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I agree that swingy can mean "uncertainty about the outcome", and yes – bell curves make middle results more likely, which reduces uncertainty around the mean. But my point was specifically that the extreme results (pure failure and critical success) are not significantly more common in d20...

Thanks for the reply. I think we're talking past each other a bit. My point wasn't about binary success/failure or repetition reducing swinginess.Both systems have four outcomes (Crit Miss / Miss / Success / Crit Success in PF2e, Failure / Partial / Success / Critical in Blades), not just...

Good point – swingy can mean different things to different people, and you're right that for many the term is tied to "how likely is the result to land in the middle vs. the extremes." I think that's exactly why the standard "bell curve = less swingy" explanation feels incomplete to me. My...

Thanks for the reply – I think we're actually closer than it might seem.You're absolutely right that dice pools are not a monolith. Burning Wheel, Shadowrun, Year Zero, Blades, etc. all work very differently, so blanket statements like „dice pools are less swingy“ are oversimplified and often...

After thinking about it more, I realized my earlier description (d20 shift) was still imprecise. It’s not really that “the curve simply shifts left or right”. It behaves more like a balance scale with two pans: Left pan: Crit Miss + Miss Right pan: Success + Crit Success When you increase...

Thank you for the graphic — it's excellent and shows exactly the kind of fixed templates I was talking about. What I find interesting is how similar the edge probabilities actually are. At 3–4 dice, Blades already reaches failure rates of ~6–12.5% and critical success rates of ~7–13%, which is...

Thanks for the reply. I think I wasn't clear enough in my original post.When I talked about the "rightward shift of outcome labels", I was only referring to the vocabulary / naming of the results, not to the actual mechanical consequences or probabilities.To put it simply: What would be a...

My bad. 1d6: 50 % Failure / 33,33 % Partial / 16,67 % Success / 0 % Critical 2d6: 25 % / 44,44 % / 27,78 % / 2,78 % 3d6: 12,5 % / 45,37 % / 34,72 % / 7,41 % 4d6: 6,25 % / 41,98 % / 38,58 % / 13,19 %

After recalculating the numbers, I believe the common explanation "d20 is swingy because uniform distribution vs. bell curve in dice pools" misses the real core difference. The bell curve and variance per roll are largely irrelevant here.The key lies in two other mechanisms: Granularity of...