Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 7234855" data-attributes="member: 907">I'd argue that it is: you roll a number of different dice depending on stat, skill, difficulty, and circumstance to see how well you do. It's a bit different due to the iconic rather than numeric nature of it, but then again you could just as easily do the recent editions of Shadowrun using dice with four blank sides, one &quot;Success&quot; side, and one &quot;Success plus&quot; side.I'm not saying dice pools are necessarily better or worse than more linear systems. They are different, which is good in some ways and bad in others. Some go to a bit of an extreme, such as Exalted with its humongous dice pools.Another difference with dice pools is that they make probabilities somewhat more opaque. In D&amp;D, it's trivial for me to know that if I have a +5 attack bonus and need to hit AC 13, I need to roll an 8+ which is a 65% chance of success. If my opponent has half cover, the AC increases by 2, so I'm down to 55%. In Star Wars FFG, I might instead be rolling 1 green ability die and 2 yellow proficiency dice, versus a difficulty of 2 purple difficulty dice - I'm feeling relatively confident because I have more good dice than bad and the good dice are also better than the bad ones are bad, but I can't figure out the probability of a hit in my head. I definitely can't judge how my chance is affected by the addition of a black setback die for cover. Even in a simpler dice pool system like Shadowrun* (which rolls regular d6es and counts 5s and 6s), it's non-trivial to figure out the chance of rolling e.g. 3 or more successes on 7 dice. You could do it, but it's not something you do in your head while shaking the dice in your hand. Again, this is something some would see as an advantage, others as a flaw.* I'm not saying Shadowrun as a whole is simpler than Star Wars FFG - just that the actual rolls are. There's a lot more going on leading up to those rolls in Shadowrun, though.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Staffan, post: 7234855, member: 907"] I'd argue that it is: you roll a number of different dice depending on stat, skill, difficulty, and circumstance to see how well you do. It's a bit different due to the iconic rather than numeric nature of it, but then again you could just as easily do the recent editions of Shadowrun using dice with four blank sides, one "Success" side, and one "Success plus" side. I'm not saying dice pools are necessarily better or worse than more linear systems. They are different, which is good in some ways and bad in others. Some go to a bit of an extreme, such as Exalted with its humongous dice pools. Another difference with dice pools is that they make probabilities somewhat more opaque. In D&D, it's trivial for me to know that if I have a +5 attack bonus and need to hit AC 13, I need to roll an 8+ which is a 65% chance of success. If my opponent has half cover, the AC increases by 2, so I'm down to 55%. In Star Wars FFG, I might instead be rolling 1 green ability die and 2 yellow proficiency dice, versus a difficulty of 2 purple difficulty dice - I'm feeling relatively confident because I have more good dice than bad and the good dice are also better than the bad ones are bad, but I can't figure out the probability of a hit in my head. I definitely can't judge how my chance is affected by the addition of a black setback die for cover. Even in a simpler dice pool system like Shadowrun* (which rolls regular d6es and counts 5s and 6s), it's non-trivial to figure out the chance of rolling e.g. 3 or more successes on 7 dice. You could do it, but it's not something you do in your head while shaking the dice in your hand. Again, this is something some would see as an advantage, others as a flaw. * I'm not saying Shadowrun as a whole is simpler than Star Wars FFG - just that the actual rolls are. There's a lot more going on leading up to those rolls in Shadowrun, though. [/QUOTE]

Verification