something physical, so you can feel more powerful as your character evolves
• The results are less swingy than rolling a larger die (such as the d20) and adding a modifier (at least as long as modifiers are relatively low and there are no backup strategies)

Assuming success are counted (instead of adding all values), you also have the benefit of:

• Being able to easily define a gradual level of success (e.g. success at a cost)
• Counting numbers > X is an operation that comes easily even to people averse to math

That being said, there are also disadvantages:

• Most people don't know the probabilities for success for dice pools by heart; this gets tremendously worse, if you combine dice pools with variable success thresholds
• Reducing the dice pool by a die (or adding one) is not the same as requiring more successes, e.g. assuming you success on 5 or 6 on a d6, the probability of rolling 2 or more successes with a pool of 5d6 is roughly 80%; now if we say the check requires 3 successes to indicate a higher difficulty, the probability becomes roughly 25%, but if we instead indicate higher difficulty by removing a die from the pool, the probability of rolling at least 2 successes with a pool of 4d6 is roughly 52%. This poses two problems and one constraint:
  • the probability drop-off for additional required successes is quite steep, so it's hard to adjust difficulty gracefully
  • if you want to indicate difficulty by removing (or adding) dice, you need to announce it in advance
  • and if you mix both approaches, judging probabilities really becomes a nightmare
• If the number of dice in the pool becomes too large, speed at the table again suffers; the number seems to vary a bit according to personal preferences, but personally, I prefer pools to be not larger than 10, maybe 12 at best

So in essence, it is mostly a matter of game design and personal preference. I tend to like dice pools that are composed of d6, but then Shadowrun was one of the my first TTRPGs, so there's a certain bias.

One closing note: if you don't feel good about requiring more than one success for tasks, the Free League games use a d6 dice pool system where only a 6 is a success. That way, for most tasks, one success is enough. The downside is that you fail quite often with this system and all games rely on generating conditions or some meta currency to allow re-rolls of dice not showing a 6.

 

[Fenris-77]

The biggest pool I'd want to manage is probably 10, a la White Wolf. Unless I'm shooting bolters at Tyranids, then I want as many dice as I can get.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The biggest pool I'd want to manage is probably 10, a la White Wolf. Unless I'm shooting bolters at Tyranids, then I want as many dice as I can get.

My wife once got to roll something like 15-20 d20s on a damage roll with a capital ship weapon in a Star Wars Saga Edition game, but yeah damage is about the only time I’d ever want to roll any more than 10 dice.

 

[Fenris-77]

My wife once got to roll something like 15-20 d20s on a damage roll with a capital ship weapon in a Star Wars Saga Edition game, but yeah damage is about the only time I’d ever want to roll any more than 10 dice.

That is a lotta d20's. Yikes. Cool though.

My comments above notwithstanding, I actually really detest pools of d4's. Yuck. D6's are my favorites.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

That is a lotta d20's. Yikes. Cool though.

My comments above notwithstanding, I actually really detest pools of d4's. Yuck. D6's are my favorites.

Yeah, d6s are where it’s at.

I started my homemade system on a percentile+d10s system, but people kept getting confused by stuff I couldn’t figure out how it could be confusing, so I scrapped that dice pool for d10+D10 rank dice.

 

[doghead]

I don't really have a problem with any resolution system, as long as it's working as intended, and it's not too onerous or convoluted.

First up, ultimately, this.

That said, I like dice pools. Maybe it comes from those early days playing Vampire and WH40K.

For me, changing the number of dice available to you to achieve a task has a visceral quality that adding or subtracting modifiers to a single dice roll does not. In a similar vein, slowly depleting a pool of dice invokes a better sense of being pushed to your limits compared to reducing a abstract number .

D6's are my favorites.

Seconded. The down side is the lack of granularity. We started by converting our WHFRP game to use the WHFB system, but ended up converting to d12 for this reason. It was still pretty brutally elegant.

thotd

 

[Crusadius]

I like Dice Pool systems. Being able to increase the number of dice rolled gives the feel of significant character improvement, and I like the statistics behind the number of successes you can generate with increasing the pool of dice rolled.