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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 7234102" data-attributes="member: 907">As Morrus said, it makes each bonus or penalty a noticeable thing. In addition, it allows for graduations in successes. As long as the pools are kept to a manageable level, I don't find them to be much slower than d20+modifier. Of course, Exalted takes it to an extreme with dice pools of potentially 20+ dice.It also gets easier if you have specialized dice. For example, Mutant: Year Zero uses yellow dice for dice from your stat, green for those from your skill, and black for those from gear. All have a radiation symbol on the 6, denoting a success. The yellow dice also have a bio-hazard symbol on the 1, signifying trauma taken on a push, and black dice have an explosion symbol on the 1 signifying degradation of gear on a push. You can use regular dice, but it gets a lot easier with those. Similarly, White Wolf used to release d10s with different colors on the 8, 9, and 0, denoting successes (in new World of Darkness).In the case of old World of Darkness and older editions of Shadowrun, they also allowed for dual measure of success by varying the target number on each die as well as the number of successes needed, but I don't think I've seen that in a game released since 2000 except the anniversary editions of World of Darkness.Star Wars d6 used a different type of dice pool, where you sum up all the dice and compare the total to a difficulty. This does take a little longer, but you pretty swiftly learn methods of making it go faster (group up dice that sum to 10).The latest evolution of dice pools is, I think, the narrative dice system used in FFG's Star Wars system and their upcoming generic RPG Genesys. These use six different types of dice: three positive (ability, proficiency, and bonus) and three negative (difficulty, challenge, and setback), and have symbols on them instead of numbers. Ability and proficiency dice are gained based on stat and skill, and difficulty and challenge dice based on the actual difficulty. Bonus and setback dice generally reflect situational modifiers. Positive dice have successes and advantages, and negative dice have failures and threats. Failures negate successes, and if you have any successes left over you succeed in your action (extra failures do nothing). Threats negate advantages, and depending on net advantages/threats you can get good/bad side effects. For example, if you're slicing a computer system a roll that generates two net successes and three threat might mean that you did well so you got the result in half the normal time, but you also set off an alarm alerting someone to your position. If you're shooting someone and roll no net successes but two advantages, you might miss your opponent but force them to move so they are more exposed when your friend shoots them, giving your friend a bonus. There are also Triumph and Despair symbols on the Proficiency and Challenge dice, which both count as a success/failure and an extra-strength advantage/threat. It sounds complicated, but it works amazingly well in practice.</blockquote>

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